DEWEY STUDIES Volume 1 · Number 2 · Fall 2017
ISSN: 2572-4649 Mission: Dewey Studies is a peer-reviewed, online, open-access journal of the John Dewey Society, dedicated to furthering understanding of John Dewey’s philosophical work and enlivening his unique mode of engagement with the vital philosophical questions of our time.
Please visit our website for more information about the journal, or to view other issues of Dewey Studies.
Editors: Editor-in-Chief Leonard Waks, [email protected]
Associate Editors Paul Cherlin, [email protected] Andrea R. English, [email protected] James Scott Johnston, [email protected] Jared Kemling, [email protected] Zane Wubbena, [email protected]
Reviews Editor Daniel Brunson, [email protected]
Submissions: To submit a manuscript for publication, please send an email to: Jared Kemling, Associate Editor [email protected]
To submit a book review or inquire as to what books are available for review, please email: Daniel Brunson, Reviews Editor [email protected]
Title flourishes designed by Vexels.com and used with permission
EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD
Thomas Alexander (Southern Illinois University Carbondale) Douglas Anderson (University of North Texas) Randall Auxier (Southern Illinois University Carbondale) Thomas Burke (University of South Carolina) Vincent Colapietro (Pennsylvania State University) Steven Fesmire (Green Mountain College) Michael Festl (University of St. Gallen) Clara Fischer (University College Dublin) Marilyn Fischer (University of Dayton) Roberto Frega (Marcel Mauss Institute at the CNRS) Jim Garrison (Virginia Tech & Uppsala University) James Good (Lone Star College North Harris) Larry Hickman (Southern Illinois University Carbondale) David Hildebrand (University of Colorado Denver) Denise James (University of Dayton) Alison Kadlec (Senior VP, Public Agenda) Alexander Kremer (University of Szeged) John J. McDermott (Texas A&M) Erin McKenna (University of Oregon) William Myers (Birmingham-Southern College) Stefan Neubert (University of Cologne) Gregory Pappas (Texas A&M) Scott Pratt (University of Oregon) Melvin Rogers (Brown University) Naoko Saito (University of Kyoto) Charlene Haddock Seigfried (Purdue University)
EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD (cont’d)
John Shook (State University of New York at Buffalo) Giuseppe Spadafora (University of Calabria) Kenneth Stikkers (Southern Illinois University Carbondale) Shannon Sullivan (University of North Carolina Charlotte) Sor-hoon Tan (National University of Singapore) Paul C. Taylor (Pennsylvania State University) Dwayne Tunstall (Grand Valley State University) Claudio Viale (National University of Cordoba) Emil Višňovský (Comenius University) Jennifer Welchman (University of Alberta) Krystyna Wilkoszewska (Jagiellonian University) Chen Yajun (Fudan University)
DEWEY STUDIES VOLUME 1 · NUMBER 2 · FALL 2017
ARTICLES
EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION 1 Leonard J. Waks
PRAGMATIZING CRITICAL THEORY’S PROVINCE 4 Roberto Frega
ON REALITY, EXPERIENCE, AND TRUTH: JOHN WATSON’S UNPUBLISHED NOTES ON JOHN DEWEY 48 James Scott Johnston & Sarah Messer
THE PROBLEM OF NIHILISM: A PERSONAL JOURNEY FROM NIETZSCHE TO DEWEY 70 Jim Garrison
AN INTERVIEW WITH MARILYN FISCHER 95 Marilyn Fischer & Judy Whipps
RESEARCH NOTE: UNDERSTANDING DEWEY’S CONNECTION TO CHINA- A BIBLIOGRAPHIC ESSAY ON SELECTED WORKS 103 James Zhi Yang
RESEARCH NOTE: JOHN DEWEY ON NATIONALISM 112 Leonard J. Waks
BOOK REVIEW: MELVILLE AMONG THE PHILOSOPHERS 126 Robin Friedman
EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION
LEONARD J. WAKS Temple University, Emeritus Editor-in-chief
Volume 1 · Number 2 · Fall 2017 · Pages 1-3
Leonard J. Waks 2
he editors of Dewey Studies are pleased to bring you our second issue. Please join me for a guided tour of its contents, T as I point to the sections of this issue that we plan to include as regular features. First, there are three articles which have been submitted and have passed through anonymous peer-review. Roberto Frega, in “Pragmatizing Critical Theory’s Province” shows how progressive reformulations of critical theory have brought its methods increasingly closer to Dewey’s theory of inquiry. James Scott Johnston and Sara Messer, in “On Reality, Experience, and Truth: John Watson’s Unpublished Notes on John Dewey” provide a glimpse of Watson, a leading Canadian philosopher known for the development of constructive Idealism, attempting to come to grips with Dewey’ system of ideas. James Garrison, in “The Problem of Nihilism: A Personal Journey from Nietzsche to Dewey,” recounts the path Garrison, as a contemporary philosopher, traversed in arriving at Dewey’s pragmatism. Each of these articles places Dewey in productive dialogue with other philosophers. Second, we offer an engaging interview of Marilyn Fischer by Judy Whipps. Marilyn Fischer is well known to our readers as a celebrated interpreter of the works of Jane Addams—founder of Hull House, early feminist pragmatist, pacifist, and confederate of Dewey’s in Chicago. Judy Whipps, who conducted the interview for Dewey Studies, is also a noted Addams scholar and Marilyn’s collaborator in editing Jane Addams’ Writings on Peace. Dewey Studies aims to become the leading journal of John Dewey’s works, life, and times. As we state in our call for papers, we seek papers that deal not only with Dewey’s philosophical works, but also with his significance within the history of philosophy (and history more broadly), by showing how he influenced and was influenced by others. We also seek articles that deal with Dewey’s relationship with American philosophy, especially American pragmatism, and that otherwise appeal to the interests and needs of Dewey scholars. Judy’s interview with Marilyn accomplishes all of these ends by casting light on one of Dewey’s closest working associates who influenced him profoundly, and by highlighting the
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
Leonard J. Waks 3
work contemporary scholars are doing in American philosophy. Readers of Dewey Studies with ideas for future interviews are invited to query the editors by sending a note to Jared Kemling, Associate Editor, at [email protected]. Third, we provide two research notes. The first, by James Yang, provides an overview of research on Dewey’s circle in China and the Chinese reformers influenced by Dewey during the Chinese Republican period. The second, which I prepared to mark the 2018 annual theme of the John Dewey Society, reviews Dewey’s writings on nationalism. Such research notes aim to introduce our readers to particular facets of Deweyan Scholarship. They are a starting place for inquiry that may orient the reader and give a sense of the existing literature on a topic, but are not necessarily to be taken as exhaustive bibliographies or fully-detailed discussions of the topic. Research notes may be solicited or volunteered. Readers engaged in research projects, including doctoral dissertations, are encouraged to submit such notes to Dewey Studies. Finally, the issue closes with a book review by Robin Friedman of Melville among the Philosophers, a collection of essays edited by Corey McCall and Tom Nurmi that reflects on the philosophical contexts of Melville’s work as well as Melville’s own philosophical ideas. Friedman selects for special attention chapters that bring out connections between Melville’s ideas and those of modern philosophers including William James and Edmund Husserl. Melville’s importance as a leader in the American literary Renaissance is established; Melville among the Philosophers brings Melville into play as an American philosopher, and will certainly be of interest to our readers. Authors and their publishers are invited to submit books to Dewey Studies for review. Readers are invited to suggest books for review, to volunteer to review, and to submit unsolicited reviews for consideration. Please contact Daniel Brunson, Reviews Editor, at [email protected].
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
PRAGMATIZING CRITICAL THEORY’S PROVINCE
ROBERTO FREGA Marcel Mauss Institute at CNRS
Whilst proximities between pragmatism and critical theory have been noted by several scholars, no attempt has been made so far to provide an all-encompassing philosophical interpretation of critical theory’s appraisal of pragmatist themes. Through an overview of critical theory’s engagement with American pragmatism in the works of Jürgen Habermas, Axel Honneth, and Rahel Jaeggi, I provide a theoretical framework explaining the theoretical underpinning of such a project. Via the historical reconstruction of the ways in which pragmatist themes have been appropriated, I want to show that faced with major theoretical shortcomings in the works of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, their successors have generally resorted to pragmatists in the search for more promising solutions. This trend has concerned two major areas of critical theory: the methodological foundation of a critical theory of society and the identification of the political conditions under which social emancipation is possible. I contend that with respect to both themes a steady process of progressive pragmatization of the Frankfurt school of critical theory has been going on for more than half a century, and I contend that this project needs to be further completed if the threats of “normative defeatism” Habermas diagnosed in Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s later works is to be superseded once and for all.
Volume 1 · Number 2 · Fall 2017 · Pages 4-47
Roberto Frega 5
n intense dialogue has being going on for more than fifty years within the Frankfurt School about the proper place of A pragmatism, whose stakes have become unmistakably clear with the recent publication of Axel Honneth’s Freedom’s Right, a book that in important ways achieves the pragmatizing project begun by Jürgen Habermas half a century ago.1 This process has then been further advanced in the last decade by Rahel Jaeggi, who has resorted to John Dewey’s theory of inquiry to develop a critical theory of forms of life.2 This process or progressive pragmatization is theoretically complex and by no means episodic, as it invests two dimensions that are right at the core of critical theory’s philosophical project.3 On the one hand, pragmatist ideas are mobilized to overcome epistemological problems left unsolved in Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s work, concerning the methodological foundation of a critical theory of society. On the other hand, critical theorists have resorted to pragmatism to solve the equally crucial and pressing question of the political conditions under which social emancipation is possible in the historical circumstances of the contemporary (post WWII) world. On this point, too, John Dewey and, more broadly, pragmatists, have offered critical theorists normative resources to overcome the dead end to which first generation critical theory had arrived. Whilst from critical theory’s standpoint this process may be described in the terms of a canonization of Dewey as a critical theorist, in this paper I contend that this process, correctly understood, should be seen instead as determining a progressive pragmatization of critical theory itself.
1 Previous versions of this paper have been presented at my seminar on Emancipation and social progress (EHESS, April 2017) as well as at a conference on pragmatism organized at the Hochschule für Philosophie in Munich by Michael Reder and Lisa Herzog (May 9th, 2017). I thank all the participants as well as Just Serrano and an anonymous reviewer of this journal for their helpful comments. 2 Jaeggi (2014). 3 A third dimension, which I will not explore in this paper, concerns Habermas’ and Honneth’s appropriation of G. H. Mead’s theory of the self, as it plays a less strategic function in this process of progressive pragmatization. I have discussed this aspect in details in Frega (2015a).
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
Roberto Frega 6
Whilst Honneth is more explicit than Habermas in connecting the renaissance of the Frankfurt School to the adoption of methodological and epistemological premises directly taken from the American tradition of pragmatism, pragmatist themes permeate the theoretical outlooks of both authors. Habermas and Honneth’s reception of pragmatism is historically connected with their critical assessment of the historical trajectory of the Frankfurt School. Indeed, they both contend that the project begun with Horkheimer and culminating in Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment has largely exhausted its resources, so that a new starting point has to be searched for elsewhere. In particular, Habermas and Honneth see in their predecessors’ understanding of rationality as a totalizing process of domination the major obstacle to the development of a viable critical theory of society as well as to the renovation of a contemporary program of social emancipation. While pragmatist authors are by no means the only theoretical references of this project, pragmatist themes play a decisive role. Indeed, what is at stake in critical theory’s recovery of pragmatism is nothing less than the attempt to redeem normativity from the reductionistic interpretation that ensued from the instrumental interpretation of rationality developed by their predecessors. As Habermas and Honneth have explained, within the framework of a reductive conception of rationality as instrumental reason, the ideas of autonomy and emancipation lose their meaning, and the very possibility of human progress falls into pieces. Habermas has spoken to this extent of a “normative defeatism”4 to signify the failure at explaining how norms can embody a claim to validity while remaining entangled with facticity, a concern which lies at the heart of critical theory’s program throughout its history. Indeed, Habermas’ and Honneth’s major indictment against their predecessors is that, particularly in their later writings, they have abandoned the core assumptions upon which only a critical theory of society can be built, that is to say the idea that the normative resources of critique must be found within the social reality that becomes the object of critique itself. Indeed, the reconstructive
4 Habermas (1996), 330.
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
Roberto Frega 7
methodology first designed by Habermas and further developed by Honneth5 appears then to be incompatible with Horkheimer and Adorno’s method of “totalizing critique,”6 while it finds a much more promising predecessor in John Dewey’s theory of philosophical reconstruction.7 Explaining the sharp discontinuity introduced by Habermas within the history of the Frankfurt School in terms of his own reception of pragmatism has, therefore, far-reaching theoretical consequences that haven’t been fully explored yet.8 My claim in this paper is that to understand the philosophical implications of this pragmatizing move we need to distinguish at least two major dimensions through which it has been accomplished. On the one hand, pragmatism has provided critical theorists with more adequate and solid theoretical foundations for the project of a critical theory of society. To this extent, the pragmatist epistemology of inquiry, with its fallibilist assumptions, has provided a welcoming theoretical framework within which a model of immanent critique could be reformulated. On the other hand, pragmatism has offered critical theorists a positive normative model of political emancipation, under the guises of a theory of democracy that from Hegel to Adorno is nowhere to be found. The consequences of Habermas’ and Honneth’s progressive adoption of a pragmatist standpoint, later endorsed also by Jaeggi, are such that one can indeed speak of a progressive pragmatization of the Frankfurt School, one that is not complete yet. Whether these three authors got their pragmatism right is not the topic of this paper.9 Here I am mainly concerned with the fact that at
5 See Gaus (2013). 6 Habermas (1987), 120. 7 For a more nuanced appreciation of the similarities and differences between pragmatism and first generation critical theory, see Brunkhorst (2014); Hetzel (2008). As Hauke Brunkhorst correctly points out, particularly the philosophy of the young Max Horkheimer shared important assumptions with American Pragmatism, that tended however to disappear in his later work. 8 Among the works discussing the relations between Habermas and pragmatism, see in particular Aboulafia (2002); Antonio (1989); Shijun (2006). 9 I have explored this topic elsewhere. See in particular Frega (2012a, 2013a, 2013b, 2015a). Reserved views about Habermas’ pragmatism have been expressed, among others, by Hans Joas in Joas (1992) and several of the authors that have contributed
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
Roberto Frega 8
key points in the evolution of their thought, they have turned to pragmatism to solve crucial theoretical problems they have inherited from the tradition to which they belong. The question this paper asks is therefore what philosophical conclusions are we entitled to draw from this fact? What are the major philosophical consequences of this process of deep pragmatization? Answering this question requires the adoption of a historical orientation, one that helps us see the commonalities in the use of pragmatism within this tradition. This perspective shows by what arguments Frankfurt’s main representatives have resorted to pragmatism to solve which problems for which their own tradition did not possess the appropriate theoretical resources. While not engaging directly in a pragmatist critique of critical theory – something I have done elsewhere, I contend that this process of progressive pragmatization cannot be stopped and needs on the contrary to be further radicalized if one wants to achieve the theoretical goals Habermas and his successors have set for themselves. The paper is divided into three major parts, each one dealing with one of the three authors mentioned.
Jürgen Habermas’ Pragmatization of Critical Theory
Already in Knowledge and Human Interest, Habermas pointed out that pragmatist epistemology provides a reliable source to rethink the place of interest in the pursuit of knowledge, a theme that spans the tradition of critical theory from Karl Marx to today. Although the main target of that text was the German tradition spanning from Kant to Freud – here Horkheimer, Marcuse and Adorno are barely mentioned – Habermas’ text is clearly motivated by the will to go beyond his predecessors’ attempted (and failed) critique of positivism. Indeed, whereas Horkheimer believed that “positivism and pragmatism identify philosophy with scientism,”10 Habermas’
to Aboulafia (2002). 10 Horkheimer (1974), 31. Referring to both philosophical movements, Horkheimer contended that “reason has become completely harnessed to the social process. Its operational value, its role in the domination of men and nature, has been made the sole criterion” Horkheimer (1974), 15.
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
Roberto Frega 9
move will consist precisely in playing pragmatism against positivism and, at a later stage, in playing pragmatism against Horkheimer and Adorno themselves. Habermas’ reservation against his predecessors, still veiled and indirect in 1971, will be reformulated in more explicit terms in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity.11 Since the beginning, the relation between pragmatism and critical theory is tied to the epistemological search for a conception of reason capable of reconciling rationality with autonomy, the mastery of nature with the search for truth. While the first generation of Frankfurt critical theorists contended that this project was doomed, and that Weber’s gloomy predictions could not be escaped, Habermas sets on an ambitious research program aimed at rescuing our intellectual powers from such a fated destiny. It is within this theoretical framework that he turns to the theory of rationality as inquiry developed by Charles S. Peirce and further developed by John Dewey, which he sees as better suited to this task.12 Habermas’ long lasting dialogue with pragmatism does not stop here, as his uninterrupted dialogue with pragmatism has had significant impact in at least three other major dimensions of his thought. On the one hand, he has systematically relied on George H. Mead’s views to develop his own conception of communicative intersubjectivity. On the other hand, thanks in particular to a dialogue entertained with Hilary Putnam in the 1990’s, he has at least partially succeeded in overcoming his Kantian transcendentalism.13 Whilst traces of transcendentalism will never be removed from Habermas’ theoretical framework, the partial de-
11 Habermas (1987). See in particular Chapter 5, devoted to a radical criticism of Horkheimer and Adorno’s philosophical project. See also Honneth (2003) for a reconstruction of this evolution. 12 As I contend in Frega (2013b), Habermas could but fail at grasping this point, as his reception of pragmatist themes is entirely inscribed in a dualistic theory of reason, whereas pragmatists aimed precisely at providing a unified account of reason, one that could reconcile instrumentality and communication within a single integrated notion of human intelligence. 13 See Habermas (1999). I discuss the limits of Habermas’ detranscendentalization and explain how his earlier Kantianism prevents him from pursuing more consistently the project of pragmatization in Frega (2013b).
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
Roberto Frega 10
transcendentalization accomplished at this time has helped to make his “Kantian pragmatism”14 more compatible with pragmatist epistemology. Thirdly, in his political philosophy he has relied on Dewey’s theory of publics to update his conception of the public sphere. Bridging the historical gap separating the tradition of critical theory from that of Anglo-American political philosophy, Habermas has radically transformed the normative content of critical theory by creating a legitimate place for a critical theory of society whose aim is to provide guidance for projects of social reform aimed at increasing the legitimacy of democratic political institutions, which, against his predecessors, he has ceased to consider as mere epiphenomena of a bureaucratic and totalizing reason, or as mere instruments of class domination. Hence, in significant discontinuity with his predecessors and with the decisive support of pragmatism, Habermas will have succeeded in reconciling the negative program of a critique of capitalism with the positive project of a theory of democracy, or this is at least what he has attempted to do.
Pragmatizing the Anthropology of Knowledge
Habermas’ first encounters with pragmatism are owed to his friendship with Karl-Otto Apel, who introduced him to Peirce’s philosophy while they were students.15 Since its inception, Habermas saw pragmatism as a productive force capable of mediating the two competing strands of empiricist analytical philosophy and the continental tradition. Indeed, Habermas seems to be torn between the science-like proceedings of Anglo-American philosophy-science as developed by analytic philosophy, and the social account of knowledge stemming from the German tradition. He seems unwilling to give up either of these approaches, and in the search for
14 See Bernstein (2010) for a perceptive discussion of the extent to which Habermas’ Kantianism is compatible with pragmatism. I have expressed my own reservations to Bernstein’s interpretation in Frega (2011). 15 Habermas (1971), vii.
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
Roberto Frega 11
a third way capable of reconciling the analytic account of epistemic validity with the German understanding of the social and material basis of knowledge, he turns to American pragmatism, and particularly to Peirce’s epistemology. Habermas’ concern with epistemology from the early 1960s until the late 1990s is inscribed in a larger reflection on the nature and conditions of possibility of a form of social theorizing that can promote social emancipation. This exigency is summed up in the claim that today “[a] radical critique of knowledge is possible only as social theory.”16 While Habermas is aware that this description fits the task of critical theory since at least the time of Marx, he is nevertheless persuaded that this project has lately been threatened by its excessive radicalization at the hands of his own mentors and predecessors, Horkheimer and Adorno. As he will remind us in the mid 1980s, the critique of reason undertaken by these two authors since the late 1940s is so uncompromising that “[o]n their analysis, it is no longer possible to place hope in the liberating force of enlightenment.”17 Nor, on the other hand, to appraise the self- standing value of human knowledge. While Habermas shares Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s diagnosis that modern life and capitalist economy threaten to reduce knowledge validity to instrumental efficacy,18 he nevertheless criticizes them for having failed to see that modernity harbors counter tendencies capable of resisting this totalizing process. As he explains, “[t]he Dialectic of Enlightenment does not do justice to the rational content of cultural modernity [...]. I am thinking here of the specific theoretical dynamic that continually pushes the sciences [...]; I am referring, further, to the universalistic foundations of law and morality [...]; I have in mind, finally, the productivity and explosive power of basic aesthetic experiences that a subjectivity liberated from the imperatives of purposive activity and from conventions of quotidian perception gains from its own decentering.”19 Moreover,
16 Habermas (1971), vii. 17 Habermas (1987), 106. 18 Habermas (1987), 113. 19 Habermas (1987), 113.
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
Roberto Frega 12
as Habermas notes, in the Dialectic of Enlightenment “[t]the suspicion of ideology [...] is turned not only against the irrational function of bourgeois ideals, but against the rational potential of bourgeois culture itself.”20 From this totalizing perspective, the very possibility of a normative reconstruction aimed at finding within society the normative resources to criticize its present shortcomings becomes impossible. The idea of the self-destructive process of reason defended by Horkheimer and Adorno amounts for Habermas to a performative contradiction that destroys its own basis: having abandoned the very idea of valid conditions independent from human interest, critical theory is forced to renounce its own theoretical ambitions. This theoretical as well as practical dead end is a daunting legacy from which Habermas tries to escape, whilst seeking not to lose track of the philosophical project of an anthropology of knowledge to which he subscribes. On the one hand, Habermas wants to remain faithful to the idea that an adequate account of knowledge cannot be produced on purely epistemic terms, that is to say along the lines laid bare by logical empiricism, positivism, and analytical philosophy. He insists in particular on the necessity of a naturalistic account capable of inscribing the search for knowledge in the wider context of human life. On this point, he fully endorses the anthropological critique of knowledge developed in the tradition spanning from Marx to Adorno. On the other hand, he wants to resist the materialist reduction of knowledge’s claim to validity to external conditions. He searches, therefore, for a theoretical middle ground on which the notions of interest and knowledge can be reconciled, aiming at showing, in other terms, that human knowledge can be at the same time interested and valid, motivated by human being’s entanglements with the world and endowed with independent autonomy. Seeing that positivism on the one hand and critical theory on the other have failed at reconciling these two dimensions of human knowledge, Habermas will find in pragmatism’s naturalist epistemology a more promising avenue for rethinking the place and nature of reason and knowledge.
20 Habermas (1987), 119.
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
Roberto Frega 13
Habermas can therefore see in Peirce’s epistemology the first historically successful attempts at reconciling knowledge and interest within a theory of science that does not expel interest from the process whereby valid knowledge is produced.21 Habermas’ reliance on Peirce’s epistemology to ground his own anthropology of knowledge is unsurprising, as pragmatists – particularly Peirce and Dewey – wished indeed to reconcile a naturalistic and action- theoretic account of human reason as a method for the fixation of beliefs, with a more realistic understanding of truth as the autonomous norm of scientific discourse. To that extent, one can easily conclude that pragmatism and critical theory share a naturalistic view of knowledge, which for both traditions becomes the starting point for the refusal of purely representational conceptions of knowledge, so that an anti-Cartesian stance unifies pragmatists and critical theorists. Whilst indeed Peirce’s most famous papers are known as “anti-Cartesians” and while Dewey defined his own epistemology as a reaction against the “spectator theory of knowledge,” Habermas sees in positivism’s “copy theory of truth” its most distinctive mark, against which Knowledge and Human Interests (1971) is written. As Habermas correctly points out, Peirce combines a social account of knowledge with a solid conception of truth. He does this through the idea of truth as intersubjective consensus produced by the cooperative work of the scientific community of inquiry. As Habermas notes, “[a]s the sum total of all possible predicates appearing in true statements about reality, reality is no longer determined by the constitutive activities of a transcendental consciousness per se but by what is in principle a finite process of inferences and interpretations, namely the collective efforts of all those who ever participate in the process of inquiry.”22 The community of inquiry as a social group replaces the transcendental ego of modern philosophy. The upshot is that Peirce inscribes the search for truth in the concrete proceedings of a socially constituted community of inquiry: “for Peirce this concept of truth is not
21 Habermas (1971), 91. 22 Habermas (1971), 101.
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
Roberto Frega 14
derivable merely from the logical rules of the process of inquiry, but rather only from the objective life context in which the process of inquiry fulfills specifiable functions: the settlement of opinions, the elimination of uncertainties, and the acquisition of unproblematic beliefs—in short, the fixation of belief.” 23 Habermas praises Peirce for having inscribed the search for knowledge in the context of human action and for having connected the epistemic validity of scientific propositions to the behavioral system of purposive-rational action, insofar as he conceives beliefs as guides for action rather than as copies of reality: behavioral certainty as the successful control of action becomes the criterion of validity and beliefs remain unproblematic as long as actions undertaken under their guide do not fail. Because however “inquiry is the reflected form (Reflexionsform) of this pre-scientific learning process that is already posited with instrumental action as such,”24 it follows that knowledge, even technical knowledge, cannot be reduced to pure instrumentality. For pragmatists as well as for Habermas, scientific discoveries indeed always have two faces: on the one hand, they fulfill life functions and have therefore a practical character or, in Habermas’ terms, they respond to an interest. On the other hand, they are endowed with independent epistemic value that emancipates their validity from the circumstances of their production. Habermas sees pragmatism’s advantage in its reconciliation of knowledge and action: action is no longer seen as mere instrumental manipulation, but conceived as a constitutive factor in the process of knowledge production. Action and knowledge are to that extent reconciled, insofar as action acquires epistemic meaning as being instrumental in the confirmation/disconfirmation of knowledge, and knowledge acquires practical value insofar as it is purposive. Action is at the same time the medium for the domination of the external world, and the vehicle for the advancement of knowledge. As such, it provides factual command of external reality while maintaining an essential connection with the epistemic dimension of validity. Contrary to
23 Habermas (1971), 119. 24 Habermas (1971), 124.
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
Roberto Frega 15
positivism, pragmatism secures an insight into knowledge aimed at technical control which clarifies its function within human experience while laying bare the conditions of its epistemic validity. Indeed, validity defined as the condition of stable beliefs is that which grants efficacy to action. Contrary to the Marx-Weber-Horkheimer critique of reason, pragmatism rescues knowledge from the reductionist’s threats engendered by its connection to action, while not severing the umbilical thread that connects it to human interest. Scientific rationality and the knowledge-constitutive interest it represents can then be successfully inscribed in the concrete socio- technical practices of a community of inquiry which Habermas sees as the bearer of an intersubjective and no longer monological form of reasoning. The instrumental rationality that presides over technical control is therefore inscribed – and subordinated to – the communicative rationality which “arises from symbolic interaction between societal subjects who reciprocally know and recognize each other as unmistakable individuals. This communicative action is a system of reference that cannot be reduced to the framework of instrumental action.”25 Peirce’s epistemology appears then as the solution capable of preserving the core intuition of the Marxian anthropology of knowledge while protecting it against interpretations that tend to autonomize and absolutize instrumental rationality. Whilst the juxtaposition of instrumental and communicative reason does not do justice to the pragmatist epistemology, Habermas is correct in seeing in Peirce’s account the attempt to inscribe the search for knowledge in a broader anthropological framework, a program of naturalization of epistemology that will be further advanced by Dewey. From this point onward, Peirce’s epistemology rather than Horkheimer and Adorno’s theory of reason will set the framework of Habermas’ epistemology. This theoretical move is decisive insofar as no normative project could have ever been devised under the premises laid bare by Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s critique of reason. The pragmatist theory of inquiry will provide a larger background against which Habermas will develop his own theory of rationality,
25 Habermas (1971), 137.
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
Roberto Frega 16
one that from a pragmatist standpoint is far from being unproblematic, however.26 This first step is nevertheless fundamental, insofar as the attempted reconciliation of facticity with validity, under the assumption of a constitutive relation between knowledge and human interest, provides perhaps the decisive common ground upon which the successive exchanges between pragmatism and critical theory will take place. In addition, as I now intend to show, sharing an epistemological framework will also determine what critical theory will inherit from pragmatism in social and political philosophy.
Pragmatizing Politics
The second turning point I want to examine concerns Habermas’ reference to pragmatism to overcome what he saw as the most significant shortcoming of his own tradition in political theory. After his writing on Legitimation Crisis, beginning from the second half of the 1970’s, Habermas begins an inquiry into the conditions under which a political regime obtains legitimacy. According to Habermas, the central problem a constitutional state must solve is how to translate communicative power as action-in-concert into the administrative power of the state. Because of their faulty epistemology, Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s political philosophies failed to provide a convincing answer to this question. Indeed, given their reductionist understanding of knowledge and reason, their totalizing critique of capitalism can provide no conceptual space within which the question of legitimacy of power can even be asked. As Habermas himself has explicitly admitted:
[f]rom the outset I viewed American pragmatism as the third productive reply to Hegel, after Marx and Kierkegaard, as the radical-democratic branch of Young Hegelianism, so to speak. Ever since, I have relied on this American version of
26 I have formulated my own pragmatist criticism of Habermas’ epistemology in Frega (2013b).
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
Roberto Frega 17
the philosophy of praxis when the problem arises of compensating for the weaknesses of Marxism with respect to democratic theory.27
References to Dewey and pragmatism in Habermas’ political philosophy are scant and yet decisive. In Between Facts and Norms, Dewey is invoked beside J. S. Mill in chapter four,28 and then twice again in chapter seven.29 However, implicit references to a Deweyan approach to democratic politics traverse the entire text, and the whole problématique of the book is shaped by the Deweyan concern of how to combine the problem-solving orientation of the democratic state with the credentials of democratic legitimacy. In Deweyan terms, the solution to the problem of political legitimacy is found in the idea of a democratic public that Habermas further articulates in terms of a procedural understanding of the public as a collective of citizens-deliberators which embody and enact a communicative form of rationality.30 As he unambiguously explains with reference to his proceduralist conception of democracy, “no one has worked out this view more energetically than John Dewey.”31 Here Habermas explicitly endorses what Dewey termed “the method of democracy,” and makes it the basis of his own understanding of legitimate politics as the process whereby a plurality of individuals coalesce together to discuss in deliberative ways matters of concern with the aim of finding a solution which is legitimate because it is endowed with “a reasonable quality.”32 Whereas Habermas’ primitive model for conceptualizing rational communication was provided by the purely discursive model of 18th century publics of readers,33 in order to draw the full political
27 Habermas (1985), 76-77. Habermas will reassert this position nearly twenty years later in close to identical terms. See Habermas (2002), 228. 28 Habermas (1996), 171. 29 Habermas (1996), 304 and 317. 30 The connection between Habermas and Dewey via proceduralism has been clearly explained by Honneth. See Honneth (1998). 31 Habermas (1996), 304. 32 Habermas (1996), 304. 33 Habermas (1962).
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
Roberto Frega 18
implications of this notion, Habermas will later resort to the idea of a community of citizens that constitutes itself in the linguistic medium of deliberations that are however oriented toward action: contrary to the model of readers conversing together to form their opinion, in (Habermas, 1996) citizens are seen as deliberating together with the aim of giving shape to collective action. Habermas’ transition unfolds in two steps. He first introduces a purely discursive model of publicity as public discussion aimed at “feeding and monitoring parliament.”34 We can see here the priority of the legacy of Mill. Subsequently, in the second part of the book, the historical emergence of a civil society is seen by Habermas as the appropriate solution to develop a “sociological translation of the concept of deliberative politics.” With this move the discourse-based literary public sphere is finally transformed into an action-oriented pragmatist public. Democratic politics is organized according to a two-tier track model that differentiates a public sphere merely oriented to the opinion-formation through discourses, from the parliamentary bodies which are decision-oriented.35 A second distinction is then added between the discursive sphere where opinions are formed and justified decisions are taken, and the sphere of administrative actions where effective actions enact decisions taken elsewhere, according to a dualism of justification and application that Habermas continues to endorse.36 While the dualism between communicative and instrumental rationality continues to bar Habermas from a fuller integration of pragmatist themes in his philosophy, the influence of Dewey’s theory of democracy is nevertheless unmistakable and important. Indeed, Habermas sees in Dewey’s proceduralism a model for understanding societal problem-solving as a situated practice steered through discourses among affected individuals deliberating together, rather than through systems-theoretic mechanisms.37 As his discussion of Bernhard Peter’s theory of social rationality makes clear, Habermas is
34 Habermas (1996), 171. 35 Habermas (1996), 307. 36 Habermas (1993). 37 On this point, see Honneth (1998).
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
Roberto Frega 19
concerned precisely with the problem of how to move from the social-theoretic concept of a society viewed as a problem solving system to the action-theoretic concept of social groups engaged in processes of collective problem solving. Habermas’ understanding of the evolution of political systems through the lenses of systems theory exposes his account to the risk of falling back upon an instrumentalist account of reason. With the help of Dewey, he succeeds however in re-inflating communicative power in the political process through the idea of linguistically mediated cooperative practices of civil society and of parliamentary bodies. Indeed, without the idea of a public which – like Peirce’s community of inquiry and Mead’s generalized other – incarnates reason in the figure of sociologically and historically situated collectivities, Habermas would have found himself without the necessary link between an idealized and disembodied communication community38 and the blind instrumental rationality of administrative agencies, a problem that on Habermas’ own admission Hannah Arendt faced and never solved.39 “With the procedural concept of democracy, however, this idea takes the shape of a self-organizing legal community”40 and, as he further explains, “the normative countersteering of constitutional institutions can compensate for the communicative, cognitive, and motivational limitations on deliberative politics and the conversion of communicative into administrative power.”41 We can clearly see in these passages how Dewey’s public-based theory of democracy helps Habermas in developing an account of politics that combines systems theory with discourse theory in a scheme that successfully accounts for concrete processes of collective will formation. Without Dewey’s community-based notion of proceduralism, Habermas’ political theory would have remained ensnared in an abstract conception of democratic legitimacy unsuited to the tasks of a critical theory of society. The symmetry between Habermas’ usage of pragmatism in
38 Habermas (1996), 323. 39 See Habermas (1994). 40 Habermas (1996), 326. 41 Habermas (1996), 327.
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
Roberto Frega 20
his epistemology and in his political theory could not be more explicit. While taking place in different thematic domains then, Habermas’ appropriation of pragmatism is unified by a common thread, which is the emphasis on the intersubjectivity of human reason and the awareness that factuality and normativity are inextricably entangled within social practices. As I have shown throughout this section, Habermas’ interest in pragmatism is mainly motivated by his own search for a viable theory of human rationality capable of explaining how knowledge’s involvement with human interest and of legitimacy with power should not be seen as inevitable signs of the ineluctable march of a blind, instrumental, reductionist and destructive reason. In both cases, Habermas can see pragmatism as steering a badly needed middle ground between idealism (or positivism) and materialism. Habermas accomplishes a first pragmatizing step with the support of Peirce, which helps him in developing an anthropological standpoint from whose vantage point instrumental reason can be curbed, inscribing it within the larger framework of communicative rationality. In The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 1 (1984), Mead’s theory of the self will help Habermas further develop this scheme by discovering the social basis of rationality within human interaction. At a third stage, Dewey’s public-based theory of democracy will be mobilized to extend Habermas’ theory of rationality to the domain of politics, providing him with the idea of a communication community which relies on the intermediate strata of the civil society to steer its own destiny through the media of communicative rather than instrumental power.
Axel Honneth’s Radicalized Pragmatism
Honneth’s recovery of pragmatism follows in the footsteps of Habermas’ program for the renovation of the Frankfurt School, while introducing a social twist that considerably improves on his predecessor’s attempts. Whereas for Habermas the major added benefit of a pragmatization of the Frankfurt School project had to be
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
Roberto Frega 21
seen in pragmatist epistemology’s superiority in reconciling facticity with validity and instrumental with communicative rationality, Honneth emphasizes instead pragmatism’s superiority in understanding the social roots of human experience and, to that extent, of human knowledge. Honneth is also more explicit than Habermas in connecting the problem of an epistemological foundation of critical theory with that of a theory of legitimate emancipatory politics. Indeed, Honneth conceives the problem of human emancipation as unfolding at two distinct but strictly interdependent levels. On the one hand, we need to develop a critical theory of society capable of identifying the normative requirements under which the conditions of social emancipation can be determined and justified. On the other hand, contextual and specific conditions for social progress in society have to be established according to this framework. As he explained this interrelation in his first published book, “[o]nly if the emancipatory interest, which also guides critical theory at a scientific level, can already be found within social life can it justly be conceived as a reflexive moment in social evolution.”42 Indeed, “[o]nly because critical theory constantly influences in an action-guiding manner the same social praxis through which it is known to have been produced is it a practically transformative moment in the social reality it investigates.”43 If a critical theory of society is required to provide a legitimate basis to the emancipatory interest, a theory of democracy is then needed to provide the larger normative framework within which social progress can unfold historically. Honneth thus agrees with Habermas that neither of these two central requirements has successfully been fulfilled by the tenants of the first generation of the Frankfurt School. On the one hand, Honneth follows Habermas in contending that the reductive understanding of human rationality developed by Horkheimer and Adorno fails to deliver the normative standards that are required if social trends are to be evaluated in terms of their emancipatory value. On the other hand, Honneth criticizes Horkheimer – and even more vehemently Adorno – for
42 Honneth (1993), xiv. 43 Honneth (1993), 14.
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
Roberto Frega 22
having failed to provide an account of the conditions under which legitimate politics can unfold. Even more explicitly than Habermas, Honneth has contended that pragmatism has indeed provided solutions to both these problems far more convincing than those that could be found in the writings of the first generation of the Frankfurt school. Through this move, Honneth brings the pragmatization of the Frankfurt school a step further, and it is in this light that we should understand the project of “normative reconstruction” that he has been pursuing systematically throughout the last three decades. Like Habermas before him, Honneth too proceeds through a two-tier project. On the epistemological side, he wants to rescue the very idea of rationality from the totalizing critique to which Horkheimer and Adorno submitted it. He sets therefore onto a critique of Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s epistemology very much in line with Habermas’, insofar as both blame their predecessors for having made the entire edifice of critical theory repose on a reductionist understanding of rationality as instrumental reason. On the political side, he wants to redeem the idea that social life – and democratic institutions within it – is endowed with an emancipatory potential that the first generation of the Frankfurt School failed to see. As a first theoretical step in this strategy, Honneth begins by explicitly thematizing Adorno and Horkheimer’s failed attempts at developing a successful critical epistemology, noting that the resources for such a program where already available in the pragmatist tradition, a fact that at that time Frankfurt intellectuals were not ready to accept.44 After having noted Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s failure at adequately differentiating the theoretical bases of a critical theory of society from those of what Horkheimer called ’traditional theory,’ he remarks that on the other hand:
Peirce or Dewey conceive the vital interests that should be integrated into the research process rather as a sort of transcendental space that, although capable of determining
44 Honneth (2003), 63-64; 69-70.
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
Roberto Frega 23
the direction of scientific investigations, does not specify their conditions of validity. The margin thereby left by the interests that steer research should be narrowed down by means of methodic rules that reflect the consensus of inquirers with regard to scientific criteria of justification.45
He then concludes that:
in light of the intentions both authors associate with the project of a ‘critical theory,’ the pragmatists’ suggestion would have been of the greatest importance. [...] But since both authors set pragmatism too hastily aside and altogether ignore its potential, the question that lies at the heart of their anthropology of knowledge – namely to what extent critical theory can gain a superior perspective without forfeiting its rooting in pre-scientific interests – remained without answer.46
The second step in this pragmatizing strategy finds its starting point in the critique of Adorno’s dismissal of the very idea of social emancipation, and is achieved, to date, in Honneth’s peculiarly pragmatist rehabilitation of socialism within the framework of experimentalism.47 Already in his first published book,48 Honneth marked a critical distance from Adorno’s decision to entrust art with the emancipatory function, stigmatizing Adorno’s view of modern political institutions and of the social sciences as the product of the reifying process of instrumental rationality. This dismissive view inspired Adorno’s turn toward art – that he saw as the sole intellectual enterprise liable to escape from the iron cage of instrumental rationality – and toward artistic experience, which he saw as the only space in which human beings could realize freedom. The idea of the sciences, social sciences included, as mere
45 Honneth (2003), 63-64. 46 Honneth (2003), 64. 47 Honneth (2015). 48 Honneth (1993).
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
Roberto Frega 24
instruments of bureaucratic control and the idea of political institutions, democracy included, as instruments for the maintenance of intra-societal domination within what Horkheimer and Adorno dubbed “the authoritarian state” have been, and to a certain extent remain, important themes within the tradition of critical theory even today, and to that extent the meaning of this pragmatizing process remains contested within the tradition of critical theory itself.49 While following in the footsteps of Habermas’ discovery of pragmatist epistemology, Honneth goes beyond Habermas’ epistemic strategy and steadily moves from Peirce to Dewey as the main theoretical reference for appropriating pragmatist themes within critical theory.
An Epistemology of Emancipation
One of the most striking commonalities between pragmatism and the first generation Frankfurt School concerns the rejection of a received view of science that Horkheimer defined as “traditional theory” and that Dewey dubbed a “spectator theory of knowledge.” Both traditions set themselves against a Cartesian understanding of science as the quest for a detached knowledge of the external world, whose way of proceeding requires the distancing of the inquiring subject from the inquired world. Another striking commonality concerns the idea that philosophy can pursue its emancipatory interest only by opening itself to the proceedings of the – at the time newly emerging – social and political sciences.50 Their respective epistemologies attempted to conceptualize this elusive relation. While Honneth follows Habermas in criticizing his predecessors for having indeed failed to appreciate the manifold ways through which human interests are related to forms of knowledge, he is also
49 One could indeed claim that critical theory is today an house divided within itself, and that the contemporary renaissance of Adorno’s studies provides a challenging alternative to the pragmatizing program begun by Habermas and pursued by Honneth and, in a more ambiguous way, by Jaeggi. 50 I have examined at greater length the similarities between pragmatist and critical theory’s social philosophies in Frega (2013a).
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
Roberto Frega 25
interested in rescuing Horkheimer’s original socio-philosophical project as it unfolded in the research conducted at the Institut für Sozialeforschung under his direction. This perspective requires, more urgently than Habermas’, the development of an epistemology that can explain under which conditions social scientific knowledge can bear an emancipatory potential, a theme right at the heart of pragmatism’s philosophy of the social sciences. The destinies of these two projects are, however, linked, as they share common epistemological assumptions concerning the place of reason in the pursuit of knowledge and emancipation. As Honneth notes:
Adorno’s critique of sociology is designed for the exposition of a historical convergence of the “positivistic” concept of society and actual social development. It deals with the conviction that the conceptual framework of positivism only reflects a movement that, as a reification within the nexus of social life, is itself being completed in the processes of a coercive integration of all domains of action and a destruction of the capacity for individual identity.51
Echoing Habermas’ indictment, Honneth explains that:
[t]he idea of a self- destruction of human reason, the social- psychological concept of the loss of personality, the concept of mass culture, and the ideal of the authentic work of art are the building blocks of a theory of society that has its inner content in the central experience of the commonality of fascist and Stalinist domination. Its most prominent author is, of course, not Max Horkheimer but Theodor Adorno.52
Insofar as “Adorno views the relations of domination that have become visible in his own time as a structural paradigm from the development of which the hidden logic of the whole process of
51 Honneth (1993), 70. 52 Honneth (1993), 35.
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
Roberto Frega 26
civilization is to be read,”53 the inevitable consequence will be that the progress of civilization can be grasped only as a process of human regression, whose central core is provided by a conception of rationality reduced to instrumental reason. An epistemology transformed into a philosophy of history becomes then the mediating factor that unites Adorno’s critique of knowledge to his political theory. The history of western modernity is understood as the history of a process of objectification: if the defining trait of humanity as a species is its tendency to objectify nature, its socio- political equivalent is the inevitable tendency of a class to objectify and dominate another. Both processes are governed by the deployment of instrumental rationality. The very possibility of an exercise of power and control not based on instrumental domination but rather on communication is a priori excluded, as the only social processes they admit are those of one class oppressing another. Symmetrically, the recourse to pragmatism has to be seen as providing a more reliable theory of reason, one that will provide a better foundation to the epistemological project of developing a critical theory of society as well as to the political project of developing a theory of emancipation as democratization. Honneth’s indictment of the first generation differs from Habermas’ insofar as its focus shifts from the purely epistemological ground of the anthropology of knowledge to the socio-political plan of what he sees as Horkheimer and Adorno’s “definitive repression of the social.”54 Adorno’s critique of the social sciences and of politics are plagued by a similar failure at grasping the emancipatory potential embedded in the intermediate strata of social life – structures of social differentiation and public spheres, “pre-state domains of action in which normative convictions and cultural self- interpretations, as well as the purposive-rational deliberations of individuals, become socially effective.”55 The combined indictment against democracy and the social sciences – both entrapped within
53 Honneth (1993), 37. 54 Honneth (1993). 55 Honneth (1993), 76.
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
Roberto Frega 27
Adorno’s “traumatic picture of a totally administered society”56 – stems from the same theoretical roots. Indeed, the replacement of the original interdisciplinary social scientific study of society with a philosophy of history and the incapacity to move from a critical theory of totalitarian regimes to a positive appraisal of welfare democracy, are the equally negative consequences of the same theoretical move. The consequences of such a failure are for Honneth momentous, as the very possibility of a positive, emancipatory theory of society is expelled from the scope of critical theory. One is entitled to wonder what can be saved of a tradition whose theoretical bases are so radically shaken. Whereas Adorno believed that only art could escape from the alienating grip of instrumental reason,57 dismissing in the same stroke the emancipatory power of the social sciences and of democratic institutions, Honneth sees in the pragmatist tradition and in the work of Habermas the conditions of possibility for an alternative and more promising program of critical theory. His pragmatization of critical theory proceeds accordingly in two steps: after having reclaimed the superiority of pragmatist epistemology as the proper basis upon which to build a critical theory of society, he draws on pragmatism to develop a theory of democracy that he sees as the political counterpart of the emancipatory project developed through a critical theory of society. Particularly in Freedom’s Right, Honneth accomplishes this task through a process of rehabilitation of the social that, inspired by Hegel, he sees as taking place within the institutions of the “Sittlichkeit”: the family, the market, and the state. The emphatic attention devoted by Honneth to the communicative resources he sees at work throughout the whole social body is intended as a possible way out of the theoretical impasses of Adorno and Horkheimer. Whereas Habermas attempted to solve the riddles of instrumental rationality via a sophisticated differentiation between social systems steered by instrumental reason and a lifeworld permeated by communicative reason, Honneth proceeds through a
56 Honneth (1993), 74. 57 Honneth (1993), 68.
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
Roberto Frega 28
sociologically thicker and more sophisticated scheme, which unfortunately maintains Habermas’ dualism between instrumental and communicative reason. In ways that were however only adumbrated by his predecessor’s seminal work on the public sphere and that became fully evident in his subsequent works – particularly in The Theory of Communicative Action and in Between Facts and Norms – a public sphere steered by communicative rationality and populated by social movements bearing claims to social justice is now endowed with an emancipatory potential that Honneth will then re-describe in the updated terms of the Hegelian idea of ethical life, now actualized in a Deweyan theory of the democratic ethos. It is this idea that now takes center stage as the immanent normative ideal that best captures the emancipatory hopes and expectations raised by Western civilization in the course of the last three centuries and defines one of the three constitutive conditions for the realization of social freedom.
Recovering Dewey’s Public-based Theory of Democracy
More than Habermas, Honneth has been fascinated by pragmatism’s capacity to understand the emancipative function of everyday social interactions.58 Social interactions lie at the heart of social life, creating society as if from the middle, connecting individuals to macro structures.59 The conception of democracy stemming from this account of social life differs from Habermas’ insofar as Honneth appraises politics through the sociological categories of a theory of society rather than through those of a theory of discourses. Yet the theoretical trajectory is similar in compensating the steady reject of theoretical themes of the first generation with a massive
58 On this point Hans Joas has played for Honneth the role that Apel has played for Habermas, introducing him to a social theoretic version of pragmatism centered around the idea of an emancipatory potential embedded in the creativity of coordinated individual action Joas (1992, 1996). 59 This interaction-based social ontology is a common theme of pragmatist social theory. See for example Schubert (2006); Shalin (1986); Abbott (2016); Joas (1992); Frega (2015c).
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
Roberto Frega 29
incorporation of pragmatist intuitions. Whereas Habermas succeeds only incompletely at freeing himself from the grips of a totalizing paradigm of rationality through the dualism of the systems and the lifeworlds, Honneth goes a step further, ridding himself also of the remnants of a totalizing reason that Habermas confined to the steering function of power and money. Only on these conditions can the structuring force and the emancipatory power of social processes be affirmed.60 It is precisely this enhanced capacity to understand the role of social processes in the realization of what Honneth now calls “social freedom” that he sees as the decisive contribution of pragmatism, and particularly of Dewey’s theory of publics to which Honneth resorts in Freedom’s Right when it comes to the third stage of the ethical life. Here Honneth is forced to abandon the guiding ideas of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right and turns to Dewey’s theory of democracy to identify the normative conditions within which social freedom can be achieved. As he had already done in several remarkable papers written in the course of the 1990s, in Freedom’s Right Honneth is engaged in rewriting the genealogy of the tradition of critical theory, relying on the triad of Emile Durkheim, John Dewey, and Jürgen Habermas to provide an account of the conditions of political legitimacy, one that is rooted in the idea of ’democratic ethos,’ and whose essential feature is provided by a revised and expanded account of the idea of the public sphere, which he projects back on Dewey’s and Durkheim’s theories of politics in order to provide it with a thicker social substance. In Freedom’s Right, Honneth sets himself onto the task of describing the public sphere as an institution of social freedom. As he points out:
Here . . . an idea of freedom was institutionalized that no longer permitted a merely individualistic interpretation. Instead, individual citizens were to achieve their new freedom to influence political legislation by forming an intersubjectively examined opinion, in discursive exchange and dispute with other citizens, about the policies to be
60 Honneth (1993), Ch. 9.
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
Roberto Frega 30
implemented by elected representatives of the people.61
This informal public sphere, rather than the formal political institutions of the democratic state, epitomizes the progress of social freedom, because it is here that the greatest attempts at creating a free space of communication take place. Dewey is credited for having conceptualized emancipatory social actions in these terms, as for Dewey “the cooperative interaction in public will-formation is both the means and the end of individual self-realization.”62 So conceived, the public sphere can fulfill the epistemic goal of informing public decisions and at the same time the social goal of creating a cooperating public collectively involved in the self-reflective process of forming his own opinion. Honneth understands Dewey’s contribution to a theory of democracy in the terms of a revised version of Habermas’ theory of the public sphere, hence from the vantage point of a theory of collective will formation that takes place in a social public sphere opposed to the realm of the formal political institutions of the state. This view reflects Habermas two-tier model based on the epistemic division of labor between communicative and instrumental rationality, a distinction that forces both authors to conceive the public not as a collective social actor engaged in social processes of action and inquiry, but as a spectator essentially concerned with the task of forming a political opinion and hence creating and exercising communicative power. Not surprisingly, it is in the terms of a critical theory of media that Honneth interprets Dewey’s theory of the public. As he notes:
Dewey uses the term ’democratic public’ to describe the totality of all the communicative processes that enable the members of ’large societies’ with the help of the news media to take up the perspective of such a ’We’ while judging the consequences of their actions.”63
61 Honneth (2014), 260. 62 Honneth (2014), 269. 63 Honneth (2014), 274.
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
Roberto Frega 31
And he adds:
as soon as the media fulfill their task of providing the general knowledge required for dealing with social problems, the members of society will be capable, under conditions of equal rights to freedom and participation, to commonly explore appropriate solutions and work cooperatively toward the experimental consummation of their community.64
Honneth has certainly gone quite far in criticizing Habermas for not having:
further pursue[d] the question of how these practices of public opinion and will-formation could be socially generalized into the fragile structure of democratic nation- states in the 19th century, instead skipping ahead to the twentieth century and discovering a process in which this original social model was in the process of being hollowed out.65
He has also criticized Habermas’ dualizing way of proceeding, contending that:
[i]f capitalist societies are conceived in this way as social orders in which system and lifeworld stand over against each other as autonomous spheres of action, two complementary fictions emerge: We then suppose (1) the existence of norm- free organizations of action and (2) the existence of power- free spheres of communication.66
On the one hand, the idea that market institutions are purely driven by instrumental logic is contradicted by sociological studies showing
64 Honneth (2014), 275. 65 Honneth (2014), 283. 66 Honneth (1993), 298.
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
Roberto Frega 32
that no institution can function only on the basis of purposive rationality. On the other hand, the idea that the lifeworld is free from practices of power and domination gives rise to equally unrealistic assumptions. Both moves reveal a more consistent advancement in the pragmatizing project, which finds however a halt in Honneth’s unwillingness to dismiss Habermas’ dualism, with its very unpalatable consequence that for Honneth too, all of our normative attention must be “turned away from state organs and directed toward the conditions of non-coercive self-legislation among citizens.”67 State institutions and public administrations remain then subjected to the instrumental rationality of power, a position which is incompatible with the pragmatist idea of democratic experimentalism. Indeed, Honneth could have easily found in Dewey the resources needed to provide a fuller account of how epistemic practices taking place at different levels of society as well as the public and private institutions of democratic experimentalism contribute to the democratization of society.68 Such an account cannot, however, be easily squared with the Habermasian two-tier model, so Honneth can only provide proper space for it in the context of social movements, particularly in his reconstruction of the socialist tradition.69 This move is, however, insufficient, and here a more thorough adoption of themes coming from Dewey’s theory of democracy would have greatly helped Honneth to avoid these troubles. In conclusion, while the attempt to articulate a theory of democracy based on the works of Durkheim, Dewey, and Habermas – a triad from which Durkheim could be left out without significant loss – has to be seen as a decisive step forward in the self- understanding of critical theory, one wonders whether Honneth should not have gone even farther in his pragmatizing strategy.
67 Honneth (2014), 305. 68 A promising attempt in this direction is presently pursued by Just Serrano Zamora, a former student of Honneth that further advances the pragmatization of critical theory. See Serrano Zamora (2017). 69 Honneth (2015).
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
Roberto Frega 33
Indeed, rather than continuing to assume the dichotomy between the state and the public sphere as the cornerstone of a critical theory of democracy, it is probably through its overcoming that the irreversible process of the pragmatization of the Frankfurt School, originally begun by Habermas, can be brought to its complete execution.70
Rahel Jaeggi’s reluctant pragmatism
Jaeggi’s recent work provides additional evidence to the claim here defended that the Frankfurt School is undergoing a process of pragmatization that is deeply transforming its basic theoretical premises as well as its own self-understanding. In her later work, Jaeggi relies explicitly on Dewey’s theory of inquiry as intelligent problem solving to develop her own theory of immanent criticism. In the context of a broader reflection on the possibility of criticizing forms of life, Jaeggi finds in Dewey’s epistemology a promising starting point she strives to recombine with G. W. Hegel’s and Alasdair MacIntyre’s conceptions of crisis. Like her predecessors, Jaeggi’s turn to pragmatism stems from an epistemological reflection aimed at understanding the social basis of rationality in non-reductionist ways. While she does not address explicit criticisms at Horkheimer and Adorno, the acceptance of Habermas’ diagnosis of their “normative defeatisms” provides the background of her entire project. Like Honneth, Jaeggi sees in pragmatism a re-actualization of Hegel’s thought, and in Dewey’s theory of problem-resolution a variant of Hegel’s theory of social learning through crisis. From this standpoint, Jaeggi conceives of society’s capacity for problem-solving and crisis-resolution as a valid normative criteria to criticize forms of life: a form of life fails when it cannot solve the problems that emerge within itself, or when it succumbs to a crisis that shutters it from its foundations. Her major claim is that what provides forms of life with a rational content and hence grounds the possibility of critique, is precisely their capacity to
70 I further explore and justify this claim in Frega (2018), Ch. 8.
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
Roberto Frega 34
learn in order to adjust to historical variations. This problem solving orientation, in classical pragmatist style, is seen as incorporating a functional-instrumental as well as a normative dimension. On the one hand, problem-solving refers unambiguously to means-ends rationality. On the other hands, problems concern also values and norms.71 Indeed, for critical theorists as well as for pragmatists, problems represent needs that have been culturally and socially mediated, a thesis epitomized in Hilary Putnam’s rejection of the fact/value dichotomy as well as in Habermas’ entanglement of facticity and validity. On this basis, Jaeggi can then conclude that “the project of a critique of lifeforms is rooted in a so to say pragmatist reconstruction (and reduction) of historical philosophical motives.”72 This project is based on a social naturalism that conceives of associated living as a series of more or less successful adaptive moves, and of rationality as the norm of evolutionary success, reformulated in terms of social learning.73 In other words, as the result of successful processes of social inquiry aimed at solving collective problems of social coordination.74 Like Dewey and Mead on the one hand, and Habermas and Honneth on the other, Jaeggi tries to reconcile the social functionalism evoked by the pragmatic language of problem resolution with an ethical normativism that rejects purely instrumental accounts of what is a problem. Conceived as bundles of social practices, forms of life are seen as instances of solutions to social problems, in a way that owes much to Dewey’s social naturalism. Indeed, it is because they are socially construed that social problems cannot be handled in merely technical/positivistic ways. As Jaeggi contends, a form of life includes solutions to problems that are never given independently from how they are grasped within a form of life. Forms of life proceed therefore by
71 See for example Dewey (1915). For a commentary, see Frega (2010). 72 Jaeggi (2014), 59. 73 Jaeggi (2014), 343. 74 Surprisingly, Jaeggi contends that Dewey did not possess a theory of social change, nor a conception of collective learning as social process. Statements to the contrary can be found throughout Dewey’s work. See for example Dewey (2015), (1920); Dewey and Tufts (1932).
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
Roberto Frega 35
developing new interpretations of social phenomena and by subsequently providing solutions consistent with these interpretations, so that the dialectical interplay between practices and problems can be seen as the motor of social change.75 One can then say that the concept of forms of life stands to practice-theory as the concept of experience stands to pragmatism. In the footsteps of Dewey, Jaeggi describes the unfolding of forms of life through the dialectical steps of inquiry as proceeding from the unarticulated experience of an indeterminate situation up the ladder until the identification and implementation of a satisfying solution. And indeed, the process of passing through all of the “different stages of indetermination,”76 whereby a situation is first experienced in its indeterminateness, then a determination is further adopted, then a diagnosis is formulated, and finally a problem is identified, makes sense only under the assumption that social practices are impregnated by reason. In discontinuity with her predecessors though, to explain the rational basis of social life Jaeggi does not resort to the Habermasian dualism of instrumental and communicative rationality. Indeed, the epistemology of inquiry has taken over all the epistemic work this dualism accomplished in the works of her predecessors. Insofar as problems encompass a functional as well as a normative dimension, their resolution presupposes an epistemic orientation that neither the concept of instrumental rationality nor that of communicative rationality can fully grasp. On the one hand, Jaeggi defines rationality as an immanent norm of human life which proves utterly incompatible with any instrumentalistic reduction. Normativity and rationality are made the flesh and blood of human associated life as it unfolds in the interstices of social practices whose nature and quality are inseparable from their problem solving orientation. On the other hand, rationality is concretely embedded in the practical undertakings within social life in ways that a communicative theory of reason fails to grasp. By defining criticism through problem solving, Jaeggi does
75 Jaeggi (2014), 342. 76 Jaeggi (2014), 213.
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
Roberto Frega 36
not need to resort to the dualism of instrumental and communicative rationality. Her epistemology thus goes significantly beyond Habermas and Honneth in developing a notion of rationality that is decidedly more consistent with the pragmatist non-dualist conception of inquiry. Seen from a pragmatist standpoint, this move helps overcome one of the biggest theoretical obstacles separating the two traditions. Rationality is seen as permeating human forms of life deep into their action-oriented and problem-based structure; it is an irreducible and distinctive feature of human life, a mode of being which qualifies our everyday patterns of social interactions, our dealing with the external world, our being normative creatures. From the perspective of a practice-based theory of forms of life, the social basis of human rationality is no more rooted in our linguistic nature, but, rather, in our being social actors involved in ongoing practical undertakings aimed at the task of solving a form of life’s problems. Jaeggi is then in profound agreement with one of the most fundamental theoretical claims of classical pragmatists, that is to say the idea that the real basis of human reason lies within interactions with others in the practically oriented context of a form of life. So much for the similarities. Jaeggi’s account of the immanent rationality of forms of life parts company with Dewey’s account of the rationality of experience-based forms of inquiry where she retreats to a Hegelian interpretation of problems as ’crisis’, as this assumptions introduces dialectical rigidities in an otherwise more flexible account of social change. Through MacIntyre’s epistemology, Jaeggi imports in her framework the Kuhnian dualism of normal and revolutionary science which, reinforced through Hegel’s dialectics, conduces her to lose sight of the change-inducing power of ordinary events and practices, a consequence that is hard to square with the practice- based approach she has adopted since the start. Dewey is then criticized for not having grasped the inner logic of social change as a self-induced process of crisis resolution. Yet where this leads is not clear. From the standpoint of the pragmatist ecological view of society and nature, this move ends up impoverishing rather than
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
Roberto Frega 37
enriching our understanding of how social change happens. On the one hand, this juxtaposition of problems and crises leads one to construe ’normal’ (Kuhn-MacIntyre) or ’first-order’ (Jaeggi) problems as unreflective, insofar as they always presuppose an interpretative framework that they cannot call into question. This distinction reminds us of Habermas’ equally troubling distinction between conventional and reflective morality. Dewey’s notion of problem solving is then reduced to normal or first-order problems, a move clearly mistaken. On the other hand, crises are transformed into epoch-making, radical, rare, and totalizing events through which an entire normative framework – a form of life – is overturned and replaced by another. As she explains, “contradiction and crisis denotes [...] the decline (Verfall) of a historical or spiritual formation.”77 If what entitles us to criticize forms of life is their capacity or incapacity to overcome totalizing self-induced crisis, this solution seems inescapable, and yet puzzling. Kuhn’s and MacIntyre’s models of social change put an extreme emphasis on historical discontinuity and tend to substantialize historical epochs under the form of closed social totalities. Extending the same pattern to smaller social practices is problematic though. Taking side with Hegel avoids these problems, but at the cost that the distinction between problems and crisis loses its explanatory power, so that we are back to Dewey’s epistemology of inquiry. Indeed, from a pragmatist standpoint this dualizing way of thinking is neither warranted nor necessary, and the same theoretical results could easily have been achieved within the simpler and more elegant pragmatist conception of rationality as inquiry, simply by distinguishing different types of problems. One could then simply drop the distinction between problems and crisis, without losing an ounce in explanatory power, and gaining in theoretical clarity and strength. A second, and related difficulty this strategy raises, concerns the distinction between internally-induced and externally-induced change.78 Jaeggi contends that, contrary to problems, crises are characterized by their immanent dynamics. Yet if one admits that
77 Jaeggi (2015), 375. 78 Jaeggi (2014), 362-364.
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
Roberto Frega 38
social practices are essentially entangled, interpenetrating, mutually influencing, and open to the outer world, this distinction is puzzling, as it ends up substantializing the notion of social practice in unnecessary ways. Indeed, insofar as contradictions can only be internal, the very possibility of criticism must rely upon the dual separation of internal and external. Here a sophisticated notion of conflict such as Dewey’s would have been more helpful to describe how problems arising within a social unit may induce social change.79 Moreover, this distinction ends up limiting its own explanatory potential to crises that are “self-induced and within it [the form of life] unsolvable.”80 Why self-induced crisis should have priority over externally-induced crisis is decidedly unclear, particularly if one admits the strong interdependence that characterizes our globalized and interconnected world. If on the other hand externally induced crises are recuperated under the concept of internal appropriation,81 we are once again back at Dewey’s ecological understanding of social progress as problem solving, with the additional difficulty that the ecological dimension through which Dewey grasped the organism-situation interaction is lost. This return to Hegel mediated by the Kuhn-MacIntyre hypothesis is therefore not really convincing, as it forces all possible forms of social change into the Procrustean bed of a continuist philosophy of history based on the notion of internal contradictions. Rather than seeing Hegel’s’ conception of crisis as an improvement on Dewey’s conception of problem-solving, the contrary seems to be true.82 Indeed, Dewey’s social philosophy, with its acute sensitivity
79 I discuss Dewey’s theory of conflict in this perspective and provide a threefold typology of conflicts and normative criteria in Frega (2015b). 80 Hegel describes crisis as “problems that systematically lie within a given social formation, that originate within it and that cannot find a solution within it. [...] Hegel’s diagnosis of crisis describes the decline (Verderben) of given forms of life (sittlicher Formationen) as self-induced (hausgemacht)”. Jaeggi (2014), 373. 81 Jaeggi (2014), 386. 82 Here we touch upon a much more complex problem, which is that of understanding to what extent social philosophy needs to rely structurally upon concepts such as these of false consciousness or reification. Here a major difference
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
Roberto Frega 39
for interdependencies – which he termed the extended networks of indirect consequences – appears to be a much reliable guide than Hegel’s monocausal and intrinsic dialectic, to explain how social change and social learning happens, often piecemeal. Opposing self- induced and other-induced crisis is to this extent not very helpful: crisis emerges always at the crossroad of internal difficulties and new external challenges, and nothing is really gained by prioritizing the one over the other. An additional element of concern is that the scope of critique is unnecessarily reduced to a retrospective process of interpretation, something Jaeggi admits when she proposes to understand Hegel’s contribution to her project in terms of a “retrospective teleology.”83 Whilst historical evolution remains an important framework for assessing normative practices for pragmatists as well,84 their future-oriented attitude of reconstruction stands here in tension with a conception of critique that can be exercised only (or at any event preferably) retrospectively. On these and related aspects, Honneth’s reading of a Hegelianized Dewey appears more productive than Jaeggi’s insistence on differences. Indeed, Jaeggi’s attempted reconciliation of these positions in a “dialectical-pragmatist” understanding of learning processes shows that if these problematic and unnecessary theoretical distinctions are set aside, we – unsurprisingly – discover that in the end Hegel’s and Dewey’s theoretical positions are not that far apart, and that much in Dewey’s epistemology and political philosophy can be seen as an updated and non-metaphysical variant of Hegel’s philosophy.85 Jaeggi is therefore right in concluding that Hegelian dialectic and pragmatism share a common project aiming at “thinking social change as a process of rational transformation that takes place
between a certain strand in critical theory and pragmatism seems to arise, as I discuss in Frega (2013a). 83 Jaeggi (2014), 436-439. 84 I justify this claim in greater details in Frega (2012b), Chapter 8. 85 This is notably the case for Hegel’s idea of articulation as the process whereby something implicit becomes explicit, which Jaeggi utilizes to describe social change as a learning process. This idea plays an equally if not more important role in Dewey’s social philosophy, and more broadly in pragmatism. See Jung (2009); Frega (2012b).
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
Roberto Frega 40
through continuity and discontinuity [through which] socio- historical processes can be understood as processes of learning.”86 For all these reasons, Jaeggi’s account is at the same time refreshing and troubling. Refreshing, as it finally attains a conception of reason that is freed from the shortcomings of the first generation critical theorists, while at the same time not plagued by the problematic dualisms to which Habermas resorted to bring critical theory out of its dead end, and to which Honneth remains at least partially committed.87 Problematic, as it reminds us that any theoretical strategy that in the footsteps of Habermas wants to overcome the epistemological riddles of the founding fathers of the Frankfurt school cannot stop half-way, contenting itself with a dialectical reconciliation between instrumental and communicative rationality. Jaeggi’s back and forth between Hegel and Dewey remains in the end unresolved, and her endorsement of pragmatism, to a certain extent, reluctant. Yet in Jaeggi’s work we appreciate the distance traveled by the Frankfurt School in its nearly century-long journey: from the first generation’s initial project of a science-based emancipatory critical theory, to the later unfortunate reduction of rationality to instrumental reason, to Habermas’ rediscovery of a Peircean conception of intersubjective rationality, to Honneth’s reconciliation of instrumental and communicative rationality under a still more explicit endorsement of pragmatist themes, to the final, although incomplete, adoption of a conception of rationality as inquiry in Jaeggi’s own version of a critical theory of society understood as a critique of forms of life.
Conclusions
Examination of the works of Habermas, Honneth, and Jaeggi shows that interest for pragmatism within critical theory is motivated by epistemological as well as by political concerns. On the epistemological side, since the very inception of the Frankfurt School
86 Jaeggi (2014), 444. 87 See Frega (2013b).
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
Roberto Frega 41
in the works of Horkheimer, critical theorists have been attracted in particular by pragmatism’s similar concern with the place of reason in society. Whereas Horkheimer and Adorno failed to understand the specificity of pragmatist epistemology, wrongly identifying pragmatism with a variant of positivism, since the early works of Habermas and Apel, and later of Joas and Honneth, a new and more sophisticated awareness has emerged, one that correctly sees pragmatism as a post-foundational, post-metaphysical, post- positivistic, fallibilist and experimental epistemology based on the idea of rationality as inquiry that has much in common with the Frankfurt School’s critical program. On the political side, an initial prejudiced identification of pragmatism with the political philosophy of rampant American capitalism has steadily given way to the more sympathetic views of Habermas and then Honneth, which have both clearly seen its superiority in offering a valid normative framework for thinking political legitimacy, and therefore for identifying appropriate conditions for social emancipation. Habermas, Honneth, and then Jaeggi have seen in pragmatism a promising program for developing a critical theory of society capable of combining epistemic with emancipatory interests, one that is however more consistent with the socio-political conditions that have developed since the second half of the 20th century. The emancipatory role played by social movements, the democratizing function of civic society, and the post-colonial movements of independence have shown that social emancipation can be promoted by rationality-laden processes of collective learning which have contributed to a large extent to overcome formal domination and, to a certain extent, also to reduce forms of informal domination.88 Habermas’ theory of deliberative democracy, Honneth’s conception of a democratic ethos and Jaeggi’s theory of forms of life demonstrate in different ways the extent to which pragmatism has become an indispensable ingredient of contemporary critical theory. In this paper I have also shown to what extent this process remains incomplete, particularly where these authors resist giving up dichotomizing ways of thinking which prove
88 Wagner (2016).
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
Roberto Frega 42
incompatible with the pragmatist method they wish to appropriate. This situation creates theoretical tensions that are still unresolved. To that extent, a more thorough reliance on a pragmatist epistemology would help critical theory pursue its own goals while avoiding some theoretical problems that still plague it. In the face of the ever-resurgent temptation of totalizing models of critique, achieving this process of pragmatization offers a promising learning path. In epistemology, this requires that all the remnants of Habermas’ dualisms be more consistently removed, and that the idea of rationality as inquiry be more consistently articulated in the terms of a critical theory of society. In political theory, this requires that the Habermasian theory of the public sphere be completed with a theory of democratic experimentalism, better suited to account for the emancipatory function of private and public institutions such as the firm and the bureaucracy.
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
Roberto Frega 43
Bibliography
Abbott, Andrew. 2016. Processual Sociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Aboulafia, Mitchell (Ed.) 2002. Habermas and Pragmatism. London: Routledge.
Antonio, Robert. 1989. “The normative foundations of emancipatory theory: Evolutionary versus pragmatic perspectives.” American Journal of Sociology 94, no. 4: 721–748.
Bernstein, Richard. 2010. The Pragmatic Turn. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Brunkhorst, Hauke. 2014. “Kritische theorie und pragmatismus.” In Kritik und kritische Theorie. Studien zur Politischen Soziologie. Baden Baden: Nomos. 55-70.
Dewey, John. 1915. “The Logic of Judgment of Practice.” Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods 12.
—. 1982. Reconstruction in Philosophy. Found in The Middle Works of John Dewey, 1899-1924: Volume 12. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Originally published 1920.
—. 2015. “Lectures in social and political philosophy.” European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy.
Dewey, John and Tufts, James Hayden. 1985. Ethics. Found in The Later Works of John Dewey, 1925-1953: Volume 7. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Originally published 1932.
Frega, Roberto. 2010. “From Judgment to Rationality: Dewey’s Epistemology of Practice.” Transactions of the C. S. Peirce
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
Roberto Frega 44
Society 46, no. 4: 591–610.
—. 2011. “Richard Bernstein and the challenges of a broadened pragmatism.” European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy 3, no. 2: 212–215.
—. 2012a. “Equal Accessibility to All: Pragmatism, and the Place of Religious Beliefs in a Post-Secular Society.” Constellations 19, no. 3: 267–287.
—. 2012b. Practice, Judgment, and the Challenge of Moral and Political Disagreement. A Pragmatist Account. Lanham: Lexington.
—. 2013a. “Between pragmatism and critical theory: Social philosophy today.” Human Studies 37, no. 1: 57–82.
—. 2013b. “From normative spheres to normative practices: new prospects for normative theory after Habermas” International Journal of Philosophical Studies.
—. 2015a. “Beyond morality and ethical life: Pragmatism and critical theory cross paths.” Journal of Philosophical Research 40: 63–96.
—. 2015b. “John Dewey’s Social Philosophy: A Restatement.” European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy 2, no. 7.
—. 2015c. “The normative structure of the ordinary.” European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy 7, no. 1.
—. 2018. The Democratic Project. (Unpublished Manuscript).
Gaus, Daniel. 2013. “Rational reconstruction as a method of political theory between social critique and empirical political science.” Constellations 20, no. 4: 553–570.
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
Roberto Frega 45
Habermas, Jürgen. 1962. Strukturwandel der Offentlichkeit : Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der buergerlichen Gesellschaft. Luchterhand.
—. 1971. Knowledge and Human Interests. Boston: Beacon Press.
—. 1984. The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 1. Boston: Beacon Press.
—. 1985. “A philosophico-political profile.” New Left Review 151: 75.
—. 1987. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Cambridge: Polity.
—. 1993. Justification and Application. Boston: MIT Press.
—. 1994. “Hannah Arendt’s communications concept of power.” In L. Hinchman and S. Hinchman (Eds.), Hannah Arendt: Critical Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 211-230.
—. 1996. Between Facts and Norms. Cambridge: Polity Press.
—. 1999. Truth and Justification (English Ed ed.). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
—. 2002. Postscript. See Aboulafia 2002: 223–233.
Hetzel, Andreas. 2008. “Zum Vorrang der Praxis. Berührungspunkte zwischen Pragmatismus und kritischer Theorie.” In A. Hetzel, M. Rölli, and J. Kertscher (Eds.), Pragmatismus – Philosophie der Zukunft? Weilerswist: Velbrück.
Honneth, Axel. 1993. The Critique of Power: Reflective Stages in a Critical Social Theory. Mit Press.
—. 1998. “Democracy as reflexive cooperation.” Political Theory 26, no. 6: 763–783.
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
Roberto Frega 46
—. 2003. “Halbierte rationalität. erkenntnisanthropologische motive der frankfurter schule.” In H. Joas and J. Fischer (Eds.), Kunst, Macht und Institution. Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag. 58-74.
—. 2014. Freedom’s Right: The Social Foundations of Democratic Life. Cambridge: Polity.
—. 2015. Die Idee des Sozialismus. Versuch einer Aktualisierung. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Horkheimer, Max. 1974. Eclipse of Reason. Bloomsbury Publishing.
Jaeggi, Rahel. 2014. Kritik von Lebensformen. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
—. 2015. “Towards an immanent critique of forms of life.” Raisons politiques 1: 13–29.
Joas, Hans. 1992. Pragmatism and Social Theory. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
—. 1996. The Creativity of Action. Cambridge: Polity.
Jung, Matthias. 2009. Der bewusste Ausdruck: Anthropologie der Artikulation. Walter de Gruyter.
Schubert, Hans-Joachim. 2006. “The Foundation of Pragmatic Sociology: Charles Horton Cooley and George Herbert Mead.” Journal of Classical Sociology 6, no.1: 51–74.
Serrano Zamora, Just. 2017. “Articulating a sense of powers. An expressivist reading of John Dewey’s theory of social movements.” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 53, no. 1.
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
Roberto Frega 47
Shalin, Dmitri. 1986. Pragmatism and Social Interactionism. American Sociological Review 51, no. 1: 9–29.
Shijun, Tong. 2006. “’Critique’ Immanent in ‘Practice’: New Frankfurt school and American Pragmatism.” Frontiers of Philosophy in China 1, no. 2: 295–316.
Wagner, Peter. 2016. Progress: A Reconstruction. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
ON REALITY, EXPERIENCE, AND TRUTH: JOHN WATSON’S UNPUBLISHED NOTES ON JOHN DEWEY
JAMES SCOTT JOHNSTON (Memorial University) & SARAH MESSER (Memorial University)
John Watson of Queen’s University Canada is one of three individuals John Shook has identified as improving Dewey’s nascent theory of sensations. Dewey felt himself indebted to Watson in regards to his early absolutism of self/mind. In the Watson fonds at Queen’s University, Canada, there are unpublished hand-written notes by Watson on Dewey’s 1905 “The Postulate of Immediate Empiricism” and 1906’s “Reality, Truth, and Experience.” In the context of these unpublished notes, we investigate Watson’s claims against Pragmatism generally, and focus on reality, truth, and experience specifically. A brief introduction to Dewey’s theories of reality, truth, and experience precedes a fuller discussion of Watson’s chief criticisms, and an analysis of the strength of Watson’s arguments follows. We claim throughout that what is at stake here are not two rival conceptions of philosophy, one realist and the other idealist, but rather two rival understandings of Idealism, one naturalized and the other Absolute.
Volume 1 · Number 2 · Fall 2017 · Pages 48-69
James Scott Johnston & Sarah Messer 49
hat the neo-Idealism of the latter half of the 19th century influenced the development of American Classical T Pragmatism few would today deny.1 There has been a resurgence of interest in the relationship of one to the other; a resurgence that has led to the conclusion that John Dewey’s early philosophy of psychology and logic was influenced most profoundly by G.W.F. Hegel and the Scottish neo-Hegelians John and Edward Caird and Canadian John Watson, himself close to Edward Caird. 2 Indeed, it has been said Dewey’s early absolutism of self is explicitly indebted to Watson, among others.3 This would change, of course, as the development of Dewey’s functional theory of organism and environment gradually pushed aside the neo-Idealist tropes of absolute, mind, and spirit.4 By the turn of the century Dewey is often said to have abandoned Hegelian garb in favour of a Jamesian, Darwinian psychology and theory of knowledge in which adaptation and evolution took centre stage:5 the
1 Paul Fairfield, Introduction, John Dewey and Continental Philosophy (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2009), 2. I understand by the term neo-Idealism, that school of thought represented by British philosophers following Hegel in the latter half of the 19th century. Neo-Idealism roughly accords with neo-Hegelianism for my purposes. 2 John Shook, John Dewey’s Empirical Theory of Knowledge and Reality (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2000), p. 69; Christopher Humphrey, “The Sage of Kingston: John Watson and the Ambiguity of Hegelianism,” Phd. diss, (McGill University, 1992); Hilda Neatby, Queen’s University Vol. 1 1841-1917 (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1978), 136. Watson was Edward Caird’s student while at Glasgow. 3 Shook, Dewey’s Empirical Theory of Knowledge and Reality, p. 69; See also, John Dewey, The Collected Works of John Dewey, 1882-1953, ed. By Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969-1991), LW 5: 152-153, for Watson’s relationship to Dewey’s own teacher at Hopkins, G.S. Morris. 4 James Good, Rereading Dewey’s “Permanent Hegelian Deposit,” in John Shook and James Good, John Dewey’s Philosophy of Spirit, with the 1897 Lecture on Hegel, (New York: Fordham Press, 2010), p. 58. Good characterizes the “Absolute Knowing” at the end of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit as “Knowledge that does not seek to go beyond itself in order to ground itself.” Attempts to do this—attempts to cultivate a “transcendent absolute,” were the reason for Dewey’s abandonment of the British neo-Hegelians, according to Good. For they offered a “dogmatic posit” that neither Hegel, nor Dewey, would accept. 5 For example, Robert Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca:
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
James Scott Johnston & Sarah Messer 50
imposing neo-Hegelian edifice of Absolute Spirit as erected by neo- Idealists in the latter half of the 19th century is, by the turn of the century, absent. Yet, Dewey himself has said that a “Hegelian bacillus” remained in his thought (LW 5.153). In contrast, Watson never shed his allegiance to Hegel: indeed, he became further committed to moving Hegel’s heterodox account of Christianity to an orthodox conclusion. By 1906, the year of Dewey’s allegiance to “immediate empiricism,” Watson was in the process of developing what would become a novel (though neo-Hegelian) philosophy of religion.6 Dewey and Watson had the opportunity to correspond several times between the late 1880’s and the early 1890’s. Much of this correspondence is no longer extant. However, we know from Dewey’s letters that he had at least some contact with Watson.7 Watson kept himself apprised of Dewey’s work, as is evident from an unpublished collection of notes on Dewey’s pragmatism written circa 1907-1908. In what follows, we will examine these notes and discuss the particular findings of Watson in bringing attention to problems in Dewey’s treatment of central issues. These issues we will call 1) the problem of Reality 2) the problem of Experience, and finally 3) the problem of Truth. However, before we begin this, we want to discuss Dewey’s uses of these terms as they appear in the chief articles that Watson is examining: “The Postulate of Immediate Empiricism” (1905), and “Reality, Truth, and Experience (1906). It will be our claim in the final section of the paper that, though both Idealists in the broadest sense of the term, Watson misses the move
Cornell University Press, 1991), 61. 6 See J.M. MacEachran, “John Watson,” Some Great Men of Queen’s, edited by R. C. Wallace (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1941). 7 Dewey and Watson corresponded on occasion during the late 1880’s and early 1890’s. However, and for reasons yet unknown, Dewey and Watson ceased corresponding after this time. It may well be that Dewey’s turn from neo-Idealism to functionalism and evolutionary naturalism played a role. On Dewey’s contact with Watson, see for example Dewey’s letter to Alice Chipman Dewey (1907 04 16) in John Dewey, The Correspondence of John Dewey Vol 1, edited by L. Hickman (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003). Dewey discussed attending a lecture by Watson at the Brooklyn Institute in New York City.
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
James Scott Johnston & Sarah Messer 51
Dewey makes to describe in functional language what are Hegelian concepts of the real, of truth, and of the phenomenology of experiencing and in missing these, charges Dewey (wrongly, in our estimation) with what are insoluble problems from Watson’s Objective Idealist standpoint.8
Part I: Dewey on Reality, Experience, and Truth circa 1905- 1906.
Dewey had spent the previous 10 years of study in familiar/comfortable collegial circumstances, for he was head of a philosophy department that had become known for its characteristic blend of pragmatism and social thought. This ‘Chicago School,’ as William James labelled it, would continue on despite Dewey’s departure for Columbia University in 1904. In his new setting, Dewey encountered realism unvarnished, owing chiefly to the influence of the Aristotelian F.W. Woodbridge and the “critical realist” J.P. Montague.9 This had a profound impact on the tenor of the articles Dewey would write; they became more apologetic of
8 By Objective Idealist, we mean an account of the relationship of mind, consciousness, or thought that grasps the world such that everything we can say about the world is a matter of and for, thought. This does not discount an account of reality as beyond thought, though it does inhibit the account from having features or properties that can operate as predicates in propositions or claims. In the naturalized version of Idealism, suspension, negation, and sublation are rendered into naturalist metaphors of adaptation and evolution, while Reality remains thoroughgoing in respect of nature and experience. In the spiritualized version of Idealism, the Absolute takes on theological connotations and Reality is bifurcated into natural and metaphysical realms. The former may be seen in John Dewey, John Dewey’s Philosophy of Spirit, with the 1897 Lecture on Hegel; the latter in John Watson, The Philosophical Basis of Religion (Glasgow: James Maclehose and Sons, 1907). See also James Scott Johnston, John Dewey’s Earlier Logical Theory (Albany, Ny: SUNY Press, 2014) for more on Hegel’s naturalism and Dewey’s further naturalization of Hegel. 9 Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy,” 119. For an emergent and alternative reading, however, see John Shook, “The Nature Philosophy of John Dewey,” Dewey Studies 1(1) (2017).
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
James Scott Johnston & Sarah Messer 52
Pragmatism and Instrumentalism and critical of epistemology, Idealism, and classical Empiricism. Reality, Experience, and Truth were topics of mutual concern to Dewey and his critics. Indeed, these were the very topics in dispute, as we will see in regards to Watson. Here, we wish to discuss what Dewey’s understandings of Reality, Experience, and Truth circa 1905-1906 were in broad outlines. We will note where he disagreed with both realist and idealist understandings as we proceed. We will also demonstrate that the concepts Dewey was working with were in fact not alien to Idealism—at least a naturalized and functional version of it. It is this naturalization of Idealism that Watson misses in his criticism of Dewey’s Idealism and it is these understandings that we wish to capture in the final section of the paper. 10 We will draw upon two of Dewey’s articles here; “Reality as Experience” and “the Postulate of Immediate Empiricism.”11
Dewey on Reality
Dewey begins the essay, “Reality as Experience” by stating his belief that traits of experience are always “in transition towards the state of affairs in which they are experienced.”12 Objectors to this, Dewey claims, create a dualism where no dualism exists. Specifically, they place a “soul-substance, a mind, or even a consciousness” between reality and experience. Such a conception, Dewey says, is not compatible with the idea that earlier temporal situations are
10 For more on Watson’s spiritualized and religious Hegelianism, see Sibley, Northern Spirits, esp. chs. 8, 10: for more on Dewey’s naturalized and functional Hegelianism, see Thomas Dalton, “Dewey’s Hegelianism Reconsidered: Reclaiming the Lost Soul of Psychology” New Ideas in Psychology 15, 1 (1997). 1-15; James Good, A Search for Unity in Diversity: The “Permanent Deposit” of Hegel in John Dewey’s Philosophy. (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. 2006); Johnston, John Dewey’s Earlier Logical Theory; Dewey, John Dewey’s Philosophy of Spirit, with the 1897 Lecture on Hegel. 11 We choose these articles because Watson read these and commented upon them directly in his handwritten notes. 12 John Dewey, The Collected Works of John Dewey, 1882-1953, ed. by Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969-1991), MW 2.101.
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
James Scott Johnston & Sarah Messer 53
identifiable with reality (MW 2.102). Reality, whatever else it is, must include mind and consciousness as well as “the scientifically warranted early dated world” (MW 2.102). The question of the reality of experience for the objector is the question of an earlier reality contrasted to a later one (MW 2.102-103) and this cannot be correct. Dewey explains that it would be wrong to say “an earlier reality versus a later reality because this denies the salient point of transition toward” (MW 2.103). He explains that the later form of reality is the better index for philosophy because the earlier form does not take the property of transition-towards, which Dewey claims is as objectively real as any property but “is realized in experience” (MW 2.103). Dewey supposes that an early “theoretically adequate cognition” of the earlier reality (which he claims is prior to the existence of conscious beings) can be isolated and calls this “O” and contrasts this with “R” as reality (MW 2.104). Objectors whom Dewey claims follow the ‘evolutionary method’ must agree that “O” with its properties (A, B, C, D) is in “qualitative transformation towards experience” (MW 2, 104). Where is the locus of this recognition? Dewey asks. The answer is in the present experience. It is only in present experience that the transformation toward experience is realized, meaning that that which is scientifically known is contained in an experience in which “O” as an object cannot be exhaustively presented (MW 2.104).13 The motive and basis for formulating “R” as “O,” Dewey claims, is found in the features of experience that are not formulated; these can only be formulated in a further experience. “What is omitted from reality in the O is always restored in the experience in which O is present. The O is thus really taken as what it is—a condition of reality as experience” (MW 2.105). The upshot is that every experience holds knowledge of the “entire object-world” within. And this goes for any experience in which “cognition enters” (MW 2.105). Reality is never
13 The broad outlines of Hegel are in evidence, here. Present experience suspends prior reality yet prior reality continues to have a relationship (temporal in nature) with present experience. One can think of Hegel’s understanding of sublation, here.
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
James Scott Johnston & Sarah Messer 54
“just and exclusively what it is or would be to an all-competent knower; or even that it is, relatively to a finite and partial knower”. 14 Rather, knowing is but one mode of experiencing and reality is dependent upon experience.
Dewey on Experience
In “Reality and Experience” we see experience play the role of consummate gatherer; experience into which cognition enters “suspends” the particular object and its properties (the “object- world”) and in so doing, makes possible the articulation of its features. But this reality borne of experience and its “object-world” is then taken up and suspended in a further experience which, to judge by Dewey’s claims, should result in the further elucidation of features of the “object-world” (MW 2.105-106). In “The Postulate of Immediate Empiricism,” Dewey has more to say about the role and scope of experience. Here things are what they are experienced as (MW 2.158). When one wishes “to describe anything truly,” one articulates what the thing is experienced as being (MW 2.158). The interesting question is not that when one describes something one is describing it as experienced, but “what sort of experience is denoted or indicated” (MW 2.159). From the standpoint of knowledge, there can be no metaphysical claims for the absoluteness of reality and everything in it because experience and reality are dynamic; to claim otherwise, Dewey thinks, “is the root of all philosophic evil” (MW 2.160). Dewey then gives us the example of one frightened by noise. As a response to criticisms insisting that one who was frightened by a noise knew that one was frightened by a noise, or else there would have been no experience at all, Dewey distinguishes between “I- know-I-am-frightened” and “I-am-frightened” (MW 2.161). Insisting that the distinction is not merely verbal, Dewey explains that he has no reason to claim that the experience must be described by a phrase including “I know” (MW 2.162). Dewey explains that there is no
14 John Dewey, The Collected Works of John Dewey, 1882-1953, ed. By Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969-1991), MW2.159.
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
James Scott Johnston & Sarah Messer 55
reason to believe that the experience is not simply an experience of fright-at-the-noise. Knowing that one is frightened at the noise is, according to Dewey a different experience—a different thing. If a critic insists that there is no reason to believe that the person must have really known that he was frightened, Dewey’s reply to the critic would be that the critic is changing the question. The critic may be right that one knows that one is frightened, but Dewey claims that this is “only because the “really” is not concretely experienced” (MW 2.162) and the critic is departing from the immediate empiricist viewpoint that Dewey wishes to defend.15 Experience for Dewey, then, is always of “thats” (MW 2.164). Like C.S. Peirce before him, Dewey thinks the actuality one faces when one immediately experiences is brute; as yet unconditioned by cognition.
Dewey on Truth
Dewey speaks of truth in the context of the empiricist account of knowledge in “The Postulate of Immediate Empiricism.” Objective reality, which is claimed and justified only in present experience, counts for Dewey as “describing anything truly” (MW 2.158). But beyond this, nothing is said of truth, and it remains a mystery why Watson made much of Dewey’s view of truth given the paucity of an account of it in the two essays upon which he focuses heavily. Nevertheless, Dewey does have some telling claims about truth, though these are found not in “Reality as Experience” or “The Postulate of Immediate Empiricism,” rather “The Experimental Theory of Knowledge.”16 Dewey likens truth to knowledge itself;
15 The sort of Empiricism Dewey has in mind is Locke’s. Dewey seems to think that Locke admits a theory of sense-perception in which qualities or features of an experience are assembled into ideas that are then utilized in judging. While strictly speaking correct of infants, Dewey’s criticism overlooks Locke’s insistence that immediate perceptions are in children and adults themselves ideas or representations, and are already committed to the faculty of mind or thought. See John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959), 183. 16 Watson likely read this as well, given the circulation of Mind amongst philosophers in the early 20th century.
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
James Scott Johnston & Sarah Messer 56
“truth is the experienced relation of things,” and has “no meaning outside that relation”.17 Truth is not a property of a thing simpliciter rather it is a property of a thing in which a problematic issue regarding its assertion is experienced (MW 2.118). Indeed, Dewey would prefer we drop the term, truth and replace it with the adverb, truly—at least until the problematic situation or issue is ameliorated (MW 2.118). In this respect, it becomes the summary of “a quality presented by specific affairs in their own specific way” (MW 2.118).18 By way of summary, we note that Dewey was not critical of all Idealisms; only those that bifurcated reality into two, with thought or experience on one side and reality or things in themselves on the other. For Dewey, this bifurcation or dualism infected Realisms and Idealisms equally. While realists were convinced that the world and everything in it was ‘real,’ and idealists maintained that the world and everything in it could be captured in thought, realists made the world and idealists made thought into a fixed and final entity or process. The intrinsic dynamism of the world and thought were thus neglected in favour of an a priori account of one or the other. This conclusion and the account that rejected it were consistent with Dewey’s own accounting of experience—an experience that consists in both “brute facts” and thought. Dewey does not reach for a metaphysical argument or claim in grounding experience; rather, experience constitutes the environment (In Experience and Nature, Dewey will call this, “nature” which we
17 John Dewey, The Collected Works of John Dewey, 1882-1953, ed. By Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969-1991), MW2.118. 18 Dewey’s target in this essay is epistemology—what Dewey sees as an attempt to claim foundations for theories of knowledge. “Epistemology starts from the assumption that certain conditions lie back of knowledge. The mystery would be great enough if knowledge were constituted by non-natural conditions back of knowledge, but the mystery is increased by the fact that the conditions are defined as to be incompatible with knowledge. Hence the primary problem of epistemology is: How is knowledge überhaupt, knowledge at large, possible…A second problem arises: How is knowledge in general, knowledge überhaupt, valid? (MW 2, 119). Dewey invokes the entire rationalist and empiricist tradition common to modern philosophy in his encapsulation of epistemology.
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
James Scott Johnston & Sarah Messer 57
inhabit, and which we have and undergo.19 What takes place within nature does so through evolution and (on our part) adaptation and habit-formation—of both thoughts and things. There is a ceaseless dynamism to thought and things in experience; in this regard Dewey comes closest to naturalized accounts of Hegel currently finding favour in contemporary Hegel scholarship.20
Part II: Watson on Dewey
In 1906, John Watson was the pre-eminent philosopher in Canada, carrying forward British neo-Idealism in the tradition of Edward Caird and F.H. Bradley. The question we wish to raise and answer here is: what was the impetus behind Watson’s exegesis and criticism of Dewey. However, it will do to first discuss the context in which Watson responded to Dewey. In 1907-1908 Watson had already published his works on Comte, Mill and Spencer, Hellenism, and Christianity and Idealism.21 In 1907-1908 he published The Philosophy of Kant Explained and The Philosophical Basis of Religion. These two topics may have been at the forefront of Watson’s mind while entertaining Dewey’s essays. As well, F.H. Bradley features prominently in the notes: Bradley is often used to elaborate an idea in juxtaposition to Dewey’s claims.22 On occasion, Watson seems to
19 John Dewey, The Collected Works of John Dewey, 1882-1953, ed. By Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969-1991), LW1.6. 20 I am thinking in particular of Terry Pinkard’s magisterial Hegel’s Naturalism: Mind, Nature, and the Final Ends of Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). 21 John Watson, Comte, Mill and Spencer: An Outline of Philosophy (Glasgow: James Maclehose and Sons, 1895); Hedonistic Theories from Aristippus to Spencer. (Glasgow: James Maclehose and Sons, 1895); Christianity and Idealism (New York: Macmillan, 1896); Watson, The Philosophical Basis of Religion; John Watson, The Philosophy of Kant Explained (Glasgow: James Maclehose and Sons, 1908). 22 Bradley’s Appearance and Reality seems to be the chief text Watson had in mind when responding to Dewey. It is also noteworthy that Bradley and William James had been in correspondence for approximately 10 years prior to Watson’s note- taking and that Bradley had been writing on pragmatism at the very time Watson likely read Dewey’s essays. Bradley had written “On the Ambiguity of Pragmatism” in 1908 and “On our Knowledge of Immediate Experience” in 1909. Both of these
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
James Scott Johnston & Sarah Messer 58
think Bradley is Dewey’s target and wields Bradley against Dewey. We will follow Part I in using the categories of Reality, Experience, and Truth.
Reality
Watson has trouble with Dewey’s supposed conflation of experience and reality; unlike Dewey, Watson does not believe reality can be identified simpliciter. Watson claims “surely there was ‘reality’ before there was experience. We thus seem to be confronted with the alternative: either “experience’ is not identical with ‘reality,’ or the ‘prior’ facts of science are simply fictitious.”23 Watson claims that science is on his side, as the world can be said to have actually existed prior “to the advent of life and consciousness”.24 Watson seems to think that Dewey cannot confer reality on past events, as reality can only be identified with the present experience. Watson wrestles with Dewey’s claim that the world is “on its way’ to experience”.25 And he
were republished in Essays on Truth and Reality in 1922. See F.H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality: A Metaphysical Essay (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930); F.H. Bradley, Essays on Truth and Reality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968). 23John Watson, John Watson Fonds, 1069 Box 6, File 2--Pragmatism, 1. What we have extant are two sets of handwritten notes totalling 76 pages. The pages are numbered, presumably by an archivist. They are located in the archives of Queen’s University and are labelled “John Watson fonds, 1069.1 Box 6, File 2— Pragmatism.” The first 36 pages are written on lined paper and single-spaced. The remaining are written on lined paper and double-spaced. The first page is entitled “Dewey’s “Reality as Experience.”The notes seem complete, to judge by the flow of the text and the text is complete enough to withstand detailed analysis and yield fruitful results. Watson’s handwriting is, however, difficult to decipher. There is no date for these notes, but they were undoubtedly written after Dewey published “Reality as Experience” in 1906. We can surmise they were written shortly after Dewey’s publication was extant—perhaps 1 or 2 years later, putting the date between 1907-1908. The notes were collected by R. Bruno-Jofre of the Faculty of Education at Queen’s University from the archives in Kingston, Ontario, Canada in 2009. We don’t follow the pagination of the original material in the extant text as this is inconsistently applied; rather, we paginate according to the actual pages extant. 24 Watson, John Watson Fonds, 1. 25 Watson, John Watson Fonds, 1.
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
James Scott Johnston & Sarah Messer 59
seems to think Dewey claims that there is a distinction between the thought of reality and reality as experienced. If this is the case, Watson thinks, skepticism is introduced. Watson thinks another problem confronts Dewey. If reality is experience, and experiences differ amongst people, then what is real for me is not real for others. And this invites the prospect of “two reals”.26 Watson thinks the pragmatist will reject this, claiming that experimentation will settle the question. However this invites an infinite regress.27 Watson concludes that reality cannot contradict itself, whereas the pragmatist seems to suggest that it can. For Dewey in particular, only thought cannot contradict itself, but reality, it seems, can. This violates Bradley’s injunction that thought cannot accept a contradiction.28 And only a thought that is self-consistent is absolute. But for Dewey, thought “has [actually] been declared to be internally self-contradictory”, which means the postulate of thought itself must be self-contradictory.29 Dewey cannot have it both ways. Dewey, Watson says, challenges Bradley on the question of the Absolute, claiming that Bradley “passes from the thought that reality is self-consistent to the proposition that reality is self-consistent”.30 But, Watson avers, for Bradley only reality as Absolute is self- consistent, as the world of appearance is not.31 Watson then offers
26 Watson, John Watson Fonds, 2. 27 Watson, John Watson Fonds, 2. Watson invokes Bradley at this point—that an idea is predicated of (a) reality—a “feature of content” (Bradley, in Watson, John Watson Fonds, 4). The content applied to reality has no genuine existence of its own. And ultimate reality cannot contradict itself (Watson, in John Watson Fonds, 4). 28 Watson, John Watson Fonds, 2. 29 Watson, John Watson Fonds, 3. .For Bradley, according to Watson, this only shows that thought cannot be realized, and that it points beyond itself (Watson, John Watson Fonds, 5). 30 Watson, John Watson Fonds, 4. Watson most likely has in mind Dewey’s essay, “The Knowledge Experience and its Relationships” here. In this essay, Dewey challenges F. J. Woodbridge and in so doing invokes Bradley’s Appearance and Reality. Dewey’s claim is that Bradley “thrusts the conception [of the “reals”] virtually, if not intentionally, to the foreground” John Dewey, The Collected Works of John Dewey, 1882-1953, ed. By Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969-1991), MW 2.175. 31 Watson, John Watson Fonds, 4.
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
James Scott Johnston & Sarah Messer 60
this thought-experiment. Suppose, he says, that real objects are actually opposed in value and that thought is the means through which humans overcome this opposition.32 Thought creates a conditional inference (what would the world be like if it were harmonious?). In this way, thought “forms a plan of action by which this order may be worked out; and it is formed to be successful”.33 Watson believes can handle the seeming self-contradictions of thought, while Dewey wants to have it both ways. Watson views Dewey's account of reality as incomplete because, unlike the British Empiricists, to whom Dewey is often compared, Dewey avoids transcending experience. Unable to answer metaphysical questions of experience, Dewey does not attempt to prove or disprove the existence of the real. Watson criticizes Dewey's use of the word real, insisting that Reality cannot be experienced completely. Reality to Dewey corresponds with F.H. Bradley’s account of appearance. To Bradley, an appearance is anything which comes short when compared to Reality.34 To Bradley, while every appearance has truth and "is a necessary factor in the Absolute", that does not mean that one appearance cannot be ranked higher, or more real, than another.35 Bradley's “appearances” cannot be without reality, but equally, "reality without appearance would be nothing, for there certainly is nothing outside appearances".36 Reality to Bradley, however, "is not the sum of things".37 Reality is the unity in which all things come together and are transmuted.38 To Watson, Dewey cannot get to Reality without an Absolute, which would require some speculative move. For Watson, without an Absolute, experience is incomplete and, for the case of Dewey, cannot be called real. It will do to summarize Watson’s challenges to Dewey before
32 Watson, John Watson Fonds, 5. 33 Watson, John Watson Fonds, 5. 34 F.H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality: A Metaphysical Essay (Oxford: Clarendon Press), 1930, p. 430. 35 Bradley, Appearance and Reality, p. 431. 36 Bradley, Appearance and Reality, p. 432. 37 Bradley, Appearance and Reality, p. 432. 38 Bradley, Appearance and Reality, p. 432.
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
James Scott Johnston & Sarah Messer 61
proceeding to the next section. Watson charges Dewey with creating a distinction between past reality and present experience. Reality for Dewey, according to Watson, is so inextricably bound up in experience that it cannot be said to exist outside of experience. There is no transmutation of appearances (as experiences, for Dewey) and therefore, no reality that can be called real. Furthermore, only present reality in a present experience can count as genuine reality. Dewey encounters another problem: reality seems to create two or more “reals,” suggesting that reality contradicts itself. And claiming that thought alone cannot contradict itself is no escape from the problem for Dewey, because Dewey also claims that thought is inherently self-contradictory, leading to Dewey being of two minds about the unity of thought.
Experience
Watson deals most fully with Dewey’s notion of experience in his comments on “The Immediate Postulate of Empiricism.” Watson claims that Dewey denies “there is anything beyond the ‘experiences’ of the individual that experiences”. 39 Dewey “must deny that there is any “Reality” corresponding to the ‘experience’ of any abstract ‘horse- jockey’: all experiences are individual; but there is no experience over and above the sum of experience of men, or at least of finite experiencing of subjects”.40 But if this is the case, we are committed to claiming that each individual experience is real. And that seems a tautology as it suggests that “What I experience I do experience: my real experience is really experience”.41 And this invites skepticism that we “cannot be certain we are ‘experiencing’ anything”. 42 To refute this skepticism requires that “every possible intelligence who is aware of what I am experiencing at this moment must grant that I
39 Watson, John Watson Fonds, 27. Watson’s example here is that of the horse- trader who has a different experience of reality and as reality from the jockey, the family man, and the judge. 40 Watson, John Watson Fonds, 26. 41 Watson, John Watson Fonds, 26. 42 Watson, John Watson Fonds, 26.
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
James Scott Johnston & Sarah Messer 62
am actually having this experience”.43 Otherwise I may and may not experience precisely the same thing”.44 The upshot for Watson is that Dewey confuses the concreteness of the universe and the concreteness of sensible experience.45 For Watson, thought does not create aspects of objects of thought into ideas; it rather “makes a particular aspect of thought an object”.46 In Watson’s opinion, Dewey talks as if the sensible particulars were by necessity left outside of thought and operate in thought merely as abstractions.47 Another way to put the point (as Watson does) is that Dewey over- idealizes sensible particulars, which are not merely ideas but ‘real’ aspects of thought. A related concern is the concreteness of the particulars in Dewey’s account of experience. For Watson, it seems Dewey is claiming that each individual “is shut up to the reality of his own experience” and no “universal judgment whatever is possible”.48 Does this mean that experience is merely “concrete”? Certainly, this is correct. But, Watson asks, is “its concreteness a denial of possible agreement between any number of ‘experiencing’ subjects? If so, what is meant by ‘experience’ and ‘real’”?49 If individuals mean something different when pointing to and articulating concrete experiences, how can agreement be possible? Certainly, Dewey cannot mean that each subject means something different with respect to each concrete experience. Yet, by maintaining that the concrete is nothing more than the idea, Dewey is open to just this charge. Watson canvasses Dewey’s own statements on the matter and finds him wanting. For Dewey claims that things “are only and just what they are known to be or that things are, or Reality is, what it is for a [conscious] knower”” 50 Ultimately, Watson claims, Dewey
43 Watson, John Watson Fonds, 26. 44 Watson, John Watson Fonds, 26. 45 Watson, John Watson Fonds, 26. 46 Watson, John Watson Fonds, 26. 47 Watson, John Watson Fonds, 27. 48 Watson, John Watson Fonds, 27. 49 Watson, John Watson Fonds, 27. 50 Dewey, in Watson, John Watson Fonds, 27. Watson is quoting from “The Postulate of Immediate Empiricism.” The context for this passage of Dewey’s is a
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
James Scott Johnston & Sarah Messer 63
is confused on experience. Another related concern is evidenced by the following claim of Dewey’s: “By our postulate, things are what they are experienced to be; and, unless knowing is the sole and genuine mode of experiencing, it is fallacious to say that Reality is just and exclusively what it is or would be to an all-competent knower”.51 For Watson, this seems to suggest that real experiences are nothing other than “experiences accompanied by certain beliefs or interpretation of its meaning”.52 And this seems to confuse the reality of believing with the reality of what is believed. For Dewey, Watson concludes, “Real experience [is] confused with real experience of the real”.53 For Watson then, Dewey has no place for the particulars, or those aspects of the real that thought grasps. These are left outside of thought and in thought exist and function as abstractions. Furthermore, without these particulars as aspects of the real, individuals can point only to abstractions of their own thoughts and this invites the prospect of disagreement on the existence of objects, not to say their settled-upon meaning or interpretation. Finally, Dewey drains the reality out of experiences through claiming that things are only what they are experienced to be. This seems to invite confusion between what is really believed and the reality of the belief.
Truth
The question of the understanding and use of truth is raised throughout Watson’s analysis and description of Dewey’s accounts of reality and experience. It is first raised in conjunction with the
defense of the notion of immediate empiricism, which Watson is at pains to critique. Watson takes Dewey’s defense to be a criticism of Objective Idealism, which he defends (Watson, John Watson Fonds, 26). Watson likely has Dewey’s criticism of Objective Idealism as stated in “Experience and Objective Idealism” in mind. It is noteworthy that the criticism of Idealism presented there is not Hegel’s, but Kant’s. See John Dewey, “Experience and Objective Idealism.” 51 Dewey, in Watson, John Watson Fonds, 27. 52 Watson, John Watson Fonds, 27. 53 Watson, John Watson Fonds, 27.
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
James Scott Johnston & Sarah Messer 64
question of reality. Watson cites Dewey, claiming “truth is the comprehension of some aspect of reality by thought”.54 This invites the criticism that there is no difference between what is real in itself and what is real for the subject. This is compounded by Pragmatism’s insistence that the truth is “what works or gives satisfaction”.55 For, if we differ, are both “reals” true”? 56 And if not, how do we determine what ought to give satisfaction? If the Pragmatist responds with “experimentation,” the response seems infinitely regressive.57 Watson here again juxtaposes Bradley with Dewey. For Dewey, truth “is the object of thinking, and the aim of truth is to qualify existence ideally”.58 But this claim “is foredoomed to failure,” for in order to realize its end, it must employ self-contradictory means. Watson quotes Bradley in this regard.59 Thought can never completely grasp and exhaust reality; the predicate (of a subject) must always remain an ideal. We might say that for Watson, Dewey’s ‘reach’ in regards to experience goes too far, in that it does not allow for reality to exist on its own, outside of and beyond experience or thought. And while the existence of a reality beyond thought’s grasp may be a lamentable conclusion for an Objective idealist, it ensures that reality itself is something separate and distinct from the grasping thought and preserves the realist feature of an account of experience.60
54 Dewey, in Watson, John Watson Fonds,1. 55 James, in Watson, John Watson Fonds, 1. Watson is quoting from William James, “Pragmatism,” Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology vol. 2, ed. By J.M. Baldwin (New York: MacMillan, 1902). 56 James, in Watson, John Watson Fonds, 1. 57 Watson, John Watson Fonds, 1. 58 Watson, John Watson Fonds, 2. 59 Bradley, Appearance and Reality, in Watson, John Watson Fonds, 2. “And because the given reality is never consistent, though it is compelled to take the road of indefinite expansion. If thought were successful, it would have a predicate consistent in itself and agreeing entirely with the subject. But, on the other hand, the predicate must be always ideal. It must, that is, be a “what” not in unity with its own “that”, and therefore in and by itself, devoid of existence. Hence, so far as in thought this alienation is not made good, thought can never be more than merely ideal.” (Italics mine). 60 Hegel, too, laments the concept’s inability to completely grasp nature in a
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
James Scott Johnston & Sarah Messer 65
Watson also points up a fault with Pragmatism’s account of truth more generally. Quoting again from William James’s entry on Pragmatism in Baldwin’s Dictionary, he notes “A tree, e.g. has all the colours that, in any particular light…are contained in it: and likewise all the shapes that form any point of view, it presents”.61 Pragmatists generally, and Dewey in particular makes the truth of a tree consonant with its experience, such that the truth of a tree is what it is experienced to be.62 Furthermore, for Pragmatists “That which is successful in securing well-being, is true”.63 But this, Watson claims, presupposes the notion of a world self-subsistent and the “legitimacy of a desire for well-being”.64 And this in turn implies that the world and individuals within “have a certain fixed nature, without which the end of well-being, and even the reasonableness of the end, cannot be exhibited”.65 Therefore, individuals can only secure their well-beings if they are able to comprehend “the actual nature of things,” and this cannot be realized if nature is not a real and true separate from ideals and thoughts.66 In Watson’s opinion, Dewey falters in defining truth as the comprehension of some aspect of reality by thought. For this not only presumes there is no reality outside of thought, but makes it difficult to adjudicate the truth amongst competing thoughts. Furthermore, tying truth to satisfaction raises the question of a tenable account of satisfaction. Dewey’s seeming denial of reality to things outside of experience or thought seems to push Dewey in the direction of totalizing monism in which thought engulfs all. Finally, Dewey cannot fruitfully speak of truth as the securing of well-being, because well-being requires a nature solid and robust enough to withstand the machinations of thinking, and Dewey’s account does
manner similar to Bradley’s claim that thought only presents us with an ideal of the thing. See Hegel, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline, trans. by Steven Taubeneck (New York: Continuum Press, 1991), # 194. 61 James, in Watson, John Watson Fonds, 1. 62 Watson, John Watson Fonds, 1. 63 Watson, John Watson Fonds, 43. 64 Watson, John Watson Fonds, 43. 65 Watson, John Watson Fonds, 43. 66 Watson, John Watson Fonds, 43.
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
James Scott Johnston & Sarah Messer 66
not provide for this.
Final Thoughts
Watson levels several robust criticisms at Dewey’s accounts of Reality, Experience, and Truth. In isolation these are perhaps resolvable on close textual analysis of Dewey’s essays and books; together they are forceful. Watson’ analysis seems to have revealed fundamental inconsistencies in Dewey’s accounts that would remain until at least 1922, with the publication of Human Nature and Conduct (which gives a full account of satisfaction and character) and 1925, with Experience and Nature (which gives a full treatment of experience). In the former, both satisfaction and character will be set in the context of a continuum of means-ends-in-view, so that any fixed and final account of them is immediately discounted.67 Further, ends will be re-cast as “directive stimuli” that inform present choices (MW 14.157). In the latter, experience will be distinguished into the functional distinctions of ‘gross’ and ‘refined,’ with ‘gross’ articulating the immediate qualitative features of an experience had, and ‘refined’ with consciousness, thinking, and self (LW 1.17). While things will remain within experience, Dewey will insist they are not tantamount to thoughts. Thoughts refine things into ‘logical objects,’ but the world as it exists in its brute capacity to affect remains, and is only appreciated through its qualities or what Dewey will call the ‘generic traits of existence’ (LW 1.308). Indeed, reality turns out to be double-barrelled: there is on the one hand a gross experience that is immediately had and undergone, to which the epithet ‘real’ is certainly attributable. But there are refined objects that embody real relations (through logical inferences and temporal succession, in turn made possible by the generic trait of continuity) that also qualify as real. Reality is a shared feature of both. Though the criticisms levelled at Dewey are vigorous, they do reveal Watson’s inability to see a functionalist and naturalist
67 John Dewey, The Collected Works of John Dewey, 1882-1953, ed. By Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969-1991), MW 14.154.
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
James Scott Johnston & Sarah Messer 67
understanding of Idealism on display. While it is certainly the case that Dewey did not bridge the gap between reality and experience in a manner that would placate his critics, he was, nevertheless, well on his way to spanning the gap. For the accounts of experience and reality here discussed already suggested the means to span the gulf and obviate the concern that thought ‘invents’ reality. Dewey already had an account of experience as ‘brute fact,’ which would later be transformed into the “gross” and “macroscopic” experience of Experience and Nature (LW 1.17). And Dewey had already insisted that the distinction between thought and things was a functional one within experience, that we had no access to things as they were in themselves, yet this should not be a concern because it is a fact of the matter that we do experience brute facts (later, traits of existence) and that these facts are themselves facts of the matter. Dewey’s naturalized and functional Idealism is one in which reality is not bifurcated; it is the transaction of nature and experience, rather than nature, experience, and a spiritual sphere or realm metaphysically apart, that constitutes the chief ingredients of his naturalistic philosophy. It remains a matter for further historical scholarship to discern if Watson’s own more spiritual and religious account of Idealism inhibited him from seeing a naturalized account as tenable, though this is certainly our suspicion, and it is likely that Watson’s absolutist account of Reality forecloses the possibility of a functional ontology of experience, with Dewey. There is much in these notes that concerns Pragmatism more generally as well as further specific questions regarding Dewey’s account. They also shed light on the role Bradley plays for both Watson and Dewey, and the nature of the Absolute in regards Reality, Experience, and Truth. It remains an open question whether and how Dewey would have responded had Watson sent him his notes, or had them published. Our best guess is that he may very well have come to the conclusions he presented in Human Nature and Conduct and Experience and Nature that much sooner. Unfortunately, Watson’s notes on Dewey and Pragmatism didn’t see the light of day. There can be no question, though, that these notes now deserve publication.
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
James Scott Johnston & Sarah Messer 68
Bibliography
Bradley, F.H. Appearance and Reality: A Metaphysical Essay. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930.
—. Essays on Truth and Reality. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968. Dalton, Thomas. “Dewey’s Hegelianism Reconsidered: Reclaiming the Lost Soul of Psychology.” New Ideas in Psychology 15, 1 (1997). 1-15.
Dewey, John. The Collected Works of John Dewey, 1882-1953, edited by Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969-1991.
—. The Correspondence of John Dewey, 1882-1918, edited by L. Hickman. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003.
—. John Dewey’s Philosophy of Spirit, with the 1897 Lecture on Hegel, edited by J. Shook and J. Good. New York: Fordham, 2010.
Fairfield, Paul. Introduction. John Dewey and Continental Philosophy, edited by P. Fairfield. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2009, 1-5.
Good, James. A Search for Unity in Diversity: The “Permanent Deposit” of Hegel in John Dewey’s Philosophy. Lanham, Md: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006.
Hegel, G.W.F. Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline. Translated by Steven Taubeneck . New York: Continuum Press, 1991.
Humphrey, Christopher. “The Sage of Kingston: John Watson and the Ambiguity of Hegelianism.” Phd. diss. McGill University, 1992.
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
James Scott Johnston & Sarah Messer 69
James, William. “Pragmatism.” Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology vol. 2. Edited by J.M. Baldwin. New York: MacMillan, 1902.
Johnston, James Scott. John Dewey’s Earlier Logical Theory. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2014.
Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding vol. 1. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959.
Neatby, Hilda. Queen’s University Vol. 1 1841-1917. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1978.
Pinkard, Terry. Hegel’s Naturalism: Mind, Nature, and the Final Ends of Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Shook, John. John Dewey’s Empirical Theory of Knowledge and Reality. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2000.
Watson, John. Comte, Mill and Spencer: An Outline of Philosophy. Glasgow: James Maclehose and Sons, 1895.
—. Hedonistic Theories from Aristippus to Spencer. Glasgow: James Maclehose and Sons, 1895.
—. Christianity and Idealism. New York: Macmillan, 1896.
—. The Philosophical Basis of Religion. Glasgow: James Maclehose and Sons, 1907.
—. The Philosophy of Kant Explained. Glasgow: James Maclehose and Sons, 1908.
Westbrook, Robert. John Dewey and American Democracy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991.
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
THE PROBLEM OF NIHILISM: A PERSONAL JOURNEY FROM NIETZSCHE TO DEWEY
JIM GARRISON Virginia Tech & Uppsala University
The title of my paper is in the spirit of the title of this journal, Dewey Studies. The paper is a personal narrative of where Dewey’s religious humanism first fit into my Nietzschian inspired concerns for an aesthetic solution to the problem of nihilism. Ultimately, I will show why I came to prefer Dewey’s democratic approach to self-creation as a social, community achievement as more substantial and enduring than Nietzsche’s obsession with the doings of a lonely self- absorbed monster of creation (i.e., the übermensch). However, along the way, I will point out many surprising similarities between Dewey and Nietzsche including their pluralism, naturalism, empiricism, and robust perspectivalism (among others), as well as differences: such as Nietzsche’s obsession with the will to power and with nominalism. Dewey has an important existential sensibility too often ignored.
Volume 1 · Number 2 · Spring 2017 · Pages 70-94
Jim Garrison 71
hy do you study John Dewey? Why does anyone? There are as many answers as there are students of his W work. Here I offer one very personal, autobiographical account. For me, Dewey’s religious humanism offers the best response available to the challenge of nihilism. The non-teleological aim of education is growth because the meaning of life is to make more meaning. Dewey feeds my existential needs and desires, although naught sates them. However, people’s passions diverge in many ways. In a pluralistic universe, much less a pluralistic democracy, individual needs and desires vary greatly and none necessarily exceeds any other in scope or significance. After Dewey, the philosopher that has most influenced me is Friedrich Nietzsche. For someone such as I who retained a residual theism until my late 20’s the felt undeniability of the following percussive passage had an identity shattering affect. It involves a question posed by a madman with a lantern lit in the bright morning hours:
“Whither is God?” he cried; “I will tell you. We have killed him—you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing. Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us. Do we not need to light the lanterns in the morning? . . . . God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.1
How did humankind kill God? Simple, “he” was an anthropomorphic creation that served human, all too human, purposes. Of course,
1 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, translated by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), Bk.III, sec. 125.
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
Jim Garrison 72
having slain God we may have also slain “Man” his creator along with such essences as “rational animal,” “featherless biped,” and such.2 It is a chilling, dark, and disturbing proclamation. Nietzsche thought the collapse of absolute cosmic values would determine the history of Europe for 200-years. I think it will be a source of global struggle for centuries, although of course many world religions do not postulate a God at all. Upon first announcing the death of God, Nietzsche declared: “God is dead: but given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown. —And we— we still have to vanquish his shadow.”3 The ghost of God Nietzsche immediately assails is materialism.4 He concludes with a plea pleasing to a Deweyan naturalist:
When will all these shadows of God [matter, substance, the “astral order,” and such] cease to darken our minds? When will we complete our de-deification of nature? When may we begin to “naturalize” humanity in terms of a pure, newly discovered newly redeemed nature?5
Walter Kauffman remarks of this passage: “‘Naturalize’ is here used in the sense of naturalism; as opposed to supernaturalism. Man is the be reintegrated into nature.” We are not spectators of natural events; instead, we are an event among events. Nietzsche shares Dewey’s participatory naturalism while helping us understand why spectator theories have such a hold on humanity. Having assaulted materialism, Nietzsche is quick to foreclose the possibility of pure, dispassionate “rationality” and its allies (e.g., causal explanation, mathematico-logical equality, science disassociated from “artistic energies and the practical wisdom of life”,
2 Of course, “rationality” as the aim of education disappears with “rational animal” as the human essence, although it is possible to continue pursuing intelligence and wisdom as long as we do not assume they have a fixed and final essence. 3 Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Bk.III, sec. 108. 4 Ibid., Bk.III, sec. 109. 5 Ibid.
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
Jim Garrison 73
etc.) as substitutes for God6 as well as “humanity” itself.7 For his part, Dewey, having asserted, “rationality” (i.e., intelligence) is “the generalized idea of the means-consequence relation as such,” explicitly rejects “Intellectus Purus.”8 In assailing God, Nietzsche most famously dismisses transcendent Platonism in all of its forms including mathematical, logical, and scientific Platonism among others. The shadows of Platonism still darken our minds. Nietzsche is also a strident critic of Kant’s transcendentalism, which he excoriates throughout much of his later work. For instance, Kant famously limits knowledge to make room for God, free will, and immortality as unknowable things-in-themselves. After a discussion of the “ascetic priest” and the priest’s low “valuation” of “our life” of embodied passion and purpose as “a wrong road,”9 Nietzsche depicts Kant’s “ascetic self- contempt and self-mockery of reason in the assertion that there is a realm of truth and being, but reason is excluded from it!’”10 Ethereal shadows of transcendentalism and quasi-transcendentalism still haunt our thought. In summary, Nietzsche is dismissing anything metaphysical (eidos, ousia, arche, entelecheia) that would provide metaphysical comfort deriving from completing the quest for immutable certainty. It is easy to show Dewey does the same for the essence of “God” or “Man” (i.e., the human), rationality, ultimate epistemological or metaphysical foundations, or cosmic purposes in history. Early in The Will to Power, Nietzsche clarifies what he means by nihilism: “What does nihilism mean? That the highest values devaluate themselves. The aim is lacking; ‘why?’ finds no answer.”11
6 See Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Bk. III, sects. 110 – 113. 7 Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Bk. III, sec. 115. 8 John Dewey, The Collected Works of John Dewey, 1882-1953, ed. By Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969- 1991), (LW:12:17-18) 9 Nietzsche, On The Genealogy of Morals, translated by Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), Bk. III, sec. 11. 10 Ibid., Bk. III, sec. 12. 11 Nietzsche, The Will To Power, translated by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1967), Bk. I, sec. 2.
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
Jim Garrison 74
Nietzsche distinguishes four kinds of nihilism as a psychological state. The first three are passive and incomplete. The first arises “when we have sought a ‘meaning’ in all events that is not there.”12 Previously, we had assumed our highest universal ideals must eventually achieve actualization in the order of existence. What all such ways of thinking have in common is that “something is to be achieved through a process—and now one realizes that becoming aims at nothing and achieves nothing.”13 Humankind realizes it is “no longer the collaborator, let alone the center, of becoming.”14 Finding no cosmic purposes operating in the universe to join forces with, the nihilist becomes discouraged, pessimistic and gives up on life. The second passive psychological state arises when “one has posited a totality, a systematization;” that is, some sort of “unity, some form of ‘monism’,” demanding the “devotion of the individual.”15 When one realizes there is no such totalizing universal, the individual finds they have lost "faith in his own values when no infinitely valuable whole works though him.”16 “He” needed the totalizing vision “in order to be able to believe in his own value.”17 Totalitarians die with their supposed unity, their totalizing, all- inclusive hallucination. The first two passive states of nihilism assume becoming has some aim or unity. The third passive state arises when the idea of true Being beyond becoming fails. This form of nihilism exhibits “disbelief in any metaphysical world and forbids itself any belief in a true world.”18 Having reached this postmetaphysical point “one grants the reality of becoming as the only reality, forbids oneself every kind of clandestine access to afterworlds and false divinities— but cannot endure this world though one does not want to deny it.”19 Nietzsche concludes that when “the categories ‘aim,’ ‘unity,’ ‘being’
12 Ibid., Bk. I, sec. 12. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid.
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
Jim Garrison 75
which we used to project some value into the world” collapse “we pull out again; so the world looks valueless.”20 The incomplete nihilist is now entirely exhausted. The fourth psychological state of complete nihilism realizes the first three passive states themselves must undergo devaluation. They were simply mistakes “that refer to a purely fictitious world.”21 We have made a mistake and must now begin to look for meaning and value somewhere else. It is the response of “active nihilism,” which is a sign of the “increased power of the spirit.”22 Whereas passive nihilism is life denying and destructive of the aims, unity, and true Being or God we have created, active nihilism is a sign of strength that devalues eternal, immutable aims, unity, and true Being, but realizes the grandeur of the capacities that created them. The complete, active nihilist begins to join the power of creation to the power of destruction. Having announced humankind has slain their God, the highest values devalue themselves, and the universe is devoid of meaning and value, the madman poses another question: “How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?”23 If the passive postmetaphysical nihilist does not commit self-murder, they might distract themselves by consuming material goods created by others rather than the God they once worshiped. The madman offers a better postmetaphysical alternative. Having slain the summum bonum, the creator of supreme meanings and values, humankind has no choice but to become themselves creators:
Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whoever is born after us—for the sake of this deed he will belong to a higher history than all history hitherto.24
20 Ibid. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid., Bk. I, sec. 22. 23 Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Bk. I, sec. 125. 24 Ibid.
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
Jim Garrison 76
To become like God is to assume the creativity of “the Creator.” Becoming our own value creators is the aesthetic, or better artistic, response to the crisis of nihilism. I believe the creative response is the best response. Passive nihilists despair that they cannot find any fixed and final values anywhere. They are weak, exhausted, and life denying. The active, complete nihilist may escape nihilism altogether by becoming strong, enthusiastic, and life affirming by taking upon themselves the joys of value creation and self-creation previously assigned to “the Creator.” Morality is not given; it is created to oblige and obligate human purposes. Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals not only exposes the contingency of the construction of Western morality, but the secondary will to power it serves.25 For Nietzsche, morality lay in obeying laws of our own nature, creating new laws of self-control, then recreating them when they fail to serve us well by inhibiting our growth. Nietzsche’s empirical naturalism is positively disposed toward the sciences, although he stridently rejected logical positivism and the like. For him, scientific knowledge is not given; the laws of nature are not discovered. Knowledge is created to satisfy finite human purposes arising from being participants in the affairs of existence, which is not to say it lacks objective constraint. Any artists must know the limit of her materials. Nietzsche’s Gay Science is a defense of a naturalistic, empirical, pluralistic, perspectival science that aids the life affirming needs, desires, and purposes of those that create it and use it as an instrument of creation. Nietzsche does not question the objectivity of truth, only the claim that truth is the supreme value for humankind. Nietzsche held the classical ideal of philosophy as love (i.e., philo) of the wisdom (sophia) that lies beyond knowledge. The value of knowledge lies in serving wisdom and the sagacious creation of values. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche offers his ideal image of
25 For Dewey’s application of the genetic method to morality see, “The Evolutionary Method As Applied To Morality” (MW 2: 3-38). He uses the word “genetic” or the phrase “genetic method” over two dozen times in this essay.
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
Jim Garrison 77
the übermensch as a joyful, life-affirming, disciplined, determined, strong, agile, and constant creator and re-creator of values obsessed with the artistic-aesthetic activities expressing his will to power. 26 When in “On Truth And Lie in an Non-Moral Sense,” Nietzsche writes, “What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms” the übermensch commands the regiments.27 While there is no self-foundation, there is self-assertion and creation, including self-creation, and above all an exercise of individual will to power.
Discovering Dewey
I read Nietzsche “avocationally” in the evening and weekends during the two years of odd jobs that occupied me between taking my doctorate and beginning a two-year stint as a junior investigator on an NSF grant in mathematical logic. I had come to intellectually accept the individualistic will to power version of the aesthetic solution to nihilism, although it did not accord well with my own sensibilities. I was a wavering, although complete and active nihilist when I discovered Dewey. One day in the fall of my first year on the grant, I causally pulled a copy of the original 1925 Experience and Nature off the shelf in the department library where I am sure it had lain long before I arrived in graduate school eight years earlier. I am not sure why I grabbed the book; however, it quickly captured my attention as I began to read the “Introduction”28 which I still prefer to the revised “Introduction” of the 1929 version. As best I can remember, here is what seized me at the time
26 For a devastating critique of “the will to power,“ see MW: 14: 97ff. Dewey remarks, “In the beginning, this is hardly more than a name for the quality of all activity” (MW 14: 97). Dewey is especially interested in creative activity: “Activity is creative in so far as it moves to its own enrichment as activity, that is, bringing along with itself a release of further activities” (MW: 14: 99). The aim of creative activity is vital to the aim of education and life. 27 Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense” in The Birth of Tragedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 146. 28 See Dewey, LW 1: 365-392.
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
Jim Garrison 78
My first undergraduate degree was in neurophysiological psychology. It included a course on human perception that taught me the world of objects is a hypothesis constructed (in the case of sight) from an electromagnetic event transmitted to our brain by a electro- chemical process where it was assembled under the influence of physical, biological, and cultural conditions. Hence, perceptual objects and their relations are contingent falsifiable constructions. This course drove me stumbling into philosophy.29 I guessed quickly Dewey was treating experience phenomenologically, although not transcendentally.30 When I got to the fourth paragraph, I was riveted for I understood exactly what Dewey was about:
There are two avenues of approach to the goal of philosophy. We may begin with experience in gross, experience in its primary and crude forms, and by means of its distinguishing features and its distinctive trends, note something of the constitution of the world which generates and maintains it. Or, we may begin with refined selective products, the most authentic statements of commended methods of science, and work from them back to the primary facts of life. The two methods differ in starting point and direction, but not in objective or eventual content. Those who start with coarse, everyday experience must bear in mind the findings of the most competent knowledge, and those who start from the latter must somehow journey back to the homely facts of daily existence.31
I would soon learn Dewey was introducing his empirical denotative method, which Thomas M. Alexander rightly calls his philosophical
29 I was required to take the sophomore introduction to philosophy course my first semester of graduate school. I received a “C” on my first paper in this course. 30 My hopeful suspicions were soon confirmed when later Dewey writes, “experience for philosophy is method not distinctive subject-matter” (LW 1: 371). Experience is not a distinctive subject-matter, although we may designate distinctive subject matters within it by applying the denotative method. 31 Dewey LW 1: 366.
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
Jim Garrison 79
method.32 My course in perception eventually led to a dissertation for a doctorate in the history and philosophy of science and mathematical logic titled: “Geometry as a Source of Theory‑Ladenness in Early Modern Physics.”33 The history of science indicates theories not only explain phenomena, they determine data selection. The result when done well is a virtuous circle of continuous and contingent construction, testing, confirmation, falsification (Peirce was in my dissertation), and revision.34 I realized immediately that what Dewey is depicting above is how to carefully trace the up and down pathway of construction and criticism leading to revisions of our constructions. Later I would learn this was a philosophy of reconstruction. My dissertation confirmed my belief first acquired in my perception class that humans create the world of objects and such, including scientific objects, although there are objective constraints because we do not create ex nihilo. One may make an infinite number of things from a block of clay, but one cannot make anything they like, although creative possibilities arise with emergent skill, techniques, tools, and warranted assertions. Reading Nietzsche expanded my insights regarding the human creation of meaning and value. There are no meanings and values without meaning and value makers. Consider the following passage through a meaning and value creating interpretative lens:
But the history of thought shows how easy it is for them [the scientific practitioners] to forget that science is after all an art, a matter of perfected skill in conducting inquiry; while it reveals that those who are not directly engaged in the use of this art readily take science to be something finished, absolute in itself, instead of the result of a certain
32 Thomas M. Alexander, The Human Eros: Eco-ontology and the Aesthetics of Existence (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), p. 54ff. The denotative method like Dewey’s logical instrumentalism is an instance of genetic method. 33 For a Deweyan version of value-ladenness, see Putnam (2002). 34 Later in the 1925 “Introduction,” Dewey concedes: “Inevitably our argument travels in a circle and comes back to where we started” (LW 1: 378).
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
Jim Garrison 80
technique.35
For me then and now this is a statement of gay science. What I thought this Dewey was saying above was later confirmed in chapter 9, “Experience, Nature and Art” by such passages as this one:
But if modern tendencies are justified in putting art and creation first, then the implications of this position should be avowed and carried through. It would then be seen that science is an art, that art is practice . . . . When this perception dawns, it will be a commonplace that art—the mode of activity that is charged with meanings capable of immediately enjoyed possession—is the complete culmination of nature, and that "science" is properly a handmaiden that conducts natural events to this happy issue.36
Putting art first is the solution to nihilism. Science is the art of creating warranted assertions serviceable to other arts.37 Those that read Dewey scientistically are simply mistaken. In the very next paragraph of Experience and Nature, I encountered the following happy convergence of primary phenomenology and phenomenological analysis sans the transcendental: “But coarse and vital experience is Protean; a thing of moods and tenses. To seize and report it is the task of an artist as well as of an informed technician.”38 Art, including the arts of the technosciences, perform all the functions claimed for a priori transcendental structures.39
35 Dewey LW 1: 366. 36 Dewey LW 1: 268-269. 37 Dewey says, “The idea is, in short, art and a work of art. As a work of art, it directly liberates subsequent action and makes it more fruitful in a creation of more meanings and more perceptions” (LW 1: 278). We may say the same for our entire mathematico-logical arrangement of kinds, concepts, logical structures, and such. 38 Dewey, LW 1: 367. 39 Of course, in the radical empiricism Dewey shares with William James, relations, including temporal relations, as well a relata are experienced.
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
Jim Garrison 81
It was pleasing when later in the 1925 “Introduction,” Dewey puts even gay science in its place: “Science will then be of interest as one of the phases of human experience, but intrinsically no more so than magic, myth, politics, painting, poetry and penitentiaries.”40 Gay science should serve not enslave the creative mind. In the 1929 “Introduction,” Dewey indicates,
[T]he great vice of philosophy is an arbitrary "intellectualism" . . . By ‘intellectualism’ as an indictment is meant the theory that all experiencing is a mode of knowing, and that all subject-matter, all nature, is, in principle, to be reduced and transformed till it is defined in terms identical with the characteristics presented by refined objects of science as such.41
A bit later in the revised “Introduction,” he adds: “When intellectual experience and its material are taken to be primary, the cord that binds experience and nature is cut.”42 Transcendent (e.g., Plato, Gödel, Russell, etc.) and transcendental (e.g., Kant, Heidegger, Derrida, etc.) philosophy cuts the cord. Pragmatism puts modern philosophy’s obsession with epistemology in its proper place. Outside the intellectual (e.g., categories, concepts, subjects, and their predicables) resides such matters as immediate anoetic experience on one side and wisdom on the other. Dewey’s phenomenology “indicates that being and having things in ways other than knowing them, in ways never identical with knowing them, exist, and are preconditions of reflection and knowledge.”43 “All cognitive experience,” Dewey continues in his 1925 “Introduction,” “must start from and must terminate in being and having things in just such unique, irreparable and compelling ways.”44 Dewey also affirms “the old saying that philosophy is love of wisdom, of wisdom
40 Dewey LW 1: 369. 41 Dewey LW 1: 28. 42 Dewey LW 1: 29. 43 Dewey LW 1: 377. 44 Dewey LW 1: 378.
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
Jim Garrison 82
which is not knowledge and which nevertheless cannot be without knowledge.”45 A God could be both omniscient and a fool. Something else about Dewey’s 1925 ”Introduction” captivated me. Like Nietzsche, Dewey is a perspectival empirical naturalist that knows there is no pre-given cosmic aim, unity, or true Being:
The operation of choice is, I suppose, inevitable in any enterprise into which reflection enters. It is not in itself falsifying. Deception lies in the fact that its presence is concealed, disguised, denied. An empirical method finds and points to the operation of choice as it does to any other event. Thus it protects us from conversion of eventual functions into antecedent existence: a conversion that may be said to be the philosophic fallacy, whether it be performed in behalf of mathematical subsistences, esthetic essences, the purely physical order of nature, or God.46
This passage stridently opposes classical metaphysics. Aims, unities, or true Being (e.g., eternal, immutable essences) are eventual artistic functions of human creative action. We make meaning and value endlessly in service to our privations and purposes without assurance of success. By the time I finished reading Experience and Nature, I was convinced that like Nietzsche only more extensively and systematically, Dewey is a champion of the genetic method, although he eventually came to prefer the “compound word ‘genetic – functional’ to describe what I regard as the proper method of philosophy.”47 Within his genetic–functional method, traits, natural kinds, linguistic meanings, essences, are all subfunctions we creatively construct from antecedent existence. For instance, ”The name objects will be reserved for subject-matter so far as it has been produced and ordered in settled form by means of inquiry;
45 Dewey LW 1: 305 46 Dewey LW 1: 389. 47 Dewey LW 14: 147.
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
Jim Garrison 83
proleptically, objects are the objectives of inquiry.”48 What Dewey says about “objects,” and by implication all onto-theology, applies equally well to all of the other subfunctions of logic including its norms (i.e., values), which are themselves the falsifiable, contingent consequences of prior inquiry. Of course, it also applies to cosmic aims, unity, and true Being. Having read the 1925 “Introduction” I moved quickly to complete the book, although I found myself often having to stop, put it down, and walk about. Besides the magnificence of chapter 9, chapters 2, “Existence as Precarious and as Stable” and 5, “Nature, Communication and Meaning” especially satisfied my existential cravings. For those that can accept it, the following propels them at least as far as complete active nihilism:
The stablest thing we can speak of is not free from conditions set to it by other things. That even the solid earth mountains, the emblems of constancy, appear and disappear like the clouds is an old theme of moralists and poets. The fixed and unchanged being of the Democritean atom is now reported by inquirers to possess some of the traits of his non-being, and to embody a temporary equilibrium in the economy of nature's compromises and adjustments. A thing may endure secula seculorum and yet not be everlasting; it will crumble before the gnawing tooth of time, as it exceeds a certain measure. Every existence is an event.49
Dewey is rejecting the classical metaphysics of substance (i.e., eidos, ousia, arche, telos, entelecheia) throughout Experience and Nature. He had long held such a perspective.50 The following also from chapter 2 became the topic of my second published paper.51
48 Dewey LW 12: 122. 49 Dewey LW 1: 63. 50 James W. Garrison, “John Dewey, Jacques Derrida, and the Metaphysics of Presence.” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, Vol. 35, No. 2, 346-372. 51 James W. Garrison, “Dewey and the Empirical Unity of Opposites.” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, Vol. 21 No. 4, 549‑561.
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
Jim Garrison 84
As against this common identification of reality with what is sure, regular and finished, experience in unsophisticated forms gives evidence of a different world and points to a different metaphysics. We live in a world which is an impressive and irresistible mixture of sufficiencies, tight completenesses, order, recurrences which make possible prediction and control, and singularities, ambiguities, uncertain possibilities, processes going on to consequences as yet indeterminate. They are mixed not mechanically but vitally like the wheat and tares of the parable. We may recognize them separately but we cannot divide them, for unlike wheat and tares they grow from the same root. Qualities have defects as necessary conditions of their excellencies; the instrumentalities of truth are the causes of error; change gives meaning to permanence and recurrence makes novelty possible. A world that was wholly risky would be a world in which adventure is impossible, and only a living world can include death. Such facts have been celebrated by thinkers like Heracleitus and Lao-tze.52
The primordial existential task for those that wish to live long, lovely, and meaningful lives requires creatively using the relatively stable and slow moving events of existence to prevail over the relatively precarious. If there are no eternal immutable values, there is yet delight in making ones that endure. Chapter 5 contains a clue to the superiority of Dewey’s response to nihilism that I comprehended upon first reading, but would have to do a good deal more work to adequately appreciate. We begin with the following crucial distinction between antecedent existence, socially constructed linguistic meaning, and equally socially constructed logical essences: “Yet there is a natural bridge that joins the gap between existence and essence; namely communication, language, discourse.”53 The evolving existential
52 Dewey LW 1: 47. 53 Dewey LW 1: 133.
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
Jim Garrison 85
event called “human nature” creates meaning, essence, and value from the other evolving existential events. This participant stance implies other events may also use us. The philosophic fallacy arises when we assume that the products of our creation exist antecedent to language and inquiry. Dewey’s philosophy of language contributes substantially to the superiority of his solution to the problem of nihilism: ”Primarily meaning is intent and intent is not personal in a private and exclusive sense.”54 Chapter 5 is an extended argument for the social construction of meaning that resembles that of the later Wittgenstein.55 Dewey claims,
Language is specifically a mode of interaction of at least two beings, a speaker and a hearer; it presupposes an organized group to which these creatures belong, and from whom they have acquired their habits of speech. It is therefore a relationship, not a particularity. This consideration alone condemns traditional nominalism.56
A meaning is a bounded universal shared by at least two people. Dewey devastates Nietzsche’s nominalism. All meaning is social and the social gives rise to mental functioning. “Mind is seen to be a function of social interactions:” hence, a “genuine character of natural events when these attain the stage of widest and most complex interaction with one another.57 Similar remarks hold for the social nature of the self, although Dewey’s friend and Chicago colleague George Herbert Mead does a much better job of working out the details. The social nature of the mind and self takes us
54 Dewey LW 1: 142. 55 See M. Medina, “In Defense of Pragmatic Contextualism: Wittgenstein and Dewey On Meaning and Agreement. The Philosophical Forum, Vol. XXXV, No. 3, 341-369. See also W.V.O. Quine, “Ontological Relativity” in Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969) pp. 26-68. See also Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1979). 56 Dewey LW 1: 145. 57 Dewey LW 1: 6-7.
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
Jim Garrison 86
beyond Nietzsche’s nominalistic ideal of a lonely self-absorbed monster of creation, especially self-creation, exercising “his” will to power. Self-creation is always social self-creation. The selfish self- creation of the übermensch along with his lesser cousins Rorty’s ironist and Foucault’s dandy is simply a mistake.58 However, Dewey did not de-emphasize the importance of individuality, far from it. For him, individuality is a task of social self-creation: “Freedom or individuality, in short, is not an original possession or gift. It is something to be achieved, to be wrought out.”59 Dewey thought individuals had a unique potential that society should strive to educate such that each could make their unique contribution to society. This notion of moral equality celebrates incommensurable one-time-only qualitative individuality. It is so radical Dewey argues that society may not know it needs the function until the individual that can perform it arrives.60 This is part of Dewey’s democratic pluralism discussed in the next section. Nietzsche despised democracy. Dewey thinks “the social, in spite of whatever may be said regarding the temporal and spatial limitation of its manifestations, furnishes philosophically the inclusive category.”61 He repeats this conclusion near the end of the essay: “I do not say that the social as we know it is the whole, but I do emphatically suggest that it is the widest and richest manifestation of the whole accessible to our observation.”62 Social transactions emerge from physical and organic transactions, although they are not reducible to them. It is only through the social that language and meaning emerge.63 Even the
58 See my 1998 article, “Dewey, Foucault, and Self-Creation.” Educational Philosophy and Theory, Vol. 30, no 2, 1-134. 59 Dewey LW 2: 61. 60 See my 2012 article, “Individuality, Equality, and Creative Democracy—The Task Before Us.” American Journal of Education, Vol. 118, No. 3, 369-379. 61 Dewey LW 3: 45. 62 Dewey LW 3: 53. 63 Dewey thought only human beings were linguistic, hence capable of constructing meanings, essences, and values. There is considerable evidence other primates are also linguistic. Kanzi and some of his close relatives may be linguistic. If so, Kanzi acquired language by taking the attitude of others in a hybrid Bonobo- Human community of practice. The philosophical theory behind this community
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
Jim Garrison 87
übermensch exercising his individual creative will to power is socially “wrought out.” By the time I had finished reading the original 1925 version of Experience and Nature, I was convinced Dewey offered a better because more social artistic-aesthetic solution to my nihilistic crisis.
Some Other Things I Have Learned about the Aesthetic Solution from Studying Dewey
I still believe Dewey’s solution to the crisis of nihilism excels that proffered by Nietzsche. This section fills out a few more details regarding such an assertion. I begin with Dewey’s magnificent essay, “Construction and Criticism,” which I would retitle ‘Construction, Criticism, and Self-Creation” for many reasons one of which is its masterful use of a reference to a passage from Emerson’s “Self- Reliance”:
A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within," and "Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility then most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side. Else to-morrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.64
A great deal of the art of student centered teaching resides in detecting our student’s “gleam of light.”65 After Schopenhauer, Emersion is perhaps the most important influence on Nietzsche’s
derives from Wittgenstein, but is entirely compatible with a Deweyan account (see Segerdahl et. al., 2005). 64 Dewey LW 5: 139. 65 See James W. Garrison, Review of The Gleam of Light by Naoko Saito. Teachers College Record, 1650-1655.
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
Jim Garrison 88
thinking.66 However, my primary interest in this essay involves the opening paragraph:
I have used the word construction rather than creation because it seems less pretentious. But what I mean by it is the creative mind, the mind that is genuinely productive in its operations. We are given to associating creative mind with persons regarded as rare and unique, like geniuses. But every individual is in his own way unique.67
I wish Dewey had been more pretentious. If scholars were to read Dewey’s philosophy of construction and reconstruction as a philosophy of creation and re-creation the aesthetic response to nihilism would be readily recognizable. Dewey thought creativity everyone’s prerogative. Following Emerson, Nietzsche thought creativity only the special privilege of geniuses. “Each individual that comes into the world is a new beginning;” Dewey believed, “the universe itself is, as it were, taking a fresh start in him and trying to do something, even if on a small scale, that it has never done before.”68 This claim leads directly to Dewey’s commitment to pluralistic communicative democracy and unique potentiality already discussed. While the details of Dewey’s democratic thought are immensely important in filling out exactly how his solution to the crisis of nihilism surpasses Nietzsche’s, it is sufficiently well known as not to detain us on this occasion. Nietzsche goes boldly beyond good and evil, a place many consider Dewey far too timid to venture; the many are mistaken:
66 See Kaufmann’s “Introduction” to Nietzsche’s The Gay Science, pp. 7-13. The original version of The Gay Science included an epigraph from Emerson. Kaufmann argues that Nietzsche may even have derived the idea of gay science from Emerson. Dewey’s own reading of Emerson is quite compatible with Nietzsche’s in this regard (see MW 3: 184-192). Significantly, Dewey draws democratic inspiration from Emerson whereas Nietzsche does not. 67 Dewey LW 5: 127. 68 Ibid.
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
Jim Garrison 89
The idea and the practice of morality are saturated with conceptions that stem from praise and blame, reward and punishment. Mankind is divided into sheep and goats, the vicious and virtuous, the law-abiding and criminal, the good and bad. To be beyond good and evil is an impossibility for man, and yet as long as the good signifies only that which is lauded and rewarded, and the evil that which is currently condemned or outlawed, the ideal factors of morality are always and everywhere beyond good and evil. Because art is wholly innocent of ideas derived from praise and blame, it is looked upon with the eye of suspicion by the guardians of custom . . . . Yet this indifference to praise and blame because of preoccupation with imaginative experience constitutes the heart of the moral potency of art. From it proceeds the liberating and uniting power of art.69
Dewey’s philosophy of re-creation glides easily beyond conventional good and evil. The creation of values that human beings are prepared to sacrifice themselves for takes us directly to Dewey’s religious humanism. One may read Experience and Nature as an expression of religious humanism. The opening paragraph of the 1929 “Introduction” identifies the title of the book with Dewey’s “empirical naturalism” or “naturalistic humanism.”70 Let us quickly clear the air regarding humanism. Consider Dewey’s essay, “Does Human Nature Change?” Dewey answers the question posed by his title in the first paragraph with an emphatic Yes! Like the rest of ontology for Dewey, speaking proleptically the contingent falsifiable human essence is the objective of creative collective inquiry across generations. Human nature is not an antecedent existence one may discover. Dewey’s A Common Faith is the fullest statement of his religious humanism. For him, “the religious” as adjectival is, as with the aesthetic, available in every domain of experience; it is a function
69 Dewey LW 10: 351. 70 Dewey LW 1: 10.
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
Jim Garrison 90
not a substance. Religious humanism offers “better adjustment in life and its conditions,” but no cosmic aims, unity, or true Being.71 Much of the humanism resides in the appropriate adjustment of one’s self to the larger pluralistic universe (i.e., right relationship) of which we are a part, including our families and local community:
The whole self is an ideal, an imaginative projection. Hence the idea of a thoroughgoing and deep-seated harmonizing of the self with the Universe (as a name for the totality of conditions with which the self is connected) operates only through imagination—which is one reason why this composing of the self is not voluntary in the sense of an act of special volition or resolution. An "adjustment" possesses the will rather than is its express product.72
The ideal of a whole self is a product of the creative imagination. It is involves faith in things unseen such as peace on earth, the end of racism, and such. Notice that while achieving such a state no doubt involves willful action it is an adjustment involving accommodating our selves to events as much as adapting events to our needs and desires. Composing our selves (i.e., self-creation) is not an act of special volition or will to power. Faith is required to allow an imaginative unifying ideal end- in-view of our own creation vanquish us in thought, feeling, and action:
Conviction in the moral sense signifies being conquered, vanquished, in our active nature by an ideal end; it signifies acknowledgment of its rightful claim over our desires and purposes. Such acknowledgment is practical, not primarily intellectual. It goes beyond evidence that can be presented to any possible observer.73
71 Dewey LW 9: 11 72 Dewey LW 9: 15 73 Ibid.
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
Jim Garrison 91
Faith may be evaluated by the extent of our willingness to make sacrifices while striving with creative intelligence to overcome obstacles in securing the ideal.74 Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. died for his dream.75 Controversially, Dewey expressed his religious humanism in part by asserting: “It is this active relation between ideal and actual to which I would give the name ‘God.’ I would not insist that the name must be given.”76 In a letter to army private Charles E. Witzell, Dewey clarifies his stance:
I have taught many years and I don't think that any of my students would say that I set out to undermine anyone's faith. . . . The lectures making up the book were meant for those whose religious beliefs had been abandoned, and who were given the impression that their abandonment left them without any religious beliefs whatever. I wanted to show them that religious values are not the monopoly of any one class or sect and are still open to them.77
In the following, Dewey expresses to his friend Max C. Otto his own sense of God’s existential status in his typically unpretentious manner:
For I feel the gods are pretty dead, tho I suppose I ought to know that || however, to be somewhat more philosophical in the matter, if atheism means simply not being a theist, then of course Im an atheist. But the popular if not the etymological significance of the word is much wider. It has come to signify it seems to me a denial of all ideal values as having the right to control material ones. And in that sense
74 Dewey LW 9: 19. 75 King also had an intelligent method he used as a means to his ideal end-in- view—Henry David Thoreau’s civil disobedience. Mohandas K. Gandhi had already successfully tested it in India. 76 LW 9: 34. 77 Dewey, Correspondence, Volume 3 [1943.06.05 (22265)]).
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
Jim Garrison 92
Im not an atheists and dont want to be labelled [sic.] one.78
Dewey’s religious humanism requires the creation of contingent “ideal values” (for example, pluralistic, communicative, social democracy) we may then seek to serve and to which we may sacrifice. After his early works (1882-1898), Dewey expresses little interest in “religion.” Many think he wrote A Common Faith only for those that have abandoned traditional belief, but nonetheless felt religious. Surely, his letter to private Witzell suggests such a reading. If so, then Dewey is mostly appealing to people like me. I acknowledge my reading not only of Dewey’s philosophy of religiosity, but of his entire corpus is idiosyncratic with regard to my personal existential concerns. I have spent a lifetime developing an aesthetic solution to the crisis of nihilism adequate for my purposes that I could confidently offer to others when their highest values transvalue themselves. However, mine is only one motive for studying Dewey. So, in the spirit of pluralism I ask again: Why do you study John Dewey?
78 Dewey, Correspondence, Volume 2 [1935.01.14 (08049)]).
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
Jim Garrison 93
Bibliography
Alexander, Thomas M. The Human Eros: Eco-ontology and the Aesthetics of Existence. New York, N. Y.: Fordham University Press, 2013.
Dewey, John. The Collected Works of John Dewey, 1882-1953, edited by Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969-1991.
Garrison, James W. “Dewey and the Empirical Unity of Opposites.” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, Vol. 21, No.4 (1985), 549‑561.
—. “Dewey, Foucault, and Self-Creation. Educational Philosophy and Theory.” Educational Philosophy and Theory, Vol. 30, No. 2 (1998), 1-134.
—. “John Dewey, Jacques Derrida, and the Metaphysics of Presence.” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, Vol. 35, No. 2 (1999), 346-372.
—. Review of The Gleam of Light by Naoko Saito. Teachers College Record, 1650-1655 (2006).
—. “Individuality, Equality, and Creative Democracy—The Task Before Us.”American Journal of Education, Vol. 118, No. 3 (2012), 369-379.
Garrison, James W; Hickman, Larry; Ikeda, Daisaku, Living as Learning: John Dewey in The 21st Century. Cambridge, MA: Dialogue Path Press, 2014.
Medina, M. “In Defense of Pragmatic Contextualism: Wittgenstein and Dewey On Meaning and Agreement.” The Philosophical
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
Jim Garrison 94
Forum, Vol. XXXV, No. 3 (2004), 341-369.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Will To Power. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Random House, 1967.
—. “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense.” In The Birth of Tragedy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
—. The Gay Science. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1974.
—. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Penguin Books, 1954.
—. Beyond Good and Evil. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1966.
—. On The Genealogy of Morals. Translated by Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Vintage Books, 1967.
Putnam, Hilary. (2002). The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002.
Quine, W.V.O. “Ontological relativity” in W.V.O Quine, Ontological Relativity and Other Essays. New York: Columbia University Press, 1969.
Segerdahl, P., Fields, W. & Savage-Rumbaugh, S. Kanzi’s Primal Language: The Cultural Initiation of Primates into Language. New York: Palgrave, 2005.
Rorty, Richard. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1979.
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
AN INTERVIEW WITH MARILYN FISCHER
MARILYN FISCHER (University of Dayton, Emerita) & JUDY WHIPPS (Grand Valley State University)
Marilyn Fischer specializes in political philosophy and American pragmatism. She served as director of the Core Program at the University of Dayton, an integrated, interdisciplinary program through which students can fulfill most of their general education requirements. Her research focuses on the philosophy of Jane Addams. She is the author of Ethical Decision Making in Fund Raising (2000), On Addams (2003), as well as an editor of Jane Addams's Writings on Peace, 4 volumes (2003), Jane Addams’ Essays and Speeches (2006), and Jane Addams and the Practice of Democracy (2009).
Judy Whipps conducted this interview with Fischer on behalf of Dewey Studies in the fall of 2017. Whipps was a co-editor with Fischer on Jane Addams's Writings on Peace, 4 volumes (2003) and Jane Addams’ Essays and Speeches (2006). She has published work on Addams, Feminism, and many other topics.
Neither Whipps’ questions nor Fischer’s responses have been edited in any way.
Volume 1 · Number 2 · Fall 2017 · Pages 95-102
Marilyn Fischer & Judy Whipps 96
Q: I know you had a somewhat non-traditional academic career. How and when did you come to study philosophy?
Pragmatists talk about how we are social selves. When and where we live and the people and events that intersect with our lives enter into the construction of who we are. My associations with philosophy have spanned several varieties of myself, all of which carry the impress of generational shifts. Growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, no one ever asked me what I wanted to do when I grew up. The only course my mother insisted I take in high school was typing, so I could support myself as a secretary until I married and had children. I remember watching a few episodes of a soap opera that featured a woman who was a doctor. I was dumbstruck that women could actually do something! My senior year I took a required civics course with a teacher who, as a Jewish woman lawyer in my conservative Christian town, could get no other job. She gave us some readings by a British political writer—Barbara Ward, if I remember correctly— whose philosophical leanings struck a chord in me. I decided to major in philosophy, not really knowing what it was, while also fulfilling pre-med requirements. After college, philosophy tugged more strongly than medicine, but it didn’t occur to me it could become a career. During my first semester of graduate school, I dreaded my T.A. discussion sessions and hoped that no one would show up. What could I possibly have to say to them? I soon realized that I really did like the teaching part of philosophy, so continued on.
The job market was tight in the early 1980s. After a string of sabbatical replacement jobs, I spent ten years as an adjunct at the University of Dayton, while my children were young. When they reached school age, I was lucky to get a tenure-track job at UD. Had it been ten years later, I probably would have been offered a non- tenure lectureship, with a heavy teaching load and no possibility for research. I have a lot of sympathy for younger scholars, given how hard it is to find a position that enables them to fulfill all of their promise. During my years at UD, I defined myself primarily as a teacher. My favorite course was a two-semester, fifteen-credit marathon that fully integrated history, religious studies, philosophy,
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
Marilyn Fischer & Judy Whipps 97
and English. Six to eight faculty members from these disciplines collaborated intensely to develop the curriculum and teach the course. Philosophical texts made much more sense to students and faculty when we could locate them within their original historical settings. The course transformed my teaching and writing. Since retiring two years ago, I’ve been relishing another variety of myself as a full-time writer.
Q: What philosophical questions most intrigue you?
More varieties of the self here. At first, the problem of evil was very real to me, given the disjunct between my legalistic, fundamentalist upbringing and the realities my generation confronted in the midst of the Vietnam War and the movements for civil rights and women’s rights. In the 1980s and 1990s, as “applied philosophy” made its appearance, questions of social justice loomed large. In the 1990s the local chapter of the national philanthropic fundraising organization invited me to work with them on fundraising ethics. That led to my first book, Ethical Decision Making in Fund Raising, and my interest in the role non-profit organizations play in a capitalist, democratic society. Since 2000 I’ve cycled through questions in the philosophy of music and issues of multi-cultural diversity.
Q: Music has played an important role in your life as a long-time member of the Dayton Philharmonic Orchestra. How do you see the interaction between philosophy and music?
All throughout childhood, college, and graduate school I took violin lessons and performed at every opportunity. For twenty-five years my night job was as a violinist with the Dayton Philharmonic, an excellent regional, professional orchestra. There is a unique and intimate intensity to being in the very same time, down to the nanosecond, with eighty-five fellow musicians as our ears, minds, emotions, and muscles respond to each other with exquisite precision. It was a privilege to sit just a few feet from Itzhak Perlman, Yo-Yo Ma, Dave Brubeck, and Sarah Vaughan and make music with them. I think of music and philosophy as kindred art forms. Both
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
Marilyn Fischer & Judy Whipps 98
seek to cast into beautiful form how life goes and what matters most, the one in tones and rhythms and the other in words and concepts. Now, as I sit at my desk crafting sentences, I feel as though I am making music with my pen.
Q: How did you discover Jane Addams’ philosophical work? What speaks to you about her work?
This is not the usual story of writing a dissertation and then spinning out variations for decades. While I was an adjunct at the University of Dayton, a colleague in the Philosophy Department asked if I could pick someone to impersonate for a panel on social justice, along with Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and Willy Loman. I quickly ran through the children’s biographies I had been reading to my daughter. I had no idea that my mental coin toss between Dorothea Dix and Jane Addams would change the direction of my life. As I prepared by reading some of Addams’s texts, the quality of her ideas and the texture of her prose resonated. I wrote a few conference papers, unsure if what Addams wrote counted as “philosophy.” I’m grateful to my department colleagues for tolerating this deviation from acknowledged pathways.
Q: Had you studied Dewey before you began working with Addams’ philosophy, or did reading Addams bring you to reading Dewey?
I flew by a bit of Dewey in graduate school, but like other social philosophers of the time, I focused on permutations of Rawls. Someone suggested that I send my first fledgling attempts to articulate Addams’s social ethics to Charlene Haddock Seigfried. My first reaction was “How could I? She is a big-time, honest-to- goodness philosopher; how could she possibly be interested in me?” I sent them anyway, and Charlene replied most encouragingly that yes, Addams counted as a philosopher, and yes, I might have something to say. She tucked in a reading list, and was gracious enough not to tell me it was a syllabus for “Intro. to Pragmatism 101.” Charlene also introduced me to SAAP (Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy). I am eternally grateful for her mentoring and
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
Marilyn Fischer & Judy Whipps 99
friendship.
Q: You are in the midst of an extensive project on Addams right now. What is your goal for this project and what have you learned that has surprised you?
In 2014 I received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities to work on a book about Addams’s pacifism. I wanted to track chronologically how she came to formulate the cosmopolitanism that characterizes her understanding of peace. As I worked slowly through essays she wrote in the decade between founding Hull House and writing Democracy and Social Ethics, I discovered a deeper, more interesting story. Just underneath the surface of her prose lay a substratum of scientific thinking, drawn from many iterations of late nineteenth evolutionary science. Pragmatists say that theories are tools. Throughout her life, Addams kept right up to date with the latest scientific theories in biology and the social sciences and used them as tools to investigate the social reforms she is known for: child labor, immigration, workplace conditions, sex trafficking, women’s suffrage, war and peace.
The depth of Addams’s engagement with evolutionary science surprised me. The project has now become a projected three-volume work on how Addams used science, literature, and rhetoric as tools throughout her writing career. Volume I, Jane Addams’s Evolutionary Theorizing: Constructing Democracy and Social Ethics, is now under review at the publisher. Volume II will cover Addams’s writings on peace and social justice from 1902 until 1914. Volume III will cover her writings during and after World War One.
Q: Is there a common misconception of Addams that you would like to change?
People generally say that Addams came up with her philosophy by reflecting on her experiences, in conversation with a relatively small number of intellectuals. This picture misses how Addams used a vast range of scientific and literary writings as resources for filtering,
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
Marilyn Fischer & Judy Whipps 100
shaping, and making sense of her experiences. Far more than is currently recognized, Addams was a complicated and sophisticated intellectual of international reach.
Q: How do you see the philosophic relationship between Addams and Dewey?
Contemporary scholars, particularly Charlene Haddock Seigfried and Judy D. Whipps, have done excellent work demonstrating commonalities between Addams and Dewey’s pragmatist methodology, and their views on social democracy, ethics, and education. They also show how Addams went beyond Dewey in addressing issues of class and gender. To fine-tune our knowledge of Addams and Dewey’s philosophical relationship, chronology is key. A few years ago Charlene used Dewey’s lecture notes to show that Dewey didn’t “get” Addams’s pragmatism when he taught Democracy and Social Ethics shortly after its publication in 1902. In my manuscript I show that Addams in 1895 was already doing pragmatist ethics by starting with morally problematic situations, well before Dewey articulated the method. In comparing Dewey and Addams we should keep in mind that Addams wrote before, and then in response to, World War One. Many of Dewey’s significant writings came later, when the country and the world faced quite different situations.
Q: Does the pragmatist feminist work on Addams and other women of her era change how we see Dewey’s work or classical pragmatism?
Yes! Dewey spent a lot of time at Hull House and served as a trustee. Some of the women who worked at the Laboratory School lived at Hull House. The women at the Laboratory School, as well as at Hull House, had lots of autonomy to work out their own ideas and methods. Dewey was attentive to all this, and I imagine a lot of cross- fertilization worked its way into Dewey’s writings. Sorting all this out would be a splendid project for someone to take on!
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
Marilyn Fischer & Judy Whipps 101
Q: Do you have a favorite quote from Dewey (or Addams)?
Two of my favorite quotes from Addams show how she absorbed the literature of her day and transformed it creatively.
The first is from Democracy and Social Ethics: “We have learned as common knowledge that much of the insensibility and hardness of the world is due to the lack of imagination which prevents a realization of the experiences of other people. Already there is a conviction that we are under a moral obligation in choosing our experiences, since the result of those experiences must ultimately determine our understanding of life.”
The second is from Second Twenty Years at Hull House: “The human power for action mysteriously depends upon our capacity to throw into imaginative form that which we already know, upon a generous impulse to let it determine our deeds.”
In the first, Addams is working off of a passage from Irish historian W.E.H. Lecky; in the second, a passage from English poet Percy Shelley. At the time, borrowing other writers’ words without attribution and embroidering on them was a common practice.
Q: What can we learn from Addams and Dewey that is relevant in today’s social and political environments?
Ever so much! I’m glad to be part of a community of scholars in which different people take on different tasks. Look at any SAAP program and you will find lots of presentations that use Addams and Dewey as resources for an enormous range of today’s social and political issues. Maurice Hamington on care ethics, Judy Whipps on leadership and adult education, and Danielle Lake on “wicked problems” have used insights from Addams and Dewey to great effect, as have many others writing on aesthetics, the environment, and all aspects of social justice.
I’m glad other scholars are learning enough about today’s issues to be
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
Marilyn Fischer & Judy Whipps 102
able to use the early pragmatists in rigorous and meaningful ways. To do the kind of writing I do, I have to keep my head buried in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The relevance of my work on Addams comes from parsing out her interdisciplinary method as clearly and precisely as possible. Addams took the concrete particularities of morally problematic situations and brought to them intellectual insights from a vast array of disciplinary perspectives. Even though the science and historiography she used are long outdated, her method of inquiry is a model for today.
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
RESEARCH NOTE: UNDERSTANDING DEWEY’S CONNECTION TO CHINA- A BIBLIOGRAPHIC ESSAY ON SELECTED WORKS
JAMES ZHI YANG University of Oklahoma
Editor’s Note: Research notes offer a starting point for inquiry; they aim to introduce and orient our readers to existing literature on topics in Dewey Scholarship. They are not necessarily intended as exhaustive bibliographies or detailed treatments of the topics. Whether solicited or volunteered, the notes are reviewed for quality by the Dewey Studies editorial staff, but are not subjected to anonymous peer review. Readers wishing to prepare such notes are invited to send queries to Daniel Brunson, Reviews Editor, at [email protected]
Volume 1 · Number 2 · Fall 2017 · Pages 103-111
James Zhi Yang 104
ohn Dewey’s two-year sojourn to China (1919-1921) created a J shared educational experience between the United States and China. As one of Dewey’s daughters, Jane Dewey, recalled: “when he was in China, Dewey left feeling affection and admiration not only for the scholars with whom he had been intimately associated [,] but for the Chinese people as a whole. China remained the country nearest his heart after his own.”1 During Dewey’s visit, China was in the midst of its May Fourth/New Culture Movement, during which the country transformed itself from an imperial dynasty to a modern nation-state. It is no exaggeration to say that the encounter between Dewey and modern China is one of the most fascinating episodes in the intellectual history of twentieth-century China. However, Dewey’s connection to China is one of the lesser- known aspects of his scholarly work. This bibliographic essay therefore aims to describe, organize, and provide critical commentary on some of the significant works in English and Chinese that address Dewey’s educational experiences and influences in modern China. After comparing and synthesizing these works, I will categorize them into three groups: works that treat Dewey’s visit to China as a historical event, works that address Dewey’s sojourn as a cultural exchange, and works that explore Dewey’s visit as an episode in intellectual history.
Dewey’s Visit to China as a Historical Event
The first category regards Dewey’s visit to China as an influential event in Chinese history. Some researchers have used a historical framework to study Dewey’s activities in China and to examine his influence on modern Chinese education and culture.2 Most works in
1 Jane. M. Dewey, “The Biography of John Dewey,” in The Philosophy of John Dewey, ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp and Lewis Edwin Hahn (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1939), 3-45. 2 Timothy J. Bergen, “John Dewey’s Influence in China,” Proceedings of the Thirty- third Annual Meeting of the Southwestern Philosophy of Education Society 33 (1983): 72-84; Thomas Berry, “Dewey’s Influence in China”, in John Blewett, John Dewey:
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
James Zhi Yang 105
this category successfully delineate the limitations and achievements of Dewey’s influence on China. Within this group, Barry Keenan’s The Dewey Experiment in China: Educational Reform and Political Power in the Early Republic is a pioneering historical study of Dewey’s time in China. Keenan characterizes the influence of Dewey’s pragmatism on modern Chinese education while simultaneously analyzing a series of mismatches between Dewey’s educational thought and Chinese societal and political reality during the Republic of China’s early period. However, Keenan’s analysis of Dewey’s influence on Chinese education is limited mainly to the realm of educational administration. When detailing Dewey’s contribution to Chinese educational reformation during the early Republican period, his book does not sufficiently explore the intellectual and philosophical motivations behind Chinese scholars’ acceptance of American pragmatism. Equally significant is Yuan Qing’s John Dewey and China. In this Chinese book, Yuan explicates Dewey’s life and lectures in China and the aftermath of the American educator’s visit, arguing
His Thought and Influence. (New York: Fordham University Press, 1960), 204-225; Chow Tse-tsung, The May Fourth Movement: Intellectual Revolution in Modern China (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960); Fairbank, John King, The Great Chinese Revolution: 1800-1985 (New York: Harper & Row, 1986); Gao Qi, History of Modern Chinese Education (中国现代教育史) (Shanghai: Press of Beijing Normal University, 1985); Berry Keenan. The Dewey Experiment: Educational Reform and Political Power in the Early Republic (Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 1977); S. Alexander Rippa, Education in a Free Society: An American History (New York: Longman, 1997); Nancy. F. Sizer, “John Dewey’s Idea in China: 1919 to 1921,” Comparative Education Review 10, no. 3 (1966): 390-403; Su Zhixin, “A Critical Evaluation of John Dewey’s Influence on Chinese Education,” in American Journal of Education, 103, .no. 1 (1995): 302-325; Sun Yongzhou, “John Dewey in China: Yesterday and Today,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 35. no. 1 (Winter 1999): 69-88; Shan Zhongxin, ed. Biography of John Dewey (Anhui, China: Anhui Province Education Press, 2009); Yuan Weishi, History of Chinese Philosophy (中国哲学史) (Guangzhou: Zhong Shan University Press, 1987); Yuan Qing, John Dewey and China (杜威和中国) (Beijing, People’s Press, 2001); Zhang Qing, “Pragmatism and the Enlightenment in Modern China (实用主义哲学与近代中国启蒙运动),” Journal of Fudan University, 5 (1988).
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
James Zhi Yang 106
that he had a deep influence on Chinese intellectual life and education during the May Fourth period. A particularly valuable aspect of this work is that it notes the compatibility of Dewey’s philosophy with the traditional Confucian cultural psychology of Chinese scholars. However, this issue is not covered in sufficient depth.
Dewey’s Sojourn to China as a Cultural Exchange
The scholars of this group generally highlight the significance of cultural diversity by exploring an intercultural dialogue between Dewey and modern China.3 In this category, two of the most substantive studies are Jessica Ching-Sze Wang’s John Dewey in China: To Teach and To Learn and Wang Yanli’s Approach to Dialogue: John Dewey and Chinese Education. The first book proposes and explores an intercultural understanding between Dewey and China. Wang reconsiders the implications of Dewey’s visit to China by uncovering the mutual influences between Dewey and China. Her most important finding is the multiplicity of roles that Dewey played during his two-year
3 Gary Bullet, The Politics of John Dewey (Buffalo: Prometheus, 1983); Mei Hoyt, “John Dewey’s Legacy to China and the Problem in Chinese Society,” Transnational Curriculum Inquiry, 3., no.1 (2006): 13-25; Wang Rui, “John Dewey’s Influence on Chinese Education” (doctoral dissertation, Northern Illinois University, 1993); Jessica Ching-Sze Wang, John Dewey in China: To Teach and To Learn (New York: State University of New York Press, 2007); James Zhixiang Yang, “When Confucius Encounters John Dewey” (doctoral dissertation, University of Oklahoma, 2016), https://shareok.org/handle/11244/45406; Wang Yanli, Approach to a Dialogue: John Dewey and Chinese Education (走向对话: 杜威与中国教育) (Beijing: Education and Science Press, 2008); Xu Guoqing, Chinese and Americans: A Shared History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014); Yang Dongping, Chinese Education of the Twentieth Century (艰难的日出:中国现代教育的二十世纪) (Shanghai: Wenhui Publishing House, 2003); Yu Xiaoming, “The Encounter between John Dewey and the Modern Chinese Intellectuals: The Case of the 1922 Education Reform” (doctoral dissertation, University of Virginia, 1991).
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
James Zhi Yang 107
stay in China as a teacher and as a student. This work asserts that when modern Chinese scholars and educators learned new ideas from Dewey’s visit, they also contributed to the development of Dewey’s own intellectual thought and worldview. Nevertheless, in discussing the connection between Dewey and May Fourth China, Wang tends to oversimplify the intellectual dynamics of the May Fourth period and fails to clarify the main intellectual schools prevalent during this period. For instance, the book does not identify what part of Confucianism they targeted while arguing the standpoint of anti-traditionalism held by Chinese iconoclasts.4 A work published in Chinese, Wang Yanli’s Approach to Dialogue: John Dewey and Chinese Education, also puts Dewey’s visit in the setting of an equal dialogue between Dewey and Chinese history, extending from the May Fourth era to the periods of Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping. In the conclusion, Wang states, “the reason that John Dewey’s ideas deeply influenced modern Chinese educational thought during the May Fourth Period was that his educational thought fundamentally challenged Chinese education’s traditional methods of thinking.”5 Of note, the educational thought of Confucianism embraces some aspects, such as the thought of Wang Yangming’s School of Mind, Confucian School of Evidential Investigation, and the idea of Learning of Practical Use to Society, which become the driving forces behind Chinese educators’ access to Dewey’s pragmatism. In other words, based on a dichotomy between traditional Chinese education and Dewey’s educational ideas, Wang’s work downplays the role of Confucian education in Dewey’s Chinese students’ approach to American pragmatism. Another relevant work in this category is Xu Guoqi’s Chinese and Americans: A Shared History, which treats Dewey’s visit to China as one of the most significant aspects of a shared history held by both China and America.6 Xu points out that Chinese scholars learned new values and ideas from Dewey,7 but Dewey also
4 Wang, John Dewey in China, 1-9. 5 Wang, Approach to a Dialogue, 166. 6 Xu, Chinese and Americans, 204-231. 7 Ibid., 214-219.
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
James Zhi Yang 108
transmitted to the American people the new ideas acquired from his Chinese sojourn.8 Xu also notes that “the most important and fundamental claim Dewey brought to China resonated deeply with Confucian value— education is life and life is education.”9 Nevertheless, this is an important point that deserves more attention than Xu gives it in this book.
Dewey’s Visit to China in Intellectual History
The third approach utilized by scholars is to examine the implication of Dewey’s visit to China from the perspective of intellectual history. In this category, works by some scholars examine the intellectual link between influential modern Chinese intellectuals and Dewey. To varying degrees, these works focus on Dewey’s Chinese devotees as a specific group in the context of the May Fourth Movement.10 In “The Encounter between John Dewey and the Modern Chinese Intellectuals: The Case of the 1922 Education Reform,” Yu Xiaoming concentrates on the interaction between Dewey and Chinese educational reformers in the 1920s by analyzing the role of Dewey’s educational thought in Chinese education reform.11 The
8 Ibid., 226-231. 9 Ibid., 228. 10 Chow Tse-tsung, The May Fourth Movement: Intellectual Revolution in Modern China (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960); Li Yun-shin, “John Dewey and Modern Chinese Education: Prospectus for a New Philosophy” (doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2000); Lin Yusheng, The Crisis of Chinese Consciousness: Radical Anti-Traditionalism in the May Fourth Era (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1979); Wang Ying, John Dewey’s School and Chinese Education (杜威教育学派与中国教育)(Beijing: Beijing Institute of Technology Press, 2000); Xie Changfa, The Study of the Educational Activities of American-Trained Chinese Students before the Second Sino-Japanese War (Shi Jiazhuang: Hebei Educational Press, 2001); Kuang Qizhang,“Pragmatism in China: The Deweyan Influence” (doctoral dissertation, Michigan State University, 1994); Zhang Huajun, John Dewey, Liang Shuming, and China’s Education Reform (New York: Lexington Books Press, 2013). 11 Yu, “The Encounter between John Dewey and the Modern Chinese Intellectuals,” 34-170.
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
James Zhi Yang 109
author mentions the shared ground between Dewey’s and Confucius’s intellectual thought, but his argument does not provide a detailed explanation of how Confucianism affected Dewey’s Chinese students when they confronted Dewey’s thought.12 Li Yun-shin’s dissertation, “John Dewey and Modern Chinese Education: Prospectus for a New Philosophy,” examines and evaluates Dewey’s influence on the May Fourth generation. By studying several historical figures, including Hu Shih, Tao Xingzhi, Bertrand Russell, Mao Zedong, and Sun Yat-sen, this dissertation attempts to identify and explicate a philosophical dialogue occurring between Dewey and the diversity of Chinese intellectual thought.13 Li argues that the intellectual ferment experienced by the Chinese scholars was greatly shaped by Western learning (in particular, Dewey’s influence) and Chinese social and political reality. Among the works in this category, Wang Yin’s Chinese Education and the School of John Dewey is the latest monograph in Chinese that explores an intellectual linkage between Dewey and his Chinese followers.14 Wang’s study of the intellectual development of these scholars focuses specifically on an inquiry regarding modern aspects of the educational journey of Dewey’s Chinese devotees. That is to say, the author regards these Chinese scholars’ acceptance of Dewey’s pragmatism only as the result of the American philosopher’s tremendous influence. Overall, the three categories of scholarship outlined here are interrelated and complementary. Although page limitations prevent me from expounding on all works pertinent to Dewey’s connection to China, I believe that the works discussed in this essay are sufficient to provide scholars with a comprehensive overview of the topic. When studying Dewey’s connection to China, some researchers synthesize the cultural exchange approach and the intellectual history approach. For example, my dissertation, “When
12 Ibid. 13 Li, “John Dewey and Modern Chinese Education: Prospectus for a New Philosophy,” 81-184. 14 Wang, John Dewey’s School and Chinese Education, chapters 1 through 3.
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
James Zhi Yang 110
Confucius Encounters John Dewey: A Historical and Philosophical Analysis of Dewey’s Visit to China,”15 focuses on how Dewey’s pragmatic philosophy interacted with the specific themes of Confucian education during the May Fourth period. By investigating five Chinese educators (Hu Shih, Liang Shuming, Tao Xingzhi, Guo Bingwen, and Jiang Menglin), my study uncovers how these Chinese intellectuals bridged the gap between their Confucian education and their Deweyan learning in order to apply Dewey’s educational thought to Chinese social and political reality. In contrast with other works that view Western civilization as the driving force behind Chinese scholars’ approach to Dewey’s pragmatism, my dissertation demonstrates that Chinese educators’ Confucian educational experiences forged a solid foundation for them to learn from Dewey’s philosophy. Last, in addition to the academic works described above, two collections of Dewey’s lectures16 deserve attention from the Dewey community. During his tour of China from 1919 to 1921, Dewey delivered more than 200 lectures on politics, education, culture, and society. John Dewey: Lectures in China, 1919-1920 comprises two series of sixteen lectures each, one series on social and political philosophy and the other on educational philosophy. Unfortunately, although Dewey’s lectures were originally delivered in English, all of the texts were transcribed into Chinese. Therefore, in editing the volume, translators have had to translate the lectures back into English from notes taken in Chinese. This book should be of special interest to English-speaking scholars of the Dewey community. Correspondingly, Democracy and Modern Society: Dewey’s Lectures in China is a compilation of Dewey’s speeches published in Chinese and therefore conducive to the work of Chinese scholars
15 Yang, “When Confucius Encounters John Dewey.” 16 Clopton, Robert W, and Ou,Tsuin-Chen, eds and trans. John Dewey: Lectures in China, 1919-1920 (Honolulu, HI:University of Hawaii Press, 1973); Yuan Gang, Sun Jiaxiang, and Ren Bingang, eds. Democracy and Modern Society: John Dewey’s Lecture in China (民治主义与现代社会：杜威在华讲演集) (Beijing: Beijing University Press, 2004).
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
James Zhi Yang 111
studying Dewey’s connection to China. In contrast with John Dewey: Lectures in China, 1919-1920, the book includes Dewey’s lectures on Chinese higher education and traditional education, which are not contained in John Dewey: Lectures in China, 1919-1920. Likewise, this book’s editor extends the focuses from Dewey’s lectures to include the speeches of Alice Dewey (Dewey’s wife) and Evelyn Dewey (his daughter) in China. Furthermore, the book also includes essays and speeches by some of Dewey’s Chinese followers, whose aim is to introduce Dewey’s pragmatism to the Chinese intellectual community. Together with John Dewey: Lectures in China, 1919-1920, the Chinese-language Democracy and Modern Society: Dewey’s Lecture in China is a valuable asset for the Dewey community. Finally, it is worth noting that several Deweyan scholars pay special attention to certain parts in Dewey’s private letters, which were written during his two year trip to both China and Japan. During the 1920s, Dewey’s East Asian trip letters were collected and published under the title of Letters from China and Japan.17 Fortunately, this book has been translated into a Chinese version in 2016.18 As a Chinese translator, Liu Xing asserts that these letters will be of great benefit in understanding Chinese influence on Dewey’s intellectual development.19 Of note, both the collections of Dewey’s lectures and his letters from East Asia have not been included in the collected works of Dewey. Therefore, for both American and Chinese Deweyan scholars, these documents will be conducive for them to explore Dewey’s connection to China beyond Dewey’s scholarly works.
17 John Dewey, and Alice Dewey, Letters from China and Japan, ed. by Evelyn Dewey (New York: E.P. Dutton & Company, 1920). 18 John Dewey, and Alice Dewey, Letters from China and Japan (杜威家书: 1919年所见中国与日本), ed. by Evelyn Dewey and trans. by Liu Xing (Beijing: Beijing Normal University, 2016). 19 Kan Chaoqun, “Contrast between China and Japan from John Dewey’s View 100 Years Ago (中国和日本的反差, 杜威百年前怎么看).” New York Times (Chinese), January 12, 2017. Accessed February 8, 2018. https://cn.nytimes.com/china/20170112/dewey-china/.
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
RESEARCH NOTE: JOHN DEWEY ON NATIONALISM
LEONARD J. WAKS Temple University, Emeritus
Editor’s Note: Research notes offer a starting point for inquiry; they aim to introduce and orient our readers to existing literature on topics in Dewey Scholarship. They are not necessarily intended as exhaustive bibliographies or detailed treatments of the topics. Whether solicited or volunteered, the notes are reviewed for quality by the Dewey Studies editorial staff, but are not subjected to anonymous peer review. Readers wishing to prepare such notes are invited to send queries to Daniel Brunson, Reviews Editor, at [email protected]
Volume 1 · Number 2 · Fall 2017 · Pages 112-125
Leonard J. Waks 113
ationalism was the dominant political concept of the 19th century and is re-emerging as a major force in 21st century N politics with the growing power of nationalist movements in the United States and Europe and the success of the Brexit initiative in the United Kingdom. John Dewey addressed nationalism in more than 100 passages scattered throughout 20 volumes of the complete works from World War One through the aftermath of World War Two. The main outlines of Dewey’s account of nationalism are already evident in his earliest statements, though he expands it in subsequent works. Significantly, nationalism is not mentioned in the first edition of Ethics (1908), but is discussed throughout all three parts of the second edition (1932). Nationalism per se is barely mentioned in Democracy and Education, but when placed within the context of his work during World War One, the book can fruitfully be read as a program for countering nationalism through education. Dewey approached nationalism as a problem with conceptual, historical, ethical and educational dimensions. In this research note I indicate his main ideas regarding each dimension.
The Concept of Nationalism
Dewey approaches the concept of nationalism by relating the family consisting of ‘nation,’ ‘nationality,’ and ‘nationalism’ to the related concepts of society, the state (and polity) and culture. Dewey sharply distinguishes the concept of ‘national’ from ‘social’ and ‘political’ but notes that they can be blended, as in political, cultural or social forms of nationalism.1 He emphasizes the importance of social bonds within national and transnational groups formed through communication, give and take. Democracy, in social
1 John Dewey, The Collected Works of John Dewey, 1882-1953, ed. by Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967- 1990). “Education from a Social Perspective,” MW 7: 114-18.
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
Leonard J. Waks 114
terms, is deep and broad communication, and it’s conscious acceptance as the principle in settling conflicts. The spirit of science is essential in democracy, as differences are to be resolved through inquiry rather than force. For Dewey the term ‘nation’ is used in two distinct senses: as a synonym for nation-state, or as a synonym for an ethnic group. The first converts ‘nation’ into a distinctly political notion, and nationalism into a synonym for patriotism—devotion to the state. The second or ethnic notion associates ‘nation’ with race and territory, but Dewey rejects both conceptual associations. The idea of race has no scientific support, and is used almost exclusively in political projects. Some nations, moreover, such as the Jewish nation, have existed without a national territory.2 Dewey opts for a cultural definition of ‘nation’—a group sharing a common life, language and literature, living together in communities of intellectual life, with moral emotions and common practices based on common transitions and hopes.3 But modern nationalism can be understood in two senses: as devotion to the state, or as devotion to the cultural group.
The History of Nationalism
All nationalisms arise from dissatisfaction. The Napoleonic spread of liberal social values through military conquest resulted in German nationalism after 1807 as Germans sought national unification for self defense. Italy similarly sought unification to rid itself of Austrian domination. Smaller national groups (e.g., Hungarians, Bohemians), chafing under imperial domination, similarly claimed the right to self-governance in their own sovereign nation states under the banner of nationalism.4 Nation consciousness took distinct forms in France and
2 Dewey, “The Principle of Nationality,” MW 10: 286-92. 3 Dewey, “Chinese National Sentiment,” MW 11: 216-28. 4 Dewey, “The Principle of Nationality,” MW 10: 286-92; “Education and Social Change,” LW11: 409-418.
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
Leonard J. Waks 115
Germany. In France, the forces binding the nation included liberal values and the use of enlightened reason by citizens. The Germans developed a sharply contrasting notion of the nation as the trans- rational, mystical Volk bound by ties of blood (racial purity) and soil.5 Germans asserted a cultural basis for political and military nationalism, condemning French culture and its liberal conception of the individual citizen as “primitive sensuous animality.” By contrast they saw the German Volk as possessing ‘true’ individuality through intuitive merger with the Nation as the historical bearer of Absolute Reason. The assertion of cultural superiority was used to justify German domination of the French and the Franco-Prussian war of 1870.6 Prior to World War One, nationalism did not exist in the United States—a multi-racial multi-ethnic nation. Our national ideal has been social—the deep and broad ties constitutive of democracy.7 The Chinese are devoted to their long-standing habits and traditions, but prior to the War had never had a strong central state.8 Chinese nationals who traveled for education or commerce could see China as a nation, a greater unity beyond their villages and regions. But they couldn’t convert this perception into political nationalism, as there was no central state to which they could transfer earlier loyalties;9 an effective Chinese state was (in 1920-21) a project for the future, which other nations should leave to the Chinese.10 After World War One, liberal and Marxist political theorists and economists predicted that increasing trade and international labor organization would lead to the decline of nationalism, but both were wrong: by the 1920s a new toxic militaristic nationalism spread
5 Dewey, German Philosophy and Politics, especially section 3: The German Philosophy of History, MW 8: 184-205. 6 Dewey, German Philosophy and Politics, MW 8: 184-205; Review of Russell, Religion, Science and Philosophy. LW 11: 455-464. 7 Dewey, “Education from a Social Perspective,” MW 7: 114-18; “The Fruits of Nationalism,” LW 3: 153-58. 8 Dewey, “Old China and New” MW 13: 96. 9 Dewey, “Divided China,” MW 13: 136. 10 Dewey, “The Issues at Washington, III. China’s Interest,” MW 13, 181-5.
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
Leonard J. Waks 116
rapidly.11 Science and technology were increasingly devoted to corporations and the military, which shaped national scientific agendas to further competitiveness.12 In America, cries of ‘America First’ paralleled the propaganda of totalitarian regimes of Germany and Russia. Even after World War II and the Hydrogen bomb, nationalism remains a potent force for global anarchy, chaos, and mass destruction.13
The Ethics of Nationalism
The Two Sides of Nationalism
Dewey grants that nationalism has been a ‘two-sided’ ethical force, a “tangled mixture of good and bad.”14 On the positive side, nationalism was a “movement away from obnoxious conditions”: narrow parochialism and dynastic despotism. The buildup of nation states substituted a unity of feeling and freedom of intercourse over wider areas, putting an end to local isolations,15 and generated “a personal loyalty which had previously been found only among the members of small city states.”16 “Except for where the national spirit has been built up, public spirit is practically non-existent.”17 But on the negative side, nation states have been built up by and sustained through violent conflict. Internal unity and fellow feeling has been accompanied by hostility to the people of other nations. The devotion to the state as an object of worship has made the state into the post-imperial church. But “the ‘nation’ by which millions swear and for which they demand the sacrifice of all other
11 Dewey, Liberalism and Social Action, LW 11:28. 12 Dewey, “Review of Russell, Religion, Science and Philosophy,” LW 11: 460. 13 Dewey, “World Anarchy and World Order,” LW 15: 205-210; “The Crisis in Human History,” LW 15: 211-24. 14 Dewey, “The Principle of Nationality,” MW 10: 286-92; “The Fruits of Nationalism,” LW 3: 153. 15 Dewey, “The Fruits of Nationalism,” LW 3: 153-58. 16 Dewey, Ethics (2nd edition), LW 7:168. 17 Dewey, “The Fruits of Nationalism,” LW 3: 153.
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
Leonard J. Waks 117
loyalties is a myth; it has no being outside of emotion and fantasy.”18
Nationalism is a ‘Menace’ to Individual Freedom
Nationalism is a “menace” to individual freedom; it constrains the give and take among peoples that leads to creative advances in all field; it demands a loyalty to the state superior to all other loyalties, and thus distorts the aspirations and opportunities of individuals.19 Peoples measure their national states by their power to expand.20 Thus individuals everywhere live under the pall of the threat of war, while war in itself is completely destructive of personal freedom—a “wholesale enslavement of entire populations.”21
The Ethical Challenge of Nationalism
Nationalism has “gone so far as to detach individuals from their local ties, but not far enough to give them a new center and order of life.”22 The ethical challenge is developing the good, or social, aspects of nationalism into a new order, without furthering its evil political and cultural sides.23 We must put an end to the state as an object of worship and recognize that the “nation” of political nationalism and patriotism is a “myth.” But historical cultural nations do exist as a fact - even though they are rarely the nations of political nationalism. It may not, however, be possible or advantageous for each national cultural group to have its own autonomous state, or indefinitely to retain their societal cultures intact. Cultural differences should be welcomed. The special good of each group should be extracted so that it will surrender into a common fund of wisdom and experience constituting the national spirit of America. The dangerous thing is
18 Dewey, “The Fruits of Nationalism,” LW 3: 155. 19 Dewey, Ethics, LW 7: 368. 20 Dewey, “The Crisis in Human History,” LW 15: 211-24. 21 Dewey, “Freedom,” LW 11: 253. 22 Dewey, Individualism Old and New, LW 5:71. 23 Dewey, “Nationalizing Education,” MW 10: 203-211.
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
Leonard J. Waks 118
for the different groups to isolate themselves, to live off their pasts, to keep themselves intact and then to refuse to accept what other cultures have to offer, so as thereby to be transmuted into authentic Americans.24 The idea of cultural uniformity is repellent. All national groups within modern nation states have to be ready to assimilate— not to some prior fixed cultural pattern or in a ‘melting pot’—but to one another.25 Each national group in the modern nation state however, whether through incorporation or immigration, must have its own recognized cultural rights as may be consistent with general social unity: to sustain the national language and literature, moral outlook and religion, and in multinational states formed through aggregation of multiple national cultural groups, a degree of political autonomy.26
The National Mystique vs. Public Spirit
Nationalism has created a “purely fictitious” conception of the national interest, a symptom of the absence of enduring and meaningful ties in the corporate state. Corporate and military elites use mystical devotion to the state for plunder and profit. Humans fall for this nationalistic propaganda because they have a “pathetic instinct” toward the adventure of living and struggling together, which daily life under modern corporate conditions does not satisfy.27 There is, however, a genuine national interest that the fictitious conception obscures: that those among us be “protected from pestilence, from unnecessary infection, that they enjoy a reasonable degree of economic comfort and independence, that they be protected from crime and from external invasion.”28
24 Dewey, “Nationalizing Education,” MW 10:205f. 25 Dewey, “The Principle of Nationality,” MW 10: 289. 26 Dewey, “The Principle of Nationality,” MW 10: 289 27 Dewey, Individualism Old and New, LW 5:72. 28 Dewey, “The Fruits of Nationalism,” LW 3: 156.
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
Leonard J. Waks 119
Science and the New Morale
To draw on the national spirit to address emerging problems, the prevailing aggressive culture of nationalism has to be replaced by a culture of science. Heretofore, science and science-based technology have been used primarily by corporations and the military as instruments of national competitiveness, leading to inevitable wars.29 Nationalism has shaped the scientific agenda, whether towards research affecting national economic superiority or military triumph.30 “Science” is now embedded in the prevailing “folklore” of aggressive nationalism because it is understood in the popular mind as providing new powerful means for existing ends including national military and commercial ascendancy. But science is also creating new kinds of individuals who seek to guide decisions through disinterested cooperative inquiry rather than force. Science is creating a new folklore—a “new morale” leading beyond the search for means to ends existing independently of science, to the creation of new desires and new ends. The value of science lies not just in getting us what we want, but in freeing our imaginations and our sense of power in achieving what was previously unimaginable—including a world without war. Such a world could be secured through global institutions featuring deep and broad communication and cooperative inquiry in problem solving instead of coercive force—in essence, a global democratic order. This new morale can, and must, be spread.31
The Challenge of Nationalism to Philosophy and Education
This sets a challenge to philosophy and education. For Dewey the two are two sides of a single coin: philosophy is the general theory of education, while education in its broadest sense provides the means
29 Dewey, “Review of Russell, Religion, Science and Philosophy,” LW 11: 455-464. 30 Dewey, Freedom and Culture, LW 13: 157. 31 Dewey, Freedom and Culture, LW 13: 168.
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
Leonard J. Waks 120
for fostering growth in accord with philosophical ideals.
Philosophy
Social movements are prior to philosophical reflection, but philosophical ideas have two important social functions. First, “ideas may run ahead of action” and “people who are acutely sensitive may feel movements that have a great future while they are still inchoate.” Second, philosophical formulations may help to clarify the aims of the movements, and provide social actors with intellectual justifications for their activities. Philosophical ideas enter history and shape new institutions as they are forming. “What was once an intellectual proposition becomes a sustaining part of a later state of culture.”32 Nationalistic philosophies generate justifications for war. Hegel’s philosophy of history, in particular, ignores the simple fact that nation-states are a new invention. Hegel’s insistence that only one nation at a time can be the bearer of Reason and the fullest realization of God ignores the possibility that the nation, like previous forms of collective life, might be temporary and eventually give way to a genuinely international federation to which nations will be subordinated.33 The United States is too new a nation for its national experience to give rise to a philosophy of history. “Our history is too obviously future.”34 We need a philosophy that “articulates and consolidates” ideas inherent in our social practices, and clarifies and guides future endeavors. The depth and width of human intercourse is the measure of civilization. An American philosophy must make the freedom and fullness of human companionship the aim, and intelligent cooperative experimentation the method—both in our internal affairs and in international relations.35 Writing at the end of World War Two, Dewey puts this idea
32 Dewey, “Lessons from the War—in Philosophy,” LW 14: 313-15. 33 Dewey, German Philosophy and Politics, MW 8: 197-8. 34 Dewey, German Philosophy and Politics, MW 8: 202. 35 Dewey, German Philosophy and Politics, MW 8: 203f
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
Leonard J. Waks 121
in more universal terms, stating that the philosophical ideas underlying nationalism are mixtures of incompatible ancient and modern elements. He prescribes that philosophy must “purge” itself of unmodern elements, by “facing the things in modern life that are genuinely modern” and liberating them from the “burden of old and incompatible institutions (such as the sovereign nation) that are weighing them down.”36 Creating a thoroughly modern philosophy will require an intellectual “revolution.”37
Education in the Formation of Nation States
Popular education has been the primary means for building up national consciousness in Prussia, Austria, and France. The United States did not face the same inter-national struggles as the European nations.38 In the colonial period the American states used the schools to build a foundation of knowledge for citizens. The movement in America that corresponded to 19th century European Nationalism was the common school movement of the 1830s-1850s, which was social rather than political; it was aimed at assimilating immigrants and making education and opportunity available to all. Education was seen as a patriotic necessity, the salvation of the Republic. But American patriotism did not yet degenerate into rigid nationalism, as the Republican mission included the provision of asylum for the oppressed from other nations.39 The pursuit of the democratic ideal through education, furthermore, was not seen as demanding any specific instructional programs or methods.40 In the early 20th century the social mission of American elementary education demanded the incorporation of science, as the spirit of investigation. Progressive educators saw that in the modern world all trades and occupations depend upon science; they proposed
36 Dewey, “Lessons from the War—in Philosophy,” LW 14: 328. 37 Dewey, “Lessons from the War—in Philosophy,” LW 14: 331. 38 Dewey, “Education from a Social Perspective,” MW 7: 114-18. 39 Dewey, “Education from a Social Perspective,” MW 7: 114-18. 40 Dewey, “Lectures to the Federation for Child Study,” MW 7: 380-382.
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
Leonard J. Waks 122
an education through occupations which would in itself provide an introduction to science.41
Nationalism and Indoctrination
European nation states invented “definite techniques” of propaganda and indoctrination to lead their citizen subjects both to national identification and hostility towards ‘aliens.’ After World War One, The United States followed suit. As a result, Dewey notes in 1937 that “our schools have been guilty of a great deal of indoctrination of a bad kind—indoctrination into nationalism, miscalled patriotism.” Returning to his distinction between devotion to the state vs. devotion to the genuine national interest—the interest in the well- being of our co-nationals—Dewey adds that “everybody ought to have public spirit, but the indoctrination of patriotism has given us a narrow, vicious type of nationalism” instead.42
The Anti-Nationalist Educational Program
So what should educators do about nationalism? In his major 1916 essay “Nationalizing Education” 43 Dewey says they should withstand the clamor for political nationalism based on hysterical excitedness and the imposition of mechanical patriotic drills. Instead they should emphasize the distinctly social dimension of education. The United States has an international, interracial character. Democratic education should first promote tolerance and respect for all groups, and recognize specific contributions made by each national group.44 Dewey then adds a second, more robust social feature. Beyond contributions of the different groups, we need to emphasize a characteristic that all foreigners recognize in America: the openness and friendliness of our people. This social feature of the American character was bred through opportunity on the expanding frontier.
41 Dewey, “Education from a Social Perspective,” MW 7: 114-18. 42 Dewey, “Education Today,” LW 11: 574-5. 43 Dewey, MW 10: 203-211. 44 Dewey, “Nationalizing Education,” MW 10: 205f.
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
Leonard J. Waks 123
But as the frontier period has ended, those who could join together in friendship when subduing nature might well turn to subduing one another. To prevent inter-ethnic conflict and violence, the schools must create conditions for inter-group friendliness. The virtues of self-esteem, forbearance, well-wishing which were largely unconscious products of frontier circumstances must now become the “conscious fruits” of education. “To nationalize American education is to use education to promote our national idea—which is the idea of democracy.”45 Dewey developed this second feature into the comprehensive educational program of Democracy and Education. Children from all ethnic and racial groups in the neighborhood or district are to be brought together and set to work in cooperative activities or occupations, addressing problems and seeking to achieve common ends. Their differing perspectives become both important elements of subject matter as well as ingredients contributing to success. They build forbearance and mutual respect, self-esteem and fellow feeling, while also acquiring the capabilities—intellectual and social—of adult life. Dewey returns to the problem of democratic education in the late 1930s. The comprehensive aim of school education, he said, has become the subordination of the individual to the nation; schooling in totalitarian Germany and Russia, and also in America, has become indoctrination in nationalism and patriotism. Dewey acknowledges that education needs some frame of reference or it is bound to be aimless. In place of nationalism, Dewey again offers democracy, but notes that democracy is not a fixed ideal. “The problem of education in its relation to the direction of social change is all one with the problem of finding out what democracy means in its total range of concrete applications: economic, social, domestic, international, religious, cultural and political.”46 Education at all levels must be organized around investigations to discover what democracy concretely requires and how to make progress in realizing it.
45 Dewey, “Nationalizing Education,” MW 10: 210-11. 46 Dewey, “Education and Social Change,” LW 11:417.
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
Leonard J. Waks 124
Works Cited
Dewey, John. The Collected Works of John Dewey, 1882-1953, edited by Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967-1990. All references to the collected works will be listed as EW, MW, or LW (for early, middle, and later works) followed by the volume, a colon, and the appropriate page numbers.
—. “Education from a Social Perspective.” MW 7: 114-18.
—. “Lectures to the Federation for Child Study.” MW 7: 380-382.
—. German Philosophy and Politics. Especially section 3: The German Philosophy of History, MW 8: 184-205.
—. Democracy and Education. MW 9.
—. “Nationalizing Education.” MW 10: 203-211.
—. “The Principle of Nationality.” MW 10: 286-92.
—. “Chinese National Sentiment.” MW 11: 216-28.
—. “Old China and New.” MW 13: 96.
—. “Divided China.” MW 13: 136.
—. “The Issues at Washington, III. China’s Interest,” MW 13: 181-5.
—. “Racial Prejudice and Friction.” MW 13: 243-55.
—. “The Fruits of Nationalism.” LW3: 153-58.
—. Individualism Old and New. LW 5: 67-77. Especially chapter 4: The Lost Individual.
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
Leonard J. Waks 125
—. “Are Sanctions Necessary to International Organizations.” LW 6: 197-224.
—. Ethics (2nd edition). LW 7. Especially Part I section 9(2) “Renaissance and Reformation”; Part II, Section 10(5) “The Present Need for Theory”; and Part III, 17(5) “Nationalism, International Relations, Peace and War.”
—. Liberalism and Social Action. LW 11: 4-64. Especially chapter 2: “The Crisis in Liberalism.”
—. “Freedom.” LW 11: 248-56.
—. “Education and Social Change.” LW11: 409-418.
—. “Review of Russell, Religion, Science and Philosophy.” LW 11: 455- 464.
—. “Education Today.” LW 11: 568- 81.
—. Freedom and Culture. LW 13: 81-99; 157-83. Especially chapter 2: “Culture and Human Nature” (81-99) and chapter 6 “Science and Free Culture” (157-183).
—. “Lessons from the War—in Philosophy.” LW 14: 313-35.
—. “World Anarchy and World Order.” LW 15: 205-210.
—. “The Crisis in Human History.” LW 15: 211-24.
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
BOOK REVIEW: MELVILLE AMONG THE PHILOSOPHERS
ROBIN FRIEDMAN Independent Scholar
McCall, Cory and Tom Nurmi, eds. Melville Among the Philosophers. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017. 252 pp. ISBN: 978-1-4985- 3674-5 (Hardback, $100); 978-1-4985-3675-2 (eBook, $95). https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781498536745/Melville-among-the- Philosophers
Reviewed by Robin Friedman, Independent Scholar [email protected]
Volume 1 · Number 2 · Fall 2017 · Pages 126-132
Robin Friedman 127
erman Melville (1819-1891) has been for the most part overlooked by philosophers. Melville Among the H Philosophers considers how philosophers can benefit from the study of this great American novelist and poet as well as how philosophers may help illuminate Melville’s work. The book includes ten newly-published essays in two parts: six essays in “Melville as Philosopher” explore philosophical themes in Melville’s works, while four essays in “Inheriting Melville” view Melville’s work in light of current philosophical concerns including feminism, colonialism, and racism. The essays are written by scholars of diverse backgrounds and philosophical persuasions. The book concludes with an exhortatory Afterword on Melville’s continued significance by Cornel West. In their introductory essay, the editors argue that the concept of silence is important to Melville ontologically and epistemologically, in that silence expresses human limitations and claims to knowledge. This understanding of silence reflects the religious, questing character of Melville’s work. A second dimension reflects the tendency, in Melville’s day and ours, to silence voices with which one may disagree, including the voices of people of different cultures, races, religions, or points of view. This forms a political dimension of silence. Religion and politics are, in fact, two great preoccupations of Melville, focused upon by readers, critical studies, and the contributors to this volume. The essays address a range of Melville’s novels, stories, and poetry, including Typee, Moby-Dick (four essays), Pierre, Benito Cereno, The Encantadas, Bartleby, the Scrivener, and Clarel. Some of these works are familiar while some remain little read. In this review, I focus on the essay on Melville’s first novel, Typee, on one of the essays on Moby-Dick, and on the essay on Clarel. These essays provide consideration of Melville’s writing from its beginning to, with the glaring exception of Billy Budd, its conclusion.
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
Robin Friedman 128
Melville’s first book tells an exotic first-person story about a Melville-like character, Tom, jumping ship in the Marquesas Islands and living for several months among the Typee, a tribe of supposed cannibals. Tracy Strong’s essay, “On Religion and the Strangeness of Speech: Typee as a ‘Peep’” combines a close literary study of Melville’s book with philosophical reflection. Strong considers the nature of “peeping” and how Typee offers a “peep” at Polynesian life, especially at its open sexual practices. Sexuality is invariably tied with religion, and Strong explores the philosophical issues the book raises in terms of attempting to understand the nature of religion and, to understand a culture different from one’s own. Tom observes the religious practices of the Typee on a daily basis and confesses his lack of understanding. Tom concludes that the native practitioners don’t understand them either. Tom is accepting of the tribal religious practices until the natives urge him to allow his face to be tattooed. He sees what he regards as a disfigurement of his face as a loss of his identity and thus engineers an escape from the tribe and boards another ship for another voyage. The inability to understand the nature of religion, both one’s own and others, leads Strong to explore Melville’s view on language. He finds “the inadequacy of language is Melville’s constant theme” (118). To understand the language of the Typee, other than for simple references to objects, a person would need to become part of their culture or the “life-world” which Tom is unable to do. Strong briefly traces his theme of the inability of language to communicate on matters of importance through later works of Melville while he draws as well on apt philosophical sources including Emerson, Wittgenstein and Levinas. Strong observes that Melville’s view of the limitations of language works against Melville’s attempt to communicate about religion and about the interior life of individuals in his writings. Melville was aware of the conflict and understood, for example, that
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
Robin Friedman 129
it was “a species of folly” to seek to understand God. He nevertheless kept struggling with understanding in his writings knowing that he would inevitably fail. “And that failure,” Strong concludes, “is his greatness as an author” (121). Moby-Dick was Melville’s sixth novel and has become widely recognized as a masterwork. Although in time the novel inspired a massive secondary literature and a great popular following, in Melville’s day the book sold poorly and received tepid reviews. Of the four essays on Moby-Dick in this volume, my focus is on the outstanding essay in Part II by Marilyn Nissim-Sabat. Nissim-Sabat’s philosophically rich essay, “Melville’s Phenomenology of Gender: Critical Reflections on C.L.R. James, Mariners, Renegades, Castaways and Paget Henry’s Caliban’s Reason” shows a deep engagement with Caribbean philosophy together with a provocative exposition and defense of Husserlian phenomenology. The essay develops its philosophical themes to offer insights into different ways of approaching Melville and also into reading Melville to help understand contemporary issues about gender. Nissim-Sabat distinguishes between “historicist” and “poetical” ways of reading Moby-Dick. The historicist approach, taken by some Caribbean thinkers, tends to involve a strictly political reading of the work in terms of illustrating the flaws of the United States culture of expansionism and domination of other people in Melville’s day. Nissim-Sabat develops the poetical approach from her understanding of Caribbean mythology. A poetic reading of a work takes account of the archaic, universal elements that give it significance. She finds support for her view that universal human characteristics may be found in a particular cultural myth in her defense of the a priori (rather than culturally or scientifically conditioned) character of Husserl’s phenomenological reduction. Her distinction between historicist and poetic ways of reading suggests that there are many insightful, even competing, ways of reading a
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
Robin Friedman 130
complex literary work such as Moby-Dick. Nissim-Sabat applies her poetical approach to reflect on Moby-Dick’s treatment of gender. She finds in the book hints of a nuanced development of concepts of humanity, femininity, and masculinity that enhance current reflection on these difficult issues. Contrary to readings which see the novel relying upon stereotypes of masculinity, Nissim-Sabat finds many passages in Moby-Dick which suggest feminine aspects in the godhead, in the Pequod’s crew, and in Captain Ahab. A psychotherapist as well as a philosopher, Nissim- Sabat reflects that traits of masculinity and femininity are separate but not inconsistent with one another and that both traits are found to varying degrees in each human person. In a discussion which draws well on Melville’s text, is philosophically insightful, and avoids ideological posturing, Nissim-Sabat finds that Melville illustrates in his portrayal of Ahab’s inner life “the torment that can result when a human being, for whatever reason, through whatever developmental trauma, attempts to existentially live as incompossible ‘male’ and ‘female’ traits that are actually compossible and therefore can coexist in one and the same person” (145). Published in 1876, Clarel is an epic poem of about 18,000 lines that occupied Melville’s evenings for years while he worked drearily in the customs house by day. The book describes a trip to Palestine by a student, Clarel, in an unsuccessful quest for religious faith. In 1856-1857, following the failure of Pierre and Moby-Dick, Melville had himself undertaken such a journey. In his essay “’In Voiceless Visagelessness’: The Disenchanted Landscape of Clarel,” philosopher and poet Troy Jollimore weaves together biography, philosophy, and literary analysis, tempting the reader to explore Melville’s little-read epic. Jollimore presents Melville as preoccupied throughout his life with religious questions. In Clarel Melville illustrated the search for God in a world which has become disenchanted through lack of
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
Robin Friedman 131
faith, the failure of the argument from design in light of Darwinism, and the problem of evil. Jollimore makes telling use of the pragmatism of William James in arguing that philosophy is a matter of reflection on lived experience before it becomes a subject for analytical argument. Jollimore offers a broad, provocative restatement of James’ position in The Will to Believe and The Varieties of Religious Experience to argue eloquently that Melville presents religious questions in Clarel through characters that illustrate the consequences of different attitudes towards life that the reader can assess by their consequences for human completeness. Jollimore shows, for example, how Melville ties the primary character’s religious quest to the search for one’s beloved (a soulmate or, in Yiddish, bashert). Clarel’s search for God becomes intertwined with his unsuccessful pursuit throughout the poem of Ruth, a young Jewish woman whose father has just died. Melville’s poem thus “falls into a long history of Christian metaphors that view union with God through the lens of some earthy, human relationship” (17). Jollimore’s insight in combining Melville’s religious quest with his lifelong search for a bashert in his reading of Clarel can readily be expanded to help understand much of Melville’s life and writing. Although Jollimore finds Melville’s poem unsuccessful in its efforts to reconcile science and religion and reason and feeling, he concludes that if the poem does not offer resolution it shows what it means “to find oneself there, mired in a painful and irresolvable conflict of intellect and spirit. And it reminds us that, even if the world does not permit itself to be mastered by human reason, it nevertheless remains an important subject of reverence and awe” (21). Melville Among the Philosophers enhanced my love of Melville and my engagement with philosophical questions. The book succeeds in its goal of showing Melville’s philosophical significance. The essays introduced some philosophers unfamiliar to me and will
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017
Robin Friedman 132
probably do so for most readers. Students of Melville and those interested in the relationship between literature and philosophy will enjoy this book.
Dewey Studies Vol 1 · No 2 · Fall 2017