Or, the Potential Rewards for Scholars Who Dialog Across Difference

Dewey, Women, and Weirdoes: or, the Potential Rewards for Scholars who Dialogue across Difference Craig A. Cunningham, David Granger, Jane Fowler Morse, Barbara Stengel, and Terri Wilson Editor’s note: These essays were presented as part of an alternative session at the Annual Meeting of the Philosophy of Education Society in March of 2005. The authors have refined their original presentations and added an introduction and conclusion to make their thoughts and questions available to a wider audience through Education and Culture. Abstract This symposium provides five case studies of the ways that John Dewey’s philosophy and practice were influenced by women or “weirdoes” (our choices include F. M. Alexander, Albert Barnes, Helen Bradford Thompson, Elsie Ripley Clapp, and Jane Addams) and presents some conclusions about the value of dialoging across difference for philosophers and other scholars. Introduction In The Education of John Dewey, Jay Martin (2003) suggests, “It was and remained a characteristic of Dewey that he was always receptive to alternative ideas. With professional philosophers, he generally held to his own positions, but with intelligent women, non-philosophers, odd thinkers, and ordinary folk, he was a student again” (167). Martin’s insight is the basis for a hypothesis that seems worth exploring: that John Dewey is able to speak eloquently to us today—as much as a century after he formulated his ideas—precisely because of his willingness to listen, to closely attend to those we might categorize as women and weirdoes. We use the provocative expression, “women and weirdoes,” to acknowledge E&C/Education and Culture 23 (2) (2007): 27–62 ◆ 27 28 ◆ Craig A. Cunningham et al. that John Dewey took seriously persons who often were not given credence in philosophical circles. During Dewey’s scholarly career, women constituted minor voices at best in philosophical discourse; in addition, philosophy had come to be professionalized in Dewey’s time in a way that excluded those without philosophical credentials. However, Dewey came to understand (and with Emerson, to proclaim) that philosophy and life were not separable domains. And Dewey’s biographers note the significant role played in his life by such women as Alice Dewey, Jane Addams, Ella Flagg Young, numerous graduate students, the Camp sisters, Anzia Yezier- ska, and by such “odd ducks” and nonphilosophers as Scudder Klyce, F. Matthias Alexander, Franklin Ford, and Albert Barnes. While these sources of inspiration we seek to study may be classified as “odd” or “socially subordinate” in the realm of professional philosophy, it is also true that each of the persons we identify were intelligent in Dewey’s sense of a mind in use—often in unusual ways. We main- tain that the interaction between Dewey’s lived experience and the shaping of his philosophical inquiry warrants greater scholarly attention. Our perspective is partly historical and partly philosophical. Dewey’s relationships have, for the most part, been documented. A variety of well-researched biographies, the Collected Works and now the Collected Papers, lay out the basic historical narrative. However, some relationships have been mined extensively and others less well considered. And what has not been done in a systematic way is the kind of analysis that looks closely at Dewey’s thinking in juxtaposition with the thinking of nonphilosopher others in the context of those particular relationships. The work offered here is a first step that lays out some useful paths for more extensive historical inquiry and offers some preliminary examples of the kind of textual analysis that can prove our thesis. We are not suggesting that Dewey didn’t listen to or attend to other professional philosophers. Obviously he did. Those influences are well documented in the Rockefeller (1991) and Ryan (1995) biographies, among others. Here we begin to explore the “value added” by Dewey’s willingness to take seriously—for philosophical purposes—those who moved outside the bounds of professional philosophy, and even, in some cases, outside of accepted social circles. We are particularly interested in the ways in which Dewey’s works seem remarkably contemporary, as if they were written to address present issues in education, the arts and public life. Is it possible that the contemporary power of Dewey’s thought rests, at least in part, in just his willingness to cultivate, appreciate and appropriate the thinking of in- teresting women and odd ducks? Two essential questions guided our inquiry: First, were Dewey’s theories in fact significantly influenced by women and those professionally excluded eccentric voices we are calling weirdoes? How was this influence transacted? Second, if such influence did impact Dewey’s own thinking, so what? What should we think, say, or do as a result of establishing Dewey’s philosophically significant interaction with women and weirdoes, and their influence on him? As we pursued this work, it became clear that our initial questions would not E&C ◆ Education and Culture Dewey, Women, and Weirdoes ◆ 29 be easily answered—and would not be answered at all until we raised a range of other questions. Why was Dewey drawn to those we studied? What was the nature of his relationships with them? What kind of a teacher—and learner—was Dewey? What qualities of personal responsiveness permeated his teaching and his theoriz- ing? How did Dewey go about developing insights and theories? How did he share those insights and theories with the broader public? What emerges is a picture of the philosopher as “man thinking” (to use Em- erson’s idiom). Of course, for Dewey, thinking done well is an interactive process into real puzzles for actual human persons and marked by open-mindedness and responsiveness. These are elements that we find in each of the case studies described below. These qualities of thinking are the elements that opened Dewey to the influences of all those with whom he came and remained in contact. Because we exam- ined only a few candidates, and because the constraints of time and space prohibited us from completing a thorough examination of even these initial examples, we see our work here as preliminary, as more of a pilot study than a comprehensive one. Our hope is that these beginnings may inspire others to conduct similar studies, either by joining with us in a longer-term project, or by working on their own to address similar questions. Included here are five case studies taken from Dewey’s biography. Among the many women and weirdoes we could have selected, we chose Jane Addams, Helen Bradford Thompson, Elsie Ripley Clapp (as an exemplar of Dewey’s interaction with female graduate students at Teachers College), F. M. Alexander and Albert Barnes. We suggest that Dewey was influenced intellectually in these instances where he experienced dialogue across difference, and that these relationships are not anoma- lies, but critical tokens in understanding the quality of Dewey’s thinking. Dewey’s thinking is enriched when he is a “learner,” undergoing the kind of questioning in the face of trouble or doubt or desire that he himself so famously claims is the starting point of thinking. We offer here sketches of Dewey not as eminent philosopher but as a thinker learning from different others Dewey’s Pragmatic Poet: Reconstructing Jane Addams’s Philosophical Impact Barbara Stengel John Dewey calls Ralph Waldo Emerson “The Philosopher of Democracy” in an essay of the same title (1903/1977). In making his case that Emerson is a philosopher, Dewey acknowledges that some (including Emerson himself) might be inclined to see him as a poet rather than a philosopher. Dewey goes on to discuss the difference between the poet and the philosopher. The poet is maker rather than reflector. The poet discerns and uncovers rather than analyzes and classifies. The poet evidences a “natural attitude” where the philosopher relies on reasons for believing. However, the distinction is not hard and fast; in Emerson’s case at least, one can be Volume 23 (2) ◆ 2007 30 ◆ Craig A. Cunningham et al. both poet and philosopher. Dewey’s description of Emerson as poet and philosopher of democracy holds, I suggest, for Jane Addams as well, but it is, perhaps ironically, as poet that Add- ams impacted the philosophy of John Dewey. Addams is unquestionably a maker of democratic community and pragmatic education; Dewey is just as unquestionably a reflector. Through her work at Hull House, Addams discerned the shape of democracy as a mode of associated living and uncovered the outlines of an experi- mental approach to knowledge and understanding; Dewey analyzed and classified the social, psychological and educational processes Addams lived. As I will dem- onstrate below, Addams’s “natural attitude” brought Dewey up short in a situation in which he could, by his own admission, only rely on reason. In this essay, I claim that Dewey became Dewey in the last decade of the nine- teenth century and that Jane Addams was present as poet to his philosopher. When I say that Dewey became Dewey, I mean that he let go of religious practice and theo- logical language, focused a conception of democracy as a mode of associated living, shifted from Hegelian dialectic to pragmatic experimentalism, acknowledged the relational nature of the self and found a way to think about thinking rooted in human action, thus acknowledging the unity of human experience. Dewey’s interaction with Addams, again by his own admission, forced a reconsideration of his thinking, a reconstruction that led to the very elements (noted above) that have rendered Deweyan thought useful to us in the early twenty-first century. I make my case by focusing here on just one significant instance documented in Dewey’s correspondence and described—in various ways—in contemporary Dewey biographies.

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