Education for a Democratic Society: Central European Pragmatist Forum. Volume Three (Value Inquiry Book Series 179) (Value Inquiry Book)

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Studies in Pragmatism and Values SPV John R. Shook Editor

Other Titles in SPV John Shook. Pragmatism: An Annotated Bibliography, 1898–1940. 1998. VIBS 66 Phyllis Chiasson. Peirce’s Pragmatism: A Dialogue for Educators. 2001. VIBS 107 Paul C. Bube and Jeffrey L. Geller, eds. Conversations with Pragmatism: A MultiDisciplinary Study. 2002. VIBS 129 Richard Rumana. Richard Rorty: An Annotated Bibliography of Secondary Literature. 2002. VIBS 130 Guy Debrock, ed. Process Pragmatism: Essays on a Quiet Philosophical Revolution. 2003. VIBS 137 John Ryder and Emil VišĖovský, eds. Pragmatism and Values: The Central European Pragmatist Forum, Volume One. 2004. VIBS 152 John Ryder and Krystyna Wilkoszewska, eds. Deconstruction and Reconstruction: The Central European Pragmatist Forum, Volume Two. 2004. VIBS 156 Art Efron. Experiencing Tess of the D’Urbervilles: A Deweyan Account. 2005. VIBS 162 Beth Singer and Leszek Koczanowicz, eds. Democracy and the Post-Totalitarian Experience. 2005. VIBS 167 Sami Pihlstrom. Pragmatic Moral Realism: A Transcendental Defense. 2005. VIBS 171 Editorial Board of SPV James Bohman Raymond Boisvert Paulo Ghiraldelli Jr. Peter H. Hare Leonard Harris David Hildebrand

Kenneth Ketner Leszek Koczanowicz Tomasz Komendzinski Andrew Light Richard Shusterman Jaime Nubiola Sami Pihlstrom

Frank Ryan Sandra Rosenthal John Ryder Harvey Sarles Barbara Saunders Charlene Seigfried

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CONTENTS Foreword by Larry A. Hickman

ix

Preface by John Ryder and Gert-Rüdiger Wegmarshaus

xi

EDUCATION AND DEMOCRACY ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

The Necessity of Criticism: Dewey, Derrida, and Democratic Education Today Don Morse

1

John Dewey and the Necessity of a Democratic Civic Education Carlos Mougan Rivero

11

Philosophy and Education: Richard Rorty’s Considerations Alexander Kremer

21

Democracy Undefended: Education in the Age of Cognitive Science Jane Skinner

29

EDUCATION AND VALUES FIVE

SIX

Pragmatic Moral Realism: Education for Ethical Seriousness Sami Pihlström

41

John Dewey’s Post-Traditional Notion of Community Dirk Jörke

53

SEVEN

Art as Education: Constructivism and Instrumentalism Lyubov Bugaeva

EIGHT

Dewey’s Idea of Aesthetic Experience in the Processes of Education Krystyna Wilkoszewska

65

87

CONTENTS

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EDUCATION AND SOCIAL RECONSTRUCTION NINE

Reconstruction Through Education James Campbell

TEN

John Dewey’s Understanding of Democracy: Inspiring Political Education in Germany Gert-Rüdiger Wegmarshaus

103

Is Pragmatic Political Technology a Reasonable Possibility? John Ryder

113

ELEVEN

TWELVE

Thick Democracy Too Much? Try Pragmatism Lite Michael Eldridge

97

121

EDUCATION AND THE SELF THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

Persons and Educational Values: Socrates, Buber and Dewey Richard E. Hart

133

Pluralism and Democracy: Individualism by Another Name? Erin McKenna

143

Steps Toward an Ecological Consciousness: Loyalty to the Inherited Matrix of Experimental Intelligence Vincent Colapietro

155

Educating for Autonomy: Identity and Intersectional Selves Kathleen Wallace

165

SEVENTEEN Learning about Possibility John Lachs

177

About the Editors and Contributors

185

Index

189

FOREWORD It is by now increasingly apparent that life in the 21st century will be lived without the comfort of old certitudes. The austere convenience of Cold War peaceful co-existence, enforced by the threat of Mutual Assured Destruction, has been succeeded by the growth of violent conflicts too numerous to count, waged along lines that are ethnic, religious, territorial, and more. A world of autonomous nation states, at one time a bulwark against agents of terrorism, carriers of lethal viral strains, and the influx of conflicting cultural values, has morphed into a new global village in which intercontinental travel is routine and national borders are increasingly porous. Religious and moral certitudes based on centuries of received tradition have begun to blink in the glare of the new relativisms espoused by post-modernist cultural theories. Even environmental factors such as global warming now appear to conspire against confidence in the human future. At virtually every level of human social interaction – in politics, religion, education, technology, and commerce – change now appears to be the only constant. Central Europe has proved to be a crucible within which many of these combustible elements have combined. The opening of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the “Velvet Revolution” in Czechoslovakia during the same year, the enlargement of the European Union in 2004 to include the countries of Central Europe: such events, momentous in themselves, continue to spawn new conditions and circumstances which are still only imperfectly understood. What new forms of democratic participation will emerge within countries long accustomed to one-party rule? How will the next generation be educated, and by whom? How will cultural clashes between East and West, rich and poor, religious majorities and religious minorities be resolved? For some, these new circumstances call for retreat into the securities of ethnic solidarity, authoritarian political or religious leadership, or absolute moral values. For others, however, including the contributors to this volume, our new century is pregnant with great potential. It is a working premise of the Central European Pragmatist Forum and its participants that change is both unavoidable and the source of great opportunities. The Forum’s participants view their work as advancing a central insights of a rich philosophical tradition in which this premise has been paramount. Their work looks backward for inspiration to the work of pragmatists such as Charles S. Peirce, William James, George Herbert Mead, F. C. S. Schiller, and John Dewey, and forward to the difficult but exciting task of applying their insights to the problems of contemporary men and women. In the most mature public expression of this pragmatic tradition, truth is understood as a social goal, not as dogma received from sources transcendent of human experience. Far from being arbitrary or entirely a matter of

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convention, however, truth is also understood as objective in the sense that judgments about vital matters, whether of common sense or science, must be subjected to experimental tests in order to receive their warrant. Truths are treated not as absolute, but as tools to be utilized in the continuing efforts of human beings to manage emerging events. Within this tradition, democracy is understood not simply as a form of government, but, more importantly, as a means of communication among individuals and groups with different, often competing, agendas. Democracy is thus treated as incapable of being exported, since the form it takes is governed by historical and cultural context. The viability of democratic institutions, or their lack thereof, will therefore depend on the energies and the commitments of individuals and the various publics that they form, and that provide avenues for their participation in the wider society. Within this tradition, education is understood as more than the generational transmission of social values, although it may be that. It is understood instead as the cultivation of the tools of learning – of learning how to criticize and refine received values in ways that yield new insights, new ways of living, and new opportunities for the growth of individuals and communities. Within this tradition, facts and values are treated not as separate, but as intimately intertwined. Facts are understood as facts-in-context: as selected from alternatives on the basis of interest, need, and historical and cultural background. For their part, values that fail to be informed by facts are understood to be marked by their failure to be reliable, which is to say, valuable. Perhaps most importantly, the contributors to this volume are committed to the idea that philosophy has an important role to play within human life, and that philosophers have an obligation to address vital issues. Consequently, they have chosen to confront the future with energy and confidence. They relish engagement with the problems and potentials of a changing social environment, in all their complexity and uncertainty, because they relish the opportunities that change brings for men and women of intelligence to enlarge the meanings of human life. Larry A. Hickman Center for Dewey Studies Southern Illinois University, Carbondale

PREFACE Education for a Democratic Society is the third volume in the series of conference volumes of the Central European Pragmatist Forum (CEPF) published by Rodopi.1 CEPF is an association of scholars, primarily though not exclusively philosophers. They are European, largely from Central and Eastern Europe, from the United States and Canada, and one regular participant is from South Africa. They work in various fields of the history of American philosophy, social and moral philosophy, aesthetics, and political theory. The American philosophical traditions of pragmatism and naturalism have long been of interest to philosophers and others in Europe, though it has been rather a minority interest. In recent years such interest has grown in Europe, particularly in Central and Eastern Europe, thus the rationale for the creation of CEPF and its conferences. This and the preceding volumes from those conferences attest to the ways in which primarily European scholars, in conversation with their North American counterparts, are thinking through the American philosophical traditions. This volume presents selected conference papers of the CEPF meeting held at the University of Potsdam, Germany, in June 2004. The CEPF Potsdam meeting was focused on the discussion of pragmatist educational theory, its philosophical foundations, and its consequences for social, political, and educational reconstruction. The first CEPF conference, held under the auspices of the Slovak Academy of Sciences in Stara Lesna, Slovakia in 2000, and the second meeting at Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland in 2002, were devoted to the themes “Pragmatism and Values” and “Deconstruction and Reconstruction” respectively, and to a more general outlook on pragmatist philosophy in its internal differentiation and its various ramifications. The third meeting at Potsdam was focused on the specific topic of education. The Executive Board of the CEPF and the organizers of the conference considered this focus on education not only theoretically promising and philosophically rewarding, but to be of urgent relevance to contemporary democratic societies. The editors have organized the conference papers in four sections: I – Education and Democracy; II – Education and Values; III – Education and Social Reconstruction; IV – Education and the Self. Each section consists of papers that elaborate various aspects of the topics. The final paper in the collection is a special contribution from the conference’s Keynote Speaker, John Lachs. Some of the papers deal directly with education and its relation to democracy, while others address questions and issues that have a bearing on the understanding and problems of education. The most influential of the classical pragmatist philosophers in the work of the contributors is John Dewey, but the papers collected here also draw on the neopragmatists Richard Rorty

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and Hilary Putnam, as well as others, from Jacques Derrida to Paolo Freire. Along the way many of the more sustained philosophical issues are examined: community, criticism, citizenship, individuality and individualism, oppression, experience, ethical and aesthetic values, and individual and social development, all within the context of as ongoing assessment of the means and ends of education. The papers in Section I, Education and Democracy, concentrate on the foundations of Pragmatist educational theory. At the same time all the papers provide not only analyses of pragmatist, primarily Deweyan, educational theory, but engage in comparative studies of Dewey and Derrida, of Dewey and Rawls, of Dewey and Rorty, and of Dewey and Freire. Don Morse concentrates on the necessity to instill habits of criticism as the “road to [the] release” of creative activity. He argues that such criticism finds an illustration in Derrida’s concept of deconstruction, especially in light of the centrality of “experience” for both Derrida and Dewey. Carlos Mougan Rivero is concerned above all with citizenship. Dewey’s concept of democracy, he argues, “supplies the grounding for the development of a theory of citizenship education....” This, he maintains, is especially true given the “moral meaning” Dewey gives to democracy. Alexander Kremer is interested in the implications for education and democracy of Richard Rorty’s writings, above all in the context of the traditional questions “Who am I as an individual?” and “Who am I as a human being?” With these concerns in mind, Kremer asks the question whether democracy requires its own form of education. The answer he gives is “yes and no”: “yes” in so far as democratic society, for example in Rorty’s vision, has needs that other forms of social life do not, and “no” because education cannot be wholly unique since it must address the more ongoing character of what it means to be a human being. Jane Skinner, for her part, has a more social concern, one that deals with the social problems generated by the disparate distribution of wealth and the exacerbating contemporary process of economic globalization. She explores Dewey’s approach to education and democracy in comparison to Paulo Freire’s, and argues that both have an understanding of the nature of education that takes seriously the problems of social oppression, though Freire can add something that liberal approaches, including Dewey’s, typically lack. In this respect they offer preferable alternatives to much of contemporary education and schooling, which in neither form nor content pays serious attention to this prominent feature of contemporary life. Section II, Education and Values, is devoted to two different sets of values: two papers address the bearings of pragmatist thinking on moral and political philosophy, while two papers deal with questions of aesthetics. Sami Pihlström’s paper deals with pragmatic moral realism through Putnam and the Wittgensteinian tradition. Dirk Jörke’s paper reads Dewey against the back-

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ground of current debates between communitarianism and liberalism. Dewey, he argues, offers a model of community that goes beyond standard liberal and communitarian conceptions. Education is, then, one of the necessary means by which such community is accomplished and sustained. Lyubov Bugaeva traces the stunning similarities between Dewey’s aesthetics as developed in Art as Experience and the theoretical views of the leading Russian Constructivists of the 1920s, especially Ilya Erenburg and El Lissitzky. Among other common traits, art is in both traditions didactic, and didactic in similar ways. Bugaeva’s paper suggests the interesting question how it is that these two disparate traditions turned out to be so similar in detail, especially since one is forged in a social revolution and the other, while perhaps revolutionary in implications, is interested more in reconstruction than in revolution. In her chapter, Krystyna Wilkoszewska demonstrates the remarkable relevance of Dewey’s non-contemplative understanding of art for reflecting on the interactivist turn in contemporary fine arts. She is interested in the importance of understanding the aesthetic dimension of the pragmatist, especially Deweyan, concept of experience. In so far as education, as Wilkoszewska puts it, “penetrates all spheres of life,” the aesthetic dimension of experience is no less pertinent for education than for any other social process. The papers in Section III, Education and Social Reconstruction, examine the significance of pragmatist thinking for bringing about deliberate change in the state, society, and education, as well as for exercising political power within “thin” and “thick” democracies. James Campbell examines the principal contribution social pragmatists, principally Dewey, but also George Mead and James Tufts, made in developing the intrinsic, inseparable relationship between education, school, and democracy. As the title of his paper suggests, Campbell is concerned with the central role of education for democratic social reconstruction. As he puts it, “education and democracy [are] virtually synonymous.” This fact has implications for the form and content of education, as well as for the structure and organization of educational institutions themselves. Gert-Rüdiger Wegmarshaus stresses Dewey’s notion of democracy as a way of life. He illustrates the bearing of such a view of democracy on education through the discussion of an educational program under way in Germany called “Learning and Living Democracy.” The program aims at actively teaching democracy in schools by establishing close and strong working connections among the students, teachers, neighborhoods and local communities. John Ryder discusses both logical and practical limitations of the sustainability of a democracy that is based on the pragmatist principles of open inquiry, experimentation, and the pooling and sharing of experience vis-à-vis the growing danger of anti-democratic behavior and religious fundamentalist beliefs. He explores the question whether the methods of social reconstruction

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developed within the pragmatist tradition can reasonably be expected to achieve their own ends. The focus is on the problem of promoting certain democratic social ends without having recourse to the non-democratic, and therefore non-pragmatist, practices of manipulative social engineering. In other words, is the “thick” democracy of pragmatism and the forms of education it promotes in fact possible? Michael Eldridge develops the concept of “intellectualizing practice” to address the potential problems Ryder has raised, and in so doing expresses a less skeptical attitude towards the possibility of participative democracy, even under hegemonic and rather militarist policy approaches as currently demonstrated by the Bush administration. The commitments and practices that constitute pragmatism are indeed capable of addressing social problems, including that of large scale dissent, even if such problems are not solvable entirely, i.e. even if a “thick democracy” is not achievable in a given context. Thus, rather than “thick democracy” we may well be content with “pragmatism lite.” Section IV, Education and the Self, consists of papers that deal in various ways with the individual. Richard Hart is directly concerned with an understanding of education that can properly address the needs of individual persons. Education in its most meaningful sense is a cooperative interaction of persons engaged in a mutual process of development. In defense of this view and its implications he appeals to Dewey, as well as to Socrates and Martin Buber. Thus understood, many contemporary forms of schooling, including the current uses of instructional technologies, fall well short, indeed dangerously short, of appropriate educational ideals. Erin McKenna is also interested in the person, and like Jörke she explores Dewey’s ideas in relation to liberalism and communitarianism, in this case in relation to the general concept of individualism. Education is to be understood in part in this context, i.e. as a component of the process of the development of the individual and of the community. Vincent Colapietro is interested in the concept of growth and with the role of education in fostering growth. In the process of examining this question he invites us to rethink the assumption commonly made, and one certainly relevant to education, that immaturity represents a lack. Rather, he advises that we consider immaturity in its experiential richness, and that we develop an understanding of growth and education accordingly. Kathleen Wallace’s contribution takes up the question of the autonomy of what she refers to as the interactional, plurally constituted self. Autonomy, she argues, is enabled through reflexive communication, a concept that itself draws from the work of Josiah Royce and Justus Buchler. Though not generally thought of as classical pragmatists, Wallace points out that Royce and Buchler both made clear that they drew heavily from the pragmatist tradition, especially from Peirce, James, and Dewey. If autonomy is an important goal of individual development,

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Wallace argues, then education is to be understood in part as a process that contributes to its achievement. The final paper in the volume is a contribution by John Lachs, who gave the Keynote Address at the Potsdam conference. Lachs argues that education too often is focused on learning about the actual, and thereby leaves little room for exploring possibilities. This is particularly bothersome in relation to social improvement and the criticism of institutions, for only by envisaging the possible can we move toward the better. Further, talking about possibilities is ineffective without taking steps to enact them. This imposes a huge responsibility on teachers: they must have the courage to show their students by their actions what is necessary to convert possibilities into actualites. If this is taken as a standard of good teaching, many of us fail. Taken together, the papers collected in this volume provide a glimpse into ways that Europeans are taking up pragmatist and neopragmatist themes, and the potential of an ongoing conversation between European and North American specialists. The Central European Pragmatist Forum will continue to hold its biannual conferences to foster this conversation. The editors would like to thank all the participants in the Potsdam meeting for contributing to an atmosphere of serious intellectual engagement and collegial conversation. The editors would also like to thank Larry Hickman for contributing the Forward to this volume; James Campbell for his invaluable assistance in preparing some of the papers for publication; and John Shook, general editor of the Studies in Pragmatism and Values special series, for his ongoing support and editorial assistance. John Ryder Gert-Rüdiger Wegmarshaus

NOTES 1. John Ryder and Emil VišĖovsky, eds., Pragmatism and Values: The Central European Pragmatist Forum, Volume One (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 2004); John Ryder and Krystyna Wilkoszewska, eds., Deconstruction and Reconstruction: The Central European Pragmatist Forum, Volume Two (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 2004).

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Part One EDUCATION AND DEMOCRACY

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One THE NECESSITY OF CRITICISM: DEWEY, DERRIDA, AND DEMOCRATIC EDUCATION TODAY Don Morse

Genuine democracies are rare. One reason they are so rare is that they involve the letting happen of unique situations. They require taking people on their own terms in a way that respects their differences from us – and yet this is not something we typically do. The most common thing, the habitual thing, is to rely on a conventionalized grasp of another and to let this grasp determine how we treat them. Rather than let people in their differences freely interact with us and co-shape our experience, we fall back on a mechanical and diminished understanding of them and democratic interaction is stifled. If this is correct, and democratic societies are threatened by routine and conventionalized consciousness, it would seem to follow that to educate for such societies, one thing we would sorely need is to instill habits of criticism. Habits of criticism would seem to be needed to continuously challenge and overcome routine consciousness and to open up a space that allows for each unique situation to stand forth as what it is and be regarded on its own terms. In this paper, I would like to examine in more detail the kind of criticism we should be cultivating in our students if we want a democratic society. John Dewey gives us the first clue to the kind of criticism we need. 1. Dewey’s Philosophy Dewey’s philosophy is first and foremost an attempt to articulate a faith in the possibilities of experience. This faith is needed because western thought is held hostage by an authoritarian metaphysics that disparages experience. “How largely philosophy has been committed to a metaphysics of feudalism,” Dewey laments. “How thoroughly philosophy has been committed to a notion that inherently some realities are superior to others, are better than others.” The metaphysics of feudalism is an over-arching world-view according to which reality is ranked and ordered in hierarchical fashion. On this view, God is superior to man, for example, or Reason to sense. “On the whole it has been denied,” Dewey explains, “that experience and life can regulate themselves and provide their own direction and inspiration.” Instead, it has been believed that some higher form of reality must regulate the lower. Indeed, lower reality

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DON MORSE

has been thought to be worthless and even evil without the direction of some higher regulation. “Experience has been systematically disparaged in contrast with something taken to be more fundamental and superior in worth.” Dewey’s aim, however, is to give as full and rich an account of experience as possible in order to show that it can, in fact, stand on its own. Dewey wishes to show that “experience itself is the sole ultimate authority ... the course and material of experience give support and stay to life, and ... its possibilities provide all the ends and ideals that are to regulate conduct.”1 But what are we thus left with when we begin with experience? Dewey is clear on this point. Experience, taken as given before any transcendent imposition, and freed from legislation by its external rule, is understood as always unique and ongoing. It is never the same twice. It is changing and moving, never fixed and frozen into an abstract identity. Indeed, as Dewey insists each experience is utterly irreplaceable and unrepeatable. “Action is always specific, concrete, individualized, unique ... each situation has its own unique end and ... the whole personality should be concerned with it.”2 In particular, creative intelligence must be utilized. Unlike Reason, as traditionally understood, intelligence begins with no external end to be achieved and works instead only with the ends given by a situation. With intelligence adjudicating between actual ends in a situation, experience stands on its own in its diversity and multiplicity. Experience lacks any overarching unity and yet, with intelligence, it can regulate itself by its own ends and needs. The goal of Dewey’s philosophy is to restore integrity not simply to experience but to experience’s multiple, irreducible plurality of meanings. What Dewey aims to show, above all, is that “there are many meanings and many purposes in the situations with which we are confronted – one, so to say, for each situation. Each offers its own challenge to thought and endeavor, and presents its own potential value.” What we need to dispense with is the idea that there is a single meaning and purpose in life, to which all situations in their diversity are beholden. We must replace this idea with “the idea of a plurality of interconnected meanings and purposes.”3 And, above all, we must use intelligence as a non-authoritative way to regulate these meanings and purposes among themselves. 2. Political Implications The task of restoring the integrity of the plural experience helps to explain Dewey’s view of democracy. A key feature of democracy is equality. On Dewey’s view, equality means, “the world is not to be construed as a fixed order of species, grades or degrees. It means that every existence has something unique and irreplaceable about it, that it does not exist to illustrate a principle, to realize a universal or to embody a kind or class.” Equality on Dewey’s view entails the removal of all consideration of superior and inferior.

The Necessity of Criticism

3

“It means, in short, a world in which an existence must be reckoned with on its own account, not as something capable of equation with and transformation into, something else.”4 What’s wanted in a democracy, then, in which equality is prized, is a habitual openness to one another as utterly unique and irreplaceable existences. Indeed, this openness to others seems to be the crux of Dewey’s conception of “creative democracy” as a way of life. The core aim of such a way of life is to act so as to give differences a chance to show themselves “because of the belief that the expression of difference is not only a right of the other persons but is a means of enriching one’s own life-experience.”5 Democracy requires the free and fluid interaction of differences. It is the faith that these differences of experience themselves, without any external intervention, without the metaphysics of feudalism and its hierarchical impositions, can organize and manage themselves sufficiently and fully, especially with the help of intelligence. 3. Obstacles to Deweyan Democracy This part of Dewey’s definition of democracy – differences being able to show themselves and regulate themselves – raises at once the pressing question of what prevents its realization today. Dewey is clear on the obstacles. The metaphysics of feudalism, as he sees it, has sunk down deep into our consciousness today and regiments our minds by an abstract, external imposition of uniform thinking. Like obedient children, “we, too, allow our purposes and desires to be foisted upon us from without.” A conventional, normalized grasp of situations is becoming routine and as a result we no longer approach experience with fresh eyes capable of meeting its novelty. The media, in particular, deepens this problem of uniform thinking, Dewey says, by foisting upon the public a business generated definition of its existence before the public gets a chance to define itself. “Just as in the conduct of industry and exchange generally” life “is obscured, deflected and defeated by ‘business,’” Dewey explains, “so specifically in the management of publicity” as well. According to Dewey, the public has not yet found itself in democratic societies. It is divided from itself and unaware of itself in all of its rich multiplicity. Meanwhile, interests in “pecuniary profit” are so powerful as to take control of the mechanism of publicity and to control their outcomes. “The gathering and sale of subject matter having a public import is part of the existing pecuniary system.”6 We might add that things have gotten much worse in this regard since Dewey’s own day. As Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer have shown, the culture industry has grown to massive proportions and affects nearly every aspect of human experience. The culture industry is the industry that manufactures and distributes cultural forms such as film, entertainment, music,

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and so forth. Adorno and Horkheimer insist that its models of person hood have so infected our behavior as to render individuality otiose. As they put it, “individuals have ceased to be themselves and are now merely centers where the general tendencies meet.”7 In any case, Dewey recognizes this problem. Indeed, he anticipates it. In an address given somewhat late in life, entitled “Construction and Criticism,” Dewey points out that the great need in our time is creative individuality. Too much are we becoming regimented in our daily life, he says – so much so, in fact, that “the standardized factory has become the symbol of our civilization.” 4. The Necessity of Criticism Hence, what we need is criticism. Criticism is a form of judgment by which we identify worthwhile, experiential goods and attempt to remove the obstacles to their realization. In the present case, with the good being democracy, and mechanized thinking or uniformity its obstacle, criticism demands a way of breaking through this uniformity and instilling unique, creative, and irreplaceable individuals at the heart of experience. “Every individual is in some way original and creative in his very make-up,” Dewey explains. “This is the meaning of individuality. What is most needed is to get rid of what stifles and chokes its manifestation. When the oppressive and artificial load is removed, each will find his own opportunity for positive constructive work in some field.” “Creative activity is our great need,” Dewey says, “but criticism ... is the road to its release.”8 But what would such criticism look like? Dewey tells us that it must involve the media. The media, he says, must become artistic, for “the function of art has always been to break through the crust of conventionalized and routine consciousness.”9 This is well and good. But how, specifically, would such artistic forms of media or communication function? What features would an artistic, creative form of criticism possess – one whose aim is to open up experience forever anew to its own novelty and unique individuality? When we ask the question this way, a surprising answer emerges. For a long time now in continental philosophy, creative criticism has been the norm. Resources have been available for opening up experience and letting happen its uniqueness and novelty. I have in mind, in particular, Jacques Derrida’s concept of deconstruction. Derrida is nothing if not creative. Of course, this very creativity has often been used as a charge against him, as if to say that he is all style and no substance. American philosophers, especially, have seemed to see little use in his ideas. However, in the context of this discussion, it should be clear just how Derrida’s ideas are pertinent. Deconstruction is the practice, in fact, of a key and crucial aspect of criticism as Dewey defines it. To see that this is so, the first thing we must recall is that Dewey himself noted the increasing regimentation and uniformity of mind being imposed

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upon our time. He worried a great deal about this and called for the invention of a new individualism that would overcome it. Secondly, recall that for Dewey the aim of criticism and of philosophy in general is to restore experience to its integrity, that is, to let happen its autonomy, and in such a way that makes democracy itself possible. 5. Derrida’s Philosophy These two points define, in fact, the very aim and intention of deconstruction. Deconstruction, as tireless critique, responds to the increased regimentation of mind in our time that Dewey himself worried about. It does so by trying to disrupt and unsettle the very heart of our efforts to regiment thinking. It challenges the very metaphysics or way of thinking that makes such regimentation possible – all in the service of freeing up experience and rendering it autonomous. What is deconstruction? It is not a method of criticism in the traditional sense (as external critique). Rather, it is a form of philosophizing by which the certainty of western metaphysics is challenged and disrupted from within. The way we tend to think, as westerners, is through identity. We rely on the authority of the “is,” whereby a thing or idea is taken to have presence – a solid, sure, unshakable certainty as to its meaning and value. We favor the selfpresence of some entities or ideas as if they were simply given undisturbed by differences. What this means, for example, is that the self is taken as given and unquestionable in opposition to every other. Or that instrumental reasoning and communication, as the condition of every business exchange, is given as indubitable – the solid and sure basis of every exchange, in fact. Some fixed identity or other is assumed at the expense of everything it excludes. Deconstruction destabilizes this identity thinking by demonstrating how its rock solid identity relies, in fact, on some other thing than itself, on difference, and hence is not present to itself but is rather fluid and changing. We can see this, for example, in the case of communication. Derrida deconstructs this concept by showing that a condition of its possibility is that it is, in fact, impossible. When we send a message, Derrida shows, we presuppose in principle our absence as the sender. Hence, we relinquish all sure control of our meaning as the very condition of communicating it. Employing such gestures as this, and applying them to nearly every fundamental western concept, Derrida’s philosophy consists, as he says, of “deconstructing, dislocating, displacing, disarticulating, disjoining, putting out of joint, the authority of the ‘is’.”10 Derrida aims to disrupt what he calls, after Martin Heidegger, the metaphysics of presence, the metaphysics of every “is” that sets itself up as the one true authoritative way of interpreting experience. Every such way of interpreting fails, Derrida shows, because in the end its own concepts are undecidable: difference is always present in them and cannot be

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reduced a way. It is part of what they are, so that their self-certainty as what they are cannot be established without the inclusion in them of what is different. This brings us to the second feature shared by Dewey and deconstruction: that of returning to experience. Identity thinking, according to Derrida, holds off and prevents any free letting happen of experience. This point is not always recognized, that is, people are very often mystified as to what it is exactly that Derrida is trying to achieve with deconstruction. They get the idea that the effect of deconstruction is to disrupt and displace coherent meanings but they miss the point of it all, the positive aspect to be achieved. However, Derrida is very often quite clear on this matter and lays out a perspective that, once more, sounds very similar to Dewey’s own intentions. For one thing, deconstruction is all about experience. Derrida himself says as much: “I rather like the word experience,” he says, “whose origin evokes traversal, but a traversal with a body, it evokes a space that is not given in advance but that opens as one advances. The word ‘experience’, once dusted off and reactivated a little, so to speak, is perhaps the one I would choose [to define my approach].”11 Derrida likes the word ‘experience’ because it captures best what he is up to: opening a space that is not given in advance. This is the point of deconstruction: it destabilizes, to be sure, but destabilizes in order to leave us anew and afresh in front of what is or becomes or shows up. Its task is to open a space by which experience can be, uniquely, whatever it is. Destabilizing routine, fixed consciousness, the authority of the “is,” deconstruction presents experience to us as experience (not some inherited substitute abstraction). It evokes the novelty of every event and re-orients us towards it with fresh eyes, that is, without an a priori standard, without a sure guide, demanding fresh inquiry into the experience itself. In Derrida’s mind, as in Dewey’s, this return to experience is intimately linked to the idea of democracy. The point of deconstruction, he often says, is to prepare the way for “the democracy to come.”12 For Derrida, we do not know how to apprehend each other. Or rather, we think we do, and the way is to exclude difference and reduce everyone else to our identity, which we take to be fixed and unassailable. In a democracy, however, we stand open to the other in their otherness. Indeed, the other, the unique situation they occupy, would be so much in the foremost of our minds that we would bear, as Derrida says, an infinite responsibility to the other, at least in their otherness. Like Dewey’s idea of equality, the other person, who is different from us, would count in their difference, which would be allowed to show itself. We would not measure the person by our standards of success but by their own, by the general tendency in which they are moving and relative to their own, utterly unique conditions of growth.

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6. Comparing Dewey and Derrida The idea of experience we have been discussing is worth lingering over because it is so central to my argument here and reveals a point of contention, perhaps, with the claims I am making. Dewey wants us to return to experience (and hence to instigate a new vision of democracy). But Derrida is still very often read as a textualist and for this reason would seem to be entirely at odds with Dewey. It is important to keep in mind here, however, that Derrida is misunderstood as a textualist. True, he has said “there is nothing outside the text.”13 But in explaining these words later he claims to “mean nothing else” than “there is nothing outside context.”14 This claim is consistent with his stated approach in Margins of Philosophy and elsewhere. In an article such as “Signature, Event, Context,” for instance, Derrida first deconstructs communication in general and then explains that what he has just done for communication could be done for any aspect of human experience. It is not that all experience is linguistic for Derrida. The idea rather is that what can be done to language (deconstruction) can be done to all aspects of human experience, because human experience simply will not, does not, obey the authority of the “is.” We keep trying to make it obey, through language and indeed our very metaphysics, but experience always supercedes our efforts. It is always more, in excess of our efforts to freeze it and define it. “Something always escapes,” as James would say. We can see then how deconstruction and pragmatism share common ground, much more so than is often recognized. Both aim to recover experience in all its novelty and to make this the basis of future inquiry. Both think experience itself is unmasterable, is unique, and that the task of philosophy is to respond to this uniqueness rather than impose some higher, authoritarian way of thinking above it. Derrida scholars, moreover, confirm that Derrida himself is really up this, most notably David Wood, who makes an extended case for the idea. I realize this idea, that Derrida is like Dewey in his conception of experience, will be hard for American philosophers to accept; an excursion into Wood’s analysis seems warranted. According to Wood, “there is no doubt that Derrida recognizes what I would call the phenomenological imperative – of staying within the experience, of acknowledging experience.” The concept of experience that Wood has in mind derives from Hegel. “Derrida is appropriating ‘experience’ in a way that strongly resembles Hegel, for a process productive of a certain kind of insight.” Experience, in this Hegelian sense, is openness, openness that is “a condition for philosophy’s productive intercourse with what lies outside of itself.” More specifically, experience is a separation from what is and movement into some other thing; it is a refusal of rest and conclusion. It is a restless openness to what shows up. It is the showing up of ever more processes of existence. It resists every transcendental condition of possibility

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and overflows behind it as the wellspring of all abstraction and cognition. It is on the basis of this definition of experience that Wood then says “We can find in the movement of Derrida’s writings an exemplary development of the problematic of experience.” His writings achieve, in other words, the restoration of experience, and along with it the responsibility we owe to every experience, by refusing a fixed cognition of them. This is so much the case that Wood even says, “deconstruction itself (and indeed the concept of responsibility that Derrida has given such weight) are each nothing other than experience regained. Deconstruction is, if you like, the experience of experience.”15 This is aptly put. What Derrida recognizes and tries to evoke is experience itself, the fluid ongoing emergence of what is but never stays fixed. Like Dewey, who also tries to return us to primary experience as the locus of thought and life, Derrida, too, recognizes that experience is unique, qualitatively distinct, and irreducible. And it is this “experience of experience” that he tries to make manifest against every illicit authority and abstraction. All for a point: for both thinkers, to free up experience itself in its unmasterable qualitativeness is itself to create the conditions of democracy. Democracy is the letting happen of unique situations, and intelligent responsiveness to them, to their irreducibility, as we can see so clearly, for example, in Dewey’s notion of equality. It may be objected here, however, that despite these apparent similarities, there is still a fundamental difference between Dewey and Derrida that keeps them worlds apart. It could well be argued, for one, that Dewey is able to make positive pronouncements about the goods of experience, while Derrida is perhaps too unwilling to make the same. Depending on how you look at it, Derrida too steadfastly refuses (or rightly resists) any positive pronouncements about what to do. His critique is relentlessly negative and achieves no positive results for experience. Dewey, on the other hand, again depending on how you look at it, too readily offers (or rightly offers) a positive account of what is good and what we should try to achieve, namely the concrete experienced goods of art, science, and social interaction. There would seem to be a major difference of emphasis for these two thinkers – a criticism from either side that could be leveled against the other. The problem with this objection, however, is that it is too conservative. It draws too sharp a line between the two thinkers on this score. I prefer a more pragmatic approach. If we grant that both thinkers aim to refer us to experience in its unmasterable uniqueness, then it becomes a question of context, it seems to me, which way back to experience is more needed. If it seems our context is far too over-determined, so that even apparent concrete goods like science are infected and become abstract authorities lording it over experience, then deconstruction may be more suitable for the occasion of returning us to a more indeterminate, fluid experience. If, on the other hand, there are clear cases

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where concrete goods, however, are needed, as when communication is needed in a democracy, so that the public may become aware of itself, then deconstruction may not be what is called for in that occasion. I see no reason why we have to choose in principle between deconstruction and pragmatism as paths back to experience, provided we grant that both are paths back to it. Indeed, it seems experience itself should rather decide, based on its own needs. It is experience, after all, that both sides seek to restore and that they ask us, in the end, to trust. 7. Conclusion This brings us to our conclusion. At the outset we discussed what it would mean to educate for a democratic society. A democratic society, we said, would be one that restored integrity to experience and allowed experience itself to adjudicate its own interests. The crust of convention always threatens the autonomy of experience, however, as we saw, since it the more habitual thing. Democracies are always under threat from routine consciousness, which, without criticism, takes hold of and dominates our understanding of a situation, squeezing differences, and hence democracy, out of existence. What’s needed to combat this routine consciousness is the cultivation of arts of criticism, arts of resistance, which remain in place as standing habits of defense and protection among people. Both Dewey and Derrida have given us a way to think about how to cultivate and practice these arts. These figures make for an odd pairing, to be sure. But what this pairing reveals, above all, in its surprising similarity is the urgency of the need it expresses. If we want a democratic society, we must educate for it. This education must involve criticism – indeed, ever more vigilant and constant criticism as deconstruction demands. Such criticism, too, must remain creative and become ever more so, as Dewey would himself affirm, so that deconstruction, in its creative persistence, forms a legitimate and much needed option. Dewey provides the framework of criticism, and Derrida offers a unique, creative, and contemporary instance of such criticism, with his effort to deconstruct the same uniformity of mind that Dewey himself worried about. Both Dewey and Derrida have their uses in educating for a democracy and both point, moreover, when taken together, to what is needed. We need both European and American approaches. We need both pragmatism and deconstruction. Both approaches are needed and many more besides. Every effort must be made, and education must everywhere instill, habits of breaking through convention and allowing each unique event to stand forth on its own terms. Education for a democratic society requires multiple approaches and multiple tries and certainly the refusal of partisanship in choosing our favorite approach in this collective effort. We should choose both approaches and

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others as well. We should combine our efforts and find friends in the service of democracy wherever we can. The realization of democracy is that important.

NOTES 1. John Dewey, The Essential Dewey, Vol. 1, ed. Larry Hickman and Thomas Alexander (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), p. 77; p. 22; p. 23; p. 22. 2. John Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957), pp. 167–168. 3. John Dewey, The Essential Dewey, Vol. 1, p. 25; ibid. 4. Ibid., p. 77; p. 78 5. Ibid., pp. 342–343. 6. Ibid., p. 306. 7. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Continuum, 1964), p. 155. 8. John Dewey, “Construction and Criticism,” in The Later Works, Vol. 5, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988), p. 133; pp. 142– 143; p. 143. 9. John Dewey, The Essential Dewey, Vol. 1, p. 306. 10. Jacques Derrida, “The Time is Out of Joint,” trans. Peggy Kamuf, in Deconstruction is/in America, ed. Anselm Haverkamp (New York: New York University Press, 1995), p. 25. 11. Jacques Derrida, Points: Interviews, 1974–1994 (Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 207. 12. Ibid., p. 338. 13. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. 158. 14. Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc., trans. S. Weber and J. Mehlman, ed. G. Graff (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1988), p. 136. 15. David Wood, Thinking After Heidegger (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002), p. 33; p. 28; p. 24; p. 26.

Two JOHN DEWEY AND THE NECESSITY OF A DEMOCRATIC CIVIC EDUCATION Carlos Mougan Rivero

The education of citizens has never been as problematic an issue as it is today. For past ages, it was a less controversial topic due to social and political conditions, and cultural and philosophical entailments. In the ancient world there was social agreement about the meaning of a “good life” and, as a consequence, the promotion of virtues among citizens was an undisputed necessity. Furthermore, for Aristotle the acquisition of some virtues for citizenship was the measure of a good government. Conversely, in the modern world the new presence of liberalism split the issues of the good life and political questions, so that the building of a people with civic virtues is no longer a public task. In the first modern treatise of civic education, Some Thoughts Concerning Education by Locke, the acquisition of virtues of “gentleman” is a private task and the responsibility for civic education lies exclusively on the family. In the modern world, where each person has his or her own conception of life, where there is no transcendent point of reference that provides certainty about the meaning of the good life, and where the difficulties of agreeing on some core of values amidst the diversity of beliefs, limited attempts to find a common political frame undermine the possibility of a theory of education for citizenship. The main liberal authors are not dismissive of the importance of virtue within citizenship; but they deem that it is not the role of political theory to form virtuous citizens, because it breaks or weakens the moral neutrality of political power that is the main guarantee of respect for the rights of individual freedom. The ancient world, because of its theoretical excess, and the modern world, because of moral restrictions by the main ways of liberalism, agree in rejecting the necessity of providing arguments for education for democratic citizenship. At the same time, the transformation of political theory and the changing social and political conditions converge in the increasing importance of the meaning of citizenship. On the one hand, political theory understands citizenship not only as a right but also as an active commitment within society. The problem with citizenship includes not only questions about how to get the same legal status for everyone (as typically characterized by Marshall) and how many rights – even social rights – that the state is to guarantee, but also the development of a set of virtues which we need for the maintenance of good political order. So, as Will Kymlicka and Wayne Norman note, and many other philosophers echo, “the

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promotion of responsible citizenship is an urgent aim of public policy.”1 On the other hand, the analysis of sociological authors such as Anthony Giddens, Christopher Lasch, and Ulrich Beck, corroborates this understanding of the individuals within a postmodern society. In Beck’s interpretation, the advances of our society do not decrease the risks.2 On the contrary, the absence of certainty and security is a core characteristic of postmodern society. The solution for Beck is the development of new cosmopolitan consciousness that entails a new interpretation of responsibility, state, and justice. In the same sense, Giddens thinks that doubt is not a scientific requirement but a fact provided by scientific development.3 So modernity leaves the great questions about the meaning of life in the hands of individuals. The trends to abandon oneself to routine and to live as everybody else does are strong and, as a result, critical thought is lost or fleeting. The solution, again, is to provide citizens with the capacities for thinking, deciding, and sharing responsibilities. Moreover the relevance of a democratic civic education today is shown because every ethical purpose, whatever it may be, calls for the necessity of a citizenry with some specific virtues. Deliberation about genetic manipulation, ecology, euthanasia, or any ethical subject calls for active citizens who are responsible and informed. The necessity of education for democratic citizenship is a convergent demand of advanced societies. Consequently, we also need a theory that makes clear its nature, contents, and boundaries. We can define the theory of democratic civic education as the theory which contains all the theoretical aspects that converge in underlying relevance and importance to promote the civic virtues and values through public policies. This theory depends on a definite ethical conception of democracy. In this sense, Dewey’s philosophy is especially suitable because his way of understanding democracy supplies the grounding for the development of a theory of citizenship education. The following ideas indicate some requirements of a theory of citizenship education and the adequacy of a Deweyan and pragmatic perspective. 1. The Private and the Public The arguments for democratic civic education encourage us to push back the boundaries of the traditional and liberal distinction between the private and the public. Concern for the moral education of citizens calls for bridges between moral and political areas that are rejected by those who see these bridges as endangering the core of liberalism. From a liberal perspective, the good and justice, morals and politics are to be differentiated. So, attempts to get inside the moral from the political, or to judge the political from an understanding of the good life, reject the most important achievement of modernity: individual freedom. The rationale for democratic civic education is to take responsibility for the building of individuals’ virtues, and further for the choice of a pattern of

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citizenship, and for the promotion of a way of understanding the good life that is not compatible with the neutrality of political power. We can distinguish two strategies for defending the separation of the political from the moral. First, from the moral side, it is possible to maintain that this division is the result of an engagement with a fundamental liberal virtue: individual responsibility.4 The political promotion of virtue confuses socially ordered behavior with moral conduct, and makes virtue impossible because it removes individual responsibility for the choice of a right way of living or doing. It is appropriate for public policy to set up conditions that make possible the good life, that is that advance self-determination; but it should not promote a specific version of the good life because to do so would reduce individual freedom and responsibility. This argument is not adequate because it assumes that a worse environment improves our situation. Certainly, honesty, loyalty, and solidarity are viewed as better when developed under unfavorable circumstances; but we cannot agree that they improve in adverse contexts. But, setting this aside, the most relevant consideration for my purpose is to indicate that this line of argument does not consider the relationship between the conditions of the moral and its contents. The self-determining ability is more than a condition of morality; it is an important part of an ideal of human perfection that springs up from the capacity of thinking and doing by one’s self. We only need to take into consideration how this idea may be different from other ideals of human flourishing, like religious foundationalisms, or how critical we can be of a society ruled by the values of the open market and consumerism. In this sense, what many liberal authors have forgotten is the social condition of morality. So, in Dewey’s perspective, we form our values from the socially available goods. Because virtues do not exist before human interplay and there is no principle that can teach us the proper way from the outside, we have to accept that the best choice is using our intelligence to evaluate socially accepted goods. We cannot determine good or bad without relying upon social meanings. If we accept that self-determination is a politically valuable ideal, we should admit that it has to be socially constructed and, further, politically promoted. In Dewey’s perspective, self-determination means to increase the capacity for moral growth, and society has to provide the means for the development of individual abilities. The policies committed with individual values cannot be morally neutral. The call to keep liberalism apart from its moral implications has also been argued from an exclusively political perspective. The main figure here is undoubtedly John Rawls, who has compellingly defended the idea of a liberalism free from moral commitments. Still, in spite of his ideal that the state has to be morally neutral, especially with regards to religious beliefs, he had to admit in Political Liberalism “that justice as fairness includes a notion of certain political virtues.”5 So, Rawls sees the necessity of educating citizenship in some virtues, and his attempts to reduce the moral meaning of his position are rationally

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inconsistent. As John Gray shows, the position of Rawls is only understandable based on protections of the idea of moral autonomy.6 For example, it is clear from his argument against the right of religious minorities to be exempt from public education. Rawls defends the view that the state has the duty to impose knowledge of constitutional and civil rights because everyone has to realize the freedom of consciousness and the possibility to refuse communitarian beliefs. The issue is that the state is committed to the idea that the beliefs of individuals are their own choice and not a social imposition. If this is true, however, the possibility of a political order without moral commitment disappears, and a political order based on moral autonomy emerges as the true meaning of the work of Rawls. The necessity of a democratic civic education requires a political conception that understands democracy as more than an institutional order; it requires attitudes, habits, beliefs, and a disposition to collaborate with others. In this sense, Dewey supports the position that democracy is a way of life, an attitude characterized by openness, sensibility, flexibility, and a certain disposition to face the problems of life collaboratively.7 An expanded meaning of democracy that pushes back the traditional boundaries between the moral and the political is a requirement for the developing theory of democratic civic education. Dewey’s philosophy focuses on a moral conception of democracy which supplies important resources. 2. Democracy as a Way of Individual Life Emphasizing the relevance of a theory of education for democratic citizenship highlights the fact that democracy is not restricted merely to the enacting of public policy but that it affects all aspects of individual life. Education for democratic citizenship needs to start with the idea that individuals are, in large measure, socially constructed. It rejects much of the hypothesis of human being as intrinsically good – the noble savage – especially the supposition that human nature is driven by selfishness or self-interest. Education for democratic citizenship emphasizes that if citizens are passive, socially apathetic, or economically oriented, it is not due to “natural” mechanisms but to social and educational conditions. It is thus opposed to the traditional liberal idea of an “invisible hand” that blends the worst drives of individuals into social goods as it is expressed in the famous Mandevillean phrase: “private vices, public virtues.” Education for democratic citizenship suggests that if individuals are well educated, in suitable circumstances and in a favorable environment, they will be responsible, concerned for others, and social-minded. It further supposes that virtues, as Aristotle said, are not in nature but at the same time are not against nature. In this sense, Dewey stressed that, if democracy is a process through which individuals cooperate in the solution of collective problems, this process will have effects on the individuals. Democracy understood as a way of life means – aside

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from institutions – the building of subjectivity, the acquisition of ideas, attitudes and individual habits. Democracy for Dewey is basically a question of habits, and habits are in an important way a social construction. Ideas are only real if they are incorporated in habits which drive human activity.8 So, for Dewey, we can only have democratic ideas if we live democratically.9 He makes clear that democracy is superficial if we do not incorporate into our attitudes of daily life the habits of considering other points of view, of modifying our interests to benefit others, of refusing privileges and exclusivity, and of using our intelligence to solve our problems cooperatively. Because Dewey understands philosophy as a theory of action, he thinks that democracy is not a theory about power but a vital practice, a style of doing. It includes not only beliefs and thoughts, but also desires, feelings, and attitudes. Democracy cannot be interpreted to require the subordination of our wishes to our reason. Democracy refers to rationality as much as to our emotional life. The political world starts where the deeds of individuals affect others.10 Our emotional life is collective and affects others to the same degree that our ideas do. Passions, desires, and interests include a socio-political dimension. So, we can judge ideas and emotions from a normative perspective. Selfishness is anti-democratic because it indicates an attitude that isolates individuals and undermines collaboration and cooperation. For the same reason, the perspective of Dewey may be useful to argue for political improvement with increasing artistic, cultural, and intellectual sensibility. Music, literature, and the other forms of art are singularly important for the democratic construction of self. Esthetic experience gives individuals greater sensitivity, more flexible ways of thinking and understanding other points of view, and the ability to see questions from new perspectives. The democratic process which gives an externalized voice to everyone within society requires intrinsically the ability to put oneself in the place of the others; this in turn depends on an internal attitude. Dewey’s perspective rejects the view that individuals can have a political self separate from the rest of their identity. This incorporation of the esthetic dimension in his concept of democracy also inclines Dewey’s position towards a theory concerned with the education for citizenship. These considerations imply the breaking of the traditional liberal walls that isolate the private from public considerations. Dewey argues against the claim that we must keep democracy apart from areas classically considered private. Believing that democracy affects the constitution of all aspects of individuality, Dewey’s conception of democracy stands in opposition to defenders not only of the aggregative model of democracy but also of deliberative currents.11 The meaning of democracy spreads out to all the areas where there is interplay of human beings. But to say that democracy exists wherever we find human interaction does not imply the total politicization of individuals, or claim that democracy is the only or main human good. Democracy is the best way to get to human ends, the final goods.

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3. Education for Democratic Citizenship and the Ideal of Self-Realization Education for democratic citizenship is committed to the liberal ideal of selfrealization. So, it is important to stress that this theory has a liberal rationale, namely that virtues cannot be politically imposed. Virtues are an individual decision. The democratic state is neither morally neutral nor morally imposing. A politically liberal order implies that the institutional arrangements aim to facilitate the development of individual capacities. In this sense, Dewey’s theory allows us to overcome the dualism that splits individual interest and common good. To understand democracy from the point of view of a theory of action makes possible the coincidence between collective and individual interest. The private interest is socially reasonable because individuals are participating with others in the same enterprise. The coincidence of interests is not something mysterious. Our actions are interconnected from the beginning and the democratic process means to be aware of this connection and to transform it for the individuals’ benefit. Moreover, Dewey combined democracy with the idea of growth. Democracy is liberal because its goal is the development and the growth of individuality.12 But, as we noticed, the individual does not have a previous structure which organizes the development in conformity with some rules. Dewey stressed the open character and the malleability of humanity. Because individuality is always in a process of self-making, democracy is a process that aims to increase the potentials of individuals. Democracy and education are two faces of the same process of growth. Growth means that there is not an end, that we cannot find a point which is the finish line. Growth indicates a process without end; it is continuity and openness. So, Dewey underlines that democracy has an essentially transformative character. Democracy, and education for democratic citizenship, do not have to be interpreted as a way of simply accommodating current differences. If we interpreted democracy in this way, then we would have to think that there are values which cannot be discussed or transformed. This would entail an absolutist interpretation of values which Dewey denies.13 A full meaning of education within democracy requires that values that need to be taught, spring up from the process of cooperation, and may be constantly submitted to a public and critical process. Nothing can be excluded a priori from the democratic process, and civic virtues do not have a ground other than the social test. The opposite is to understand values as absolute realities instead of results of as the previous circumstances. The liberal commitment of a democratic theory which makes the education of citizens the core of its position requires more than negative freedom. The liberal requisite is to set up the right conditions that make possible the growth of individuals. True plurality is not simply maintaining current differences, but only those differences which are a product of an unconstrained experience, not guided by routine, prejudices, or authoritarianism. In this line of argument, Dewey

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thought that democracy is certainly that social organization most compatible with a metaphysical conception of reality as difference, but not with the blind acceptance of previous state of affairs. To make absolute what is different is an anti-democratic perspective, because it deepens separation and undermines collaboration. 4. Democracy and Knowledge A theory of education for democratic citizenship supposes a strong entailment between democracy and knowledge. In this sense, this kind of theory is necessarily post-enlightenment. The modern world expected to get an enlightened public opinion because it believed that scientific advance implied the social distribution of information. Underlying this idea was the conviction that knowledge had some intrinsically good moral qualities. The building of virtuous citizens was considered to be a by-product of scientific development. But contemporary reflection on values has destroyed bonds between knowledge and the good, and consequently the bases for the idea of virtuous citizenship. At the present time, this idea requires the open promotion of moral habits and virtues, and appears as a characteristic challenge for technologically advanced societies. The core of the new relationship between democracy and knowledge springs up from Dewey’s critique of the rationalism and intellectualism of modern philosophy. The contingency, fallibleness, and finiteness of the human learning impose a new interpretation of knowledge and truth. Knowledge is now seen as an element of action, and consequently it acquires the same characters of cooperative enterprise as democracy. From the point of view of a theory of action, both knowledge and democracy appear to hold the same inherent structure, sustained by the same attitudes: those that are necessary in a collaboration process. Only where there is the free exchange of ideas, attention to experience, the rejection of prejudice and of external authority, can intelligence and wisdom advance themselves. Democracy and science are intertwined; they reinforce each other. The issue is misunderstood when we think that Dewey is proposing the transforming of citizens into scientists. Dewey’s proposal is, rather, that the attitudes of scientific research be spread among individuals. In this way, intelligence would be the guide of social life, demonstrating that democracy is incompatible with absolutism or fundamentalism. In democracy, as in science, the guarantee of truth is not the agreement by itself but the fact of openness of arguments and a disposition to modify ideas in the face of experience. Finally, science and democracy need the public test of consequences, the attention to facts and evaluation by them. Democratic and scientific attitudes require public responses. The spread of intelligence through human co-existence further discloses the intrinsic relation of democracy and education. The link between democracy and education is a strong point in Dewey’s philosophy. Democracy exists only if it is

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educative and, by the same token, education exists only if it is democratic.14 Clearly, Dewey understood education has a wider meaning than scholarship.15 Education is essentially communication and every social life is communicative. Rules and laws, together with mass media, propaganda, leisure, etc., are educative because they contribute to form habits, and in this way, beliefs, feelings, and thoughts. Education is to show how searching for solutions should be a cooperative enterprise. We can judge institutions and social organizations democratically, therefore, to the extent that they help increase perspectives, empower our capacities, and enhance our interests. Understood as growth, most of our life is educative when it communicates to others and this contributes to form their habits. As is well known, we cannot transmit habits by theory or by words. To build habits demands deeds and examples rather than words. Furthermore, we can judge the democratic level of a country by considering how much their citizens have habits of cooperation and solidarity, and whether they see other citizens as collaborators or as competitors. In summary, the link between democracy and education rejects the liberal idea that the political order does not need, or demands very few, civic virtues in its citizens. Democracy for Dewey means that individuals acquire personal habits and attitudes. The moral meaning that Dewey sets out for democracy provides the basis for a theory of education for democratic citizenship.

NOTES 1. Will Kymlicka and Wayne Norman, “Return of the Citizen: A Survey of Recent Work on Citizenship Theory,” Ethics 104 (1994), pp. 325–381. 2. Ulrich Beck, World Risk Society (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999). 3. Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991). 4. As for example Douglas Den Uyl, “Liberalism and Virtue,” in Public Morality, Civic Virtue and the Problem of Modern Liberalism, ed. W. Boxx and G. M. Quinlivan (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2000). 5. John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), p. 200. 6. John Nicholas Gray, Liberty and Human Nature in the Liberal Tradition (D.Phil. Thesis, Oxford University, 1978). 7. John Dewey, “Creative Democracy: The Task Before Us,” The Later Works of John Dewey, vol. 14, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988), pp. 224–230. Hereafter references to the Collected Works of John Dewey are indicated by MW (The Middle Works) or LW (The Later Works) followed by volume and page numbers. 8. Dewey, “The Place of Habit in Conduct,” MW 14: 13–60. Dewey spells out the political and democratic meaning of habits in The Public and Its Problems, LW 2: 335– 339.

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9. Dewey, LW 2: 368. 10. Dewey, LW 2: 328. 11. John Shook, “Deliberative Democracy and Moral Pluralism: Dewey vs. Rawls and Habermas,” in Deconstruction and Reconstruction: The Central European Pragmatist Forum, Volume Two (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004), pp. 31–43. 12. Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy, MW 12: 186. 13, Shook, “Deliberative Democracy and Moral Pluralism: Dewey vs. Rawls and Habermas,” p. 34; and Larry Hickman, “Dewey’s Pragmatic Technology and Community of Life,” in Classical American Pragmatism: Its Contemporary Vitality, ed. Douglas Anderson, Carl Hausman, and Sandra Rosenthal (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), p. 32. 14. Dewey, “Democracy and Education in the World of Today,” LW 13: 294. 15. Dewey, “Education as a Necessity of Life,” MW 9: 4–7.

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Three PHILOSOPHY AND EDUCATION: RICHARD RORTY’S CONSIDERATIONS Alexander Kremer

1. The Hermeneutical Horizon The necessary and inherent connection between philosophy and education is beyond question. Countless different philosophies have been born since the Greeks, but in some form or other, directly or indirectly, every philosophy addresses the relationship between the human being and the world in general. This concern seems to be self-evident from ancient Greek philosophy, through medieval Christian philosophy, to the end of the modern period. However, we can also always find some ontology, usually in a latent form without elaboration, within contemporary philosophies. Examples include Karl Jaspers, Jean-Paul Sartre examining above all the individual, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, John Austin, and even the young Richard Rorty researching primarily mind and language. All of them have based their views on some ontology that asks the same question as had the first philosophers: “Who is the human being in the world?” I am persuaded that this is the primary question of philosophy, because every philosophical theory is produced by a finite and historical human being who, first of all, understood oneself in the world. Philosophy can be defined in several concrete ways, but the essential structure of philosophical thinking does not change. The formal structure of this thinking works not only in traditional metaphysical philosophies, but also in contemporary analytic and continental philosophies. The formal structure of philosophical thinking might be regarded as the theoretical and historical selfreflection of the human being, which is the permanent condition of existential inquiry. However, if philosophy is a permanent, theoretical self- and worldunderstanding and interpretation, then, drawn from this basic concept, philosophy should necessarily also be self-education. By considering the basic philosophical questions and developing our own answers and standpoints, we develop at the same time our own world-views and personality; that is, we accomplish self-education. The opposite is also true. Self-education is always self-reflection in some form. In general two levels can be distinguished here: the world-view level and the philosophical level. We do not have to take typical or special philosophies, but in the course of self-education we have to raise either the world-view

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question (“Who am I as an individual?”) or the philosophical question (“Who am I as a human being?”). Self-education cannot be considered spontaneous, that is, it cannot happen on the basic level of thinking, but self-education is always and necessarily self-reflection. If we consider philosophical questions together with students in a philosophy course, the same thing can happen to the persons who are really involved in the procedure by their activities. Since education wants fundamentally to form personal values and attitudes, that is, the world-view of the individuals, and philosophy is concerned primarily with the relationship between the human being and the world, the excellent opportunity for education inherent in philosophy is obvious. Although philosophy is not identical with a world-view, it can teach and educate us if we let it influence us. Education is able to individualize the opportunities inherent in philosophy, and the experiences of education can react upon philosophy, but the dominant side of the relationship is philosophy, because philosophical views are more comprehensive than educational ones! It is not only by chance that those philosophers who express concern about education determine their primary educational goals according to their philosophical views. It has been this way since the Sophists and Socrates, through Plato and Aristotle, to the formulation of Rousseau’s, Hegel’s, and Schleiermacher’s educational theories, and on into the present. We can even say that philosophies and educational theories are influenced as well by the social and historical horizons of philosophers and by their existential determinations. What then should education be like in a democratic society? Does democracy need a new, special education? Is this a “yes” or “no” question? Only give a wrong answer can emerge from such a dichotomy. The horizon must change to “yes and no.” “Yes,” because of the discontinuity, and “no” because of the continuity of every process. Every process in the world contains discontinuous and continuous moments simultaneously. Without discontinuous moments nothing new would be born. This view can also be shown by Thomas Kuhn’s theory, influenced by Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time,1 about the changing paradigms of sciences. In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Kuhn wrote that a paradigm does not change in the normal developing period of science. However, in a period of revolutionary transformation paradigmchange occurs, that is, discontinuous moments become dominant. Kuhn’s theory can be applied to the movement of other theories, including the educational. Do not forget, however, the other side. Do we need absolutely new education for a democratic society? May we say “no,” and if so why? Not only do we not need absolutely new education, but it would be in fact impossible. I will develop this point in the third part, when I will raise critical questions and make discuss regarding Rorty’s theory.

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2. Rorty’s Considerations Does democracy need a new, special form of education? The first answer is “yes,” because basic educational principles are defined primarily by philosophies, and these, beyond their relative self-development, are determined by the features of the prevailing socio-historical systems. If the latter are changing, then the educational principles and theories will also changing. This can be shown not only through the philosophers mentioned earlier (i.e. Plato, Aristotle, Rousseau, etc.), but also by John Dewey. As he put it: Although a book called Democracy and Education was for many years that in which my philosophy, such as it is, was most fully expounded, I do not know that philosophic critics, as distinct from teachers, have ever had recourse to it. I have wondered whether such facts signified that philosophers in general, although they are themselves usually teachers, have not taken education with sufficient seriousness for it to occur to them that any rational person could actually think it possible that philosophizing should focus about education as the supreme human interest in which, moreover, other problems, cosmological, moral, logical, come to a head.2 Given the fact that from the feudal social systems of Europe, a new, democratic society was born in the United States, one can expect that Americans would naturally emphasize new values and principles in every field of society, from the economy through politics to education. Beside the continuous moments, e.g. the religious and other traditional philosophical values, known from the praxis of several churches and from the American Constitution of 1789, the discontinuous moments of social development should become dominant. These were drawn primarily from the concept of “democracy” and “democratic person,” that is from the democratic constitution and the democratic feeling of the citizens. We can find a similar situation in the work of Richard Rorty. Rorty, who is strongly influenced not only by John Dewey but also by Jacques Derrida, also emphasizes the discontinuous moments. He is aware of the epoch-change between the modern and postmodern socio-historical periods and considers traditional, metaphysical philosophy obsolete. He argues that in the course of the twentieth century there were no crises that called forth new philosophical ideas. As high culture became more thoroughly secularized, the educated classes of Europe and the Americas became complacently materialist in their understanding of how things work. They also become complacently utilitarian and experimentalist in their evaluations of proposed social and political initiatives.

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When Rorty visited the University of Pécs in Hungary in May 2004, he criticized contemporary academic philosophy in his lecture, titled “Universalist Grandeur, Romantic Profundity, Humanist Finitude”: This consensus among the intellectuals has moved philosophy to the margins of culture. Such controversies as those between Russell and Bergson, Heidegger and Cassirer, Carnap and Quine, Ayer and Austin, Habermas and Gadamer, and Fodor and Davidson, have had no resonance outside the borders of philosophy departments. Philosophers’ explanations of how the mind is related to the brain, or of how there can be a place for value in a world of fact, or of how free will and mechanism might be reconciled, do not intrigue most contemporary intellectuals. These problems, preserved in amber as the textbook “problems of philosophy,” still capture the imagination of some bright students. But no one would claim that discussion of them is central to intellectual life. Solving those very problems was all-important for contemporaries of Spinoza, but when today’s philosophy professors insist that that they are “perennial,” or that they remain “fundamental,” nobody listens. Most intellectuals of our day brush aside claims that our social practices require philosophical foundations with the same impatience as when similar claims are made for religion.3 After such an entrée we can raise the question: “What is his own position regarding philosophy and education?” In his lecture Rorty argued against both “universalist grandeur” and metaphysical “romantic profundity.” They have some differences, but they are common in their metaphysical essence. As Rorty said: Habermas and I both distrust metaphysics. But whereas he thinks that we must find a metaphysics-free interpretation of the notion of universal validity in order to avoid the seductions of romanticism, I think that that notion and metaphysics stand or fall together.4 Influenced first of all by one of his philosophical heroes, John Dewey, Rorty says that pragmatism should be viewed as an alternative to both universalism and romanticism: Pragmatism simply discards the notion of “legitimacy” invoked by both universalists and romantics, and puts short-term utility in its place. The pragmatist response to the dialectic Habermas summarizes in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity is to say that talk of universal validity is simply a way of dramatizing the need for intersubjective

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agreement, while romantic ardor and romantic depth are simply ways of dramatizing the need for novelty, the need to be imaginative.5 Rorty’s perception is clear. People who relish the universalistic metaphors of height and the romantic metaphors of depth “see inquiry as having an exalted goal called ‘Truth’, which they think of as something more than successful problem-solving, something like breaking through to the way things really are, independent of human needs and interest.”6 These philosophers “can take a rueful satisfaction in their own steadily increasing irrelevance.”7 Rorty’s lecture in Pécs, however, can be regarded as a direct consequence of his earlier published thoughts. He struggles not only against the metaphysical tradition, but also in general against the determining role of the past. He accomplishes this by using the tool of irony, while he undertakes absolute solidarity with the future. Meanwhile he emphasizes also the contingency of every important aspect of the present. He wrote in Contingency, Irony and Solidarity: The line of thought common to Blumenberg, Nietzsche, Freud, and Davidson suggests that we try to get to the point where we no longer worship anything, where we treat nothing as a quasi divinity, where we treat everything – our language, our conscience, our community – as a product of time and chance.8 Drawing from the works of the late Wittgenstein, Rorty regards sentences as tools. He says in Essays on Heidegger and Others that “sentences as tools is a notion one associates with Wittgenstein rather than with Heidegger and Derrida.”9 However, he seems to regard also philosophy in general as a tool, for in his works philosophy is considered vocabulary, and a vocabulary is a tool. He speaks about tools on at least three levels: first as sentences; second as procedures like irony, solidarity, etc.; and third as philosophy. According to Rorty, these tools, because of their untidiness caused by contingency, are easily applicable in order to support an absolutely positive goal in a moral sense: the creation of a much more democratic and liberal society than is evident today. As he wrote in Contingency, Irony and Solidarity: One of my aims in this book is to suggest the possibility of a liberal utopia: one in which ironism, in the relevant sense, is universal. A postmetaphysical culture seems to me no more impossible than a postreligious one, and equally desirable.10 The social glue holding together the ideal liberal society ... consists in little more than a consensus that the point of social organization is to let everybody have a chance at self-creation to the best of his or her abilities,

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ALEXANDER KREMER and that that goal requires, besides peace and wealth, the standard ‘bourgeois freedom’. ... In such an ideal society, discussion of public affairs will revolve around (1) how to balance the needs for peace, wealth, and freedom when conditions require that one of these goals be sacrificed to one of the others and (2) how to equalize opportunities for self-creation and then leave people alone to use, or neglect, their opportunities.11

This effort can be considered interesting and worthwhile, but only to a point. Philosophers must remember that the end does not justify the means! This notion of philosophy can be accepted on the basis of Derrida’s deconstruction or John Caputo’s Radical Hermeneutics, or even his More Radical Hermeneutics, which express a profound understanding of the history of philosophy and its various traditions. 3. Questions and Criticism I would first raise several questions: (1) Is Rorty not afraid of the loss of such historic knowledge? Massproduction has already produced mass-consumption. Will instrumental reason not also prevail among philosophers? Or is this acceptable for him as an advance on the Plato-Kant canon? (2) Is Rorty not afraid that such quasi-philosophers will fail to read not only the classic works of philosophy (works of Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, etc.), but also fail to read Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and even Rorty himself? The reason for that will be quite simple: if everything can be considered contingent, it does not matter what the “old boys of philosophy” said. (3) Is Rorty not afraid of the repetition of the historical tragedies (e.g., from the crusades to the world wars and the Holocaust) if we teach for our students the “contingency of everything?” I accept the position that education for a democratic and liberal society needs different values and principles to be prioritized than does education for a traditional, often autocratic and even dictatorial, society. However, would it not be better to harmonize the past and the present, and should we not rather learn from the past for our future? I am persuaded that we can realize only an intentional autonomy regarding our past. The reason I say that is not only Tacitus’ claim that “Historia est magistra vitae,” but also the young Heidegger’s repetition (Wiederholung) and the Gadamerian historically effected event (Wirkungsgeschichte). It seems to be not only a mistake to neglect the influence of the past, but it is impossible in any case to be free of it. As Gadamer put it in the Truth and Method:

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But on the whole the power of effective history does not depend on its being recognized. This, precisely, is the power of history over finite human consciousness, namely that it prevails even where faith in method leads one to deny one’s own historicity.... Consciousness of being affected by history (wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewusstsein) is primarily consciousness of the hermeneutical situation. To acquire an awareness of a situation is, however, always a task of a peculiar difficulty. The very idea of a situation means that we are not standing outside it and hence are unable to have any objective knowledge of it. We always find ourselves within a situation, and throwing light on it is a task that is never entirely finished. This is also true of the hermeneutic situation... 12 Based on these theories and my experiences, it seems clear that we not only do not need an absolutely new education for a democratic society, but it is in fact impossible. We cannot neglect the continuous moments of education, because we have to take into account not only our socio-historical experiences, but also the psychological needs and laws of the developing personality. From sociohistorical and moral points of view, we ought to remember World Wars I and II, the Holocaust, the dictatorships, etc. Also we ought not forget, for example, the values and principles of ancient Greek democracy, the modern revolutions and reforms, and the important values of Western philosophy preserved in the American Constitution of 1789. Regarding the psychical dimension of the personality, we can say that it does not change with socio-historical systems. This means that beside preferring the democratic attitude, creativity, etc., it is also worth teaching our children and students, at the proper age, self-discipline (self-control), concentration, patience and tolerance, problem-solving, and so on, as, for example, Erich Fromm said in his The Art of Loving. I am persuaded that these traditional personal features are worth preserving because they can make the people even in the most liberal and democratic society better citizens and better people.

NOTES 1. See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), p. 29. 2. John Dewey, “From Absolutism to Experimentalism,” in The Later Works of John Dewey, vol. 5, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984), p. 156. 3. Richard Rorty, Universalist Grandeur, Romantic Profundity, Humanist Finitude (Lecture at the University of Pécs, Hungary, 3 May 2004), p. 2.

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4. Ibid., p. 5. 5. Ibid., p. 10. 6. Ibid., p. 11. 7. Ibid., p. 13. 8. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge Univesity Press, 1989), p. 22. 9. Richard Rorty, Essays on Heidegger and Others (Cambridge: Cambridge Univesity Press, 1991), p. 3. 10. Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, pp. xv–xvi; see also 84–85. Cf. Rorty, “Philosophy and the Future,” in Rorty and Pragmatism, ed. Herman J. Saatkamp, Jr. (Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 1995), pp. 204–205. 11. Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, pp. 84–85. 12. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd edn. (London: Sheed & Ward, 1989), p. 301.

Four DEMOCRACY UNDEFENDED: EDUCATION IN THE AGE OF COGNITIVE SCIENCE Jane Skinner

Vocational education in modern western democracies exists in a pivotal tension between the cognitive understandings underpinning dominant (neoliberal) politics, philosophy and economics; and the cognitive possibilities offered by the twentieth century’s two leading educational thinkers, John Dewey and Paulo Freire. It suggests that this could be seen (not too fancifully) as a microcosm of the agon identified recently by Joseph Margolis between the “naturalizable” and the “natural”1 – the current version of the enduring tension in western thought between rationalism and relativism, between Platonic forms and pragmatic realities. It suggests further that the educational outcomes of this debate have significant implications for the reinstatement of an active participatory democracy. Education in global western society is inevitably involved in (re)producing the people seen to be necessary for its perpetuation. A growing proportion of western youth (and privileged youth within all societies) now aspires to positions in the economic, financial and management fields, or in technology and the related rapidly developing field of biotechnology. Tertiary education has responded accordingly. Business schools and technology laboratories that might have been expected decades ago to occupy spaces outside of the academy increasingly occupy a central position within it. The business of scholarship has become business. At the same time research institutes funded by business interests outside of traditional academic institutions are often at the cutting edge of research and thus of the production of new knowledge.2 All of this is within the context of a competitive, market driven, and increasingly globalized “knowledge society” – globalized, that is, in so far as trade in finance, goods and services are concerned – but not open to a similar free movement of people. Capital moves effortlessly to where wages are lowest: workers are frequently refused entry to where wages are highest.3 However, participating countries are increasingly formally democratic – and it is therefore possible to assume a large degree of political neutrality within this knowledge production system as a whole. Very largely the market proposes and the market disposes – or so it would seem. The all-pervasive nature of this world order has caused increasing alarm amongst sociologists, scientists and certain progressive economists who fear

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that it may be demographically, ecologically and economically unsustainable.4 However a certain academic inertia appears to accept the independence of disciplinary knowledge and therefore to allow for the current teaching of business disciplines to remain unchallenged, as if these were necessarily autonomous, self-referential, and politically neutral. Undergraduate business courses focus upon basic economic, financial and management studies, and research at the highest levels is concerned with econometrics (mathematical economic modelling) actuarial science and game theory. The thinking underpinning these programs broadly accepts “pure reason” in the form of mathematical truths behind equilibrium theory, game theory, Darwinian determinism in life forms, genome sequences, and dependent mental capacities. Assumptions underpinning texts in the fields of both business and education are indicative of this same approach. Take for instance a leading current business research methodology text: The development of the scientific method in business research lags behind similar developments in the physical sciences. Physical scientists have been more rigorous in their concepts and research procedures. They are much more advanced in their theory development than are business scientists.5 An educational theory textbook, studied by cohorts of aspiring teachers since the 1980s, insists that at best theory is “characterised by a high degree of elegance and sophistication” while education theory is “only at the early stages of formulation and thus characterised by great unevenness.”6 Both education theory and management theory therefore still suffer from a residual hankering after the certainties of physics. There is no suggestion in either of these extracts that the nature of the disciplines they describe may be fundamentally other than the physical sciences: no suggestion that as social sciences they are by nature moral, political endeavours and hence essentially relative “all the way down.” There is of course, by extension, no thought that the natural and applied sciences are necessarily themselves interpreted through particular, currently fashionable, ideological lenses. Rather than providing a counterweight that might challenge these assumptions, naturalizing strains within philosophy, psychology and cognitive science serve rather to reinforce this approach to knowledge. As always, these decontextualized normative theories exist just beyond our grasp – and yet they remain the grail that is seen as the legitimate end of knowledge. This standpoint contrasts with the educational thinking of John Dewey, who conceived as early as 1916 that modern industrial reality required an understanding of education that brought together practice and theory in an intricately interwoven whole grounded in experience. It also contrasts as radically with the thinking of Paulo Freire who warned that an education

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whose subject matter remained unexamined and politically decontextualised would serve only to reinforce the oppression of current ideas. I shall consider each of these positions briefly and attempt to reposition them within our contemporary context. Dewey held that: The advance of psychology, of industrial methods, and of the experimental method in science makes another conception of experience explicitly desirable and possible. This theory reinstates the idea of the ancients that experience is primarily practical, not cognitive – a matter of doing and undergoing the consequences of doing. But the ancient theory is transformed by realizing that doing may be directed so as to take up into its own content all that thought suggests, so as to result in securely tested knowledge. “Experience” then ceases to be empirical and becomes experimental. Reason ceases to be a remote and ideal faculty, and signifies all the resources by which activity is made fruitful in meaning. Educationally, this change denotes … a plan for studies and method of instruction [essentially humanistic and contextualised].7 This understanding, if employed in the teaching of economics and management disciplines would entail their study through real life situations enabling an immediate tempering of accepted theory with reality – strengthening, challenging or disproving theory in the context of current circumstance and experience. No transcendental truths would be admitted or sought. A Deweyan approach would therefore appear to be entirely appropriate. It may be useful to take a small real life example in order to illustrate this point. In September 2003 a colleague and I, working as educational advisors within a large modern commerce faculty in the University of Natal, South Africa, were given a batch of first-year Economics 1 assignments to mark. One assignment question concerned the effect upon the exchange rate and the balance of payments of recent (and pending) cuts in interest rates. The theory here is that investors will be less enthusiastic about the South African currency, the rand, as opposed to other countries’ currencies once the rate of return on their investment has decreased. Also, the greater liquidity in the South African economy caused by lower interest rates, and consequently greater borrowing and more business activity, will lead to inflation within the country and a consequent rise in prices. This in turn will make our exports more expensive and less attractive to foreign buyers. Both situations should lead to the depreciation of the South African rand. The students who were aware of the recent significant appreciation of the rand were more confused than those who had only read their textbooks. But a few of them, by searching the internet and studying the financial press, unearthed other interdependent variables – particularly, in this case, the weakening of the US dollar. In fact, the only way

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to teach this in order to come close to a realistic picture and hence good theory would be to look holistically at the full picture and to accept from the beginning the instability of theory. To study this kind of dynamic complexity is generally assumed to be beyond the capacity of undergraduate students. But the human mind can take in a great deal if it is interested – and the real world is an interesting place! The alternative way of teaching this can only be an oversimplification and a divorce of theory from practice and thus a distortion. The employment of “case study” methodology at postgraduate level in business schools and the prevailing curriculum approach of “Outcomes Based Education” (OBE) at school and undergraduate level, requiring the achievement of concrete outcomes in skills and knowledge and problem-solving ability, might suggest that something like a Deweyan approach does indeed prevail in current educational practice. But this would be extremely misleading. OBE was the education policy conceived in the age of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher and geared to provide the human capital necessary to achieve economic dynamism for the market economy at a time of stalling growth. It continued uneasily into the technologically driven global “New Economy” of the 1990s and into our more fraught current decade. By definition it seeks specific, preordained “outcomes,” while independent thought outside of the scenarios set within business limits is in effect discouraged. Experience in the Deweyan “experimental” sense is stifled by an understanding that there is one truth in economics, and that management theory, econometrics, and actuarial science can exist as predictive normative truth rather than highly volatile and unpredictable human endeavours. More interesting are Michael Gibbons and his co-authors’ ideas concerning The New Production of Knowledge, which distinguish current “Mode 2” trans-disciplinary, problem-solving knowledge production required by the “Knowledge Society” from older “Mode 1” disciplinary knowledge. These ideas have been applauded by educators, and they would appear to be Deweyan and “experimental”; but the catch here is the conceived generative mechanisms and ends of this knowledge production. “By contrast with traditional knowledge, which we will call Mode 1, generated within a disciplinary, primarily cognitive, context, Mode 2 knowledge is created in broader, transdisciplinary social and economic contexts.”8 This represents what the authors see as an entirely new type of socioeconomic knowledge generation, coming from and directed towards the needs of commerce and industry and not from human “cognitive” processes. (The social element within “socioeconomic” turns out to be illusory since social contexts of extreme deprivation cannot generate commercial interest. Only research generated “cognitively” can do that). This is in fact the pure theory of market determination in its initiation phase. However valuable Deweyan educational theory may be (its insights into consciousness and the linking of these to the real world making it especially

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appropriate for the teaching of advanced practical skills and economics and management theory), it is nonetheless lacking in one important dimension. Like other classical Liberal theory, it fails to sense ideology masquerading as truth, and this is particularly problematic in our current mono-polar world. While Dewey was attracted to the pragmatic and socially aware programme of the New Deal in the 1930s and thus by implication to a humanistic understanding of economics, it is unlikely that he would have approved of the essentially Marxian concepts of false consciousness being developed by thinkers like Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer (the Frankfurt School) in the same decade.9 The liberal thinker John Rawls comes close to appreciating the problem of perception in modern contexts when he warns, in his 1993 publication Political Liberalism against accepting the conclusions of science “when these are controversial” or “economic theories of general equilibrium, for instance, when these are in dispute.”10 But, despite his suspicions, he ultimately fails to acknowledge that the assumptions of neo-Darwinism in the life sciences or of deregulated financial markets in economics may be strongly influenced by political ideology. A problem therefore lies, I believe, in classical liberalism’s deep suspicion of critical thought as a tool of western Marxism (although in reality it was never an effective tool for this, as Marxism itself believed in ultimate truths that sit uneasily with individual conscious thought). Rawls missed the opportunity in the 1990s of seeing critical thought as a valuable tool of social justice and therefore of democracy, and Dewey lived in an age before the current post-Marxian late capitalism could hardly have been imagined. The conceptual tools required for assessing the possible hidden agendas in economics and business education are however available in the insights of the Brazilian educational thinker Paulo Freire’s ideas of an “education for critical consciousness.” In order to master economic and business knowledge in a way that will make it serve global society as a whole and not only particular segments of it, management education would have to be not only “experimental” – a holistic combination of theory with practice as Dewey suggests – but also politically sensitive. Critical consciousness in the Freireian sense is necessary to alert students to the additional dimension of power operating beyond immediate experience. Freire’s ideas are not however epistemologically distant from Dewey. Apart from clear parallels between Freire’s (Marxist) notion of praxis and Dewey’s integration of theory and practice, Freire’s critique of education as he found it would have found some resonance with Dewey. Take, for instance, this passage from The Pedagogy of the Oppressed: Implicit in the banking concept [Freire’s notion of impoverished teaching methods that ‘make deposits’ in students’ consciousness to be stored for future use] is the assumption of a dichotomy between human beings and

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JANE SKINNER the world ... the individual is spectator not re-creator.... It follows logically from the banking notion of consciousness that the educator’s role is to regulate the way the world “enters into” the students. The teacher’s task is to organise a process that already occurs spontaneously ... everything in this ready-to-wear approach serves to obviate thinking.11

Both Dewey and Freire therefore broadly agree that “thought has meaning when generated by action upon the world.”12 What impact might a Freirian “unveiling” of the truth have on economics teaching? Understandings of economics and therefore of appropriate economic policy interventions have gone through constant change over the last century. This implies that there can be no one independent economic “science,” and that there should logically therefore not be only one version taught. It does not, however, imply that all understandings of economics are equally valid. Some are a lot more logical, ethical and democratic than others – but it has to be remembered that overall, as John Kenneth Galbraith13 has it, “the combined result of the unknown cannot be known.” Accurate and sustained prediction in economics is logically impossible. Rather: Out of the pecuniary and political pressures of the time economics and larger economic and political systems cultivate their own version of the truth. This last has no necessary relation to reality. No one is especially at fault. What it is convenient to believe is greatly preferred.14 At present “what is convenient to believe” is narrowly focused upon monetary policy involving inflation targeting and maintaining stability through the manipulation of interest rates, but these goals take no account of the social context and the political effects which are set outside of their field of vision. The market is supposedly neutral. But Keynes’s understanding that “there is no clear evidence from experience that the investment policy that is socially advantageous coincides with that which is most profitable”15 should be taken into account by any government that is formally democratic. A government that sees itself as in any way responsible for the social welfare of its citizens would need to understand Keynes’s position when he says: “I am now somewhat sceptical of the success of a merely monetary policy directed towards influencing the rate of interest [and] I expect to see the state taking an ever greater responsibility for directly organising investment.”16 Contrary to popular belief however Keynes was not in favour of state control of industry and emphasised that his recommendation for “a somewhat comprehensive socialisation of investment” was consistent with the preservation of “a wide field for the exercise of private initiative and responsibility.”17 John Kenneth Galbraith is probably the greatest living exponent of the economic ideas of John Keynes. He explains current monetarism this way:

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Galbraith: By concentrating on the Federal Reserve, concentrating on the interest rate, and excluding everything else it excludes a lot of unwelcome state activity as having to do with the way the economy is working. You worry about unemployment, you worry about pensions, you worry about schools and you can say, “But we’ve got control of the matter of the interest rates, and we don’t have to bother about all that junk.” It’s a wonderful conservative device. Interviewer: Is that why conservatives applaud Milton Friedman? Galbraith: Absolutely. That’s one of Milton’s undoubted strengths – a wonderful concentration of economic policy on something with which you need not be immediately concerned and excluding a lot of things that cost money. And those are involved with social programs, relief, welfare, things of that sort, that you don’t want the government monkeying with. If I were a conservative I would be a devoted supporter of Alan Greenspan.18 Therefore while Dewey would suggest that no business knowledge be studied in isolation from what is really happening, Freire would suggest that students also be required to ask “whose interests does it serve?” This last question would, especially in the twenty-first century, need to encompass not only the global population beyond national interests but also future generations and the whole living planet. It would require that the limitations of current economic theory be considered ecologically as well as socially and politically. Philosophically speaking the opposition between economic time and natural time is epistemological: a basic conflict between ways of seeing and explaining the world. The key words here are reversible and irreversible. Since the time of Adam Smith standard economics textbooks have treated economic processes as inherently reversible.... Economists, including Marxist ones, [understand economic processes as] capable of reverting to “ initial conditions.” So long as supplies last the market is completely insensitive to the depletion of natural capital like fish, forests and soil. No matter how rare a good may become in absolute terms, exports will continue as long as there is anything physically left to export. Prices will not tell us about the true level of stocks or the fragility of the natural systems we depend on.19 However, if the business context is generally inimical to this kind of broad debate and critique, the overarching theoretical milieu within the academy is, if anything, even more so. “Naturalizing” assumptions of cognitive science and evolutionary psychology constitute, by implication, a more radical assault on the possibility of human agency than either Dewey or Freire could have envisaged. The scientific investigation of cognitive processes, starting from an

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assumption of physicalism and materialism, seeks to unearth the processes that replace consciousness: an essentially scientific and not a philosophical task.20 I argue elsewhere21 that this assumption puts intolerable limits on human capacities and concepts of human agency on account of its refusal to envisage that material mechanisms may support immaterial outcomes in thought and ethics. Critically conscious thought can never thrive under any form of neoPlatonism. Honed by education, it remains the essential bedrock of democracy. At present the realisation of this goal is hampered by the idea that democracy exists in tandem with markets, that markets think more effectively than people, and that biotechnology and genome sequences can encompass human consciousness.

NOTES 1. Joseph Margolis, Reinventing Pragmatism: American Philosophy at the End of the Twentieth Century (Ithica, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2002), p. 7. 2. Michael Gibbons, The New Production of Knowledge: The Dynamics of Science and Research in Contemporary Societies (Thousand Oaks, Cal.: Sage Publications, 1994). 3. Susan George, Another World is Possible If… (London: Verso, 2004), p. 5. 4. For example: George, Another World is Possible If…; Vandana Shiva, Tomorrow’s Biodiversity (London: Thames and Hudson, 2000); Harry Shutt, The Trouble with Capitalism: An Enquiry into the Causes of Global Economic Failure (London: Zed Books, 1998); Patrick Bond, Elite Transition: From Apartheid to Neoliberalism in South Africa (London: Pluto Press, 2000). 5. D. R. Cooper and P. S. Schindler, Business Research Methods (New York: McGraw Hill, 2003), p. 14. 6. L. Cohen and L. Manion, Research Methods in Education, 3rd edn. (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 78. 7. John Dewey, Democracy and Education (New York: Macmillan, 1964), p. 276. 8. Gibbons, The New Production of Knowledge, p. 1. 9. Thodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (London: Verso, 1999). 10. John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), pp. 224–225. 11. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. M. B. Ramos (New York: Continuum, 1973), pp. 56–57. 12. Ibid., p. 58. 13. John K. Galbraith, The Economics of Innocent Fraud (London: Allan Lane, 2004), p. 54. 14. Ibid., p. 10.

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15. John B. Davis, Keynes’s Philosophical Development (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 164. 16. Ibid. p. 166. 17. Ibid. pp. 165–166. 18. Interview with John K. Galbraith, “Depression Era Economics: Looking for a Remedy,” 9 February 2000, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/commandingheights/shared/ initextlo/int_johnkennethgalbraith.html#1, p. 11. 19. George, Another World is Possible If…, pp. 43–44. 20. For example, Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994); Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained (Boston: Little, Brown, 1991). 21. Jane Skinner, “Why (Education) Policy Can’t be Implemented These Days: Some Philosophical Considerations,” South African Journal of Education 30 (2003), pp. 41–56; Skinner, “Deconstructors and Reconstructors of the Pragmatist Project: An Educational Viewpoint,” Deconstruction and Reconstruction: The Central European Pragmatist Forum, Volume Two (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 2004), pp. 165–175; Skinner, “Beyond Materialism: Mental Capacity and Naturalism, A Consideration of Method,” Metaphilosophy 37 (2006), pp. 74–91.

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Part Two EDUCATION AND VALUES

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Five PRAGMATIC MORAL REALISM: EDUCATION FOR ETHICAL SERIOUSNESS Sami Pihlström

1. Introduction I want to examine the relation between two different but in my view reconcilable ways of emphasizing what might be called ethical seriousness.1 Both pragmatism, represented today by Hilary Putnam in particular, and “Wittgensteinian” moral philosophy, represented by thinkers such as D. Z. Phillips, Raimond Gaita, and Ilham Dilman, oppose all kinds of anti-realist, relativist, and skeptical views in metaethics, insisting that our moral considerations are no less objective or absolute than our factual, empirical, or scientific ones. Pragmatists and Wittgensteinian thinkers typically urge that moral considerations, though being inevitably based on what may be called a moral subject – the agent whose life or ethical integrity is at stake in a particular problematic situation – are not “merely subjective” but express, or should express, something more than sheer personal preferences. Yet ethical thinking is deeply personal in the sense of being inherently connected with some particular person’s way of understanding life, with this person’s “practical identity.”2 In a word, ethics is something both absolute (and thus, ideally, something much more serious and important than anything else the subject engages in) and ineliminably personal. It is both at the same time, and it is absolute precisely because it is personal (or vice versa). Furthermore, ethics is, for both pragmatists and Wittgensteinians, entirely “natural” for us humans – as natural as anything can be – yet irreducible to any naturalscientific picture of humanity. The historical background of the positions held by pragmatist and Wittgensteinian philosophers would of course require a much longer investigation than the one I can offer here. In the case of pragmatism, Putnam and other neopragmatists primarily appeal to such classics as William James and John Dewey; in the Wittgensteinian tradition, the central insights have naturally been taken from Wittgenstein himself, but they were transmitted to contemporary Wittgensteinians through intermediary figures like Rush Rhees and Peter Winch. I will not discuss these historical influences here. We may note, nevertheless, that Wittgenstein’s own ethical views – because of their “quietist” character – are not as easily comparable to pragmatists’ views as

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some of his followers’ positions are.3 Furthermore, it should be understood that when speaking of pragmatism or Wittgensteinian moral philosophy in general terms, I have in mind only ideal types; this should, in a more comprehensive discussion, be concretized and substantiated through more detailed references to the actual views defended, for example, by Putnam, Phillips, or Dilman.4 2. Moral Realism, Moral Anti-realism, and Pragmatism How could the pragmatist-cum-Wittgensteinian position briefly described above receive a more elaborate philosophical interpretation? I want to begin to address this question by explaining in broad strokes what the realism discussion in moral philosophy is all about, in order to define the context in which the pragmatic moral realism I hope to be able to defend emerges as a distinctive position. I cannot here discuss the sophisticated differences between different versions of moral realisms and anti-realisms (let alone related realisms and anti-realisms in general metaphysics, epistemology, and the philosophy of science).5 These groups of doctrines, which also in the case of ethics have crucial metaphysical, epistemological, and semantic components, may for our purposes be loosely characterized as follows. Moral realists of different brands share the view that there really are, in some sense, objective moral values (or norms, as the notion of value sounds too metaphysical to some realists), that is, some (natural or cultural) structures that are normatively action-guiding, independently of individual interests, beliefs, or other merely subjective states or conditions. Ethical statements are about such values, or at least purport to refer to them, and such statements are true or false independently of individual opinions (or, according to stronger realists, even independently of any human opinions). Moreover, most realists hold that at least some ethical statements are true and that, hence, it is possible to obtain moral knowledge. Contrary to moral realists, moral anti-realists deny the objectivity of action-guiding values and thereby reject the objectivity of the issues of moral deliberation. Anti-realists, again, may disagree over whether moral discourse is strictly non-cognitive and lacks truth-value, merely expressing emotions or other attitudes (emotivism, prescriptivism, and other forms of expressivism – views famously held by logical empiricists and their followers, but also by a number of contemporary metaethicists), or whether it is cognitive but contains only false statements purportedly referring to actually non-existent objective values (“error theory”) – or, in a relativist formulation, statements whose truth-values are relativized to a cultural framework, paradigm, tradition, or perspective.6 Putnam – well known for his recent pragmatist sympathies – has argued for a moderate moral realism and against sharp fact/value and science/ethics dichotomies in numerous writings since the early 1980s.7 This project has been an element of his on-going struggle with the realism issue in general

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metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of science. It appears to me that this broader discussion of realism, crucially influenced by Putnam’s contributions in the 1980s and 1990s, has gradually largely exhausted its resources. It is hard to find any novel perspective on that discussion any longer, even in terms of pragmatism. Moral realism, however, is still an interesting issue about which something significant can even today be said. The basic positions have not been explored as thoroughly as the general options regarding realism and anti-realism. Therefore, we may still learn something new by turning to Putnam’s pragmatist writings on ethics and by further developing some of his insights, as well as those of his critics. Despite Putnam’s original work, pragmatism is, unfortunately, usually ignored in recent – either naturalistically or non-naturalistically oriented – defences of moral realism. Even when pragmatism is considered in discussions of moral realism, it is often construed narrowly as a theory of the justification of moral principles in terms of their practical results. It will be one of my chief claims in the present undertaking that pragmatism ought to be seen more widely as a comprehensive framework for a successful defence of moral realism. The same applies to what I am calling “Wittgensteinianism,” which has been at least as neglected as pragmatism in the realism debate. Philosophers influenced by Wittgenstein often regard the disputes between realism and its alternatives as so deeply misguided (or nonsensical) that they seldom even use these notions in their writings, whether ethical or non-ethical. Neither Wittgenstein nor the classical figures of pragmatism, we should note, produced any specific ethical treatise that could be referred to as the magnum opus of pragmatist moral philosophy – although John Dewey, in particular, did of course address ethical and political issues in innumerable writings throughout his career.8 It seems to me that a pragmatically realist view of values and the rejection of the fact/value dichotomy runs through virtually all of the central pragmatists’ oeuvre (though not through Wittgenstein’s, at least not in the same sense). It is one of the defining features of the pragmatist tradition, from William James to Putnam, that ethical issues are no less cognitive or rationally negotiable than scientific or everyday ones, though it may, admittedly, be more difficult to find support for this view in the work of the father of pragmatism, Charles Peirce.9 We will now take a closer look at one specific (neo)pragmatist argument along these lines. 3. Putnam’s Pragmatic Argument for Moral Realism Putnam’s basic argument for the kind of moral realism or moral objectivity he favors appears to be the one labelled “companions in the guilt argument,” which is in effect a kind of “indispensability argument” (to borrow a Quinean label). Putnam points out that objective, action-guiding moral values should not – pace moral skeptics, radical relativists, and “error theorists” like Mackie

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– be regarded as “queer” objects that are hard to locate in the natural-scientific picture of the universe (a picture which most contemporary philosophers, especially analytically oriented ones, assume to be roughly correct). Were values queer in this sense, then all normative notions, including the ones we need to rely on in defending the very scientific conception of the world that Mackie and other critics of objective values regard as superior to ethics, would be equally suspect. We would have no “empirical world” at all as the object of our (scientific and non-scientific) descriptions, if we did not subscribe to the objectivity of at least some values. In order to have a coherent concept of a fact, Putnam believes, one must invoke values. The ways in which we discuss factual matters reveal and presuppose our system of value commitments; values are, in this sense, indispensable in our dealings with the world. There is, in particular, no easy way to deny the normatively action-guiding role played by the notions of rational evaluation, acceptability, warrant, justification, and so forth, and if these notions are allowed in our scientific conceptual scheme, then there is no motivation for excluding moral values – which, in any case, are not situated in any transcendent realm higher than the natural (and social) reality familiar to us but are entangled with the quite ordinary facts we find ourselves being surrounded by.10 Putnam’s general pragmatist approach is reflected in his terminology: he often speaks about “the real world” (or “life-world”) we live in and “the real language” we use, about “the way ethical arguments actually sound.”11 He draws attention to the actualities defining our practices of ethical evaluation and argues that as soon as that practical context is fully taken into account, there is no room for an artificial philosophical distinction between factual and evaluative discourse – nor, consequently, for a physicalist picture of reality that takes only scientifically established facts seriously and disregards values as “queer.” The human world is “messy,” Putnam says, and it refuses to be neatly compartmentalized into facts and values. This, apparently, is something that pragmatists have argued since James and Dewey, while the fact/value dichotomy that denies this messiness continues to be presupposed by several leading analytic philosophers. Indeed, the “messiness” which pragmatists like James and Putnam talk about helps us to distinguish pragmatist forms of moral realism from other apparently pragmatic but not really pragmatist positions. Non-pragmatist moral philosophers may ground moral realism in our ordinary practical experience (instead of trying to offer any fully conclusive theoretical proof), but if, as they claim, that moral facts are parts of the independent structure of reality, their position is not a pragmatist one, as it remains a species of metaphysical realism about morality and about the world in general. It seems that in the current realism debate in moral philosophy, only metaphysical realism and its denials (expressivism, error theory, and so on) are the chief candidates, while pragmatism and pragmatic realism are unduly neglected.

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Most importantly, for the truly pragmatic moral realist, the ethical is in no need of any external grounding or justification. As Putnam puts it, no science can teach us to make the kind of distinctions requiring “moral perception” (which is to be distinguished from any mysterious intuition); making such distinctions (for instance, between someone’s “suffering unnecessarily” and this person’s “learning to take it”) requires “a skill that, in Iris Murdoch’s words, is ‘endlessly perfectible’, and that as she also says, is interwoven with our (also endlessly perfectible) mastery of moral vocabulary itself.”12 Evaluative properties – whether epistemic or ethical – can be perceived only when one has learned to understand and to “imaginatively identify with” the relevant evaluative outlook.13 Putnam, together with Iris Murdoch (who apparently has, in addition to the pragmatists, been one of his ethical heroes since the early 1980s, at least), is thus strictly opposed to the picture in which ethics is treated as something to be justified “from outside,” be that picture evolutionary, utilitarian, or contractarian.14 All these pictures try to defend ethics in nonethical terms. The pragmatist, respecting the autonomy of ethical considerations in human life, should resist such efforts to reduce ethics to something allegedly more fundamental, to justify (or criticize) its role in human affairs by appeal to something other than ethics itself. 4. Ethical Inquiry? The kind of pragmatic moral realism briefly sketched here on the basis of Putnam’s writings is quite different from, say, Cheryl Misak’s conception of pragmatic moral realism (or cognitivism, as Misak prefers to label her view). For this cognitivism, a Peircean notion of truth as the final opinion upon which inquiry could not improve is employed, in order to make sense of the idea that moral discourse, not unlike its scientific cousin, aims at truth or is “truth-apt,” capable of accommodating a robust truth predicate, though not the strongly non-epistemic notion of truth assumed by correspondence theorists and other non-pragmatists.15 We may surely say, with Misak and other Peircean moral realists, that moral judgments can at least in some cases be true or false independently of individual preferences and opinions. To that extent, we should definitely be moral realists; likewise if we follow thinkers like Putnam (or Murdoch). The alternative would, after all, be something like expressivism, in which the truth-aptness of moral discourse is illegitimately denied, contrary to our established practices of ethical evaluation. Ethics, Misak argues, is a project in which we “try to get things right” and in which we should be responsive to experience and argument. Hence, moral beliefs do fall under the scope of “truth, knowledge, and inquiry.” There is a place for debate, criticism, and improvement in ethical inquiry, in a fallibilist spirit.16 But even if we wish to employ the truth-predicate here, it may be misleading to characterize moral thought as a kind of “inquiry” into the way

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the world (the “moral world”) is. Pace Misak (and Putnam17), I suggest that we should either remove the word “inquiry,” or at least be very careful about its interpretation in ethical contexts. In this sense, the pragmatism we may see as emerging from Putnam’s thought is of a Jamesian rather than Peircean variety. Regarding moral theory as a “code for problem-solving,”18 and in this sense as something that resembles scientific inquiry, amounts, from a Jamesian or Wittgensteinian point of view, to a banalization of morality. This is somewhat ironic, because such characterizations of ethics or moral theory are not meant to banalize the ethical. On the contrary, they are intended to “save” ethics from the anti-realist threats of non-cognitivism, error theory, and relativism. In this case, the cure may be worse than the disease. What I have in mind can be explicated through an analysis of our ordinary notion of inquiry. I believe the pragmatist ought to admit that, while in any normal inquiry the correct answers to the questions posed are in some sense supposed to lie “out there,” waiting to be discovered by the inquirers (us), this is not the case with moral questions or “moral inquiry” (if Putnam’s or the Wittgensteinians’ views are on the right track). There can be no moral knowledge resembling scientific knowledge in the sense of a correct answer to some definite question, a definite answer supposed to be given in advance, independently of the procedures by means of which we arrive at our answers (it is only that we are not aware of the right answer). This is not what morality is like, if we take a look at our ordinary moral practices. Instead, moral inquiry – if we are willing to use this term – is an investigation of one’s own life, “work on oneself,” and there usually are no pre-given answers to the questions that arise in the course of such an investigation prior to the actions that constitute one’s living of that life itself. Moral answers, and presumably even the questions to which they are answers, are, literally, constructed by us through our lives, instead of being discovered by inquirers in the way scientific facts are discovered, even though there is a sense in which we can and do end up with wrong ethical answers and wrong ways of living. Otherwise morality as we know it would hardly make sense at all. Perhaps we can, somewhat metaphorically, keep the word “inquiry” to remind us that ethics is not beyond intelligent discussion and – in Deweyan terms – experimental, active thought, conducted in a fallibilist spirit. Yet, in such a Deweyan-like view, there is no question of a reduction of ethical thought to non-ethical, purely epistemic inquiry. Nor is there any hope (nor, indeed, motivation) for reducing ethics to one single over-arching aim or interest; following Dewey, Putnam says that ethics “ultimately rests on every human interest”19 – and is thus ubiquitous, reaching each and every corner of human existence. The human interests of inquiry and problem solving are only parts of what the ethical amounts to in our lives. When Misak tells us that morality “aspires to truth,” because when debating over moral choices we try to find “the right answer” and act “as if

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there really is a truth of the matter at stake, something that we are trying to discover,”20 we may charitably read her statement as referring to the seriousness that moral disputes have in our lives, but nevertheless insist on giving up the words “something” and “discover.” There is no “something” there, awaiting discovery, in advance of our engaging in our moral considerations in the first place. There is no definite “right answer” to be discovered (or a definite right answer that we might fail to discover) independently of our working our way to, or toward, that answer in the context in which the worry arises, in the context where we are able to see it as an ethical worry of our own – a context, that is, which already reveals our being committed to moral seriousness. Acknowledging this feature of our practice of ethical consideration hardly makes us moral anti-realists, even though it does commit us to the view that morality is “in us,” our (or my) business. We can still speak of the pursuit of truth in moral affairs – at least if we are willing to connect the notion of truth more closely with individual people’s lives and their personal problems (perhaps, again, in a manner reminiscent of James’s rather than Peirce’s or Dewey’s pragmatism). Misak herself maintains that “[s]ensitivity to context and situations will be a primary feature of moral inquiry” and that the pragmatist should build “the full complexity or the full richness of our moral lives into the position at the outset.”21 My reservations with the notion of inquiry notwithstanding, there is a great deal to learn from her metaethical pragmatism, although its Peircean orientation is quite different from the one developed here on a Putnamean and Wittgensteinian basis. Similarly, to be fair to Dewey’s pragmatism and its concept of inquiry, one might argue that inquiry is a matter of transformation, change, and growth – of resolving a problematic situation – instead of discovering ready-made answers that somehow already exist prior to the inquiring process (as conceptualized by standard scientific realism, for instance). If so, inquiry might even be seen as a special version of moral deliberation; science would be modelled on the basis of ethics, rather than vice versa.22 His Deweyan and Wittgensteinian sympathies notwithstanding, Putnam himself may not be completely safe from the kind of criticism I have presented against Misak. That is, even Putnam, one might argue, preserves too strong an analogy between ethics and scientific inquiry. A Wittgensteinian critic, Ilham Dilman, brings these worries out perceptively; indeed, Dilman is one of the few recent commentators on Putnam who have directly taken up his ethical views – and one of the few Wittgensteinian moral philosophers to explicitly address the realism issue. After arguing that Putnam correctly joins Kant and Wittgenstein in attacking transcendental realism, or metaphysical realism, which erroneously pictures the language–reality relation as an external one,23 Dilman goes on to deplore Putnam’s new direction of thought, his adoption of something like “commonsense realism” as a replacement for what he used to

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call internal realism. Dilman appears to think that Putnam has been too eager to give up his early (or middle) position of the 1980s because of some realist critics’ charges of idealism. According to Dilman, no commitment to (linguistic) idealism is necessary, if one defends the internal relation between language and reality in Wittgensteinian terms, thus preserving Wittgenstein’s “Copernican Revolution.” Putnam’s new engagement with the reality of moral values might seem to be close to Dilman’s own concerns – but it is precisely here where these two thinkers diverge, precisely because Dilman refuses to see ethics as an “inquiry” in the Putnamean (pragmatist) way.24 Dilman contrasts Putnam’s inquiry-oriented view with Wittgenstein’s, as presented in the latter’s famous 1929 “Lecture on Ethics,”25 but one of the Wittgensteinian themes that emerges in his discussion is something we find in Putnam, too: as Dilman tells us, if someone does not understand the moral (or, analogously, religious) obligation, “thou shalt...,” except in prudential terms, there is nothing we can say to that person – except in moral (or religious) language itself (which, ex hypothesi, the person does not understand). That is, there is nothing further, more basic, that we can say, nothing pre- or nonethical that could persuade such a person to adopt the moral point of view.26 Dilman points out that Wittgenstein certainly rejected the kind of “objectivism” which Putnam embraces: ethical beliefs are not arrived at by objective assessment; they are held by personal commitment. Objectivity means neutrality and detachment. An objective person is committed to truth, certainly, and to doing justice to what he is considering. But for this very reason he has to keep detached from what he is considering. What he considers and judges, namely the object of his considerations, exists or holds independently of him, of where he stands as a person. This is not so in the case of ethics for Wittgenstein.27 Dilman’s careful juxtaposition of Putnam’s and Wittgenstein’s views may not be entirely fair to Putnam – even though I do agree that Putnam at least occasionally too strongly emphasizes the analogy between ethical thought and objective, knowledge-seeking inquiry such as science. I doubt that Putnam would ever deny the need to commit oneself, personally, to whatever one finds among one’s ethical beliefs. Realism in ethics, in the pragmatist sense that Putnam (not unproblematically) has tried to articulate and I am trying to explicate here, is not, or should not be, incompatible with personal sincerity. Moral values, or whatever one is ethically (personally) committed to, can be thought of as “real” within the human world (Dilman’s words), but because of the distinctive character of this ethical dimension of reality, no metaphysicallyrealist “independence” need or can be invoked here. The pragmatic moral realist can hold that moral values and duties are personally real, objective to some extent (that is, not subjective or “relative” in any easy way), though of course not objective in the sense in which sticks and stones and electrons are “objective.” Through this kind of example, we may end up viewing the notion

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of objectivity itself as a Wittgensteinian “family resemblance” notion. There is no essence of objectivity uniting the objectivity of electrons and the objectivity of values. The pragmatist can easily accommodate such a pragmatic pluralism about the ways in which things are “real” or “objective” in an anti-reductionist world-picture, and it seems to me that Putnam has, pace Dilman, done us a service in articulating such a form of pragmatism in a penetrating manner. The same can, in fairness, be said in defence of Misak, who denies that a cognitivist view of moral deliberation as an experience- and reason-driven inquiry blurs the distinction between ethics and science, or their distinctive aims.28 True, Dilman is right to point out that mere objective existence in the sense of existence “independently of the individual” is not enough for the reality of moral values qua moral:29 such values must be experienced as personally demanding, as real for the person in question (for me), in order for them to be genuinely moral. Moral reality is, in this sense, personal and absolute. For these reasons, Dilman opposes Putnam’s “ethical realism” or “moral objectivism,” as well as Putnam’s conception of the entanglement of fact and value, or science and ethics.30 However, entanglement is not identity. If one claims, with Putnam, that ethical evaluation is entangled with or inseparable from (scientific, objective) description of facts, one is not thereby committed to the absurd claim that there is no difference whatsoever between evaluating things morally and describing (scientifically) what is and what is not the case. Putnam himself repeatedly stresses that rejecting the fact/value dichotomy is not the same thing as rejecting the corresponding distinction. While he may sometimes go too far in his comparison of ethics and science, the pragmatic moral realist need not do so. The “personal dimension of morality,” as emphasized by Dilman, must be maintained, however realistic one is about “moral reality.” 5. Conclusion: Moral Problems as Personal Problems This brings us to a concluding note on Wittgensteinian views on ethics. The idea that there is nothing non-ethical that could, even in principle, “ground” the ethical, an idea we find in Putnam and Dilman, has been an important theme in the Wittgensteinian tradition in recent moral philosophy. The Wittgensteinians’ approach can perhaps be interpreted not merely as a view close to pragmatism but, even primarily, as an instance of quasi-Kantian transcendental reflection, with a kind of moral realism as the emerging result (parallel to the empirical realism Kant is able to defend on the grounds of his transcendental idealism): our being able to hold any genuinely ethical views on anything – or, presumably, any views whatsoever – or to make any genuinely moral choices in our lives – or, again, any choices, since all of our choices have an ethical dimension – necessarily requires that certain ethical views are held by us, personally, as absolutely correct, that is, not as mere opinions, subjective

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attitudes, or beliefs relative to a person or a community.31 “Realism” here emerges from a full realization of what morality means “from within,” as a human creation, in human lives and practices. The Wittgensteinian move in contemporary moral philosophy is to maintain that “moral viewpoints determine what is and what is not to count as a relevant fact in reaching a moral decision.”32 The facts to be taken into account in the evaluation of any given ethically relevant situation (that is, any human situation) are partly constituted by the moral viewpoint we have personally adopted and by the language we speak (expressing that standpoint). Wittgensteinian ethical thought, precisely like pragmatism, highlights the idea that personally relevant moral conclusions cannot be dictated by general (reductive) ethical theories. Nevertheless, the various theories that have been presented in the history of moral philosophy may constitute a part of the background that plays its role in defining the ethically problematic situations we find ourselves in. One of the major open issues in both pragmatism and Wittgensteinian moral philosophy is, precisely, the extent to which an ethical theory can be developed, while remaining sensitive to the ordinary human experiences of personal ethical commitment from which any ethical reflection should begin.

NOTES 1. This paper, based on my presentation at the 3rd Central European Pragmatist Forum in Potsdam, June 2004, summarizes some of the central ideas more thoroughly examined in chapters 1 and 2 of Pihlström, Pragmatic Moral Realism (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005). I am grateful to the participants of the Potsdam conference for stimulating comments and criticism. 2. The notion of practical identity is employed, for example, by Christine M. Korsgaard in The Sources of Normativity (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 3. For a lucid comparison between James and Wittgenstein, see Russell B. Goodman, Wittgenstein and William James (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 4. This is something I try to do in Pragmatic Moral Realism. 5. For classifications of certain key forms of realism, see Ilkka Niiniluoto, Critical Scientific Realism (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), as well as Sami Pihlström, Structuring the World: The Issue of Realism and the Nature of Ontological Problems in Classical and Contemporary Pragmatism (Helsinki: The Philosophical Society of Finland, 1996). 6. For more details, see the essays in Essays in Moral Realism, ed. Geoffrey Sayre-McCord (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988), especially the editor’s introduction; also see Michael Smith, The Moral Problem (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2000), and Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity. The classical presentation of the

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error theory is J. L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1981). 7. See Hilary Putnam, Reason, Truth and History (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Realism with a Human Face, ed. James Conant (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990); The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002); and Ethics without Ontology (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004). 8. For a basic exposition of the place of morality in human conduct, see John Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct: An Introduction to Social Psychology (New York: The Modern Library, 1922); for Dewey’s rejection of the fact/value dichotomy and the corresponding distinction between scientific and “emotive” language, see Dewey, Theory of Valuation (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1939), pp. 64–66; for his views on the possibility of “moral knowledge,” see John Dewey and James H. Tufts, Ethics, rev. edn. (New York: Henry Holt, 1932), chapter 14. For historical discussions of the classical pragmatists’ ethical and political idea(l)s, and for the continuing social and political relevance of pragmatism, see the dozens of essays collected in the two previous proceedings volumes of the Central European Pragmatist Forum, as well as Putnam, Ethics without Ontology. 9. See, however, Cheryl Misak’s reading of Peirce as a moral cognitivist in Misak, Truth and the End of Inquiry, rev. edn. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), chapter 5. 10. For Putnam’s ways of developing this line of argument, see his works mentioned in note 7 above, and see also the discussion in Pihlström, Pragmatic Moral Realism, chapter 1. 11. Putnam, Reason, Truth and History, p. 139; Realism with a Human Face, pp. 166–167. 12. Putnam, The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy, p. 128. 13. Putnam, Ethics without Ontology, p. 69. 14. Putnam, The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy, p. 131. 15. See Misak, Truth and the End of Inquiry, as well as Misak, Truth, Politics, Morality: Pragmatism and Deliberation (London and New York: Routledge, 2000). 16. Misak, Truth and the End of Inquiry, pp. 170–173, 182. 17. Putnam, The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy, pp. 103–110. 18. Misak, Truth, Politics, Morality, p. 54. 19. Putnam, Ethics without Ontology, p. 5; see also p. 10. 20. Misak, Truth, Politics, Morality, p. 86. 21. Ibid., pp. 98, 129. 22. I am grateful to Vincent Colapietro, Michael Eldridge, and Larry Hickman for raising this issue. 23. Ilham Dilman, Wittgenstein’s Copernican Revolution: The Question of Linguistic Idealism (New York: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 152–153, 165. 24. Ibid., chapter 9. 25. See ibid., pp. 176 ff. 26. Ibid., p. 181. 27. Ibid., p. 186; see also pp. 189 ff. 28. See Misak, Truth and the End of Inquiry, especially p. 191. 29. Dilman, Wittgenstein’s Copernican Revolution, pp. 193, 218.

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30. Ibid., pp. 199 ff. 31. See Sami Pihlström, Naturalizing the Transcendental: A Pragmatic View (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2003), especially chapter 7, and Pihlström, Pragmatic Moral Realism. 32. D. Z. Phillips, Interventions in Ethics (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), p. 8.

Six JOHN DEWEY’S POST-TRADITIONAL NOTION OF COMMUNITY Dirk Jörke

In John Dewey’s major work in the field of political theory, The Public and Its Problems, the author searches for the “great community” as an answer to the decline of the public in the era of industrialization. As reasons for this degradation of public life in the United States, he points to the increase of mobility, the additional emerging of the mass media, and the resultant decline in political communication. Dewey argues that through these changes there is, on the one hand, a tendency of modernity itself to further accelerate by destroying old habits and previous patterns of thinking. On the other hand, paradoxically, there is a tendency for most people to hold on to these old modes of thinking, to hold on to old-fashioned convictions and norms. These convictions and norms, however, cannot deliver guidance in a rapidly changing world. It is exactly the combination of these two tendencies that is the cause of the decline of democracy. “Conditions have changed, but every aspect of life, from religion and education to property and trade, shows that nothing approaching a transformation has taken place in ideas and ideals.”1 This, in short, is Dewey’s diagnosis of the eclipse of the public. But what is his suggested response? In The Public and Its Problems, Dewey argues for a combination of a democratic-epistemological reform of political action and a renewal of local forms of community, which he considers as the basic cells of democracy. Together they should contribute to the transformation of the “great society” into the “great community.” The reader who expects a catalog of concrete measures for this transformation, however, will be disappointed. Dewey gives us only the hint that “democracy must begin at home, and its home is the neighborly community.”2 How these modes of interacting are to be revitalized in a modern industrial society, he does not say. And he does not demonstrate why he believes this kind of medicine could help. It is a little bit old fashioned to appeal to the family and the neighborhood for a revitalization of the democratic life – especially if you consider the decline of traditional ways of living as he does. Further, why should we believe that in these small communities people will trust each other? There are many occasions for conflict and even hatred, particularly when people know each other well. But Dewey seems to ignore these negative dimensions of small communities. It is at this point of his argument where we can find a romantic notion of community and morality, which I would like to call a “communitarian”

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one. However, it is exactly this kind of romanticism, to which Dewey reacts very critically in other parts of The Public and Its Problems. How can we explain this tension, if not to say contradiction? There are two notions of community and also of morality in the works of Dewey. One is the communitarian one I mentioned earlier. In the first section I will give a rather short overview of it. But there is still another notion, namely, some kind of a post-traditional conception of community and morality. This one goes beyond the communitarian approach, and also beyond the liberal emphasizes of individuality. Therefore, Dewey can provide us with a version of community which is able (on the normative level) to dissolve some of the main problems of the recent liberal-communitarian debate. I conclude with some observations on the educational implications of this post-traditional conception. 1. The Communitarian Model To begin, let me make a few remarks on Dewey’s more traditional notion of community. At the beginning of Dewey’s philosophical career he was influenced by the neo-Hegelian thought of T. H. Green and F. H. Bradley. For them, there exists a universal consciousness, or god, which guarantees the order of things and also bridges the troublesome dualisms of human life such as those between nature and culture, subject and object as well as the dualism between the community and the individual. Therefore, one of the main features of neo-Hegelianism is the conviction that there is an ultimate harmony between both, that there are no irresolvable conflicts between the community and the individual. You cannot think of the individual without thinking of the community to which he or she belongs. The individual is a part of it, insofar as his beliefs, habits, and values are formed by the customs of the community. According to this view, the community is prior to the person because, without the shared values and common practices, the life of the individual could not flourish. It would simply not be a human life in its complete sense. The young Dewey adopted this kind of thought. And he also adopted from Green and Bradley an ethics of self-realization. For them, the good life consists in actions that can promote our self-realization. And our self-realization is best served when we are promoting the basic values of our community. For example, in his Outlines of a Critical Theory of Ethics (1891), Dewey writes: “In the realization of individuality there is found also the needed realization of some community of persons of which the individual is a member; and, conversely, the agent who duly satisfies the community in which he shares, by the same conduct satisfies himself.”3 This is a strong communitarian statement. If the individual can exist only as a member of the community, there is a need for cultivating these communities even if they suppress the life of some of their members. I do not want to repeat

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here the critique of this priority. Let me just say that I agree with most of the liberal arguments except for one: I think the communitarians rightly emphasize the necessity of some shared values in a democratic society. Without such values, there is or would be a decline of the public life. Thus we have to look for a conception that will be beyond the lines of both communitarianism and liberalism. How can Dewey help us? Dewey broke with most of his neo-Hegelianism by the beginning of the twentieth century, formulating the main features of his naturalistic or pragmatic philosophy. However, his neo-Hegelian notion of community did not completely end at that time. We can find traces of it in the middle period of his works and also in his later writings. Dewey writes, for example, in the first edition of his Ethics (1908), that “we cannot separate the idea of ourselves and of our own good from our idea of others and of their good.”4 In The Public and Its Problems he gives us a highly enthusiastic view of the idea of community, namely that community is the same as democracy: “Regarded as an idea, democracy is not an alternative to other principles of associated life. It is the idea of community life itself.” And on the next page he says: “Wherever there is a conjoint activity whose consequences are appreciated as good by all singular persons who take part in it, and where the realization of the good is such as to effect an energetic desire and effort to sustain it in being just because it is a good shared by all, there is in so far a community.”5 Even in Freedom and Culture (1939), there is still this communitarian approach: “for a number of persons to form anything that can be called a community in its pregnant sense there must be values prized in common.”6 The trouble with this model is simply that it no longer works. As we know from our own experience, in pluralistic societies these “values prized in common” no longer exist. In fact, there is a high diversity of values and modern societies have to deal with this reality. Yet, we also know that it is exactly this kind of diversity that is one of the biggest challenges for democratic societies. On this point the communitarians, as already mentioned, are right: If we do not want a further decline of public life, we need some shared “basic principles” or a sense of commitment. Therefore, we have to search for a concept of morality or “Sittlichkeit” which, on the one hand, is strong enough to bind the people of a democratic society together, but which, on the other, also requires no strong commitments to any particular communities and values. This challenge is certainly not new. And we can find many different approaches to solve this democratic dilemma in recent literature. There is for example Stephen Macedo’s “ethical liberalism,” or the approach of Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson in Democracy and Disagreement, where they argue for some kind of a “substantive liberalism.”7 But this is not the place to discuss theses theories. Rather, I will demonstrate in the next section that we can find in the later works of Dewey, in addition to his communitarian approach, a concept of “Sittlichkeit” which can give us an answer to the “democratic dilemma.”

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In this section I will focus on two majors works of the later Dewey, namely Human Nature and Conduct (1922) and the second edition of Ethics (1932). Taken together, these works provide us with a post-traditional notion of “Sittlichkeit” and thus a kind of an ethical or reflective liberalism. At the beginning of Ethics, Dewey draws a sharp distinction between a conventional notion of morality and a “reflective” morality. The “reflective morality” differs from the former in its criticism of strict regulations of the social life and in its approval of reflective methods in the handling of conflicts. This “reflective morality” no longer searches for eternal and unchangeable values, but instead reconstructs its values again and again in the confrontation with “problematic situations.” “The difference between customary and reflective morality is precisely that definite precepts, rules, definitive injunctions and prohibitions issue from the former, while they cannot from the later.”8 In modern times, a theory of morality can inform us as to how to confront an ethical conflict in a more intelligent way; but it cannot offer us a precise answer to the “problematic situation.” As Dewey states, “[I]t does not offer a table of commandments in a catechism in which answers are as definite as are the questions which are asked. It can render personal choice more intelligent, but it cannot take the place of personal decision, which must be made in every case of moral perplexity.”9 This conception is very similar to a post-conventional or proceduralistic notion of morality.10 There is an explicit refusal of substantive values and there is also a plea for a change of our attitudes when we are confronted by ethical questions. In short, our attitudes or habits have to become more “intelligent.” I will turn shortly to see what this means for Dewey. Before considering this question, however, I would like to consider briefly another aspect of his later thinking on community and morality. It is not only this post-conventional theory of morality which makes a difference to Dewey’s communitarian approach. In the second edition of his Ethics, there is also a new approach concerning the relationship between the individual and the community. As mentioned, in his early writings Dewey had held that there is some kind of harmony between both. We can find this neoHegelian model even in the first edition of the Ethics, but now things are somewhat different. Although he is still far away from claiming a fundamental conflict between the individual and the community, as some liberals do, he now distances himself from the notion of society as an organism, where everything fits to everything. Now he acknowledges that there are conflicts in modern societies that could arise anywhere. Dewey interprets these social conflicts as “problematic situations”; this is a situation within a particular context and with concrete problems rather than a fundamental or universal conflict, like the conflict between labor and capital, or between male and female. And it is precisely for this reason

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that we can solve these “problematic situations” if and only if we have adequate habits. If we are trained in dealing with these problematic situations in an “intelligent way,” Dewey argues, there is not only the chance to solve them but also the opportunity for individual and social growth. What does this mean? We have to look at Dewey’s socio-psychological writing in Human Nature and Conduct to get an answer to this question. In this work he distinguishes three categories for analyzing human behavior: habit, impulse, and intelligence. Let me begin with his notion of “impulse.” It is a bundle of out-going energies which are in the beginning without a specialized goal. Human beings develop these goals little by little through the processes of socialization and education. These processes form the typical habits of a human. Without those habits human beings could not exist, and therefore habits are fundamental to our interaction with the world. There is also some kind of circle between these socially formed habits and the customs of the community into which a child is born. The child incorporates the values of its family and the values of a particular society through the forming of his habits in the process of socialization. And through these habits the customs of the community, its practices and values, are being reproduced. At this point Dewey argues, however, that besides all the socialization there exists in most human beings a remainder of unformed impulses, namely the ‘I’ as George Herbert Mead describes it, in contrast to the socially formed ‘me.’ It is this part of the self which leads to social conflicts, to “problematic situations.” The ‘I’ challenges the social customs. For example, imagine a young man whose name is Bob. Bob feels attracted to other young men. He is seventeen years old and is still living in the house of his parents in a small town. The parents and also the neighborhood are conservative. Thus there is a “problematic situation.” Initially, the conflict is only in Bob’s mind; he is torn between his loyalty to his parents and his desires. Maybe he becomes depressed. But there is also the opportunity to “come out.” Then there is another kind of “problematic situation,” that is a social conflict. It is a conflict between his wishes and the values and even the feelings of his parents. Perhaps the young man would like to run away from home to a place where the people are more tolerant. Perhaps Bob will never see his parents again. That would be a rather bad outcome and in some way there is still a “problematic situation.” But possibly there will be a different outcome. Perhaps the parents are able to detach themselves from the values of their social environment and to understand their son; maybe they can even come to the conclusion that some of their values have been based on old-fashioned customs. Then they could challenge these customs and accept Bob’s feelings. The “problematic situation” would then be resolved. What is this example about? It is about acting in a customary way as opposed to acting in an “intelligent” way. It is therefore about Dewey’s notion of “intelligence” and also about his notion of “growth.” “Intelligence” for Dewey is not the same as reason. “Intelligence” is only a method, an instrument to solve

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“problematic situations.” It is a willingness to see things from another point of view, to try new ways of acting, to imagine new customs and institutions. It is, in short, the logic of inquiry. Dewey also describes this as the “scientific method.” This description may be a little bit misleading, because he is not calling for the application of the methods of the natural sciences to human relations or for social engineering. He is arguing, rather, for the development of more intelligent habits, which he finds during his lifetime mostly epitomized in the natural sciences. These intelligent habits are those of an open mind, the willingness to take the view of the other and the willingness to change some features of the “problematic situation” to make things different. In Human Nature and Conduct, Dewey argues further that this attitude has to become part of the habits of men: “What is necessary is that habits be formed which are more intelligent, more sensitively percipient, more informed with foresight, more aware of what they are about, more direct and sincere, more flexibly responsive than those now current.”11 These intelligent or reflective habits are necessary if we want to live in a democratic society, that is, in a society in which there is the opportunity for each member for individual self-realization and growth. It is exactly this notion of intelligent habits, which is beyond Dewey’s conception of a “reflective morality” in the second edition of Ethics. As we have seen “reflective morality” is more an ensemble of attitudes than a catechism of norms. In Dewey’s words: The alternative method may be called experimental. It implies that reflective morality demands observation of particular situations, rather than fixed adherence to a priori principles; that free inquiry and freedom of publication and discussion must be encouraged and not merely grudgingly tolerated; that opportunity at different times and places must be given for trying different measures so that their effects may be capable of observation and of comparison with one another. It is, in short, the method of democracy, of a positive toleration which amounts to sympathetic regard for the intelligence and personality of others, even if they hold views opposed to ours, and of scientific inquiry into facts and testing of ideas.12 Now we have the crucial connection among Dewey’s social psychological assumptions, his theory of inquiry and his democratic theory. The link between them is a post-traditional notion of “Sittlichkeit,” as I want to call it. The sources of morality are therefore no longer unchangeable norms or a substantial identity, but come from the members of a democratic society expecting from each other the recognition of diversity. For Dewey, the virtues of a truly democratic citizen are those of openness, a willingness to change and an appraisal of difference. It is especially the last, the appraisal of difference, which puts Dewey’s conception

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both beyond the liberal notion of tolerance and the communitarian traditional notion of community: “To cooperate by giving differences a chance to show themselves because of the belief that the expression of difference is not only a right of the other person but is a means of enriching one’s own life-experience, is inherent in the democratic personal way of life.”13 Therefore, Dewey’s conception is on the one hand more demanding than the liberal one, insofar as he is arguing for a form of appreciation of otherness which is far beyond passive tolerance. It provides us with a notion of “Sittlichkeit” which can bind the citizens of a democratic society together, without neglecting their differences. Concerning the communitarian agenda, on the other hand, Dewey’s post-traditional conception is both weaker and stronger. It is weaker insofar as he is not demanding shared values in a substantial sense, and in this way his conception is more realistic concerning the “fact of pluralism” in modern societies. But it is much stronger in so far as the recognition and even the appraisal of differences overstretch the capabilities and virtues of most people. I have shown that we can find some kind of a post-traditional form of community or “Sittlichkeit” in Dewey’s later works. Besides the communitarian approach of his early writings, and even besides a communitarian reading of his more mature work, there are several hints towards a “post-traditional” and even “multiculturalist” conception which I have tried to lay out in this section. So far, however, I have not dealt with the troubling question of the likelihood of the realization of this approach. Dewey’s conception is far from the reality of modern societies in general and the virtues of ordinary people in particular. There exists only a small amount of respect for difference in most democracies, and even this amount has been declining in the last decades. Take for example the rise of xenophobia in most modern societies. Or take the ethnically motivated crimes against humanity in the former Yugoslavia. Therefore, the question is how can we bridge this gap between Dewey’s post-traditional reformulation of “Sittlichkeit” and the “real world”? In the next section, I want to deal with Dewey’s own answer to this challenge. It is an answer that is, as I will argue, still relevant. 3. Education for Democracy Dewey wrote extensively on education. Besides Democracy and Education, which he himself considered as his most important book, there are a large number of articles, essays and statements on pedagogical questions. He also founded the Laboratory School, known worldwide as the “Dewey School,” and for a long period of time he was also one of the leading pedagogical reformers in the world. It is therefore not an exaggeration to say that education is the central theme of his theory and also of his political engagement. Dewey’s philosophy of education has often been misunderstood. Primarily, it has been wrongly equated with an anti-authoritarian conception of education that

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focuses only on the wishes of the pupil. First of all, this is a misunderstanding in so far as it is at odds with Dewey’s notion of experience, for which the interaction of active and passive elements, of doing and undergoing, is crucial. And this is also part of the experience of education. Education is not only doing but also undergoing; it is, across the board, an interaction between student and teacher. Therefore, Dewey does not deny that the teacher has to guide the pupil if the process of education is to be successful. But what is the goal of education? To put it in Dewey’s words: “Since in reality there is nothing to which growth is relative save more growth, there is nothing to which education is subordinate save more education.”14 However, the goal of education is not to gain as much knowledge as possible. Education is, rather, more a matter of getting used to certain habits of handling “problematic situations.” The end is to become skilled in solving “problematic situations.” Thus, the purpose of education is the development of the kinds of intelligent or reflective habits which are the conditions of dealing with “problematic situations” in an intelligent way, through which we are able to enrich our experiences and grow. Dewey therefore argues for a method of education that provides the pupils with the habit of openness, that is to say an experimental attitude towards the problems of every day life. What is the connection of democracy and education? For Dewey, democracy has two meanings. First of all it is a way of life, a way of acting together in all social realms. It is the idea of a social democracy as the precondition for the selfrealization of the individual. For Dewey the growth of the personality of each member of the society depends on the structure of the social spheres to which he belongs. And the more democratic they are, the more there is the opportunity of individual growth. “To learn to be human is to develop through the give-and-take of communication an effective sense of being an individually distinctive member of a community.”15 In so far as all social spheres are relevant for the process of self-realization, this meaning of democracy is related to the whole society and it is therefore more than the process of the political decision-making. The second meaning of democracy is political in the traditional sense. It is a form of acting together for reaching collective ends or for solving collective problems. In this sense, “democracy” is a means which is directed towards the realization of the “great community”: “The political and governmental phase of democracy is a means, the best means so far found, for realizing ends that lie in the wide domain of human relationships and the development of human personality.”16 Both concepts are closely related to Dewey’s fundamental idea or ideal of growth. And there is an interaction of both meanings of democracy that can be reconstructed as an interaction of ends and means. You can distinguish them only in an analytical sense. For that reason, it is crucial to see that for Dewey the purpose of the school and also of the kindergarten is to prepare the children for a democratic way of life as well as for an intelligent way of solving “problematic situations.”

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In “The Challenge of Democracy to Education,” Dewey says: “Education must have a tendency, if it is education, to form attitudes. The tendency to form attitudes which will express themselves in intelligent social action is something very different from indoctrination.”17 But it is not the only task of the school to form these “experimental” or “scientific” habits. It also has to provide the children with a sense for the fruits of cooperation as a means for solving problems and as an end by itself. Therefore, “these pupils must be prepared to be members of communities, recognizing the ties that bind them to all the other members of the community.”18 The purpose of education is thus both the training of intelligent habits and the creation of some sense of community. However, it would be going backwards if Dewey understood “community” here in a substantial way; instead, he had to search for a “post-traditional” notion of community even in his educational writings. And indeed he does, especially in his reflections on the multiculturalist challenge of education and democracy. Multiculturalism has been one of the most important topics in political theory in the recent years. Nevertheless, there was a similar discussion in the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century. One of the most prominent critics of the ideology of the “melting pot” was Horace Kallen. But we can find a quite similar criticism of the politics of assimilation, and also a plea for rights of ethnic groups, in some writings of Dewey. For example, Dewey says: “If there is to be lasting peace there must be a recognition of the cultural rights and privileges of each nationality, its right to its own language, its own literature ... and such political autonomy as may be consistent with maintenance of general social unity.”19 But how can these fit together, the acknowledgment of difference on the on hand, and the need for some “general social unity” on the other? For Dewey it is the school, where children with different ethnic and even social backgrounds should act together and thus become aware of the fruits of cooperation. A prerequisite for such cooperation is some kind of mutual respect and the recognition of the worth of each group. To get to this point we need a multicultural curriculum, that is, a curriculum in which the merits and contributions of each ethnic group are emphasized: “We need a curriculum in history, literature, and geography which will make the different racial elements in this country aware of what each has contributed and will created a mental attitude towards other people which will make it more difficult for the flames of hatred and suspicion to sweep over this country in the future.”20 But Dewey does not argue for multilingual instruction. On the contrary, he pleads for English as the main language in the classroom. This is problematic, because in learning a language you also learn the social norms, which are included in practicing a particular language. While Dewey is well aware of this difficulty, he is also convinced that in a democratic society there is a need for a common language; otherwise there would be no opportunity for acting together. You can also see this insistence on a common language and the goal that is

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behind this, namely to unite the pupils while respecting their differences, in his arguing for mixed classes: “[I]t is the office of the school environment to balance the various elements in the social environment and to see to it that each individual gets an opportunity to escape from the limitations of the social group in which he was born, and to come into living contact with a broader environment.”21 Dewey wants to bring these pupils together without subjecting them to the substantial norms of one dominant group. Rather, they should get a sense of the values of cooperation through social and ethnic boundaries and learn “to transform passive toleration into active cooperation,” as Dewey writes in “The Basic Values and Loyalties of Democracy.”22 Students should be encouraged to interact cooperatively with one another regardless of community membership in order to develop reflective values. These shared “reflective values” are those feelings and competences which are necessary for a democratic society to flourish, when values such as a common history or a shared religion no longer exist substantially. Concerning the decline of the public life in recent decades and the increase of the new media, which are for the most part non-interactive forms of communication, the school is the privileged institution of the education for democracy in a multicultural society. Dewey’s insistence on education as the base of a truly democratic culture has become therefore one of the most challenging theories to contemporary societies.

NOTES 1. John Dewey, The Later Works of John Dewey, vol. 2, ed. Jo Ann Boydston ((Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984), p. 142. Hereafter references to the Collected Works of John Dewey are indicated by EW (The Early Works), MW (The Middle Works), or LW (The Later Works), followed by volume and page numbers. 2. LW 2: 213. 3. EW 3: 322. 4. MW 5: 268. 5. LW 2: 148 f. 6. LW 13: 71. 7. See Stephen Macedo, Liberal Virtues: Citizenship, Virtue, and Community in Liberal Constitutionalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), and Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, Democracy and Disagreement (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996). 8. LW 7: 165. 9. LW 7: 166. 10. But this similarity to a proceduralistic approach does not mean that Dewey is now arguing for a Kantian concept of morality. For Dewey ethical questions are still related to the self-realization of the individual. It is a conflict between different goals, which cannot be realized at the same time, or between an end of the individual and the

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means of the situation: “The struggle is not between a good which is clear to him and something else which attracts him but he knows to be wrong. It is between values each of which is undoubted good in its place but which now get in each other’s way. He is forced to reflect in order to come to a decision.” (LW 7: 125). Therefore the ethical conflict according to Dewey is not between some particular wishes of the agent and a universal notion of the (Kantian) right, between inclination and obligation. Compare Axel Honneth, “Zwischen Prozeduralismus und Teleologie: Ein Ungelöster Konflikt in der Moraltheorie von John Dewey,” in Philosophie der Demokratie: Beiträge zum Werk von John Dewey, ed. Hans Joas (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000), pp. 116–138, and Jennifer Welchman, Dewey’s Ethical Thought (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1995). 11. MW 14: 90. 12. LW 7: 329. 13. LW 14: 228. 14. MW 9: 56. 15. LW 2: 154. 16. LW 11: 217. 17. LW 11: 189. 18. MW 15: 158. 19. MW 10: 289. 20. MW 15: 155. 21. MW 9: 24 f. 22. LW 14: 277.

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Seven ART AS EDUCATION: CONSTRUCTIVISM AND INSTRUMENTALISM Lyubov Bugaeva

The same laws of economy and material limitation should govern the production of a ship, a house, a poem, or a pair of boots (Alexander Rodchenko). Where ends and means interpenetrate and inform one another, however, the application of techne, or productive skill, in the arts leads to enriched experience, whether the art product be a painting or a pair of shoes (Larry Hickman on John Dewey).

The thing, or the object, which is one of the principal philosophical categories originating in classical Greek philosophy, underwent its next interpretive transformation in the Pragmatism in the 1920s and finds itself at the center of attention in the art of Constructivism. A close look at the object in these two independent and dissimilar modes of conceptualizing the world discloses a strong parallel. 1. Philosophy of Object: Constructivism In 1922 in Berlin Ilya Erenburg and El Lissitzky (Lisickij), ideologists of Constructivist art, founded the journal Veshch (Vešþ’) / Gegenstand / Objet (Object, or Thing), notable for its short period of existence (the first doubled volume was published at the beginning of 1922; the third and the last volume, in the middle of 1922), and for its universal character, in that the journal’s content reflects a broad spectrum of innovative ideas in various fields and spheres of art. The introductory article of the first issue connects the emergence of the journal with “exchange of practical knowledge, realizations, and ‘objects’ between young Russian and West European artists.” The object in this declaration is at the same time a link, “a meeting point” between Russia and the West, and a symbol of the beginning of a new, creative, epoch.1 The fundamental characteristic of contemporary life is seen as the prevalence of the constructive method.

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LYUBOV BUGAEVA We find it [the constructive method] just as much in the new economics and the development of industry as in the psychology of our contemporaries in the world of art...2 We have called our review Vešþ’ (Object) because for us art means the creation of new ‘objects’. That explains the attraction that realism, weightiness, volume, and the earth itself hold for us.3

By ‘objects’ the founders of the journal meant not functional and primitive utilitarian objects of everyday life but objects of art. From the point of view of Lissitzky and Erenburg, “every organized piece of work – whether it be a house, a poem, or a picture – is an ‘object’ directed toward a particular end, which is calculated not to turn people away from life, but to summon them to make their contribution toward life’s organization.”4 Then the goal of art is the revelation of objects, which is actually the revelation of life’s mystery and the sense of life. The authors of the journal Veshch created a syncretic artistic ideology institutionalized in the conception of Constructivist art. Although Constructivism (the Russian Konstruktivizm) was already initiated in 1913 with the abstract geometric constructions of Vladimir Tatlin and articulated in 1920 in the Realist Manifesto by Vladimir Tatlin, Antoine Pevsner, and Naum Gabo, the Constructivism of Veshch stands out as a special trend within Constructivism in general, as it was theoretically the one most thoroughly developed. The first issue of the journal Veshch presented the editor’s program and stated the basic propositions of the concept of “object” in Constructivist art. Schematically they amount to the following tenets. A. Usefulness Franc Hellens, a Belgian writer, connects usefulness with technological development. For Hellens “literary language evolves together with the spirit of the age, which is itself subject to the influence of economic and social evolution.”5 The realistic present of mechanical simplification finds its match in refinement, preciseness, and usefulness. Hellens advises artists, writers and film directors, in particular, to read technical books to find inspiration there and then to draw attention in their works “to what is positively ‘useful’, exclusively necessary, to things that produce movement, to dynamic force.”6 B. Existence of a project Franc Hellens compares a motorcar with an old cart. According to Hellens, the former is marvelous and affects us by the inner beauty of its engineering; “the key to its style is simplicity of line and the absence of arabesque and ornamentation.”7 The principal idea of the Constructivist artists as articulated by Hellens is the ideal construction made of geometrically correct elements.

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The conception of mathematically calculated harmony based on a rational foundation brings Constructivists very close to social and political utopianism since both look forward to the project of an ideal future. Constructivism as well as utopianism strives for an explication of the principles of the object’s construction that then lead to the inner parallelism of various spheres of art. The conception of Constructivist art presented by the journal Veshch has a number of intersecting points with the conception of art generated by the participants of the Dutch movement De Stijl. Some of the Veshch contributors, including Theo van Doesburg, a Dutch architect and designer and the founder of the De Stijl journal, took part in the movement De Stijl. Constructivists replace the notion of “style” with the notion of a construction that serves as the foundation for the object and for society in general. The word stijl also has another meaning: a ‘post, jamb or support’. In particular it refers to the upright element of a crossing joint in cabinetmaking and carpentry. ‘Style’ as conceived by Van Doesburg and other early De Stijl collaborators was not seen as the surface application of ornament or decoration, but as an essential ordering of structure which would function as a sign for an ethical view of society.8 One of the principle goals of the advocates of new art becomes “a stripping down of the traditional forms of architecture, furniture, painting or sculpture into simple ‘basic’ geometric components or ‘elements’.”9 The project that forms the basis of objects becomes explicit in the compositions of lines. In the mid 1920s, van Doesburg, under the influence of works of Kazimir Malevich, Alexander Rodchenko and Lissitzky, comes to the con-clusion that the diagonal can represent the human body in motion, and in addition he becomes convinced that “diagonal relationships more completely realized ‘the spiritual’, because they opposed the gravitational stability of the natural and material structure of horizontals and verticals.”10 C. Unity of form, matter and material Van Doesburg argues for the semiotic intersection of form, matter and material. With the development of the idea that a notion should be expressed in form, and form in methods, a significant change is taking place in monumental art. The illustrative and decorative character must be rejected on grounds of standing in perfect contradiction to essence. For the essence consists of creating, in accordance with a constructivist plan, an aesthetic space with the aid of the correspondence of colors.11

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In the 1920s Albert Gleizes, a French painter leaning towards Cubism and Abstractionism, evaluates positively the collapse of realistic and mimetic painting. The pictorial realism that is dependent on perspectival vision is based on the external resemblance of the original and its representation. In the absence of external resemblance, the mind repossesses its key position in the creation of a work of art. The object has to free itself from illusions weakening it. Instead of a painting reflecting the outside (general) world distorted by emotions, it should be an internal, personal image constructed according to immutable, universal laws. ... The internal, personal world is consistent with the laws of constructivism. This is the downfall or more precisely the purge of the realistic interpretation; it is a revelation of that which is important and definitive, which goes beyond the fortuitous and transient that up until now have constituted the exclusive focus of painters and sculptors.12 Fernand Léger, a French painter, sculptor, ceramist, graphic artist, and scenepainter, echoes Albert Gleizes in his rejection of mimetic art. Herein lies the dramatic tension. A bad artist copies an object residing in a state of similitude. A good artist depicts an object being in a state of equivalence. ... Those who depict are being truthful. Those who copy are lying.13 Lissitzky, an advocate of nonobjective art, also stands in opposition to mimesis. Non-objectiveness for him seeks to reveal the inner structure of the object, and in fact means the creation of a “new objectiveness” that differs from the familiar world of objects and excludes mimesis. E. Rhythm The Constructivist artist not only discovers a scheme or a project at the foundation of the object but also feels a rhythm. To paint is ... to bring the surface to life with lines, forms, and color. Just as the world is a majestic rhythm of both perfection and infinity, the picture, too, is rhythm reduced to the proportions of the frame and visible because it is stripped of random incidents that obscure it. It is like the rhythm of the universe, perfect and infinite.14

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F. Contextuality The object in Constructivism is contextual; it means that it exists in a certain spatial and temporal continuum. Lissitzky developed an idea of a new space in his own invented form of abstract art that he called Proun (Project for the Affirmation of the New). Proun is a combination of geometrical forms that includes a viewer looking at them from various angles. In Proun, space is configured by the movement of the viewer’s eyes; moreover, space is transformed by the viewer who actively inhabits it.15 Subsequently, several of Lissitzky’s compositions utilize shifting axes and multiple perspectives to convey the idea of rotation in space. The artistically created space is subjectively situational. 2. Philosophy of Object: Instrumentalism The 1920s and 1930s are the acme of Constructivism, and this period is also the period of John Dewey’s shaping of the conception of Instrumentalism within the philosophy of Pragmatism in its application to the sphere of aesthetics. In July 1928 Dewey visited Leningrad and Moscow. Though his visit to Soviet Russia did not change considerably Dewey’s aesthetic preferences, it may have contributed to his thoughts on the role of art in society. The conception of instrumental knowledge as well as the interpretation of the object in art was theoretically postulated in his Art as Experience (1934), where Dewey defined the notion of “useful.” For Dewey both fine and practical art have a common principle: “so far as the action is useful not simply to something else, but in itself and to the whole self, there is beauty.”16 Hence one of the characteristics of the object in instrumentalism is: A. Usefulness What in Dewey’s terminology is termed “instrumental” in the sphere of art is connected with the notion of knowledge and skills. High skill in one or another sphere of art can be achieved when the object causes a constantly renewed sense of excitement. Instrumentalism is manipulation (in the best sense of the word: manipulation as usage) of the works of art. In the act of manipulation, in the focus of attention along with the perception of the outer side of the aesthetic object, is the object’s inner structure, which makes possible the very act of manipulation. Instrumentalism, like Constructivism, aims at the explication of the principles of the object’s organization. Dewey works out the concept of “design” that reflects the outer as well as the inner structure of the object. In Dewey’s terminology design has a double meaning:

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LYUBOV BUGAEVA It signifies purpose and it signifies arrangement, mode of composition. ... Only when the constituent parts of a whole have the unique end of contributing to the consummation of a conscious experience, do design and shape lose superimposed character and become form.17

Thus, according to Dewey, the next characteristic of the object of art is: B. Existence of a project While creating the work of art the artist pays attention not only to the physical characteristics of the material he uses (for Dewey these characteristics are different from the characteristics-sensations of the object in Hume’s philosophy), but also to the meanings of these characteristics. Thus, according to Dewey, the object of industrial art has form intended for special usage that can become aesthetic when “it serves immediately the enrichment of the immediate experience of the one whose attentive perception is directed to it.”18 Dewey combines the notions of form and matter, and marks the dynamic character of form connected with the material used to produce a particular work of art. Hence the object of art is characterized by: C. Unity of form, matter and material Dewey never considered art to be based on any simple-minded mimetic resemblance to nature. What he called “realistic” art, in contrast to the naturalistic, is that art which “reproduces details but misses their moving and organizing rhythm.”19 The object of art in Dewey’s sense is distinguished by: D. Non-mimetism Dewey claims that “because rhythm is a universal scheme of existence, underlying all realization of order in change, it pervades all the arts, literary, musical, plastic and architectural, as well as the dance.”20 Thus Dewey, like the Constructivists, notes such characteristic of the object as: E. Rhythm Experience in Instrumentalism as well as in art is “the result of interaction between a live creature and some aspect of the world in which he lives.”21 For Dewey “the attributes of the work of art depend not only on the persons experiencing it (as well as on the art product) but also on the circumstances of the experience.”22 Thus Dewey inserts experience into certain contexts. According to Dewey,

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Esthetic recurrence in short is vital, physiological, functional. Relationships rather than elements recur, and they recur in differing contexts and with different consequences so that each recurrence is novel as well as a reminder.23 The notion of the problematic situation introduced by Dewey locates and contextualizes human experience, and actualizes the search for new solutions in the situation “here and now.” Experience in Instrumentalism then is not a discrete and extemporal experience, but rather is connected to the emotional sphere, and “aesthetic form is not the exclusive result of the lines and colors,” but “a function of what is in the scene in its interaction with what the beholder brings with him.”24 Dewey’s accent on the immediate in aesthetic experience brings in the characteristic of the object that is: F. Contextuality Consequently, Dewey’s view of the object in relation to Constructivist theory represents the figure of Uroboros – Dewey’s conception demonstrates at each step the same logic of argumentation as the Constructivist conception does. 3. Art as Designing The first issue of the journal Veshch formulated, along with the general principles of the object’s structure, the general principles of Constructivist art. Art is: A. Nature- and experience-based Gleizes considers an engine more human and natural than a tree or even a human body; for him, technical development surpasses the evolution of nature. Scientists (for example) have created metallic organisms that can produce energy, which until now was thought only to derive from natural organisms. Engineers will soon replace the muscles of both man and animal.25 Hence, a painting based on constructive principles as well as an engine is naturally based: “it will be subject to precise laws of design not from the realm of imagination but deriving from the meticulous study of nature.”26 Jacques Lipchitz, a French sculptor and one of the founders of Cubism, declared in 1922 that in his art he had already created “an object which was quite autonomous in nature and was parallel to nature.”27 The difference between new art and traditional art, according to the Constructivists, lies in the experimental character of new art, which is far from

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being speculative. The Constructivist painter in the process of creating a work of art addresses his own intuition and experience in order to counterbalance addressing the traditional form predetermined by artistic or literary canons. We are no longer dealing with some kind of opinion put forward by a certain individual concerning an image that existed some time in the past; distortions or thoughts born out of a particular case are always unlawful: here is [the] individual revealing himself through the constructivist laws of the universe. This is not an interplay of memories ... but rather an interplay of architectonic laws that rest upon everything around us.28 Art occupies a special role in Dewey’s naturalist metaphysics of experience. Comparing art and nature Dewey defines art as “a natural event in which nature otherwise partial and incomplete comes fully to itself.”29 Larry Hickman points out that in Dewey’s view the parallelism of nature and art is based on their creativity. ... mimicry is only one of the many senses in which art imitates nature. In a richer and more general sense, art imitates nature because nature is fecund and productive, and brings forth consequences, and this is also what productive skill accomplishes.... The imitation of nature by means of the development and use of technology – productive skill – is, then, more than simple mimicry, though it may be that.30 For Dewey “science is an art” and “art is practice,”31 which is similar to inquiry diverging not from theory but from the mode of practice “not intelligent, not inherently and immediately enjoyable.”32 For Dewey art is nature- and experience-based. B. Objective, non-individual character The objective character of scientific methods in Constructivism becomes a model for art; art turns into a specific branch of science. In 1919, Punin, a commissar of the Russian museum in Petrograd, Russia, wrote that young artists are looking for such methods of work that will allow them to create objective artistic forms irrespective of the influence of personal subjective factors. However, realism in Constructivism does not mean “truthfulness” as mimetic reproduction of reality. Léger distinguishes between conventional “visual realism” and the “new” or “conceptual realism”33 and finds realism in devotion to the basic principles of the object’s organization. In Lissitzky’s interpretation the linear perspective that focuses rays in the subject’s point of vision is connected with subjectivity in art, while the denunciation of linear perspective correlates with the rejection of subjectivity. The objectivity and

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“new realism” are routed in the trans-individual character of art. Collectiveness is affirmed as the main characteristic of the art of the future. All artists irrespective of their nationality share one final goal: to find a common and architectonic foundation for the plastic experiment. Following the quest for a universal method of expression with various “isms,” artists have come to realize that the art of the future is collective, and constructive, and anti-individualistic art.34 The counter-individual character of art declared by the journal Veshch finds its realizations in numerous works of Constructivists. Thus László Moholy-Nagy, a Hungarian painter whose artistic works were influenced by the geometrical compositions of Lissitzky and Malevich, in 1922 presented Telephone Painting, according to the legend, ordered on the phone; later he started to use a sprayer for painting and rejected a signature in order to increase the impression of anonymity and thus escape the inevitable subjectivity of a work of art. Dewey also considered the creative activity of an artist as an integral part of human creativity. Art is not separated from real life and is not confined in museums.35 The art product is the result of experience and “is not something that happens in an encapsulated subjectivity,” but “has an objective locus, evoked and informed by a transaction between organism and environment.”36 Then “the history of human experience is a history of the development of arts.”37 Dewey points out that A work of fine art, a statue, building, drama, poem, novel, when done, is as much a part of the objective world as is a locomotive or a dynamo. And, as much as the latter, its existence is causally conditioned by the coordination of materials and energies of the external world.38 Therefore, the next feature of art in Instrumentalism is objectiveness and realistic non-individual character. C. Universalism In the 1920s the project of scientific and aesthetic reorganisation of the world on the basis of the idea of universal harmony became extremely popular. In the avant-garde of the universalistic approach are the artists associated with Veshch: Lissitzky and van Doesburg, Rodchenko and Nadezhda Udaltzova. Rodchenko worked on the creation of universal clothes, Udaltzova on the creation of the universal bags for women. Lissitzky created prouns, geometrical forms floating in cosmic space; van Doesburg, the universal style in art.

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LYUBOV BUGAEVA The development of the new art towards the abstract and the universal, excluding the external and the individual, has rendered possible the realization of a collective style, achieved through common efforts and common notions. Towering above the individual and the nation, this style articulates precisely and concretely the loftiest, most profound, and most general requirements of beauty.39

Behind all the artistic attempts to create a universal object there lies an aspiration to a revolutionary reorganization of the world, and to develop a new mentality that will transgress the limits of individual consciousness, and at the same time that will not reject individuality but reorganize it artistically. Universalism that borders on globalism finds its reflection in international aspirations of creators of “new art,” starting with the title of the journal presented in three languages Veshch / Gegenstand / Objet, and ending with multilingual manifestos of artists and the international authorial personnel of the journal. As Lissitzky and Erenburg claimed, “art is today international, though retaining all its local symptoms and particularities.”40 The efforts of the Veshch contributors were aimed at the creation of “the new collective, international style” as a result “of work undertaken in common.”41 Dewey, like the Constructivists, insisted on art’s universal instrumental value. For him, art’s special function and value are connected with its enriching experience. For example, songs sung by harvesters do not only bring aesthetic experience into their work but also initiate desire to work and make the work creative. In the same way the work of fine art does not only raise an aesthetic sense of excitement but enriches human perception and communication. Aesthetic experience is an integral part of Dewey’s recognition of the global functionality of art, and is related to his understanding of the aesthetic experience as one where “the whole creature is alive.”42 For Dewey, the selectivity of art ... extracts matter from a multitude of objects, numerically and spatially separated, and condenses what is abstracted in an object that is an epitome of the values belonging to them all ... [it] creates the “universality” of a work of art.43 In Instrumentalism, within the work of art there are no “oppositions of individual and universal, of subjective and objective, of freedom and order.” ... the “universal” is not something metaphysically anterior to all experience but is a way in which things function in experience as a bond of union among particular events and scenes.44 Dewey thus ascribes to art a universal cosmic character.

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D. Connection of art and industry Constructivism owes its origin to the early Futurism of “The First Manifesto of Futurism” (1909) by Marinetti, which treats the technical achievements of the beginning of the twentieth century as the turn from the “epoch of man” to the “epoch of technique.” Léger, who tried to convey mechanical elements in his paintings, states: I believe that the presence of beauty in an industrial object does not rule out the presence of artistic creation. Aim: How to achieve the equivalence of objects by combining the conscious (construction, will, knowledge of three-dimensional methods) with the unconscious (creative instinct).45 Van Doesburg in his 1922 lectures declares that “the machine ‘represents the very essence of mental discipline ... mechanics is the immediate balance of the static and dynamic – the balance of thought and feeling’.”46 Van Doesburg links the liberation of man with the development of industry, in that the latter opposes a manual labor that lowers man to the level of instrument. The photomontage, one of the principal artistic methods of Constructivism, connects the new art and the technical means; its main goal is an integration of objects from the world of machines into the world of art.47 As for Dewey, he asserts that the separation of fine art and practical industrial art brings an esoteric meaning to fine arts.48 Technology in Dewey’s terminology, like in Constructivism, is not in opposition to art. Furthermore, life in general resembles the industrial cycle as it produces new values, new feelings, and so on.49 Like the Constructivists, Dewey thus asserts the connection of art and industry. E. Serial character Le Corbusier, a French architect and theorist of architecture and design, demonstrated himself to be an active advocate of such forms of new functional art as serial art on the pages of the magazine Esprit Nouveau in the 1920s. Le Corbusier did not only work out several city projects, where the life activity of the citizens was organized in a number of vertical levels strictly divided into functional zones, but also proposed to build houses in series to develop the unity of thoughts and feelings determined by the unity of living conditions. This architect likened human activity to mechanical operations and identified “the industrialization of building and the manufacture of prefabricated products as achievements – essential factors that will play an important role in future architecture.”50 The idea of serial art was developed in the 1920s by the participants of the movement De Stijl. J. J. P. Oud, the leader of Dutch functionalism,

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referring to Frank Lloyd Wright’s practice, pointed out that though the components of Wright’s Robie house were machine-made, they nevertheless possessed an aesthetic value.51 In July 1922 De Stijl published a key article by Moholy-Nagy, titled “Production and Reproduction.” The article asserts that reproduction and the serial production abolish representation in the familiar sense and emphasize the concept of design. The individual picture becomes a structural element of the whole work of art.52 Instrumentalism, similar to Constructivism, treats serial production positively. Hence experience, which is one of the central categories in Instrumentalism, is interpreted as the series of the problematic situations in progressive change; while solving these situations the subject structures his life and constructs himself. In Instrumentalism the relations between the original and a copy are irrelevant; what is relevant is experience, the sense of excitement caused by a work of art; “a copy which can be distinguished from the original only by X-rays, microscopes, and chemical analysis is aesthetically equivalent to the original, whatever its market-value might be.”53 F. Artist as a scientist and an engineer Science was a source of inspiration for the avant-garde in general and for Constructivist art in particular. In Constructivism, which assigns a special role to science, the artist is often compared with the scientist. The destruction of the theme as a pretext will before long enable the generation now free from academic models and trying to prolong the reign of ambiguity to actually enjoy art. The artist will be like the scientist....54 I conclude from this that one can only truly build with the aid of numbers and geometry, and not by geometrizing either our futurist pursuits of yesterday or our cubist ones of today. This geometrization is only an apparent construction; the real construction remains invisible behind the surface of the painting; it serves as “means” and not as an “end”. An artist must be a good geometrician and good mathematician and must be well acquainted with certain elements of physics and biology. I have stated in my book that art is science made human and that art and science are inseparable. The future belongs to those artists who are at the same time architects and constructors, rather than to modistes who work exclusively from and for the sake of emotions.55 Visually the concept of the artist as an engineer of the world is represented in Lissitzky’s infamous photomontage and photogram “The Constructor” (1924). In this piece Lissitzky positions himself as the “artist-constructor” who abandoned the paintbrush for the compass.

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For Dewey “science is an art,” and it “is one among the arts and among the works of art”;56 moreover, art bears the palm in their interrelation.57 However, while for Constructivists the artist is a scientist, for Dewey the scientist is an artist. G. Practice-based: the activity of the artist and the viewer The human being, as both an artist and a viewer, is active in Constructivist art. The relations between the artist and reality remind one of Karl Marx’s idea of the dialectical, active unity of the knower and the known in the act of knowing. According to Marx, cognition is an active process; the subject in the act of cognition transforms himself as well as the object of cognition. The artist of Constructivist art turns a passive spectator into an active participant of art: Today man is aware of his creative mission. He is no longer content with passive adaptation. Physical needs lead to a faster pace calling for decisions devoid of sentimentalism....58 ... the aims of monumental art can be achieved on a completely different basis by placing man inside the plastic arts (and not in front of them), thereby enabling of him to fully participate in this art.59 Lissitzky, in his children’s book “Suprematist Story of Two Squares in Six Constructions,” narrates the cosmic version of the October revolution and suggests that readers create models to illustrate the plot of the story and thus to establish order in the world of chaos, which will be an analogue of the new revolutionary world order. Van Doesburg, who often used in his magazine the images of children’s toys, asserts the game-like character of art that follows its own rules.60 The “demonstration spaces” created by Lissitzky in Germany, such as Room for Constructivist Art (Dresden, 1926) and Abstract Cabinet (Hanover, 1927– 1928), also required the activity of the viewer. Visitors were encouraged to open and close doors to shape exhibition space, to slide panels to reveal or hide pictures, change light, etc. The category of inquiry presupposes developing the experiential activity of the artist, who expands his experience in the process of creating or producing works of art. For Dewey, aesthetic perception is open for considering and re-considering. Dewey’s notion of open transformative aesthetic experience is then similar to the openness of textual interpretation in post-structuralism. In Dewey’s aesthetics, ... the artist creates only an art product; the work of art is what the product does in the person’s experience, and this depends on the person as well on the product.61

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LYUBOV BUGAEVA 4. Art, Education, and Revolution

In the aesthetic conceptions of both Constructivism and Instrumentalism, art appears as a socially oriented meta-language that in a certain way constitutes reality. Veshch was declared to “take the part of constructive art, whose task is not to adorn life, but to organize it.”62 The participants of the movement De Stijl, collaborating with the journal Veshch, accented the social dimension of art with reference to the ideas of the Dutch architect H. P. Berlage, who argued that “collective values rather than excessive individuality should be emphasized in housing blocks and public buildings, while retaining the elements of plurality and tolerance.”63 The position of the Constructivists was active and socially conscious: Vešþ stands apart from all political parties, since it is concerned with problems of art and not of politics. But that does not mean that we are in favor of art that keeps on the outside of life and is basically apolitical. Quite the opposite, we are unable to imagine any creation of new forms in art that is not linked to the transformation of social forms....64 The aesthetics of Constructivism in general correlate with the ethic of early Bolshevism. Constructivists, the members of UNOVIS (Affirmers of the New Art) in particular, never tried to separate themselves from politics; on the contrary, they participated in decorating the town for revolutionary festivities, and organized philosophical discussions and revolutionary exhibitions. Russian Constructivists enthusiastically greeted the October Revolution and sought to cooperate with Soviet authorities. Rodchenko worked for the Moscow bureau of the Section of Visual Arts (Izo) of the People’s Commissariat for Public Education (1918–1921), was one of the most active participants of the Left Front of the Arts (Lef), and identified himself with the new revolutionary government. Since 1924 Rodchenko, as well as Lissitzky, had been creating the photo-chronicle of the “great change” in the society. Lissitzky in his last years announced that his social mission as an artist was to coordinate and to align his artistic missions and goals with the missions and goals of the Soviet state. He asserted that ... art is becoming recognized for its inherent capacity to order, organize and activate the consciousness through the inner charge of its emotional energy.65 The transformative power of art connects art with ideology; art becomes ideological. The ideological orientation of Constructivist art has a theoretical ground. In his article “Art and Pangeometry,” Lissitzky re-codes and reinterprets spatial structures and establishes a correspondence between artistic

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conceptions and ideological systems. For Lissitzky, linear perspective is linked with a certain historical ideology (say, bourgeois individualism); hence other spatial and artistic systems are based on other ideological conceptions, including the collectivistic. Constructivism was an attempt to create a system that was in tune with contemporary ideology. The recognition of the social and ideological character of art is also characteristic of Dewey’s conception. However, in Dewey’s case the social and ideological character of art is rooted more in the communicative character of the work of art. According to Dewey, “the work of art is the transaction between the art product and its appreciator, and is itself a process of producing new artifacts, both tangible and intangible.”66 From Dewey’s point of view, “it is not so much the artist who communicates as it is the object or event produced, an aesthetically rich and suggestive artifact doing its work.”67 As the result of their communicative character, works of art serve as a means of creating a common, collective way of life. Works of art that are not remote from common life, that are widely enjoyed in a community, are signs of a unified collective life. But they are also marvellous aids in the creation of such a life. The remaking of the material of experience in the act of expression is not an isolated event confined to the artist and to a person here and there who happens to enjoy the work. In the degree in which art exercises its office, it is also a remaking of the experience of the community in the direction of greater order and unity.68 Art, being the product of culture and a means to express views and ideas within a certain culture, possesses a moral function. Dewey thinks that art can be legitimately and productively motivated by proletarian, commercial, or religious interests.69 However, Dewey argues that even in this case the artwork should be evaluated on the basis of how its objective aims are achieved, and not on the basis of motifs of its creation. In his far from negative estimation of the situation in Soviet Russia in the late 1920s (in 1928, the final year of New Economic Policy – NEP), Dewey notes the central role of propaganda in the system of education and in the society in general, as well as the parallelism of propaganda and education in the Soviet Russia: An incidental confirmation of the central position, during the present state of “transition,” of educational agencies is the omnipresence of propaganda. The present age is, of course, everywhere one in which propaganda has assumed the role of a governing power. But nowhere else in the world is employment of it as a tool of control so constant, consistent and systematic as in Russia at present. Indeed, it has taken on such importance and social dignity that the word propaganda hardly

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LYUBOV BUGAEVA carries, in another social medium, the correct meaning. For we instinctively associate propaganda with the accomplishing of some special ends, more or less private to a particular class or group, and correspondingly concealed from others. But in Russia the propaganda is in behalf of a burning public faith. One may believe that the leaders are wholly mistaken in the object of their faith, but their sincerity is beyond question. To them the end for which propaganda is employed is not a private or even a class gain, but is the universal good of universal humanity. In consequence, propaganda is education and education is propaganda. They are more than confounded; they are identified.70

Dewey argues that “public agitation, propaganda, legislative and administrative action are effective in producing the change of disposition which a philosophy indicates as desirable,” though he also suggests that they are effective “only in the degree in which they are educative ... in the degree in which they modify mental and moral attitudes.”71 After his visit to Leningrad and Moscow, Dewey evaluated the function of propaganda in the constitution of people’s consciousness through education and ideologically oriented art: ... those experiences convinced me that there is an enormous constructive effort taking place in the creation of a new collective mentality; a new morality I should call it, were it not for the aversion of Soviet leaders to all moral terminology; and that this endeavor is actually succeeding to a considerable degree – to just what extent, I cannot, of course, measure.72 In Constructivism as well as in the entire Soviet society visual propaganda becomes an integral part of life and art and a means of education: The role of art in shaping and reorganizing, not reflecting, public consciousness was promoted very early in the Russian Revolution. Visual propaganda was obviously a direct and successful way of achieving the mammoth task of educating, informing and persuading the people, and was particularly effective in a country whose population was neither fully literate nor united by a single language. ... as Lissitzky said, ‘No kind of representation is as completely comprehensible to all people as photography’.73 Constructivist photomontage teaches the new approach to art and the new view of the world: Photography for Moholy-Nagy was of inestimable value in educating the eye to what he called the ‘new vision’. He believed that in our efforts to come to terms with the age of technology, to become part of it and not to

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sink back into a retrogressive symbolism or expressionism, the camera with its capacity ‘to complete or supplement our optical instrument, the eye’ would help us to disengage ourselves from traditional perceptual habits.74 Constructivist artists, who saw one of the goals of art in promotion and propaganda of new ideas and new consciousness, gave preference to the art of photomontage, owing to its capacity to show visibly and in an astonishing way “the great social work under construction.” Constructivists considered the documentary character of art a powerful means of persuasion and influence, possessive of educational and informative value. Thus, for example, a poster about hunger with photos of starving people could produce a stronger impression than a placard on the same theme.75 Moreover, Constructivists distinguished between Soviet military and political photomontage and socalled photomontage represented in US advertisements. Gustav Klutsis, a Soviet avant-garde artist and one of the creators of photomontage, established a connection between the Soviet type of photomontage, the newest method of plastic art, on the one hand, and revolutionary politics and technical development, on the other.76 The idea of world transformation finds its expression in Constructivist works, e.g. Klutsis’s montage Dynamic City (1919–1921), where the new communist world is being constructed, and in his montage The Old World and The World being Built Anew (1920), where “the positive image of Lenin is superimposed over two circles in which the old world, with its whips, chains and prison, is confronted by the new, a circle framing Lenin’s head and filled with construction work.”77 Although Instrumentalism does not assert construing reality on the basis of knowledge, the possibility of such construing is there. The openness of Instrumentalism to the idea of world making allows Dewey to appraise positively the social practice of Soviet Russia, and brings him close to the conception of Constructivist ideological art. At any rate the transformative power of art declared in Constructivism and Instrumentalism is aimed at humanity and the surrounding world. Only by reconstructing the basic foundation can one resist the inevitable fall. There is only one way out for the artist: to reconstruct man. Things must be thought through to the very end.78 The break with the previous tradition, the proclamation of a revolutionary transformation of man and the world, and the ideological character of avantgarde art and Constructivism in particular, allow us to speak about Constructivism as a revolution in art. The artists themselves considered the change of orientations and priorities in art they undertook as a “phenomenon of spiritual revolution.”79 “Suprematist Story of Two Squares in Six

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Constructions” by El Lissitzky depicts the revolutionary renovation of the world through the images of red and black squares that arrived to the Earth from space and deconstructed the old traditional order of things. The renowned project by Lissitzky Lenin Tribune (Proun no. 85), with a red cube as the basis for the platform where Lenin stands, connects the social revolution of 1917 with the world revolution in the arts. The ideologists of Constructivism used to position themselves as revolutionaries, for example with the revolutionary idea of Constructivist photomontage as a new form of art. Photomontage, used by the political forces for propaganda goals in both Soviet Russia and Europe, is typically “associated particularly with the political Left, because it is ideally suited to the expression of the Marxist dialectic.”80 Dewey, like Constructivist artists, in his conception of Instrumentalist aesthetics indicates a revolutionary character of art: “For all art is a process of making the world a different place to live, and involves a phase of protest and of compensatory response.”81 However, he, like the Constructivists, does not speak about revolution in the social sense; for him, the spiritual transformation is of greater importance. Dewey conveys his impressions of the people in Soviet Russia as people whose consciousness and mentality have been radically changed or transformed, and he points to the world significance of those revolutionary changes: The people go about as if some mighty and oppressive load had been removed, as if they were newly awakened to the consciousness of released energies.... ... the more basic fact of a revolution – one which may be hinted at, but not described, by calling it psychic and moral rather than merely political and economic, a revolution in the attitude of people toward the needs and possibilities of life.... ... the outstanding fact in Russia is a revolution, involving a release of human powers on such an unprecedented scale that it is of incalculable significance not only for that country, but for the world.82 The first third of the twentieth century is a period of “spiritual revolution,” as well a period of the technical revolutionary changes connected with the development of the technical means of reproduction. According to Walter Benjamin’s “Die Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit” (“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 1935), the reproduction of works of art becomes more and more the reproduction of a work intended for reproduction. The possibility to make an endless number of photos from the negative, as a result, makes the question of authenticity pointless. When the criteria of authenticity no longer functions, then the social function of art changes in principle. While the former art was based on ritual; the new art becomes based on politics. Constructivist

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art was an avant-garde art in the “spiritual revolution,” as well as in the technical revolution of the means of reproduction, when it proclaimed the serial character of the new art and its intention to be reproducible. The “spiritual revolution” of Constructivist art and the conception of art formulated in Dewey’s Instrumentalism, in turning art to experience, nature, and context, liberated art from the power of tradition and from the contemplative character of art. However, Constructivist art set free from the power of tradition turned to politics, to spiritual state power. At the same time, a new form of relations was created between a human being and an instrument – the unity of the artist, a creator, a designer, and the instrument, which is the Constructivist method (in case of Constructivism) or the method of inquiry (in case of Instrumentalism). In such unity, the artist and the method become a kind of the micro-world competing, despite all his loyalty, with the state.83 No wonder that both Constructivism and Instrumentalism are characterized by the idea of the transformation of the macro-world, following the example of the creative relations of the micro-world. The Spirit, or the state, tends to have power over its competitors. This tendency leads to interference into any form of activity produced by the microcosm. Russian Constructivism is an agent of the revolution and at the same time is a passive element in the Stalinist “cultural revolution,” a victim of state violence. While in the 1920s the Soviet state was supportive of artistic searches and experiments, in the 1930s the situation changed. Though the art continued to keep its ideological character, the ideological directions of the Soviet society became different. The aggression of the Soviet state in the period of the “cultural revolution” was aimed at the revolutionary art of the Russian avant-garde. On the one hand, the State aimed its aggression against man in general; the turn to socialist realist art in the 1930s, despite its orientation towards an individual, was antihuman. On the other hand, the State aimed its aggression against the human being, the artist-constructor, the artistengineer, in his unity with an instrument, his constructive method. It is not surprising that one of the first of Stalin’s repressive activities was the famous miner’s repression in 1928, where engineers were accused of various crimes. The Constructivist artists who found themselves in a totalitarian state (the Soviet Union, Germany, or Italy in the 1930s), and who were not exterminated by the state as was Klutsis (executed in 1938), had either to change their artistic method or change themselves. Variants of their artistic evolution were: (1) Rejection of the Constructivist method, and incorporating themselves either into an existing powerful (state) paradigm in art (Alexander Deineka) or to another system of expression, for example the mythological (Jacques Lipchitz, Albert Gleizes). (2) Migration to another space, usually the United States, where it was possible to continue using the Constructivist method (László Moholy-Nagy, Antoine Pevsner, Naum Gabo).

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(3) Turn from a philosophical ideology of art to ideological artistic propaganda (El Lissitzky, Alexander Rodchenko) and to the art of reproduction (in the first place, to the art of photography). In this case Constructivist art is reproduction without the creative part of the man-instrument unity, a reproduction that is mechanical and not artistic. Many of the Russian Constructivist artists followed the latter version of artistic development in the conditions of the totalitarian environment. Lissitzky in 1927–1930 turned increasingly to film and photography. During the last decade of his life Lissitzky worked as a designer for the Soviet propaganda journal USSR in Construction, published in the Soviet Union in four languages. One of his works of the period was a portrait of Stalin. In 1941, the year of his death, he signed a contract for the typographical design of the collected works of Lenin. To the end of his life, Lissitzky continued to align his art with the politics of the Soviet state. As for Dewey, the fate of his conception of art is luckier than the fate of many Constructivist artists. Dewey did not have to reject Instrumentalism. Moreover, Dewey’s educational projects are an attempt to create “art of educational engineering,”84 a non-mechanical reproduction of the microcosmic unity of the creator with the instrument that is the constructive method of inquiry. How successful it was and to what results it led is the topic for another paper.

NOTES 1. El Lisickij and Il’ja Erenburg, “The Blocade of Russia Is Coming to an End,” Veshch / Objet / Gegenstand (Berlin: Verlag “Skythen”, 1922; repr. Baden: Verlag Lars Müller, 1994), pp. 55–57, at p. 55. 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid., p. 56. 4. Ibid. 5. Franz Hellens, “Literature and Cinematography,” Veshch / Objet / Gegenstand (1922; repr. 1994), p. 72. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid., p. 8. 9. Ibid., p. 11. 10. Ibid., p. 71. 11. Theo van Doesburg, “Monumental Art,” Veshch / Objet / Gegenstand (1922; repr. 1994), p. 151. 12. Albert Gleizes, “On the Position of Contemporary Painting and Its Tendencies,” Veshch / Objet / Gegenstand (1922; repr. 1994), pp. 149–150, at p. 149. 13. Fernand Léger, “Fernand Léger’s Response,” Veshch / Objet / Gegenstand (1922; repr. 1994), pp. 151–152, at p. 151.

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14. Gleizes, “On the Position of Contemporary Painting and Its Tendencies,” p. 150. 15. Sonja Briski-Uzelac, “Proun,” Russian Literature 23.2 (1996), pp. 81–88, at p. 85. 16. John Dewey, The Early Works of John Dewey, vol. 2, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967), p. 272. Hereafter references to the Collected Works of John Dewey are indicated by EW (The Early Works), MW (The Middle Works), or LW (The Later Works), followed by volume and page numbers. 17. LW 10: 121–122. 18. LW 10: 121. 19. LW 10: 157. 20. LW 10: 154. 21. LW 10: 50. 22. Abraham Kaplan, “Introduction,” LW 10: xvi. 23. LW 10: 174. 24. Armen Marsoobian, “Art and the Aesthetic,” in Blackwell Guide to American Philosophy, ed. Armen Marsoobian and John Ryder (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2004), pp. 364–393, at p. 378. 25. Gleizes, “On the Position of Contemporary Painting and Its Tendencies,” p. 150. 26. Ibid. 27. Jacques Lipchitz, “Jacques Lipchitz’s Response,” Veshch / Objet / Gegenstand (1922; repr. 1994), pp. 152–153, at p. 153. 28. Gleizes, “On the Position of Contemporary Painting and Its Tendencies,” p. 150. 29. LW 1: 279. 30. Larry A. Hickman, John Dewey’s Pragmatic Technology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), p. 74. 31. LW 1: 268. 32. LW 1: 269. 33. Caroline Messensee, “Fernand Léger – L’Esprit moderne or the Vision of a Better World,” in Fernand Léger, L’Ésprit moderne (Salzburg: Rupertinum, 2002), pp. 27–31, at p. 29. 34. Theo van Doesburg, “Monumental Art,” p. 150. 35. LW 10: 12, 13. 36. Kaplan, “Introduction,” LW 10: xv. 37. LW 1: 290. 38. LW 10: 151. 39. Theo van Doesburg, “Monumental Art,” p. 153. 40. Lisickij and Erenburg, “The Blocade of Russia Is Coming to an End,” p. 55. 41. Ibid., p. 56. 42. LW 10: 33. 43. LW 10: 73. 44. LW 10: 88, 291. 45. Léger, “Fernand Léger’s Response,” p. 151. 46. Paul Overy, De Stijl (London: Studio Vista, 1969), p. 150. 47. Dawn Ades, Photomontage (London: Thames & Hudson, 1996), p. 13.

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48. Armen Marsoobian, “Art and the Aesthetic,” p. 373. 49. Hickman, John Dewey’s Pragmatic Technology, pp. 68, 76. 50. Le Corbusier-Sonier, “Contemporary Architecture,” Veshch / Objet / Gegenstand (1922; repr. 1994), p. 81. 51. Overy, De Stijl, pp. 147–148. 52. Ades, Photomontage, p. 153. 53. Kaplan, “Introduction,” LW 10: xxiii. 54. Gleizes, “On the Position of Contemporary Painting and Its Tendencies,” p. 150. 55. Gino Severini, “Gino Severini’s Response,” Veshch / Objet / Gegenstand (1922; repr. 1994), p. 152. 56. LW 1: 287. 57. Hickman, John Dewey’s Pragmatic Technology, p. 75. 58. Gleizes, “On the Position of Contemporary Painting and Its Tendencies,” p. 150. 59. Theo van Doesburg, “Monumental Art,” p. 151. 60. Overy, De Stijl, p. 151. 61. Kaplan, “Introduction,” LW 10: xxix. 62. Lisickij and Erenburg, “The Blocade of Russia Is Coming to an End,” p. 56. 63. Overy, De Stijl, p. 24. 64. Lisickij and Erenburg, “The Blocade of Russia Is Coming to an End,” p. 56. 65. El Lissitzky, “Ideological Superstructures,” in El Lissitzky: Life, Letters, Texts, ed. Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers (London: Thames & Hudson, 1968), p. 371. 66. Hickman, John Dewey’s Pragmatic Technology, p. xiii. 67. Ibid., p. 63. 68. LW 10: 87. 69. Hickman, John Dewey’s Pragmatic Technology, p. 65. 70. LW 3: 221–222. 71. MW 9: 338. 72. MW 9: 223. 73. Ades, Photomontage, p. 63. 74. Ibid., p. 148. 75. Ibid., p. 72. 76. Ibid., p. 63. 77. Ibid., p. 68. 78. Gleizes, “On the Position of Contemporary Painting and Its Tendencies,” p. 149. 79. Ibid. 80. Ades, Photomontage, p. 41. 81. LW 1: 272. 82. LW 3: 203, 204, 207. 83. Igor Smirnov, “Khozyain i rabotnik (Master and Worker),” Logos No. 9 (1999), pp. 105–116. 84. MW 13: 323–328.

Eight DEWEY’S IDEA OF AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE IN THE PROCESSES OF EDUCATION Krystyna Wilkoszewska

1. Introduction Those who work to interpret and advance pragmatism often emphasize that it is a method of solving current problems of life rather than a philosophy in the traditional meaning of the word. They also emphasize that this method is of an experimental character. For pragmatism: (a) the aim of undertaking inquiries is the solving of the problems of daily life, not playing intertextual games or interpreting interpretations; and (b) the result is neither known nor assumed before the inquiry in undertaken but is an effect of the employment of the method. There is no doubt that the sphere of the aesthetic is very important here, especially in the Deweyan version of pragmatism, which will be the main source for our consideration. The term “experiment” is characteristic of the pragmatist method and is of scientific provenance; but it also possesses a deep aesthetic dimension. The experimental character of avant-garde art at the beginning of the twentieth century was in consonance with the pragmatist method of looking for new ways of solving old and new problems. While it is true that the theme of the aesthetic did not normally absorb the pragmatists’ minds, it is impossible to understand what the pragmatist process of inquiry means without regard to its aesthetic quality. These remarks suggest the plan of activity for contemporary aestheticians with a pragmatist orientation. Above all, they should recognize and distinguish from the surrounding reality those very significant problems that their discipline would be competent and helpful in resolving. In general, and in the case of aesthetics in particular, this first step seems to be the most difficult. Usually all inherited research traditions of a given discipline help in recognizing new problems, and in finding the best ways of resolving them. Aesthetics, however, because of the radical changes occurring in art and in all our culture in the second part of the twentieth century, has trouble connecting with its history as a discipline concerned with a philosophy of fine arts. This does not mean the end of aesthetics in general. On the contrary, it suggests great possibilities for growth, because many problems of the contemporary world demand aesthetics. But there are many problems that cannot be recognized or considered by traditional aesthetics directed to the problems of fine arts. A broadened formulation of aesthetics is needed. Such

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an aesthetics, adequate to the growing social and cultural problems of the contemporary world, is worked out by some aestheticians who are not afraid of experimentation and of the risks connected with it. Although these aestheticians come from different philosophical schools, it should be mentioned that Dewey’s formula of aesthetics, being ahead of its time, offers a source of inspiration and references, and the American philosopher is quoted today in many aesthetics works and at many aesthetic conferences. This is a significant development over the not-so-distant past, when many distinguished aestheticians had not even heard of Dewey. I will indicate some problems which are important from the aesthetic point of view that arose in our world over the last few decades, and then try to show the adequacy and usefulness of the pragmatist method in addressing these problems. The pragmatist method will be understood here in Dewey’s spirit, because for him the process of inquiry itself takes the form of aesthetic experience, and because his understanding of aesthetic experience functions as a model more adequate to contemporary aesthetic phenomena than the traditional model of contemplation. Finally, I will emphasize the importance of these themes for the processes of education. 2. Problems Demanding Aesthetic Attention A. New electronic media Electronic media have entered into our daily life on a large scale and significantly changed the domain of human experience. The subject-object relation has especially undergone a radical transformation in several aspects. First, what was elaborated in epistemology and adopted by aesthetics as the model of contemplation – also called the spectator theory of experience – gives way to the model of interaction. Interactions characterize as well the creative processes connected with media where the result of the activity is never a finished product, since in the processes of reception the recipient takes on the function of being a co-creator and a co-participant. When the subject-object relation is generated by media through interaction, the object never reaches a state of stable being. It is instead processive, flexible, always incomplete, and no longer defined as a product but as “hypertext,” which as an open structure presents the potential of its possible shapes; in relation to hypertext, the creator and the recipient become co-actors. Second, despite widespread opinion that electronic media produce pictures that appeal “to the eye,” the theoreticians of new media claim that the media’s pictures (especially digital pictures) are the pictures of a new generation. The interactive contact with them demands sensual synesthesia. A sense of tactility plays an essential role here, standing on a level equal to the senses of sight and hearing. It is a kind of revolution which cannot be overlooked: the eye and ear, the

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two high senses called the distance senses and (since ancient Greece) treated as the only culture-making senses, are now supplemented now by the lowest of the low senses: a sense of tactility. The interactive contact cannot be understood as a contemplative view but as the tactile contact. Interactivity characteristic for new media does not mean the pure mental activity: res cogitans is replaced here by the embodied subject. Touch as the most embodied sense is present in the media on the two levels: on the level of interfaces, where we have to use our hands; and on the level of virtuality, where the tactile sensations are present together with visual and auditory. Admittedly, the problems of the deep transformation in the subject-object relation, of the appearing of embodied subject, and of processualization of an object are not of a strict aesthetic character. Nevertheless, they incorporate such important aesthetic components that they challenge aestheticians. The old problems of aesthetics, such as creativity, reception, and the structure of artifacts, appear here in different forms and in a completely new context. Prior aesthetic theories are not useful for explaining the structure of hypertext in the interactive processes of its generation and its reception. Dewey’s aesthetic theory, which strayed in its character from the traditional theories because it was built not on the model of contemplative relation between subject and object but on his philosophy of experience, offers amazingly useful tools for consideration of the indicated problems. The ideas of interaction, a flexible object formed during experience and an embodied subject provided with its all senses, are adequate to the problems arising in the new media fields. The lack of deeper cooperation between the theoreticians of the new media and philosophers on the one hand, and insufficient knowledge of Dewey’s philosophy of experience among the aestheticians on the other, have caused Dewey’s aesthetics to be unappreciated and not fully adopted in this field. B. The embodied subject The changes in the concept of the subject-object relation indicated here in the domain of the new electronic media are of more global character. In aesthetics they are connected with the critique of the Kantian idea of Interesselosigkeit (disinterestedness), as well as his sharp opposition between the categories of the useful and of the aesthetic. Inside this tradition, fine arts was separated from applied arts, and the sphere of objects in ordinary use was in general deprived of any aesthetic quality. Efforts are being made today to redirect aesthetic thinking. The American aesthetician, Arnold Berleant, worked out the conception of aesthetics of engagement, explicitly emphasizing its anti-Kantian character. Building an aesthetics of engagement requires the re-examination of the traditional idea of experience. Berleant writes:

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KRYSTYNA WILKOSZEWSKA Aesthetic engagement best expresses the active, creative involvement of appreciation on its most fulfilling occasions. At its most compelling, that experience is one in which a bond develops that joins the appreciating person with the object of appreciation, a kind of total immersion in the situation. Such appreciation I describe by the term, “aesthetic engagement.” This idea is a deliberate alternative to the Kantian notion of aesthetic disinterestedness. I believe that aesthetic appreciation occurs not only in relation to art objects or beauty in nature but in many kinds of human situations, and may be conjoined with practical ones.1

Berleant does not make any reference to Dewey here, although his considerations of “aesthetic engagement” are clearly correspond with Dewey’s way of thinking. Such passages from Berleant as: “Aesthetic experience is typically associated with the arts, but it may occur in many different kinds of situations, not always artrelated,” or “I do not consider the aesthetic a separate, unique kind of occurrence but one related to other modes of experience,” could be easy introduced into the context of Dewey’s works.2 Berleant’s aesthetics of engagement takes the form of an environmental aesthetics. According to him, the etymology of aesthetics directs us to aisthesis (perception by the senses) and suggests that aesthetics should be focused on experience engaging all human senses. Such understanding of the aesthetic based on aisthesis seems to be becoming dominant today. The idea of transition from the contemplative experience to the interactive experience of engagement is also present in the works of such German aestheticians as Wolfgang Welsch, Odo Marquard, and Gernot Böhme, who are working out a new formulation of aesthetics in reference to the idea of aisthesis. None of them refers to pragmatist tradition, although Dewey’s aesthetics offers the conception of interactive, multisensual, engaged perception. Consider the following passage from Welsch: Qualities of sense, those of touch and taste as well as of sight and hearing, have aesthetic quality. But they have it not in isolation but in their connections; as interacting, not as simple and separate entities... The action of any one sense includes attitudes and dispositions that are due to the whole organism. The energies belonging to the sense-organs themselves enter causally into the perceived thing.3 As elaborated by Welsch, the concept of “aesthetic thinking” (ästhetisches Denken) is an attempt to bridge the opposition traditionally made between sensual perception and rational thinking and is very closely related to Dewey’s idea of “qualitative thought.” In Art as Experience, he writes, “We cannot grasp any idea, any organ of mediation, we cannot possess it in its full force, until we have felt and sensed it, as much so as if it were an odor or a color.”4

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It is worth quoting further from Welsch’s discussion here. He writes: “There is also the growing attention directed toward the aesthetic implications of the courses of argumentation and the styles of thinking. What is a physiognomy of a world-view, a claim, a proposal? Is it stiff, feminine, artificial, elegant, dialectic?”5 Welsch suggests that we not separate the sensual from the rational. It would be better “to mobilize the inner sensual potency of thinking and to free the reflexive aspects of sensations. Then ‘aesthetic thinking’ would not be contradicio in adiecto but rather the expression of the actual complexity.”6 German aestheticians like Welsch do not refer to pragmatism. Among wellknown aestheticians who are looking to reformulate their discipline, only Richard Shusterman explicitly refers to pragmatism and Dewey. His conception of somaaesthetics, which is directed to the embodied subject, is worked out in the spirit of pragmatism. Shusterman criticizes as well the Cartesian idea of res cogitans as Kantian opposition between the aesthetic and the practical or the aesthetic and the cognitive. He develops a pragmatist conception of experience emphasizing the role of the body and of sensuality in the life of human being.7 C. Transculturality The final group of contemporary problems I consider here is connected with the transformation of a relation between the self and the other, in both its local and its multicultural aspects. Larry Hickman tried recently to apply the pragmatist method to the problem of the global citizen.8 For aesthetics, the perspective of plurality of cultures and the phenomenon of globalization means among other things the necessity for revising the European idea of fine arts and their social roles. The European tradition sharply separated fine arts from applied arts and from the objects of ordinary life. The final indication that our fine arts had lost their close contact with life was putting them into separate places, such as museums, where their functions were limited to the delivering the aesthetic pleasure. Growing interest in other cultures, both literate and illiterate, indicated to us that no other culture separated its arts from life to such an extent as ours did. Meeting with aboriginal or Indian art on one side, and with Japanese or Chinese art on the other, reminds us of the common origins of art and its primary engagement in the practice of life, both sacred and profane. Nowhere has the aesthetic been so sharply contrasted with the practical as in the West. Today, the critique of the contemplative approach to art appreciation is closely connected with the critique of the idea of the autonomy of art. The reasons for this critique are very complex, but one of the more important of its components is the relatively new multicultural experience. On this point, it is also worth reading Dewey, who always criticized the idea of the autonomy of fine arts and never accepted the limitation of their different potential functions to the aesthetic only. He was against such institutions as our museums:

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KRYSTYNA WILKOSZEWSKA The growth of capitalism has been a powerful influence in the development of the museum as a proper home for works of art, and in the promotion of the idea that they are apart from the common life.... Not merely individuals, but communities and nations, put their cultural good taste in evidence by building opera houses, galleries, and museums.... These things reflect and establish superior cultural status, while their segregation from the common life reflects the fact that they are not part of a native and spontaneous culture.... As works of art have lost their indigenous status, they have acquired a new one – that of being specimens of fine art and nothing else.9

The critical tone of Dewey’s words is directed against the belief that our culture is higher and better than others. Such opinions dominated well into modernity, and only today are they changing; the new attitude toward other cultures is called “post-colonialism.” The evolution in using the different prefixes connected with word “cultural” is meaningful here: ‘inter-’, ‘multi-’, ‘cross-’, and ‘trans-’ indicate the process of change in our attitude toward other cultures. ‘Inter-‘ indicates the curiosity of the member of one culture in a certain strange and alien culture; ‘multi-’ was a symptom of our growing consciousness of plurality of cultures; the last two prefixes – ‘cross-’ and ‘trans-’ – indicate a postmodern attitude toward cultures which indicates also in a deeper understanding of own culture. In other words, in the face of other cultures, the illusory evidence of the ideas, statements and beliefs grounding one’s own culture is uncovered. Such meeting with other cultures undermines the feeling of the superiority of one’s own culture; it means always going beyond the limits of one’s own culture, but at the same time it facilitates a deeper understanding of it. Just the contact with art in such transcultural perspective provoked the European aestheticians to wonder whether the status of our fine arts is actually a testimony of the highest development of art. The decline of fine arts in the second part of the last century also awakened aestheticians’ suspicions of the European idea of art grounded on the narrow, maybe too narrow, aesthetic principle. 3. Education We have been considering some problems caused by cultural and social changes in the contemporary world. Although the meaning and scale of these problems go beyond the field of aesthetics, thus requiring interdisciplinary research, the problems are of such a character that the participation of aestheticians in this research is indispensable. Traditional aesthetics, in the form of a philosophy of fine arts, has repeatedly shown itself to be inadequate for the consideration of these new problems, while pragmatist aesthetics with its new concept of experience seems to be useful in their analysis.

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So far, I have said nothing explicit about education. I hope, however, that much was implied. I do not think that improvements in the processes of education consist in producing pedagogical programs and theories. Education is not a separate process; it penetrates all spheres of life. That is why the process of education essential requires the persistent recognition of contemporary problems and the description and valuation of them. It is a task not only for academics but also for many different social groups. The processes of research made in the different fields of interest, as well as their results, should be widely accessible in the schools as well.

NOTES 1. Arnold Berleant, Aesthetics of Engagement, Biuletyn PTE no. 3 (Cracow, 2003). 2. Ibid. 3. John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Perigee, 1980), pp. 120–121. 4. Ibid., p. 119. 5. Wolfgang Welsch: “Auch ist eine gesteigerte Aufmerksamkeit auf ästhetische Implikationen von Argumentationstypen und Denkstilen charakteristisch. Wie ist die Physiognomie einer Weltsicht, eines Ansinnens, eines Vorschlags beschaffen? Ist sie rigid, weiblich, gekunstelt, elegant, dialektisch?” Ästhetisches Denken (Stuttgart: Reklam, 1990), p. 47. 6. Welsch: “die inneren Wahrnehmungspotenzen des Denkens zu mobilisieren und die Reflexionsanstöße der Wahrnehmung zu entfalten. Dann wäre ‘ästhetisches Denken’ keine contradictio in adiecto, sondern Ausdruck und Belag einer unabweisbaren Komplexion.” ibid., p. 55. 7. Richard Shusterman, Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art, 2nd edn. (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000). The first edition in 1992 did not contain the chapter “Somaesthetics: A Disciplinary Proposal.” 8. Larry Hickman, “Pragmatism, Postmodernism, and Global Citizenship,” Metaphilosophy 35 (2004), pp. 65–81. 9. Dewey, Art as Experience, pp. 8–9.

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Part Three EDUCATION AND SOCIAL RECONSTRUCTION

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Nine RECONSTRUCTION THROUGH EDUCATION James Campbell

John Dewey remarks that “philosophers in general, although they are themselves usually teachers, have not taken education with sufficient seriousness for it to occur to them that any rational person could actually think it possible that philosophizing should focus about education as the supreme human interest in which, moreover, other problems, cosmological, moral, logical, come to a head.” Consequently, he continues, the philosophy of education has been seen as “a poor relation” of the rest of philosophy. If philosophers in general have not put much emphasis on education, however, social philosophers and reformers from Plato to the present surely have. The Social Pragmatists – Dewey, George Herbert Mead, and James Hayden Tufts – were deeply concerned with the possibility of reconstruction through education, particularly with the possibility of educating the citizens of tomorrow to be better moral, social and political problem-solvers. This reconstructive spirit can be found, for example, in this statement by Mead: “If human intelligence consisted in the knowledge of fixed laws and methods the man who knew them would be king”; but it consists, rather, “in the constant interaction of theory and practice.... Theory after all is nothing but the consciousness of the way in which one adjusts his habits of working to meet new situations.”1 Education, Dewey writes, is “a process of renewal of the meanings of experience,” by means of which a society prepares its own future. He continues that “society determines its own future in determining that of the young.” Education in the proper sense of the term thus requires, Tufts indicates, that we pass on the best that we have to all who are able to receive it. One of the major functions of our educational system is as “an agency for giving the common man and woman and child a share in those goods of the mind which are our social inheritance.” Essential to his understanding of passing on a full social inheritance is the maintenance of a careful distinction between ‘education’ and ‘training.’ “Training suggests primarily the acquirement of a technique,” he writes; “it implies ... formation of habits with relatively little regard to the meaning of what is done. Vines and trees are trained; animals are trained; soldiers and apprentices are trained.” Education, on the contrary, “suggests rather an emphasis upon the full meaning of situations and experiences with which we deal. It suggests wide acquaintance with all aspects, and sensitiveness to all elements, of culture and life.”2 The Social Pragmatists believe that the school, above all other educational institutions, plays a controlling role in the society’s future life. The educational system itself needs to be continually reevaluated and reconstructed, and the Social

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Pragmatists hoped to make institutional education in their day a more rational and successful process. Still, while they all agreed with Dewey that “education is the fundamental method of social progress and reform” and is thus the key to a better future for America, the Social Pragmatists were not blindly optimistic about the possibilities of reconstruction through education, nor naïve believers in the omnipotence of the schools. Dewey maintains, for example, that even if we completely reconstruct our schools eliminating the major present ills, we cannot expect our schools to change our society on their own. “‘Education’ even in its widest sense cannot do everything,” he writes; and the schools, as only “one educational agency out of many,” necessarily have limitations. Similarly, the possibility of reconstruction through education is related to the complex of other social circumstances; or, as Dewey puts it, “[t]he reconstruction of philosophy, of education, and of social ideals and methods thus go hand in hand.” For him (and the other Social Pragmatists), “while the school is not a sufficient condition, it is a necessary condition of forming the understanding and the dispositions that are required to maintain a genuinely changed social order.”3 The initial step of this reconstruction of society through education was to see the school as a social institution that reflects and influences the society of which it is a part. It was no longer possible to view the school as divorced from the issues and problems of the society, as a place where students become familiar with facts and ideas that have no direct relationship to the lives they live. As Mead notes, “[t]he school used to be a thing apart. It stood in an isolation that was guarded by traditions as old, many of them, as our modern world. Its business was to grind information into the child, and perfect him in the simple methods of dealing with words and figures.” The school must become an active institution of social reform. As Dewey writes, “[w]hat we want is to see the school, every public school, doing something of the same sort of work that is now done by a settlement or two scattered at wide distances through the city.” In a diverse society, one major function of the schools is the blending of the various backgrounds and interests of the students (and their parents) into a community, however complex, and providing the “steadying and integrating office” of “coordinating within the disposition of each individual the diverse influences of the various social environments into which he enters.” Dewey notes that the question to be addressed was “not whether the schools should participate in the production of a future society (since they do so anyway) but whether they should do it blindly and irresponsibly or with the maximum possible of courageous intelligence and responsibility.” Our society has only three choices: continued “drift,” that will “perpetuate the present confusion and possibly increase it”; conservatism, by which educators “strive to make the schools a force in maintaining the old order intact against the impact of new forces”; or his choice of intelligent reconstruction through education by selecting “the newer scientific, technological, and cultural forces that are producing change in the old order” and seeing “what can be done to make the schools their ally.”4

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Education has traditionally been a combination of the first two: drift because choices about goals and values were not made consciously; conservatism because these values and goals in particular were taken over without question from the adults’ lives. The young child begins life as a highly impressionable individual; but, to many educators, this plasticity “seems putty to be molded according to current designs.” This plasticity, Dewey continues, “has been used to signify not capacity to learn liberally and generously, but willingness to learn the customs of adult associates, ability to learn just those special things which those having power and authority wish to teach.” Such a conception of education makes it “the art of taking advantage of the helplessness of the young; the forming of habits becomes a guarantee for the maintenance of hedges of custom.” This unthinking conservatism, somewhat differently described, is frequently considered to be the primary end of school instruction; but such a conception can function successfully only for a static society, where the past is intrinsically valuable. In a moving, changing society, this conception of the intact transmitting of the inheritance of the past cannot stand unchallenged. Our schools must become self-conscious, planned, selective: a means of constructing a better future. Education must be seen as “an utilization of the past for a resource in a developing future” and not as a “process of accommodating the future to the past....” In this way, Dewey continues, “progressive communities ... endeavor to shape the experiences of the young so that instead of reproducing current habits, better habits shall be formed, and thus the future adult society be an improvement on their own.” He admits that under his vision “educational practice [is] a kind of social engineering”5; and he calls upon every citizen, and particularly every educator, to attempt to engineer an improved future for students and for society. An important part of engineering this improved future is preparing the young for their eventual careers. The Social Pragmatists were particularly conscious, however, of the ever-present danger of purely vocational instruction. Tufts, for example, admits that “the boy must first find a job and get a living”; but he further notes that “every job which has any excuse for being has some human value other than merely paying a wage.” Our goal for the young should be “not only a living, but a noble life.” Mead offers a related, but more politically explicit, statement: “The question is whether it [industrial training] is to come simply in the interests of manufacturers themselves, in the interests of industry, or whether it is to be looked at from the broader point of view....” This broader point of view, of the fuller education of the workers of society, is related to democracy and its ongoing battle to maintain itself and expand in the modern industrial world. Mead notes that “[t]he intelligence of the artisan who made the whole article made of him an admirable citizen of the older community. It was this intelligence very largely which made the success of our early democratic institutions.”6 For the Social Pragmatists, education and democracy were virtually synonymous. Dewey writes, for example, that “democracy and education bear a

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reciprocal relation, for it is not merely that democracy is itself an educational principle, but that democracy cannot endure, much less develop, without education....” For his own part, Tufts writes that the United States “is committed to a great enterprise.... It is trying to prove that democracy is possible”; and we recognize that, for there to be democracy, it is necessary to make available to every child “as good an education as he can profit by.” Dewey writes in a similar fashion that “the cause of democracy is bound up with development of the intellectual capacities of each member of society.” He further notes that in order that “the vital and organic relation that there is between democracy and education” should flourish, we must “take as seriously the preparation of the members of our society for the duties and responsibilities of democracy” as we take “the formation of the thoughts and minds and characters of [the] population....”7 “Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife,” Dewey writes. The kind of education that would act as this midwife would have to meet at least three criteria. First, a democratic society must not adopt a body of educational material whose mastery is to be considered having an education. Such a mandarin emphasis upon, say, the ‘classics’ has a tendency to overemphasize the importance of abstract intellectual life in society. This educational emphasis is usually part of a split between what he calls “education in preparation for useful labor and education for a life of leisure.” We need, rather, “a course of study which should be useful and liberal at the same time.” Leaving aside the issue of the ‘leisure class,’ in modern society there should no longer be people who are just workers. There are opportunities for ongoing education in our communities and “when we confine the education of those who work with their hands to a few years of schooling devoted for the most part to acquiring the use of rudimentary symbols at the expense of training in science, literature, and history, we fail to prepare the minds of the workers to take advantage of this opportunity.”8 This education is to give opportunity to all to expand their ability to control and find meaning in experience. Here, I think, Americans still have a great deal to learn from the European – or, at least, the German – model that connects up career training with the classroom. Trainees in jobs of all sorts – plumbers and chefs, business personnel and mechanics – split their time between learning what will be narrowly useful in their practical careers and instruction in more liberal themes. Second, rather than focusing upon a formalized conception of a completed education, education in a democracy must thus attempt to equip the individuals for their lives as adults by developing what capacities they have. As Dewey writes, “the ultimate aim of education is nothing other than the creation of human beings in the fulness of their capacities,” a principle that is violated, he continues, “when the attempt is made to fit individuals in advance for definite industrial callings, selected not on the basis of trained original capacities, but on that of the wealth or social status of parents.” In a society of individuals who are ever-in-the-making, education can neither accept some individuals as a priori better or worse, nor fail

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to help develop the abilities of each person to become all that he or she can. One aspect of this focus upon capacities is that the school must develop the students’ capacities for self-direction and cooperation, for being good citizens and good leaders, “good citizens, in the broadest sense.” This includes the ability to recognize the common interests and values of the social group. Our schools must foster what Dewey calls “public-mindedness” by a “substitution of a social purpose... for the traditional individualistic aim.” Education must make the students better able to choose values and more conscious of the nature and possibilities of social progress. They must develop the ability to “shape and direct” changes. They must grow in the “ability to judge men and measures wisely and to take a determining part in making as well as obeying laws.” They must have the ability “to take their own active part in aggressive participation in bringing about a new social order.”9 Here, I do not think that Americans or Europeans are doing very well. Perhaps there are political grounds for this reluctance to facilitate social change. Another capacity of the young, one that is obvious to all Europeans and to those Americans who have spent any time here in Europe, that American schools do not develop is the linguistic ability to face the contemporary world. Americans, of course, do not normally live the polyglot existence that Europeans do; and English (or ‘American’) is a kind of universal language at present. Still, American children and American society would benefit immensely from greater linguistic facility. Third, the Social Pragmatists also stress the point that, since the method of education has much, if not more, impact on the future adult as does the content, the relation of democracy and education requires democratic school procedures. “Whether this educative process is carried on in a predominantly democratic or non-democratic way,” Dewey writes, “becomes therefore a question of transcendent importance not only for education itself but for its final effect upon all the interests and activities of a society that is committed to the democratic way of life.” A schooling in which all the decisions are made for the students, in which the individual and collective responsibility of the youngsters is not fostered, is not the sort of schooling from which we can expect “young men and women who will stand actively and aggressively for the cause of free intelligence in meeting social problems and attaining the goal of freedom....” In a more democratic school, however, we can develop the students’ capacities “to lead and to follow” by means of teamwork and thereby produce in our schools “a projection in type of the society we should like to realize, and by forming minds in accord with it gradually modify the larger and more recalcitrant features of adult society.”10 Here, I suspect, both American and European schools need to become more democratic in their operations. European students whom I meet often seem more independent in their studies, while at the same time more resigned to defeats at the hands of various bureaucracies; American students, on the contrary, usually ask more ‘why’ questions about the processes of their education, but often seem to demonstrate

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less initiative in their academic performance. These curious contrasts suggest that greater democratization of the university is still required – less interference with student plans and more Emersonian self-reliance – before we can benefit fully from the promises of higher education.

NOTES 1. Dewey, “From Absolutism to Experimentalism,” The Later Works of John Dewey, vol. 5, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984), p. 156. Hereafter references to the Collected Works of John Dewey are indicated by EW (The Early Works), MW (The Middle Works), or LW (The Later Works), followed by volume and page numbers. Dewey, “The Relation of Science and Philosophy as the Basis of Education,” LW 13: 282; Mead, “Industrial Education, the Working-Man, and the School,” in George Herbert Mead: Essays on His Social Philosophy, ed. John W. Petras (New York: Teachers College Press, 1968), pp. 55, 57. 2. Dewey, Democracy and Education, MW 9: 331, 46; Tufts, “Individualism and American Life,” in Selected Writings of James Hayden Tufts, ed. James Campbell (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992), p. 284; Tufts, Education and Training for Social Work (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1923), p. 91. 3. Dewey, “My Pedagogic Creed,” EW 5: 93; Dewey, “Intelligence and Power,” LW 9: 110; Dewey, “Education and Social Change,” LW 11: 414; Dewey, Democracy and Education, MW 9: 341; Dewey, “Education and Social Change,” LW 11: 414. 4. Mead, “The Basis for a Parents’ Association,” George Herbert Mead, p. 63; Dewey, “The School as a Social Centre,” MW 2: 91; Dewey, Democracy and Education, MW 9: 26; Dewey, “Education and Social Change,” LW 11: 409, 411. 5. Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct, MW 14: 47, 70, 47; Dewey, Democracy and Education, MW 9: 85; Dewey, The Sources of a Science of Education, LW 5: 20. 6. Tufts, “The Study of Public Morality in High Schools,” Selected Writings, p. 142; Mead, “Educational Aspects of Trade Schools,” George Herbert Mead, p. 46; Mead, “Industrial Education, The Working-Man, and the School,” p. 52. 7. Dewey, “Democracy and Education in the World of Today,” LW 13: 296; Tufts, The Real Business of Living (New York: Henry Holt, 1918), pp. 441, 440; Dewey and Tufts, Ethics, LW 7: 364; Dewey, “Democracy and Education in the World Today,” LW 13: 303, 297. 8. Dewey, “The Need of an Industrial Education in an Industrial Democracy,” MW 10: 139; Dewey, Democracy and Education, MW 9: 259, 267–268. 9. Dewey, “Philosophy and Education,” LW 5: 297; Dewey, Democracy and Education, MW 9: 126; Dewey, “Social Purposes in Education,” MW 15: 158; Dewey, “Universal Service as Education,” MW 10: 183; Dewey, “Education and the Social Order,” LW 9: 180; Dewey, “Ethical Principles Underlying Education,” EW 5: 60; Dewey, Democracy and Education, MW 9: 127; Dewey, “Education and the Social Order,” LW 9: 182. 10. Dewey, “Democracy and Educational Administration,” LW 11: 222; Dewey, “Freedom,” LW 11: 254; Dewey, “Does Human Nature Change?” LW 13: 286; Dewey, Democracy and Education, LW 9: 326.

Ten JOHN DEWEY’S UNDERSTANDING OF DEMOCRACY: INSPIRING POLITICAL EDUCATION IN GERMANY Gert-Rüdiger Wegmarshaus

1. John Dewey on Democracy as a Way of Life John Dewey’s understanding of democracy presents a stark contrast to today’s research in mainstream political science. The understanding of democracy in political science, at least in the tradition of realistic political theory, is predominantly focused on governmental processes, parliamentary representation, party systems, voting behavior, and public opinion. This notion of democracy is oriented on the execution of state power, this understanding of democracy addresses procedures of political decision-making, and it serves as the basis for analyzing structures and functions of political bodies. The research methods applied are mostly empirical, statist, and in some cases even predominantly mathematical-technical. Dewey’s approach to democracy, however, is much more profound, more complex, more demanding, and more rewarding. Dewey’s notion of democracy is based on a philosophical-anthropological outlook on man, and his approach to democracy addresses virtually all kinds of relations between human beings in society. By doing so he does not reduce democracy to a form of government. He does not regard democracy merely as a convenient instrument of choosing and electing the ruling political and administrative elites in a given society. On the contrary, Dewey, according to and consistent with his philosophical pragmatism, insists on a notion of democracy that reaches far beyond the political rules regulating the activities of state authorities and public administration. Dewey sees democracy as a form of life, as a form of associational behavior of men and women. Hence, democracy (understood as a certain “spirit,” as an approach, and as an array of methods and procedures) may be found in each sphere of organized social life; moreover, democracy and its methods of organizing social behavior may be applied to every structure of society. Dewey is very clear on that point: In the first place, democracy is much broader than a special political form, a method of conducting government, of making laws and carrying on governmental administration by means of popular suffrage and elected

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Dewey’s democratic creed rests on two assumptions. The first is a belief in the equality of man. To Dewey this equality is a political one. He acknowledges the biological diversity (we would add today: the genetic diversity of human beings as organic creatures living in different environments) and the social differentiation of men and women (including their educational, cognitive, emotional, behavioral, religious and economic background and status). He therefore argues that assuming a sheer “mathematical,” “numerical” equality of human beings would mean denying the richness of human variety. People are different by their natural talents and by their social positions. In Dewey’s formulation: Belief in equality is an element in the democratic credo. It is not, however, belief in equality of natural endowments. Those who proclaimed the idea of equality did not suppose they were enunciating a psychological doctrine, but a legal and political one. All individuals are entitled to equality of treatment by law and in its administration. Each one is affected equally in quality if not in quantity by the institutions under which he lives and has an equal right to express his judgment, although the weight of his judgment may not be equal in amount when it enters into the pooled result to that of others. In short, each is equally an individual and entitled to equal opportunity of development of his own capacities, be they large or small in range. Moreover, each has needs of his own, as significant to him, as those of others are to them. The very fact of natural and psychological inequality is all the more reason for establishment by law of equality of opportunity, since otherwise the former becomes a means of oppression of the less gifted.2

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Dewey’s second assumption is a belief in the capacities of human nature. Dewey puts trust in the ability of humanity to arrive at cooperative, intelligent behavior addressing and solving common problems. Two moments are important here. One is that Dewey starts from the assumption that humans are social beings. Human beings are naturally driven to each other, they “cling” together. Dewey opposes the liberal view (or fiction) of the self-centered, selfassured, atomistic individual. The other is that Dewey is convinced that men and women – notwithstanding their differing views and positions – are intellectually and morally able to come to terms with each other. Dewey sees a certain spirit, an attitude of cooperativeness (including competition, but not excluding solidarity) being involved here. This attitude of cooperativeness gives rise to societal frameworks supporting public discourse, deliberation and decision-making. In the words of Dewey: “The foundation of democracy is faith in the capacities of human nature; faith in human intelligence and in the power of pooled and cooperative experience. It is not belief that these things are complete but that, if given a show, they will grow and be able to generate progressively the knowledge and the wisdom needed to guide collective action.”3 2. John Dewey on Democracy as a Learning Process Starting from this broad, complex notion of democracy as a cooperative, skillful, and intelligent way of organizing social life, Dewey comes to the conclusion that democracy is sustained both by human behavior to be learned and by social knowledge to be acquired. Democracy is not an easy road to take and follow. On the contrary, it is as far as its realization is concerned in the complex conditions of the contemporary world, a supremely difficult one. Upon the whole we are entitled to take courage from the fact that it has worked as well as it has done. But to this courage we must add if our courage is to be intelligent rather than blind, the fact, that successful maintenance of democracy demands the utmost in use of the best available methods to procure a social knowledge that is reasonably commensurate with our physical knowledge, and the invention and the use of forms of social engineering reasonably commensurate with our technical abilities in physical affairs.4 For Dewey, the relation between democracy and education is a reciprocal, mutual one. Democracy as a way of life is an educational principle, an educational measure and policy. Even an election campaign has a greater value in educating the citizens of a country who take part in it than it has in its immediate results, for a campaign serves the purpose of making the citizens aware of what is going on in society, what the problems are, and the various

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measures and policies that are proposed to deal with the issues of the day.5 For Dewey, however, the idea of sustaining democracy by learning does not mean merely acquiring knowledge of political facts and figures. On the contrary, Dewey sees learning in a democracy as an active process of social involvement, of gaining experience, of broadening one’s mind, of developing habits and skills of cooperatively, intelligently interacting with other persons and groups. To make this idea clear, Dewey uses the word “understanding” rather than the word “knowledge.” This is because “unfortunately, knowledge to so many people means ‘information’. Information is knowledge about things, and there is no guarantee in any amount of ‘knowledge about things’ that understanding – the spring of intelligent action – will follow from it. Knowledge about things is static. There is no guarantee in any amount of information, even if skillfully conveyed, that an intelligent attitude of mind will be formed.”6 Dewey’s idea of learning democracy, therefore, has a broad meaning, covering virtually all those activities in society that are leading to intelligent and cooperative problem solving, be it in state politics, in community affairs, in workplace relations or in family life. Following this idea, there is also the specific aspect of learning democracy in the educational sector of society, i.e. first and foremost in the school system. Dewey points out “that democracy and education bear a reciprocal relation, for it is not merely that democracy is itself an educational principle, but that democracy cannot endure, much less develop, without education in that narrower sense in which we ordinary think of it, the education that is given in the family, and especially as we think of it in the school.”7 3. Making Democracy a Meaningful Experience in Society and in School In a democratic society, the educational system is designed to convey the rules and the ideas of democracy to the following generations. But democratic ideas do not exist in separation from real life. Democratic ideas and principles may be expressed and laid down as notions, they may be circulated as intellectual schemes to be discussed and judged upon. However, for Dewey, the principles of democracy grow out of real life, and therefore they are to be maintained in real life, by the social processes of experience and problem solving. Democracy is not an abstract idea; it is not a mere empty word. The notion of democracy receives its meaning in social life, in the real, full and rich process of pooling experience, of discussion and consultation, of communication, of deliberation, of problem identification and cooperative problem solving. During the 1930s and 1940s, defending democracy against the totalitarian systems of German Nazism, Italian Fascism, and Soviet Stalinism Dewey, especially in his public appearances, drew attention to the role schools have to play in forming democratic habits within the younger generations. Vis-à-vis

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the totalitarian challenge, Dewey insisted “that we should take seriously, energetically and vigorously the use of democratic school and democratic methods in the schools; that we should educate the young and the youth of the country in freedom for participation in a free society.”8 He was well aware of the threat to Western democracies posed by Fascist, Nazi, or Bolshevist political regimes. But this was a threat from the outside, a challenge to democracy from intolerant and aggressive political systems. This challenge could be dealt with through diplomacy and foreign policy. And, finally, this threat, in the case of the Nazi Third Reich and its allies, was to be removed by military action. At the same time, Dewey clearly saw dangerous tendencies within the Western societies themselves, within the market-oriented free world. In the eyes of Dewey, new socio-economic developments had the perilous capacity of undermining the core of democracy in Western societies. Dewey was concerned with the rapid changes in the economic, technical, scientific and social spheres, forcing millions of people to adjust their lives to new conditions. People had to cope with technological revolutions in industry and service. They had to deal with development of new professions and occupations, to come to terms with devaluations of once highly appreciated technical skills and professional capacities. These changes in the social world had the potential of weakening peoples’ commitment to democracy. Rapid and risk-laden socioeconomic changes could alienate people from democratic participation. On this point Dewey was very outspoken: And now we have economic conditions, because of the rapid change in industry and in finance, where there are thousands and millions of people who have the minimum of control over the conditions of their own subsistence. That is a problem, of course, that will need public and private consideration, but it is a deeper problem than that, it is a problem of the future of democracy, of how political democracy can be made secure if there is economic insecurity and economic dependence of great sections of the population if not upon the direct will of others, at least upon the conditions under which the employing sections of the society operate.9 Given these rapid changes in society Dewey was bothered by a misleading, static notion of democracy, preventing adjustments of democratic forms and activities necessary to cope with new circumstances of social and economic life. We have had, without formulating it, a conception of democracy as something static, as something that is like an inheritance that can be bequeathed, a kind of lump sum that we could live off and upon. The crisis that we have undergone, will turn out, I think, to be worthwhile if

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GERT-RÜDIGER WEGMARSHAUS we have learned through it that every generation has to accomplish democracy over and over again for itself; that its very nature, its essence, is something that cannot be handed on from one person or one generation to another, but has to be worked out in terms of needs, problems and conditions of the social life of which, as the years go by, we are a part, a social life that is changing with extreme rapidity from year to year.10

Hence Dewey made it as clear as possible that “the very idea of democracy, the meaning of democracy must be continually explored afresh; it has to be constantly discovered, and rediscovered, remade and reorganized.”11 4. The German School Program “Learning and Living Democracy” Democracy indeed is nothing static. It has to be reinvented all the time; it has to be explored afresh by each new generation. This has direct consequences for the ways and methods of teaching democracy in schools. Teaching democracy in schools should be addressing the ever-changing circumstances of social life. Teaching democracy properly understood requires the introduction of learning processes conducive to cooperative problem solving based on gaining of new experiences. This bears consequences for the school as a social organization. Teaching democracy therefore is not only a matter of including certain subjects in the school curriculum, such as “Civic Education,” “Political Philosophy,” or “Ethics.” To be learning democracy within the school system means to reorganize the entire life in schools (i.e. classroom work itself, student’s sports and social activities, relations between students and teachers) in accordance with the understanding of democracy as a human field of shared and pooled experience, of open communication and cooperative problem solving. The School Program “Learning and Living Democracy” currently under way in Germany explicitly follows Dewey’s understanding of democracy as a learning process both in society and in school.12 This program, initiated by the German Federal Government led by Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, runs from 2002 until 2007. In the light of obvious and pressing new social and economic challenges to the stability of the German democratic system, the program addresses the need for significantly improving the quality of civic, democratic education in the German school system.13 The program got its kick-off at a congress in Berlin analyzing the political behavior of young Germans and the state of civic education in the German school system.14 Two major problems had been identified: First, in the wake of German unification, the 1990s witnessed a dramatic increase in violent right-wing radicalism, xenophobia, and anti-Semitism. As social research reveals, juvenile offenders had committed most acts of right-wing violence. Moreover, rightwing violent extremism heavily turned out to be a problem of young males, of less educated young people and of juveniles having grown up in the former

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Communist East Germany.15 Second, a substantial number of young people show deep-rooted political frustration, display alienation from democracy, and pursue strategies of taking refuge in the private sphere.16 In order to find remedies for these problems the program – following Dewey’s educational spirit – focuses on cooperative learning processes. Hence the program aims at learning democratic procedures and acquiring democratic habits within the life world of young people. This means learning to plan one’s life, to be organized, learning to be constructive, strengthening one’s self-esteem by cooperating within meaningful social activities. It includes the creation of a learning environment conducive to inter-subjective understanding and to the development of moral judgment. The program rests on the distinction between two different, but closely related aspects of democracy: on the one hand, democracy is traditionally seen as a political form of organizing the institutional authority of the state, while on the other hand, democracy is regarded as an educational principle. Democracy as an educational principle provides a framework for reaching important objectives in the process of learning. Democracy as an educational principle is designed to make it possible to attain a violence-free school situation, to develop mutual recognition among the students and between students and teachers.17 Democracy in school education means emotionally and intellectually encouraging learning, it means practically inciting discourse and cooperation, and it means deliberately and skillfully creating a “natural” atmosphere of respect, equality and benevolence. The program outlines two major objectives to be reached: one objective is focused on attitudes and knowledge, enabling each student to arrive at a spirit of “critical loyalty” with respect to the principles and the current practice of democratic government. The other objective has to do with habits and skills, allowing each student to develop the competencies indispensable to active participation in a democratic society.18 The means designed to achieve these objectives is inspired by Dewey’s pedagogy, which may be expressed as “Learning intensively based on Understanding” (“Verständnisintensives Lernen”).19 This learning process is rooted in experience, in practical life, in sensations, emotions, and actions. This kind of learning leads to scientific comprehension of the world as well as to discovery and acceptance of social rules. Such a learning process produces intelligence and knowledge applicable to new situations. Following Dewey’s concept of learning, the makers of the program aim at developing critical judgment and participatory activity. The activities of the program shall make it likely for every single student within the German school system to arrive at “Pro-democratic Attitudes.” The participating schools in the program “Learning and Living Democracy” are offered four different modules, i.e. areas of educational development:

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The first two modules are above all oriented to the process of acquiring knowledge, prudence, and practical abilities (“Learning Democracy”). The other two modules are designed to enable students experiencing democracy as a way of living within their own school environment, experiencing democracy as a form of social activities resulting in fruitful engagement in the wider community (“Living Democracy”).20 The program is open for participation by secondary schools in all German Federal States (“Bundesländer”) on a competitive basis. Each school running in the competition was expected to present its own plan of educational development. Each participating school had to carefully select one module in order to design the appropriate educational activities most suitably fitting its specific needs. There is clearly an overwhelming response by the schools and a desire to participate in the program, and hundreds of carefully and thoughtfully planned educational activities are underway. One may hopefully expect tangible results by the year 2007 when the program ends. At this moment it is far too early to predict the practical effects this program may yield for democratic education of Germany’s younger generations. Future research in the political and educational sciences may judge the outcome of this program, as well as to determine the subsequent steps in democratic education that are productively being inspired by Dewey.

NOTES 1. John Dewey, Problems of Men (New York: Philosophical Library, 1946), p. 57. 2. Ibid., p. 60. 3. Ibid., p. 59. 4. Ibid., p. 32. 5. Ibid., p. 34. 6. Ibid., p. 48. 7. Ibid., pp. 36–37. 8. Ibid., p. 38. 9. Ibid., p. 40. 10. Ibid., p. 39. 11. Ibid., pp. 46–47. 12. Wolfganf Edelstein and Peter Fauser, Demokratie lernen und leben. Gutachten zum Programm. Materialien zur Bildungsplanung und zur Forschungs-

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förderung. Bund-Länder-Kommission für Bildungsplanung und Forschungsförderung (BLK), vol. 96 (Bonn, 2001). On Dewey, see pp. 17, 26–27, 54–55. 13. Ibid., pp. 5–6. 14. BLK-Kongress “Für Demokratie – gegen Gewalt,” 3–5 May 2001, in Berlin. 15. Wilhelm Heitmeyer, Die Bielefelder Rechtsextremismus-Studie. Erste Langzeituntersuchung zur politischen Sozialisation (Munich: Juventa Verlag, 1992); Ursula Hoffmann-Lange, “Das rechte Einstellungspotential in der deutschen Jugend,” in Rechtsextremismus. Ergebnisse und Perspektiven der Forschung, ed. Jürgen Falter (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1996), pp. 121–137; Wolfgang Edelstein, “Die Ausbreitung der rechten Jugendkultur in Deutschland. Nebst einigen Vorschlägen zur Prävention,” in Demokratie lernen und leben. Gutachten und Empfehlungen, vol. 3 (Weinheim: Freudenberg Stiftung, 2001), pp. 41–42; Peter Noack and Elke Wild, “Überlegungen zur Entwicklung von aggressiven und Rechtsextremen Einstellungen,” in Aggressionen und Gewalt unter Kindern und Jugendlichen, ed. Mechthild Schäfer and Dieter Frey (Göttingen: Verlag für Psychologie Hogrefe, 1998), pp. 107–134; Wilfried Schubarth and Wolfgang Melzer, Schule, Gewalt und Rechtsextremismus (Opladen: Leske und Budrich, 1995); Dietmar Sturzbecher, Jugend in Ostdeutschland: Lebenssituation und Delinquenz (Opladen: Leske und Budrich, 2001); Dietmar Sturzbecher and Roland Freytag, Antisemitismus unter Jugendlichen. Fakten, Erklärungen, Unterrichtsbausteine (Göttingen: Hogrefe-Verlag, 2000). 16. Judith Torney-Purta, Rainer Lehmann, Hans Oswald, and Wolfram Schulz, Citizenship and Education in Twenty-eight Countries: Civic Knowledge and Engagement at Age Fourteen (Amsterdam: International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement, 2001); Deutsche Shell, ed., Jugend ’97: Zukunfts-perspektiven, Gesellschaftliches Engagement, Politische Orientierung (Opladen: Leske und Budrich, 1997); Deutsche Shell, ed., Jugend 2000, 2 vol. (Opladen: Leske und Budrich, 2000); Jürgen Maier, Politikverdrossenheit in der Bundesrepublik Deutsch-land (Opladen: Leske und Budrich, 2000). 17. Axel Honneth, Kampf um Anerkennung: zur moralischen Grammatik sozialer Konflikte (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1992). 18. Edelstein and Fauser, Demokratie lernen und leben, p. 25. 19. Ibid., pp. 26–27. 20. Ibid., pp. 30–32.

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Eleven IS PRAGMATIC POLITICAL TECHNOLOGY A REASONABLE POSSIBILITY? John Ryder

The issue I would like to pose concerns the adequacy of pragmatism as a political technology. The term “political technology” here should be taken to indicate the means or tools that are put to use for political ends. In this sense, a pragmatist political technology is the central characteristics of pragmatism, both its methods and its conceptual commitments, in so far as they are directed to political, or broadly social, ends. For pragmatism as a social theory to be meaningful beyond the merely theoretical, that is for pragmatist social theory to have any practical significance, it must include a political technology. Without it pragmatism is little more than another account of the problems of philosophers instead of a serious effort to address philosophically the problems of people. To put it another way, for pragmatism to be a meaningful social theory it must deal with both ends and means. To the extent that it concerns itself with ends, pragmatist social theory can point to the directions in which society should develop; to the extent that it deals with the means to achieve those ends, pragmatist social theory embodies a political technology. When the point is put this way, it is obvious enough that pragmatist social theory is or includes a political technology. John Dewey’s work is the most obvious example in that Dewey was concerned throughout with the relation of means and ends, and he argued persistently that neither can be profitably taken up without the other. How Dewey and others have understood and elaborated the appropriate pragmatist means to social and political ends is a complex matter. At the heart of it, though, and Dewey made this abundantly clear, is education. The question of the adequacy or reasonableness of pragmatist political technology, then, is necessarily a question of the conceptual content of pragmatist social theory and of education as the means of its realization. I would add one final definitional point, which is that political technology in the sense meant here must be distinguished from social engineering. The distinction is important in that social engineering is a form of manipulation, whereas a pragmatist political technology, particularly its educational dimension, is an effort to provide people the means by which their own individual and social development can be realized. We are able now to frame the question more precisely: can pragmatism reasonably expect to achieve its own ends, or, does pragmatist social theory

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contain a viable political technology? Such a political technology, in so far as it embodies both pragmatism’s conceptual content and its method, would consist of several fundamental commitments: (1) that the value of ideas, the ultimate test of their legitimacy, lies in their applicability, in their ability to achieve a desired end, to get a job done; (2) to the paramount value of democracy as a form of life and of social organization; and (3) to the central role of education as the source of the development of the democratic frame of mind and democratic habits. In one sense the answer to our question is simple enough: in the abstract it is certainly possible for a pragmatist political technology to contribute to the resolution of social problems and the development of public policy in the contemporary world. Furthermore, for many of us there is no question but that a social environment in which these pragmatist commitments drove our approach to social issues and to policy would be far preferable to the condition in which we currently live, in which economic and military power, and its preservation in the hands of those who already hold it, are the driving forces of social policy in many nations, both strong and weak. Of course you will notice that I have answered the question by saying that a pragmatist political technology is possible in the abstract. The qualifier is important because in practice it will be difficult to achieve, since it would require breaking the power of those who currently make policy in most if not all places. And I am afraid that I have no answer to the question how that might be accomplished. I am not optimistic. But there is another problem that bothers me, one that also has to do with pragmatist political technology in practice. The problem has to do with political technology in general, that is with the instrumental use of ideas to drive social policy. The twentieth century saw two large-scale applications of a basic set of conceptual commitments as the basis, the conceptual tools, for social change, fascism and Marxism. Neither of these forms of political technology, in their various versions, turned out well. Contrary to a good deal of mainstream thinking these days, I would say that fascism proved to be far more detrimental than has Marxism, but in the end neither has served to advance human dignity, freedom, or social development. One of the primary reasons was that in both cases the powers that be believed that their ideas were necessary for the development of their respective societies, so much so that dissension, even disagreement, was not to be tolerated. This in turn lead to a situation where people who did not endorse the prevailing ideas were forced to flee, fight and suffer the often gruesome consequences, comply under duress, or simply acquiesce by exhaustion. Nothing about such a situation speaks well for the ideas at work. More generally, this picture raises the question whether there might be something unpalatable, unacceptable, about instrumentalism in social life, i.e. about political technology in general.

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Of course there is an obvious response to the cases of fascism and Marxism, which is that they are not representative of the full range of ideas that can be employed instrumentally in social life, and that their failings are due not to their role in social construction but to their ideological character. In other words, neither fascism nor Marxism were democratic, and therein lay the problem. This is obviously the case with fascism, but even Marxism, which had and has a greater claim to democratic possibilities, was put to work as an ideological foundation, as a set of truths rather than a set of possibilities to be employed, confirmed or refuted in experience, revised, or possibly rejected. Nor were the basic ideas formed through the free and creative exercise of individual and community determination of values and ends. Had they been, the pragmatist might argue, i.e. had they been approached pragmatically rather than ideologically, there might have been greater hope of success. But the question I would like to pose is whether that is an adequate response to the problem suggested by fascism and Marxism to the whole issue of political technology? Is it reasonable to suppose that a more democratic set of ideas can adequately serve as a political technology, i.e. achieve the desired ends of freedom and development without exhibiting the shortcomings of fascism and Marxism? We might see the problem more clearly by suggesting that for a set of ideas to be efficacious, to be instrumentally valuable in its application to social problems and public policy, there has to be fairly widespread acceptance of those ideas across the population. This is especially true for pragmatism with its emphasis on the community development of means and ends. What happens when a sizeable portion of the population disagrees? To remain consistent, pragmatism, with its central emphasis on democratic forms of life and decision making, on collective development of means and ends with respect to social problems and policy, cannot have recourse to the forms of oppression characteristic of other political technologies. How, then, does it handle dissent, especially large-scale dissent? Pragmatist values cannot survive large-scale dissent, nor can they repress it. Therein lies the problem. The literature, as far as I know, does not address this question. There have been many fine studies of pragmatist social and political theory, and there have been fewer but no less valuable inquiries into pragmatist technology and community reconstruction. They all, however, ask the question how pragmatist principles might work assuming a general agreement among members of a society in the advantages and virtues of an experimental, community based approach to social issues. And much of the literature about pragmatism and education deals with the question of how such a consensus might be reached. If we accept the idea that education properly organized and executed can achieve a rough consensus of the necessary sort, and that people on the whole can conduct themselves in ways anticipated by pragmatist social theory, then it may well be possible that a pragmatist political technology is the best

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alternative we have. The question is whether it is reasonable to expect that education can succeed in this task and that people can act accordingly. This is a serious problem for pragmatism, and the issue is not abstractly theoretical. I would not want to argue, for example, that human nature is such that we can never expect this to happen. The concept of human nature, at least with respect to the issue of what people can or cannot be like, is itself too ideologically charged to be of much value in imagining the future. It was once assumed that people are such that some are destined to be masters and others slaves, or that most people require the firm and stable leadership afforded by a monarchy. History has suggested that neither of these views of human possibilities is accurate. On that evidence alone it is far too suspicious to argue against any sort of social organization or approach to social problems by appeal to human nature. The problem for pragmatist political technology is not whether people are capable of acting in ways described by pragmatist theory. The problem is more practical than that. It is, simply put, that we can expect people, including or perhaps especially reasonable, well educated people, to hold a wide range of views regarding the proper role of ideas, democracy, freedom, community and education. No matter how we organize a pragmatist political technology, and no matter how careful we are in its execution, for example in the forms of education it develops and perpetuates, there will, I submit, inevitably be dissension simply because any large number of people who think for themselves will be more likely than not to come to a large number of differing and incompatible conclusions. There is a serious sense in which this is a problem not so much for pragmatism but for democracy. Even contemporary forms of what I would call “thin” democracy, by which I mean societies for which democracy means little more than voting in contested elections, can and do face this problem. How, we might ask, do we handle an occasion in which a majority of voters use the polls to elect leaders or endorse policies that are hostile to the very democracy that provides the election? This question has become acute at various points in all democracies. The French, amid a great deal of criticism around the world, have recently denied to their citizens the right to wear various forms of head covering associated with religious or cultural identification, presumably in an effort to avoid undermining the nation’s secular and democratic identity. The criticism, as we know, is that such measures are themselves anti-democratic in that they contradict the right of individual expression. Another and an even more acute example can be seen in Turkey. The electoral system has brought a moderate Islamic party to power, but many of the more secular Kemalists in the country fear that the ruling party will gradually use its power to enact legislation that will move the country away from democracy and towards theocracy. How does even a thin democracy deal with this? One answer, and not a surprising one given Turkish history, is that the army might step in, as it has in the past, and put a stop to the Islamists. This might be effective, but

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there is nothing democratic about it. And to offer yet another and different kind of example, in the post-war and early cold war period in the U.S. there were many who believed that there was a real possibility that communists would come to power in the U.S., and would eradicate the democratic system. The government’s response to that perceived threat was to undermine the very freedoms of speech, press and association that define the democratic system. Whether such a “threat” was real is something people still debate. Even assuming that communism posed such a “threat,” the American response may or may not have been effective, but like the Turkish army, it was hardly democratic. If even thin democracies face this problem, without I would add any genuinely democratic way to handle it, a pragmatist political technology would face it that much more acutely. In a thin democracy like that in the U.S., people can simply opt out of many of the social practices that define the society. In elections in recent years, to give the most obvious example, more than half the eligible electorate has chosen not to participate. The system can handle this relatively easily because leaders are chosen simply by adding up the votes of those who do participate (leaving aside the role of the Electoral College in presidential elections), and then policy is handled by those who are elected. If people choose, they might pursue possible solutions to specific problems through NGOs, religious organizations and various others forms of private collaboration that define civil society. But they need not do that either. They can simply not participate in any form of social activity. In the short run at least, any number of people may so choose, and the system survives as long as there is no active opposition. In the case of a pragmatist democracy, of a pragmatist political technology, the picture would be different. Dewey in the classical literature and others more recently have made the point repeatedly that there is a greater value in collective decision making, so that community interaction is a much more important component of a pragmatist or “thick” democracy than of a thin one. A community-based democracy of that kind cannot survive if large portions of the population simply refuse to participate. And this is a problem even if there is no sustained opposition or dissension. If there is opposition or dissension then the problem is even more serious. Consider for example the question of education. Pragmatists from John Dewey to John McDermott have argued persuasively that an education appropriate to what I am calling a thick, i.e. pragmatist, democracy must have certain characteristics. It must, for example, instill in young people an appreciation for open-ended inquiry, for a hypothetical approach to problems, for a willingness, even an eagerness, to revise ideas in and through experience, and for the importance of the collective pursuit of solutions to shared problems. But as we are all well aware, there are many people who have much different approaches to education. In the U.S. today, as we know, it is more common to hear the goals of education described in terms of making people

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competitive in the marketplace than of developing individual and social capacities to solve problems. And there are many people who believe that the purpose of education is to inculcate in young people one or another set of beliefs, i.e. to raise them as young ideologues. The latter is especially true of fundamentalist religious schools. The problem suggested by the example of education is that even if we are able to convince many such people of the value of a pragmatist education, there will always be those who disagree. In fact, I suspect that there will be enough who disagree that they will pose a serious problem for a society that attempts to put to use a pragmatist political technology. Certainly there are examples of identifiable communities that would not buy into pragmatist education, for example Amish and Hassidic communities in the U.S.. These are small enough and sufficiently contained communities not to present a real problem. A problem would be posed, however, by Christian fundamentalist religious schools. Such schools represent the antithesis of pragmatist education, in that they teach young people not to be reflective, experimental, hypothetical and open-minded, but rather to accept as absolute certain principles and truths and to apply them rigidly. A pragmatist democracy, a pragmatist political technology, cannot sustain itself if a sizable portion of the population is subjected to that sort of education. A thin democracy can handle it as long as most everyone is willing to accept the results of elections, but a thick democracy cannot. What are the alternatives available to a pragmatist technology in such a situation? Clearly it will not do to employ the methods that are the common resort of ideological political technologies. No society wanting to call itself democratic can close down fundamentalist religious schools, for example. Nor can it censor or in other respects attempt to control a fundamentalist press, to give another example. As attractive as such methods might be to some, and in certain circumstances, in the end they are a cure that is worse than the disease in that they undermine the very principles of democracy itself. One obvious possibility available to a pragmatist democracy is to hope to prevail by example. Perhaps pragmatist education, especially once it is executed on a fairly large scale, will be so successful that it will attract more and more adherents, and eventually marginalize the non- or anti-democratic alternatives. This would be an extraordinarily risky thing to pin one’s hopes on, but I can think of no alternative. The seriousness of this problem is made more clear when one adds other domains of social life to the example of education. What of the press? Can we really think that the press will behave differently, or very differently, in a pragmatist environment than it does now? If it does not behave differently, then the challenge to a pragmatist political technology is obvious. And surely in a free political environment there will eventually be political parties develop that stand not simply in opposition to this or that policy, but to pragmatist

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principles in general. It is not hard to imagine a radical “Christianist” party on the model of radical Islamist parties in the Muslim world. This would pose a serious problem even for a thin democracy. Imagine how seriously it would undermine the ability of a pragmatist political technology to function. The point is that it is probably not sufficient to expect that the problems of an instrumentalist approach to social problems and policy will be less serious if the political technology in question is democratically grounded. The problems of political technology may well be endemic to social instrumentalism itself, regardless of its fundamental values. If so, then the prospects for a thick, pragmatist democracy are bleak. This is not an encouraging situation, especially at a time when even thin democracy is in serious trouble. There is a potential response to this problem from the pragmatist, Deweyan tradition. Dewey was well aware that one of the problems with traditional philosophical social and political theory was that it was far too utopian in nature. That is to say, philosophers traditionally derived the character of ideal social organization, structure and policy more a priori than empirically. This in turn meant that social and political ends were by their nature, by the method of their derivation, cut off from the realities to which they were supposed to apply. This made them either unrealistic or unrealizable, or both. As an alternative Dewey developed a method of consciously drawing social and political ends from the characteristics of existing social conditions rather than from ideal concepts. One of the clearest examples of this method is the derivation of the characteristics of democracy, i.e. as the pursuit of shared interests and reaching beyond the borders of one’s own community, which Dewey describes in Democracy and Education. Dewey thought that by deriving concepts and theoretical ends from existing conditions rather than in the abstract he could avoid the problem of unrealistic and unrealizable social and political goals. He was surely right that methodologically this is preferable to the traditional alternative. This aspect of the instrumentalist method has to be one of the high achievements of pragmatist philosophy. Social and political ends derived from existing conditions do indeed have more practical bearing than those derived more abstractly, but it does not follow that they are realizable, or even reasonably approachable. To be able to draw that conclusion more is needed than pragmatist philosophy has yet provided. This is not to say that pragmatist philosophy is incapable of the kind of theoretical development that will answer the problem, but it does suggest that at this point the problem is one that has not yet been adequately dealt with. This is a pessimistic sounding analysis, but in the end we should be not pessimistic but realistic. I am reminded of a remark Plato made in the Republic, in which he says that he is describing an ideal, and not claiming that the ideal can be achieved. He is claiming, he goes on to say, that whether the ideal can be achieved or not, the closer we can come to it the better off we will be. Rousseau makes the same point in Emile. These are wise insights that we

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do well to keep in mind. The conclusion I reach from all of this is not that a pragmatist political technology is out of reach, or not worth working toward. On the contrary, the methodological and conceptual commitments that I have mentioned to define a pragmatist political technology are indeed valuable ones and if we could manage to realize them our societies and our lives would be far preferable to what they are today. We should not expect, however, that a pragmatist approach to social problems and policy will eliminate our problems. There would remain serious problems to address, some of them inherent in pragmatism itself. But then this should not be surprising to a pragmatist. Pragmatist political technology, indeed pragmatism itself, has never claimed to be a way to eliminate social, individual or philosophical problems. Rather it is a way, perhaps notwithstanding its problems the best way we have, of addressing the problems we face.

Twelve THICK DEMOCRACY TOO MUCH? TRY PRAGMATISM LITE Michael Eldridge

Pragmatism, in the sense in which I am interested, places considerable emphasis on our ongoing practices and how they can be made better for the people involved. It recommends that we evaluate our behavior when things are not going as well as we like, consider alternatives, and reconstruct what we are doing so that our practices better serve our purposes. This I shall refer to as “intelligizing practice.” Just why I do so will become clearer after I tell a couple of stories. They both involve John Dewey, the pragmatist that I know the most about. I will then use this notion to respond to John Ryder’s worry that pragmatism may not be suitable for dealing with large-scale dissent. In extreme cases, when democracy itself is at stake, the pragmatist, Ryder thinks, cannot repress anti-democratic dissent. I will challenge this judgment. But first the two stories. The first story is one that Dewey told and has to do with his attempt just over 100 years ago to buy the right sort of desks for the Laboratory School at the University of Chicago. When Dewey was head of the Department of Philosophy, Psychology, and Pedagogy at the newly formed University of Chicago, he and his wife, Alice, organized a school that would enable them to experiment with some new approaches in education. In one of his early publications, School and Society, which was originally published in 1899, Dewey recalled that a “few years ago” when he was “trying to find desks and chairs” that would be “suitable ... to the needs of the children,” he was having “a great deal of difficulty in finding” what was “needed.” Then one dealer, whom Dewey significantly describes as being “more intelligent than the rest,” put his finger on the problem: “I am afraid we have not what you want. You want something at which the children may work; these are all for listening.”1 This is an intelligent observation because it correctly identifies the purpose of the desks and chairs designed to meet the needs of traditional education and the character of the means available to realize that purpose. Students were regarded as passive absorbers of information whether they were listening to the teacher or reading from a textbook. Dewey had a different purpose (or end) in mind. In his school students were to be active learners, pursuing their interests within the limits established by the teacher and curriculum. As he observed a few years later, in traditional education “the tendency is to reduce the activity of mind to a docile or passive taking in of the

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material presented – in short to memorizing, with simply incidental use of judgment and of active research. As is frequently stated, acquiring takes the place of inquiring.”2 Elementary school children could not be expected to educate themselves, but this was the ideal toward which Dewey wished to work. Increasingly, as children developed into adults, he hoped that each one would become an active learner: an inquirer. The model he had in mind was that of experimental science. Dewey thought that an important change had occurred in recent centuries. Before the development of modern science, people had stumbled upon the goods of life somewhat accidentally. Knowledge of these goods was then passed on within societies with new members of the community acquiring what they needed to know from their elders. But now an important cultural revolution had taken place. People could learn intentionally from experience. If there was dissatisfaction with an existing practice, such as students being reduced to listeners, one could remake it to suit one’s needs. Intelligent action, in the sense of means actually leading to the desired ends, could be instituted. To use desks made for listening in a school where active learning was the endin-view would be a mismatch. It would be stupid to do so. Thus a new type of desk was needed. Intelligence for Dewey is the use of indirect action (or means) to accomplish that (the end) which cannot be seized directly.3 This Dewey thinks is natural. Science, or directed, experimental inquiry, is an intensification of a natural process. He wrote: “The organism is a part of the natural world; its interactions with it are genuine additive phenomena. When, with the development of symbols, also a natural occurrence, these interactions are directed towards anticipated consequences, they gain the quality of intelligence....”4 Thus Dewey was not just a pragmatist; he was a pragmatic naturalist. His instrumentalism – the term he preferred to “pragmatism” – was set within a naturalistic (as opposed to supernaturalistic context). So he valued science not only for what it could teach us about inquiry but also for its results. The world described by science, both physical and social, was world enough for the secular Dewey, where “secular” means “having to do with this world” and not “anti-religious.” This understanding of learning and orientation toward science led Dewey not only into conflicts with traditionalists generally but with philosophy as traditionally understood. It was no longer philosophy’s task to describe reality and to access that reality by reason. Rather philosophy, as Dewey famously noted in 1917, should become “a method, cultivated by philosophers for dealing with” human problems.5 The story – and this is the second one that I want to tell – that best captures this shift is the one told by Charles Frankel, the Columbia University philosopher, who as a graduate student at Columbia attended the 1939 American Philosophical Association dinner that honored Dewey’s eightieth birthday. Here is what Frankel remembered: “When Dewey

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was eighty, he engaged in a debate, at a meeting of the American Philosophical Association, with his old friend and Columbia colleague, William Pepperell Montague, in the course of which Montague complimented him for his lifelong effort to practicalize intelligence. Dewey replied quietly but firmly that Montague was taking a narrow, inbred view – a philosopher’s trade-union view, he implied – of what he, Dewey, had tried to accomplish. His effort had not been to practicalize intelligence but to intellectualize practice.”6 We are engaged in practices, or ongoing activities. These activities, what Dewey elsewhere, following William James, terms “habits,” came about to meet some need. Overtime they likely will cease to be appropriate to our changing needs. Thus we need to rethink what we are doing, to make sure that there is a match between means and ends. The method whereby we make our practices more intelligent is inquiry. The task is not to take reason and try to figure out how to apply it – the practicalizing intelligence approach rejected by Dewey. Rather, one is to identify the significant disjunctions between our needs, habits, and objectives and to help us rethink what we are doing. She is to assist in the intelligizing of practice. This is no easy task, for the cultural deposits in our thinking are deeply buried and not easily recovered, examined, and changed. Oftentimes they are firmly embedded in our moralities and religions and imbued with an absoluteness and sacredness that elicits a do-not-touch attitude. But Dewey thought that nothing was beyond a possibly transforming investigation. And it was the task of philosophy to identify these tensions in society where a no longer fully effective practice was in need of transformation. This was the tension between ideal and actual that Dewey took to be central to philosophy.7 But “ideal” did not mean for Dewey something that was perfect or timeless. Rather, something was ideal if it was a “generalized end-in-view.”8 It arises naturally and is cultivated by us. It is making desirable that which naturally occurs.9 A third Deweyan ideal, in addition to science and intelligence is democracy, or, as he refers to it in “Creative Democracy – The Task Before Us,” “ordered richness.”10 By this phrase he meant the sort of social structure that enables individuals to flourish – not just for the sake of the individuals but for the group as well. He was willing to consider many different procedures as democratic as long as they met the requirement of enabling the group and its members to flourish. He thought that open and free communication was important, as was the explicit embrace of the method of inquiry that he championed. Indeed democracy for him was a social instantiation of intelligence, for an ideally democratic group would be engaged in the deliberate reconstruction of experience. What I have just presented is not the whole of pragmatism. I have not said anything about Charles Sanders Peirce, who may be considered the initiator of the pragmatic understanding. I have only alluded to William James, who was the first to use the term “pragmatism” publicly. Nor have I discussed

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prominent contemporary philosophers, who are often referred to as “neopragmatists.” I have not considered the controversy occasioned by James’s theory of truth. Rather I have limited myself to the Deweyan version of pragmatism as it bears on education and society. I have done so because I want to consider the possibility of a pragmatic politics. I say “possibility” because I cannot readily point to a society or even a group that has fully realized the Deweyan ideal of “ordered richness” as an “intelligized practice.” I can, however, point to practices that are not pragmatic in the sense that I have been trying to articulate today. I can readily point to examples of unintelligent practice, or perhaps I should say, activities that are much in need of pragmatic inquiry. The one that is most on my mind is the Bush administration’s intervention in Iraq. I am keenly aware that many think that the United States government has for decades been pursuing a pragmatic foreign policy, where “pragmatic” means “politically expedient” or even “blatantly opportunistic.” So it may be helpful to distinguish this crude pragmatism from the philosophical pragmatism that I favor. As is now well known the reasons offered for the U.S. invasion of Iraq have been several, ranging from eliminating the threat of the use of weapons of mass destruction, combating terrorism, removing Sadaam Hussein from power and thus freeing the Iraqi people from a brutal oppressor to creating a model democracy in the Middle East. Also the perception was allowed to form that Hussein was linked to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. But the administration has since clarified, more or less, that there was no demonstrable link between Hussein and al Qaeda. With the failure to find weapons of mass destruction the administration increasingly emphasized the benefits of removing Hussein from power and creating a democratic Iraq. The multiplicity of the objectives and the shifts in emphasis, not surprisingly, encouraged considerable cynicism as to Bush administration’s real motives. This cynicism grew with the lack of progress toward democracy, and it was intensified and compounded with an even more widespread revulsion as the shocking details regarding the abuse of prisoners at the American-operated prisons came to light. It is now clear that there was very little means-ends analysis beyond the initial military intervention. But in addition to the failure to work out an appropriate, workable means-end relationship, there is the question of how the decision was made. Certainly it was not the product of an open, free, deliberative process involving all the concerned parties. The resistance to intervention was such that President Bush was limited to one major partner, Great Britain, and a few other nations, some of whom have since withdrawn their troops as a result of public pressure. Bush’s disdain for the United Nations and its deliberative process bordered on contempt. Clearly, the actions of the U.S. government in regard to Iraq cannot be called pragmatic in the sense that I spelled out earlier. These actions, however, can be seen to be of a

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piece with the often high-handed behavior of the United States with regard to Latin America and the unilateral abrogation of various treaties. Our conduct in Iraq came as no surprise to many around over the world. The pragmatism that I favor has several advantages over the politically and economically expedient one that I have just described. It is pluralistic; there is no claim to universality. Rather, it respects a variety of cultures. Philosophic pragmatism, with its focus on reconstructing practices, begins where one is. Or as we sometimes say, it begins in the middle of things. Situations are seldom ideal, and they are not made so by unilateral intervention. The effort, sooner or later, has to be at the initiative of the people involved in the practice that is to be reconstructed. This is a radically different orientation from those who would take a God’s eye view and arrogate to themselves divine wisdom, power, and goodness. Pragmatists do not understand the society that is to be changed as something to be manipulated. Dewey emphasized education, communication, inquiry, and deliberation. He recognized that at times one must act directly and forcibly, but what he continually advocated was that democratic ends require democratic means. There must be a reciprocity of means and ends. Thus if the objective is a democratic society, one does not achieve this by disdaining the use of democratic techniques. Of course, at the outset of a democratic process one cannot predict what the outcome will be. If one genuinely respects the people involved and leaves it to them to determine the outcome through a process of inquiry, experimentation and deliberation, one will not know in advance what will result. One may propose, but one may not control the outcome. Otherwise it is not democratic. This sort of trust in the people involved and lack of control is viewed as a problem by many. It requires an educated public that is capable of critical thinking, for they lack an already worked out program that is clearly spelled out. They must work on problems together, developing through a deliberative process what needs to be done. This sort of think-as-you-go public activity has not, to my knowledge, been demonstrated on a large scale and over the long run. Dewey, nevertheless, had faith in the democratic process. In the 1920s Walter Lippmann in two books had called this democratic faith into question and Dewey responded to Lippmann’s cynical analysis in his 1927 book, The Public and Its Problems. He did not reject much of Lippmann’s diagnosis. Dewey conceded that citizens, as individuals, lacked the competence to select in a suitably informed way those who would exercise power in their behalf. But what he would not concede is that individuals could not collaborate with one another, organizing themselves into effective, knowledgeable groups or “publics,” to use Dewey’s term. These publics could make use of the findings of social scientists to determine beneficial policies and then both advocate them and hold elected officials accountable for their implementation. In other

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words, individuals, if isolated, could not have the necessary expertise, but individuals organized into publics could exercise social intelligence. I think the question is still open. There are signs that people are capable of doing the sort of critical thinking required and there are perhaps even more indications that they are not. But at the very least we can understand something of Dewey’s commitment to education. He knew full well that the sort of democratic society that he had in mind required an astute, alert and responsive public Larry Hickman and I visited Cuba in November 2003, participating in a conference at the University of Havana. As a good tourist I consulted various guidebooks and noticed with considerable interest the Lonely Planet observation about Cuba that “since 1959 the focus of education has shifted from the liberal arts to technical and professional training, with the intention of reducing class differentiation and promoting manual labor,” and a few lines later: “Yet while the educational system has taught Cubans many practical skills, it has been less successful in teaching people to make individual decisions, and this is reflected in the low efficiency of some sectors of the economy.”11 I do not know if this judgment is correct. But if it is, then it would not seem, from a pragmatic perspective, that Cuba has what is needed for a fully democratic politics. Nor do I think the United States does either. We certainly have many of the trappings of democracy: elections, legislators, an active media and an extensive education system. But I am not confident that our citizenry is well informed and able to think critically. I know that I have limited success in teaching critical thinking to students who are largely focused on securing credentials to get a job and who think that being educated consists of knowing lots of stuff – facts. In addition, current educational reform is focused to a great extent on holding schools accountable as measured by standardized tests. Once again, the concern is with the mastery of facts rather than developing good judgment. A second problem that confronts a pragmatic approach to politics is that pragmatism seems to have more appeal in a relatively stable society than in the sort of situation that cries out for revolutionary change. Education and developing a well-informed public consensus are not fast-acting remedies. Moreover, in societies where there is considerable disparity between rich and poor and many, even a majority, are exploited by a powerful elite, education, open communication, and free elections are often needs rather than realities. I know that in the part of the United States where I have lived much of my life, the South, elites have sometimes been afraid of a viable educational system precisely because they did not want African-Americans to play a greater role in public life. I also know that many times these oppressive elites resisted liberating movements and ultimately had to be displaced. I think that a pragmatism that relies only on intellectual persuasion will not be useful in

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some situations. Thus I argued in Transforming Experience,12 that Dewey recognized that sometimes education is not enough and coercion may be required. I grew up in a segregated society. I can recall separate schools for blacks and whites, separate public restrooms and drinking fountains, and violent racial confrontations. I do not think that the civil rights movement of the fifties and sixties could have had the success it did in transforming this deplorable, desperate situation without something more than discussion, communication, and good will. We needed the sometimes painful confrontations that were often occasioned by the aggressive tactics of the civil rights movement. Nevertheless, I think that education, whether we are talking about schooling or that which occurs through public deliberation, is preferable to sudden, violent change, particularly if that violence is allowed to overwhelm and displace the deliberative efforts. John Ryder, in his presentation at the Twenty-First World Congress of Philosophy (Turkey, 2003, and published in this volume), covers some of the same ground that I do, calling attention to democracy and education. But in the latter part of the paper he raises the question of dissent. Disagreement within a democratic society is no problem for pragmatism, provided that the majority and those in power at the time are committed to democracy. But what happens when a democratic government must deal with an anti-democratic majority? Pragmatism, argues Ryder, is limited to democratic and educational efforts and may be unable to resist successfully a powerful challenge from a majority that does share pragmatism’s commitments. Ryder worries that “pragmatist values cannot survive large scale dissent, nor can” pragmatism “repress it.”13 A pragmatic politics may be possible, but it is no sure thing. I do not think it is achievable on a wide scale in our lifetimes. But this is to think in perfectionist terms. I think it is better to understand the ideally pragmatic as a tool that we use to reshape the present in ways that are more satisfying. We should not expect perfection; just improvement. Dewey says in Human Nature and Conduct that we should not seek the best, only that which is better.14 A bestoriented politics leads not only to sharp divisions but encourages scepticism and radical relativism. Whereas in any given situation it is usually possible to know what one’s aim is and better and worse ways of achieving that aim. A pragmatic politics lacks the certainty of ideology. But when one is able to size up a situation, identify relevant alternatives, and choose according to a needbased criterion, one has a sufficient degree of intellectual security to act. One does not need absolute guarantees to act; it is sufficient to act on the basis of good judgment. Earlier I contrasted the pragmatic naturalism of Dewey with the expediency of much political pragmatism. Now I want to soften that contrast. I have been speaking as if pragmatic naturalism is committed to democracy. And so it has been. But must my favored form of pragmatism be democratic? I

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do not think so, at least not always. If pragmatism is truly committed to beginning where one is and does not have some absolute standard to invoke, then it would seem that a pragmatist who shares Dewey’s vision of ordered richness could exist, could be active, in a non-democratic setting. Ultimately, if a society is deliberative and experimental, it will be democratic in some sense. And, admittedly, the pragmatist will have an easier time of it, if she is able to work within a society that has free elections, open communication, an effective educational system, flourishing social sciences and so forth. But I do not see why these desirable conditions must be in place, for one to pursue a pragmatic political strategy. Rather, one begins where one is, using the means available to move in the direction of a democracy. This could well mean that one is initially largely undemocratic in one’s conduct, and only able to move very tentatively in a democratic direction. If I am right about this, then we can see that there is a reason why the expedient, opportunistic pragmatist and the Deweyan pragmatic naturalist are conceptually linked. They each are acting according to their interests within what they perceive to be the limits and possibilities of the situation in which they find themselves. But, as I hope I have made clear, there is a real difference between being comfortable, even smug, in one’s situation and being eager, intensely restless, to transform the situation and frustrated with the conditions that hamper the flourishing of full democracy but not allowing those frustrations to be immobilizing. So, yes, I think a pragmatic politics is possible, provided one does not have a fixed notion of pragmatic that requires his or her politics to conform to ideals of thick democracy and creative intelligence. The true test is not whether one has all the conditions of the ideal situation, but whether one is doing what one can within the limits of one’s situation to move toward the desired ideal. Ryder and I then agree – to a point. I accept that he is correct to conclude that thick democracy may not be feasible in some situations – and that Dewey was a proponent of thick democracy. But that was the actual Dewey of the first part of the twentieth century. A Deweyan pragmatist in very different circumstances is not bound to Dewey’s recommendations for his time and place, but is free to respond to a new situation with a politics that lives within the limits of what is doable. Such a politics may lack some of the values that we cherish, and it may risk being little more than what a crude pragmatist would recommend, but it may still be a pragmatic political technology. The test is in the actual practice and not in its conformity to a fixed notion of pragmatic. The test is the degree to which the practice promotes growth of the values we associate with the pragmatic legacy within the actual situation – and not how well it does so according to some absolute scale. Admittedly, one may not be able to tell at the moment of implementation how well the proposed action fits the dual requirements of practicality and ideality. But pragmatists are never permitted to know with certainty. Nor are they guaranteed success.

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So once again Ryder and I agree, as he concluded in his World Congress paper, that pragmatism is the better option among the available ones “of addressing the problems we face.”15 Perhaps the only point on which we disagree is that the apparently crudely pragmatic course of action may still deserve the name “pragmatic” even though it is coercive and undemocratic. To be sure, I would be uncomfortable with a sustained employment of force and a denial of the majority’s wishes. But I never want the pragmatist politician to be immobilized. She should always have options.

NOTES 1. MW 1: 21. References to The Collected Works of John Dewey, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967–1990) are indicated by EW (The Early Works), MW (The Middle Works), or LW (The Later Works), followed by volume and page numbers. 2. “Democracy in Education,” MW 3: 236. 3. See The Quest for Certainty, LW 4: 164, 179. 4. LW 4: 186f. 5. “The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy,” MW 10: 46. 6. Quoted in Michael Eldridge, Transforming Experience: John Dewey’s Cultural Instrumentalism (Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 1998), p. 5. 7. See Experience and Nature, LW 1: 310, and The Quest for Certainty, LW 4: 239f. 8. Theory of Valuation, LW 13: 226. 9. See A Common Faith, LW 9: 32–35. 10. LW 14: 229. 11. David Stanley, Cuba, 2nd edn. (Melbourne: Lonely Planet Publications, 2000), p. 52. 12. Ibid., pp. 66, 91f, and 95–97. 13. John Ryder, “Is Pragmatic Political Technology a Reasonable Possibility?” in this volume, p. 115. 14. MW 14: 193: “The better is the good; the best is not better than the good but is simply the discovered good.” 15. John Ryder, “Is Pragmatic Political Technology a Reasonable Possibility?” in this volume, p. 120.

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Part Four EDUCATION AND THE SELF

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Thirteen PERSONS AND EDUCATIONAL VALUES: SOCRATES, BUBER, AND DEWEY Richard E. Hart

1. Introduction Ours is an age of technology-based training, “interactive” courses, and what is known as “distance learning.” Such modalities and delivery systems are gaining in currency as each year passes. In the United States, campus-based colleges and universities are being severely challenged by the no-campus, forprofit University of Phoenix and its clones. Currently, the University of Phoenix enrolls over 200,000 students at over 140 learning centers throughout the country. One in twelve college students in America take courses at forprofit institutions. For-profit enrollment is growing three times faster than campus-based programs. In 2002 1.6 million students took online courses, while the for-profit revenue in that year totaled $23 billion. Traditional academic institutions are scrambling, many in a sense of panic, to do more Phoenix-like stuff. 97% of all public colleges and universities now offer online courses. Education administrators are in love with the “efficiencies” and “cost savings” associated with distance learning and computer-generated interactive studies. What’s not to like? You don’t need to house, feed, and socialize resident students. You can reach vast new populations of students with little expenditure. You can ship out the same course to multiple sites simultaneously; hence, one lecturer can at any moment instruct ten times or more as many students as compared to the traditional classroom. Ironically, the amount of work involved in developing and successfully teaching online courses means that they often end up costing more than initially expected. But education is not, first and foremost, about technology, curricula, budgets, assessing learning outcomes, classic texts, the physical plant, library holdings, co-curricular activities, and the like. All such factors, of course, play important roles, but education (at any level) is essentially about persons. Education involves persons, persons who come together for mutual support, friendship, growth, trust, enlightenment, who come together to explore the endless possibilities of human achievement and excellence. Through education persons can and do make substantial, meaningful contact with each other as individuals. This can occur only through dialogue, and dialogue can arise only from a foundation of trust and mutual respect. Moreover, the knowledge that

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ensues from this relationship is never an end unto itself. It seeks application to life, to lived experience, in practical, useful sorts of ways. Education, in the sense I am describing, is anything but what some regard as the pure life of the mind. Nor is it to be fully realized through competency-based learning programs or interactive computer exchanges. It can never be achieved by abstracted intellectuals, minds dis-embodied , disengaged from the heart and the world of public affairs. For sure, online courses and distance learning are not solely negative attacks on persons. Effective use of the computer in such courses affords access to vast amounts of information for research purposes, though such information is sometimes useless and self-serving. While some students may be unduly harsh, even rude, in non-personal email exchanges, others may find a sense of protection, even liberation, in the semi-anonymity of computer, rather than face to face correspondence. And for certain populations of students (shift workers, shut-ins, for example), or certain types of quantitatively or technically oriented courses, online study may be quite effective. By contrast, courses in the humanities or performing arts, for example, may not be as well served. The challenges of higher education today require a fresh re-examination of basic assumptions and goals with the concrete, living person always at the center of the inquiry and debate, for students are more than FTE’s, conveyors of civilization, instruments of production or paying consumers of our products. Education desperately needs a renewed, re-vitalized, person-centered approach to teaching and learning, one that substantially challenges much of the verbiage and contentiousness bandied about by well-meaning reformers, innovators, and blatant profiteers. Everyone needs a re-awakening to the timehonored, though presently unfashionable, foundations of teaching and learning. In my view, figures such as Socrates, Martin Buber, and John Dewey help to bring such essential foundations into sharp relief, and therefore deserve a fresh look. I will discuss each briefly. 2. Socrates Socrates is generally regarded not only as the “patron saint of moral philosophy,”1 but, also, as having been a world-class teacher. But what were his assumptions about teaching and about students? How did these assumptions become manifest in his method of doing philosophy? Was there really for Socrates any meaningful distinction between doing philosophy and teaching? Mortimer Adler, B. F. Skinner, and others have referred to Socratic inquiry as the “maieutic” method of questions and answers. We know that Socrates went about Athens questioning its citizens on various philosophical topics. His favorite targets, of course, were the Sophists and young people. He

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constantly chided people for living unexamined lives. Seeing himself as a social gadfly, his principal purpose was to make individuals uncomfortable, prompting them to think, to critically analyze their deeply held assumptions and definitions. Philosophy for Socrates was not something written down, not a carefully elaborated system celebrated and frozen in the printed word. Philosophy was more method or process than final product. Philosophy involved the pursuit of knowledge (or understanding) through the dialectical question and answer encounter of individual persons. Such face-to-face interlocutors obviously came to the conversation with diverse perspectives, interests, and abilities. Nevertheless, they were to join in free, open-ended dialogue in the hope that the best definition (of love, beauty, justice, etc.) might be eventually achieved, though there was no guarantee. For Socrates, the preferred method of teaching and learning was the dialectic, the critical method of thinking and personal interaction. Dialectic was both person-centered and holistic. Through dialectic the individual (the student) would ideally integrate a wide range of learning into a meaningful whole, thereby seeing things in toto. But seeing or understanding, while necessary, was not sufficient in itself. Socrates sought to infuse in his students the desire to improve their thinking in the deepest of ways. He was, furthermore, committed to change, to action based on such reflection. Insofar as he encouraged students to think better, he thought they could and should improve their lives and build their characters through rigorous education. In short, a good education contributes to a good person and a good life, but this is always achieved on an individual basis and as a result of process rather than final answer. Indeed, a literal definition of the term “philosopher” in its original Greek origins suggests one who searches for truth rather than discoverer of truth. In this connection we may recall the Socratic notion of midwifery and the Doctrine of Reminiscence. As we know, Socrates often referred to himself, in his capacity as philosopher/teacher, as a midwife. He found people to be “pregnant” with knowledge and experience that they did not consciously realize they had. His role as midwife was to bring this knowledge forth, to draw it out of individual persons. Similarly, his Doctrine of Reminiscence implied that the individual once knew a great deal, now deeply lodged in the soul, but that such knowledge had become corrupted and forgotten. The teacher’s job was, thus, to get the student to recall what he already knew. Perhaps the most familiar illustration of this is in the Meno where Plato described Socrates’s meeting with a slave boy. Through skillful questioning Socrates reveals to the boy that he knows the Pythagorean theorem even though he does not know that he knows it. Whether these notions are fully persuasive is not as important as the underlying general assumption. I take that assumption to be that the student, no matter how seemingly naive or ill prepared, is never a complete blank slate. The student has knowledge and a

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reservoir of experience, no matter how unrefined or inchoate. Given this foundation, the skilled and patient teacher is the one who has a chance of drawing knowledge out, presenting it to the student, and inducing the student to build from the fertile base that already exists. This represents a profoundly different way of thinking about students and their learning. Such is not so likely to occur within a distanced, information exchange via the computer. 3. Martin Buber The twentieth century Jewish philosopher and religionist, Martin Buber, is most commonly known for his existential theology and his celebrated book, I and Thou. But his essays on the philosophy of education, notably his unique application of the principle of dialogue, are both compatible in spirit with the Socratic dialectic, and mark an indispensable addition to the person-centered theory of educating. Says Buber, “Contact is the primary work of education.” Moreover, “It is not the instruction that educates, but the instructor.”2 This dramatically challenges the assumptions of much technology curricula and program-based educational theorists. For generations education has been conveniently and efficiently thought of in goal-oriented terms as the transmission of specific material, the conveyance of facts, values, culture by way of courses, curricula and innovative pedagogical technologies. Typically, faculty, chairs, and deans become obsessed with the ends or goals of instruction (Are the students now culturally literate? Have we covered everything on the syllabus?), while overlooking the necessary ground from which all education proceeds. With this in mind, Buber searches for “the elemental experience with which the real process of education begins and on which it is based. I call it experiencing the other side.”3 This experiencing of the other side reflects what Buber frequently terms the real and primal ground of community, the area from which education, by its very nature, must always proceed. Importantly, this primal ground is not simply a given. It must be actively claimed by the teacher, grasped through a conscious choice of attitude and disposition, if one is to ever achieve the authentic objectives of the teaching office. This choice shapes the nature of the human relationship and the level of its productivity. The theoretical expression of such an attitude is what Buber calls the “dialogical principle in education.”4 When one seeks this ground of dialogue with a student, the instructor truly becomes an educator, one concerned with the being, the life and potentiality of each student. Dialogue gradually brings about trust and confidence within the student, and only from this foundation will a student truly open up to learning. In Buber’s terms, the saying of Thou to the student, the acknowledging of his integrity and capacity for change, creates the communication on the basis of which technical

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information, facts, ideas, and subject matters can be successfully conveyed and used. The Socratic character of Buber’s recommendations to educators is to be found not only in the centrality of dialogue as method, but, also, similar to the Doctrine of Reminiscence, in the contention that the teacher fetches out of the student that which is already present, that which is latent and cultivating him. Closely connected is the Buberian relation between educating, the actuality of the present, and the possibilities for the future. In quasi-Socratic fashion, Buber asserts that the genuine educator “...does not merely consider individual functions of his pupil, as one intending to teach him only to know or be capable of certain definite things, but his concern is always the person as a whole, both in the actuality in which he lives before you now and in his possibilities, what he can become.”5 The teacher induces and moderates the dialogue, but he must also be prepared to enter it in his own person directly and candidly. In summarizing Buber’s contribution to the philosophy of education, I refer to one of my earlier essays. In it I argued that, contrary to how it might appear, Buber’s dialogical principle in education is not a firm of anti-intellectualism or mystical humanism. Nor does it force us to abandon innovative pedagogy. Rather, “...it simply reminds us that pedagogical choices must be preceded by a conscious choice of the proper educational attitude. On this foundation, creative pedagogy flourishes. In the absence of what Buber calls dialogue, a course of study amounts to little more than a vacuous exercise of memorization or problem solving. But the true context of education, underwritten by a solid foundation of mutuality and trust, has the capacity for achieving the personal growth, mutual edification and worldly transformation which are so cherished by the genuine educator.”6 4. John Dewey John Dewey, as we know, was a leading contributor early in the twentieth century to educational reform in the United States. He sweepingly redefined both the genesis and functions of knowledge. He was among the first to thematize the connections between student interest, experience and effort, and a revised view of the teacher as not only a transmitter of received information but as someone attuned to who the students are, their learning capacities and motivations.7 In broad terms he sought to bring about a marriage between the actualities of lived experience and education, or put differently, to apply education not just to intellect and theory but to life and its problems. Interestingly, he never in any systematic way applied his educational ideas directly to college students and curricula. However, Mildred Henry and the late Joseph Katz have found at least one instance in which Dewey applied his philosophical approach to higher education.8 His single remark is brief, and

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unelaborated, but does reflect importantly on the person-centered approach to education. “I do not think any thorough-going modification of the college curriculum would be possible without a modification of the methods of instruction. I doubt if the old-fashioned lecture system and recitation system do not make an almost insuperable bar to any very considerable change in the subject matter of studies.”9 I now elaborate briefly on the impact of some of Dewey’s leading ideas. Dewey, as distinct from most other thinkers of the twentieth century, realized that the “...understanding and power of philosophical concepts would be enhanced if they were seen not as free floating ideas but as instruments that people use critically to define and illuminate the societal, personal, scientific problems they are facing in their time.”10 Ideas are instruments of power and change. They are the fundamental tools of critical analysis, related integrally to the experiences of persons. Ideas, as rudiments of education, are essential to inquiry, and inquiry is always linked to the problems of human beings. Indeed, one of the principal arguments of his work, Experience and Education,11 was the idea that there exists an intimate, necessary, undeniable relation between the processes of actual experience and the phenomenon of education. However, the proper use of student and faculty experience, a matter so fundamental to Dewey, is a challenge largely unmet in higher education even today. From a person-centered orientation to teaching and learning, the notion is critical. Dewey, like Socrates and Buber, realized that if teachers neglect experience they will fail to bring about significant interaction with students and among students. Teachers will, thus, persist in not understanding how their students experience their lives and learn from that which they experience. In effect, teachers will lack one crucial mechanism for aiding in their students’ development. In the spirit of Dewey, Katz and Henry observe that getting “...students to experience reading, conversing, writing, thinking, observing, imagining, and feeling as intrinsically rewarding and satisfying experiences is the great challenge to college teachers.”12 I would simply add getting students to experience all this in the context of personal growth and social responsibility completes the function of educating. As we know, for Dewey philosophy is, in large measure, the general theory of education. Philosophy and education highlight the autonomy of the individual as critical thinker and locus of unique experience. Indeed, for Dewey people have educational interests and aims. It is not the curricula and bureaucracy of education that has such aims. Persons desire growth and clarification of their experience. Persons seek to put ideas into action, in order to test them through experience, and thereby make them better. Ultimately, persons and their social institutions require the abandonment of the distinction between theory and practice. Dewey helped give rise to the idea that we learn by doing. And, moreover, that education is not something we (students)

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undergo so as to prepare for some other life (our later work, our career). Rather education is our life. Given this all too brief sketch of some of Dewey’s leading ideas, we can see the relevance his work has for the person-centered view of education. Social action, instrumentalism, continuous potentiality for human growth and societal betterment, student and faculty experience, interest and motivation are all notions that significantly enhance the dialogical principles and methods of Socrates and Buber. 5. Arts-As-Catalyst I now consider very briefly an example of a college-level program I believe embraces the person-centered ideas and methods of Socrates, Buber and Dewey. I refer to the Arts-As-Catalyst program at my own institution, Bloomfield College. The most salient features of this program are the themes of empowerment, experiential and collaborative learning, themes that turn out to be both individual and group oriented. “Arts-As-Catalyst rests on the assumption that the pleasure of learning [in a personal context] is the most effective agent of motivation.” Thus, the program is “...dedicated to awakening students to their full potential as learners by putting them into situations where they learn to transcend their [typical] expectations of themselves. We know from our experience that the arts enable students to suspend their disbelief in their academic abilities. Most often, this disbelief is fostered by their economic and educational history which has given them few experiences with personal success.”13 What sorts of situations and experiences do the performing and creative arts provide or elicit from the students so as to nurture the goals of personal empowerment and collaboration? Experientially based courses in the arts, loosely referred to as studio or lab courses (chorus, acting, video production, creative writing, painting, circus performance), are “...especially valuable in creating active, impassioned learners. Such courses allow students to make and express strong connections with their lives, connections that are not immediately dependent upon book learning. They are not only learning new things, they are learning to see in fresh ways, to make use of and, therefore, value what they do know: their eighteen or more years of life. Thus, education becomes a way of seeing with new eyes, rather than being confined to the accumulation of facts that seem to exist in a world quite separate from their own. Instead of just being taught new facts, they are encouraged to make their own discoveries, to invent for themselves. “Experiential” courses should be just that – a challenging experience. They require a commitment from the student that is at once mental, emotional and physical. This includes taking real risks in front of one’s peers, as well as working with them on collaborative projects...Once they learn how to learn there’s no stopping them.”14

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Students in performing arts settings come to share the frustrations of each and rejoice in the triumphs of others. An atmosphere of mutual support and trust gradually develops, not unlike the classroom atmosphere prescribed by Buber as the underlying foundation for educating. Through the arts students are brought forth as individuals. “By sharing their frustrations and triumphs, by working out problems [of creation, or performance] together, by depending on one another to achieve a group result, the students break down stereotypes and are introduced to individuals.”15 The Arts-As-Catalyst program embraces experimental and experiential, rather than traditional, methods of teaching and learning. It relies upon handson experiences and personal involvement with artists and their creations. The outcomes are significant not only for individual students but for the institution as a whole. One of the most beneficial outcomes for individual students, reminiscent of Socrates, is the cultivation of critical thinking skills. Arts-AsCatalyst courses teach students to go beyond biases, clichés and first judgments, to question their most basic assumptions about art and the world. They teach the value of individual (personal not quantitative) assessment and openness to the experiences and perspectives of others. Institutionally speaking, Bloomfield has found that working with incoming students, through the empowering agency of the arts, enhances the motivation and attitudes toward learning of some of our most at-risk students. We retain more and more of them at Bloomfield, and over time lead many, though not all, to their ultimate moment of success, graduation. A program like Arts-As-Catalyst reflects hard-nosed, fundamental change in what we as educators do and how we do it, change rooted in the social, economic and educational realities of today’s student populations and guided, at least tacitly, by deep-seated philosophical foundations of personcentered education. Though we at Bloomfield College may not have consciously sought to wrap our pedagogical endeavors in philosophies of education or theories of student development, I believe the compelling educational views of Socrates, Buber, and Dewey – themes of dialogue, individuality, collaboration and community, knowledge and its application to “life experience,” in essence, the education of the “person” – constitute the philosophic backdrop that helps shape our work and set our ambitious goals. We have made gradual progress over the past 15 or so years. With each success – when a student through personal contact becomes inspired for the first time about creative potential, when a faculty member experiences a breakthrough in reaching difficult students – further support is added to the person-centered concept of education I have here sought to articulate and defend.16

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NOTES 1. William Frankena, Ethics (New York: Prentice Hall, 1963), pp. 1 ff. 2. Martin Buber, “On Contact,” in A Believing Humanism: Gleanings by Martin Buber, trans. Maurice Friedman (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967), p. 102. 3. Martin Buber, “Education,” in Between Man and Man, trans. Ronald Gregor Smith (New York: Macmillan, 1965), p. 96. 4. Buber, “On Contact,” p. 102. 5. Martin Buber, “The Education of Character,” in Between Man and Man, p. 104. 6. Richard E. Hart, “The Uses of Dialogue in Education: Martin Buber,” Aitia 4– 5 (Winter-Spring 1976–77), pp. 36–37. 7. See John Dewey, “The Child and the Curriculum,” in Dewey on Education: Selected Writings, ed. Martin S. Dworkin (New York: Teachers College, 1939), pp. 91–111. 8. Joseph Katz and Mildred Henry, Turning Professors Into Teachers (New York: Macmillan, 1988). 9. John Dewey, “Proceedings,” Curriculum Conference at Rollins College 1 (January 1931). 10. Katz and Henry, Turning Professors Into Teachers, p. 156. 11. John Dewey, Experience and Education (New York: Collier, 1938). 12. Katz and Henry, Turning Professors Into Teachers, p. 160. 13. “Bloomfield College Challenge Project: Toward a Multi-Cultural, MultiRacial Society,” Abstract, 31 October 1988 (unpublished). 14. John Towsen and Lisa Rabinowitz, “Arts as Catalyst,” Bloomfield College Working Paper (unpublished). 15. Towsen and Rabinowitz, “Arts as Catalyst.” 16. Parts of this paper have been adapted (revised or updated) from an earlier essay of mine, “On Personalism and Education,” The Personalist Forum 6 (Spring 1990).

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Fourteen PLURALISM AND DEMOCRACY: INDIVIDUALISM BY ANOTHER NAME? Erin McKenna

Much of political philosophy seems to suppose one must support either individualism or communitarianism. Dewey, of course, found a middle road – a both/and approach. Dewey sees the individual and the community as mutually constitutive. Individuality can only be realized within a community, and a community can be strong and grow only with diverse individuals. Dewey argued that the dualistic version of individual versus community is the result of the surrender of individuality to economic forces. The result is an individualistic outlook that erases liberty and encourages conformity. He says: Our laws and politics and the incidents of human association depend upon a novel combination of the machine and money, and the result is the pecuniary culture characteristic of our civilization. The spiritual factor of our tradition, equal opportunity and free association and the intercommunication, is obscured and crowded out. Instead of the development of individualities which it prophetically set forth, there is a perversion of the whole ideal of individualism to conform to the practices of a pecuniary culture. It has become the source of justification of inequalities and oppressions.1 The response to this sort of rugged – or as Dewey says, ragged2 – individualism is to create the conditions for a new integrated individual. “The problem of constructing a new individuality consonant with the objective conditions under which we live is the deepest problem of our times.”3 This new individuality is one that responds to the associated and changing nature of social existence. The integrated individual is able to productively live through the flexible and plastic nature of our increasingly interconnected and innovative world. He says, “Individuality is inexpugnable because it is a manner of distinctive sensitivity, selection, choice, response and utilization of conditions.” He goes on, “True integration is to be found in relevancy to the present, in active response to conditions as they present themselves, in the effort to make them over according to some consciously chosen possibility.”4 Where do we find the conditions for the emergence of such an integrated individual? Education is one place – one to which Dewey devoted much of his

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life and attention and one on which I will focus here today. However, we must note that he also argued for a change in people’s daily working conditions. It is impossible for a highly industrialized society to attain a widespread high excellence of mind when multitudes are excluded from occasion for the use of thought and emotion in their daily occupations. The contradiction is so great and so pervasive that a favorable issue is hopeless. We must wrest our general culture from an industrialized civilization; and this fact signifies that industry must itself become a primary educative and cultural force for those engaged in it.”5 In both education and industry Dewey laments the conditions that separate mind from body and force people to participate in the achievement of ends they had no part in choosing. Under such conditions individuals are not fully engaged and initiative and responsibility are but one of the costs. Dewey’s vision of education, then, extends well beyond the classroom into the conditions of daily life, and he brings the condition of daily life into the classroom. As I have argued in my book The Task of Utopia: A Pragmatist and Feminist Perspective, Dewey’s model of democracy depends on education to form critical and flexible habits of mind.6 He says, Through the making of human beings, of men and women generous in aspiration, liberal in thought, cultivated in taste, and equipped with knowledge and competent method, society itself is constantly remade, and with this remaking the world itself is re-created ... I do not believe that anyone can accurately predict what the future will bring forth or set up adequate ideals of future society. But in the degree in which education develops individuals into mastery of their own capacities, we must trust these individuals to meet issues as they arise, and to remake the social condition they face into something worthier of man and of life.7 Dewey does not prescribe any particular content for education, but seeks to use education to create socially responsible citizens embedded in the method of intelligence and experimentation. He does not draw a complete picture of the citizens such education will produce. What he does do, is describe education as the means for the development of individuals committed to the method of intelligence, capable of observation, reflection, flexible judgment, and vision. Dewey sees education as a means to encourage the formation of “free men who have learned to think, feel, and act so they can choose their own ends reflectively, with understanding of their nature and consequences. There is no deliberate direction imposed by teachers or others in authority.”8 Dewey does not lay out a master plan for education, but expects that organization and curriculum of schools will change with time, place, and needs as should any

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institutions if it is to be responsive to our continued growth and development. He says, ...schools must (1) form proper political habits and ideas; (2) foster the various forms of economic and commercial skill and ability; and (3) develop the traits and disposition of character, intellectual and moral, which fit men and women for self-government, economic self-support and industrial progress; namely, initiative and inventiveness, independence of judgment, ability to think scientifically and to cooperate for common purposes socially. To realize these ends, the mass of citizens must be educated for intellectual participation in the political, economic, and cultural growth of the country, and not simply certain leaders.9 He challenges us to begin to experiment with education; “to transform American schools into instruments for the further democratization of American society.”10 It is to be the means of shaping citizens for a changing social order. Education should be approached as an urgent ongoing experiment. Since the experimental method is inherently an ongoing process, the means involved in education are as, or more, important than any of the transitory ends we seek to achieve through it. The means inform the ends-in-view and must be consistent with them. Incremental change would be preferable for Dewey, accompanied by constant evaluation of progress, recognition of changes in purpose, and the willingness to make needed adjustments. Education is an important part of any such change as it “has the potential to bring about the most deep-rooted and far-ranging changes in society, outstripping that of violent revolution, which leaves old habits, such as sexism and racism, unchanged.”11 So what will education consist of for Dewey? How will it form critical and flexible habits of mind? He defines it as the “development of intelligence as a method of action.” He says that “it holds the key to orderly social reconstruction.”12 Given that people are inevitably educated and socialized, it makes sense to want to use this process as effectively and beneficially as possible. “Mere activity, blind striving, gets nothing forward. Regulation of conditions ... is possible only by doing, yet only by doing which has intelligent direction....”13 This implies that education, as an important activity of society, should be intelligently directed. If we recognize that human nature is neither definitely fixed (and therefore not absolutely predictable,) nor infinitely malleable, we will not attempt to control it by domination, but rather through a process of understanding or what he calls guidance. For Dewey, human nature is “essentially” social. This is supported by biology. We are born dependent and in need of education if we are to survive. This means we have needs that constrain our nature but that we are also influenced and formed by the cultures, traditions, and habits in which we are

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immersed. For Dewey, education should build on our social nature and needs to help us understand our interconnectedness with others and encourage and enable us to create and sustain a flourishing community. Education is instrumental for Dewey, but it does not serve some pre-determined end. Rather it creates an intelligent responsive disposition. It serves to promote the conditions of continued growth and development. “When the school introduces and trains each child of society into membership within such a little community, saturating him with the spirit of service, and providing him with the instruments of effective self-direction, we shall have the deepest and best guarantee of a larger society which is worthy, lovely, and harmonious.”14 Education is to provide the means of self-direction and the instruments of critical experimentation, not to instill specific beliefs or behavior. It does not seek to develop a specific plan of action, but to form the ability in each of us to develop various plans to try out. Education serves anticipation rather than prediction. Of course, even with socially responsible citizens embedded in the method of intelligence, not all resulting visions will be “acceptable.” Some solutions will work better than others, be more satisfactory in one circumstance than in another; some, while helpful, will give rise to new or different problematic situations. Here, imagination must fill in and try on new possibilities and critical intelligence must evaluate how well they work. As we envision the future, we direct the development of our social experience. “Interest and aims, concern and purpose, are necessarily connected. Such words as aim, intent, end, emphasize the results which are wanted and striven for.... Interest, concern, mean that self and world are engaged with each other in a developing situation.”15 The world, and our experience in it, is a developing situation. Every part of the development must be critically examined. We give shape to what is, and potential to what will be. There can be no disjunction between present and future, means and ends, self and society. This critical engagement with the world is an endless process of development; it is the capacity for growth. “Democracy has many meanings, but if it has a moral meaning, it is found in resolving that the supreme test of all political institutions and industrial arrangements shall be the contribution they make to the all-around growth of every member of society.”16 This ideal of democracy not only appreciates and encourages our participation in the formation of the future, it requires it. For Dewey, “the good society was, like the good self, a diverse yet harmonious, growing yet unified whole, a fully participatory democracy in which the powers and capacities of the individuals that comprised it were harmonized by their cooperative activities into a community that permitted the full and free expression of individuality.”17 Critical reflection and imagination hold the key to Dewey’s method of critical intelligence. As a method it does not, in itself, imply any particular result, but rather a continuum of means and ends. “(D)emocratic ends demand democratic methods for their realization.” We must “realize that democracy

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can be served only by the slow day by day adoption and contagious diffusion in every phase of our common life of methods that are identical with the ends to be reached and that recourse to monistic, wholesale, absolutist procedures is a betrayal of human freedom no matter in what guise it presents itself.”18 Dewey’s vision of democracy helps us imagine a participatory democracy, inhabited by people with critical and flexible habits of mind. This appears to be the necessary ground for growth. This may change as individuals and society grow and change, but Dewey seems committed to the belief that this is the necessary next stage in our social evolution. While it is the case that Dewey believes democracy to be an ongoing process without a fixed or final end, it is not the case that he makes no judgments about better and worse forms of association. For Dewey, it is an important fact that as human beings we are born to and dependent on other human beings. We are, from the beginning, associated but it is important to judge the quality of this association. No person, or any other being in nature (except perhaps the protozoa), can claim to be an isolated individual. With the recognition of our interdependence we begin to take others into account when making decisions about what to do, how to act, and what to believe. Our behavior is affected by anticipation of the response of others; it is affected by our imagined future states. It is our awareness of our connectedness that allows us to direct our behavior to certain goals and it is this ability to give intentional direction to our actions that makes lived experience possible. To help guide judgments about forms of association, judgments about the ends-in-view that guide our actions, Dewey’s work contains at least five criteria. Better forms of association, on Dewey’s view, (1) promote free and open participation by all people in a society in order to help develop critical and flexible habits of mind; (2) lead people to recognize the limits and possibilities of any particular situation and propose realistic choices for action; (3) avoid making dogmatic claims and are open to change; (4) do not narrowly focus on the ends to be achieved, but instead focus on developing abilities that allow for multiple ends to be realistically possible; and (5) open up possibilities and promote an awareness of our interconnectedness and diversity. In The Public and Its Problems Dewey presents a vision of a community that meets these five criteria of worthwhile association: the Great Community. Dewey makes an important distinction between the Great Society and his ideal of the Great Community. He says that we live in a Great Society. Born to and dependent on at least one other human being, we are irrevocably connected and associated with each other. Technology has intensified this connectedness by effectively shrinking the world and increasing our dependency on one another. This association, however, is based on the classical liberal view of the individual and lacks the awareness of our interconnectedness and the resultant consideration of each and every other in the making of decisions and the dreaming of the future. The Great Society fails to be a community because

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there is no conscious integration of people and their activities. Without an understanding of our inter-dependence and connectedness, it is not possible for individuals to make informed decisions. Dewey believes that since much of the world is no longer divided into local, stable communities where family ties and long-time friendships connect people to one another in a direct and perceivable way, the necessary awareness of our connectedness has been lost. One important reason for this change in the world, this loss of our sense of connectedness, is the presence of the doctrine of individualism. Relishing the liberating effect of the doctrine of individualism, the concomitant loss of community has been overlooked by many. Dewey argues that while the philosophy of individualism is an important and emancipatory doctrine, it has another side which we must face and consequences with which we must deal. The liberating effect of the doctrine of individualism is that it freed individuals from the economic domination of the feudal system, the political domination of arbitrary rule, the spiritual domination of the “church,” and the creative domination of superstition and custom. The oppressive phase of the doctrine of individualism, however, is to be found in the loss of community. The doctrine of individualism was so caught up in freeing the individual from domination that it attempted to free the individual from association altogether. This is not possible and the belief that it is either possible or desirable has the consequence of obscuring our connectedness from us. Without an awareness of our connectedness, people cannot make responsible and intelligent decisions about their actions, they cannot lead integrated lives, and lived experience becomes impossible. Lived experience requires an understanding of our connectedness; it requires truly associated living. True association, however, is not simply a matter of being within a family, group, or society. It is a matter of how one is in that family, group, or society. Associated living requires that a person realize that her growth is interdependent with the possibilities of growth for others. Lived experience, then, is possible only when one is engaged in the process of associated living, or what Dewey calls community. One can live in society with others and not truly be engaged with them or with one’s self. In society where there is no recognized interdependence and interaction – where there is no associated living, no community – there can be no lived experience. As lived experience requires our participation with our environment, associated living is a form of association of individuals who participate with their physical and social environments. To live in community is to be engaged with society. This engagement enables us to make sense of and organize society to some purpose, and to move experience forward in a cumulating and fulfilling way. If there is no community there can be no lived experience. Without the possibility of lived experience all our activity seems disjointed and purposeless and people will tend to be apathetic. Dewey’s way out of this quandary is not

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to be found in the rejection of the doctrine of individualism, but in reembedding the individual in society. Such an individual will not be dominated by the community nor disassociated from it. With Dewey’s notion of the individual the split between the individual and society will be dispelled and the foundation for community laid. “The problem of the relation of individuals to associations – sometimes posed as the relation of the individual to society – is a meaningless one. We might as well make a problem out of the relation of the letters of an alphabet to the alphabet. An alphabet is letters, and “society” is individuals in their connection with one another.”19 Dewey wants room for the individual, but he also recognizes the legitimacy of certain common interests. It is not as hard to reconcile the individual and the social for Dewey as it is for classical liberals, because Dewey does not see the individual and society as two essentially distinct, opposing, or dueling entities. Neither authority nor community essentially or necessarily place fetters on individuals. They can do so only if the individuals do not take hold of the authority that is ultimately theirs and participate in forming and directing their community. If we forget that our physical origin is inherently social we get a skewed view of the relationship between individuals and society. If we get too carried away with the individual as being free from associations, our sense of connectedness becomes hidden, and lived experience becomes impossible. Instead, life appears as a series of disjointed experiences with little continuity or purpose. Community requires a balance of perspective. One needs a sense of being an individual – an individual capable of experiencing, judging, acting. This individual, however, is socially embedded, socially constituted, and must try to remain attentive to its context. Dewey calls for the recovery of the “unified individual” – an individual attentive to its context. This is an individual who acts more than it is acted upon; this individual is involved in, and responsible for, its own creation. Such a person is not thrown around by any “natural forces,” but uses such forces with intelligence and purpose. Using education to teach individuals to be critical and constructive, by giving them a role to play in formulating their own direction, one obtains an ethic of social responsibility consistent with the individual. Dewey demands that individuals be educated to take hold of their lives and prepared for rational participation in the creation of their communities.20 Such preparation requires an education that leads to flexible habits of mind. For Dewey, there is no primacy to either the individual or society. The best that can be hoped for is socially embedded individuals capable of sympathy with others as well as independent and critical thought. What has been described here is an individual immersed in the method of democracy. With the recovery of the “unified individual,” we have the democratic individual – an individual with critical and flexible habits of mind involved in a social task. Getting past the idea of isolated individuals, and beyond a mere aggregate of individuals into a society, we approach the

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possibility of community – integrated individuals acting conjointly with intelligence and foresight. Dewey believes that his ideal of democracy makes sense because it fosters choice and experimentation. It is a method of experimentation applied to social concerns. It gives guidance to experience while remaining open to alternatives and change. It is less a state than it is a method. What differentiates community from mere association or society is the mutual recognition of the needs of individuals and the groups in which they participate. The Great Community will be evidenced by the integrated personality of each of its members and the consciously conjoint activity of these individuals toward a common goal. There is an awareness that the potential of the individual is increased when they have a share in a cohesive community and the potential of each group is increased when it is arranged so as to encourage the growth of the individuals through participation in the formation of the common interest (i.e. through participating in the choice of a particular end-in-view). While Dewey’s view of democracy is an ideal that has no endstate to be achieved, the process of democracy can be instantiated only when community is a reality. Because democracy requires community, and community requires conscious conjoint activity, it follows that democracy requires conscious conjoint activity. Such activity is possible only when people combine their various talents and skills to achieve an agreed upon goal. If all individuals in a community were alike, conjoint activity would not be possible. Community, and so democracy, relies on people being different, having different skills, interests, and beliefs. Democracy requires that individuals recognize and respect differences as being what make conjoint action possible, interesting, and fruitful. The ideal of democracy requires that people interact in ways that do not result in either the mere aggregation of different individuals and groups or in the suppression of difference under one dominant individual or group. Instead we must learn to handle difference constructively and make it the basis for community. Community, then, requires ongoing education. Dewey says that we must learn to be human. Human beings are born already associated, but not as functioning members of a community. We are not born respecting and appreciating differences. We are not born thinking of the wants and needs of others as being integral to our own wants and needs. Every child must learn to be Dewey’s “unified individual,” recognizing our interconnectedness and acting in light of this with intelligence and foresight. The lifetime of every individual is (or ought to be) spent learning; it is spent experimenting with communicating with others “so that genuinely shared interest in consequences of interdependent activities may inform desire and effort and thereby direct action.”21 Each person must develop and continually sustain the sense of being an individual in a community, and Dewey’s education is the necessary

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condition for developing and sustaining this sense of self. The only way to combat the habit of being dogmatic, close-minded, or disintegrated is to develop and sustain the habit of free and open inquiry into all matters with the concomitant commitment to act without being closed to revising both the means and ends of one’s action. We must constantly challenge our social habits with critical imagination and experimentation, trying out ideas and examining the results. We must critically examine the past, the present, and the possibilities of the future and act with intelligence and foresight. This means thinking things through, acting on our conclusions, and revising our theories. Above all it means accepting responsibility for ourselves and our world. Dewey proposes that the unified individual can be recovered by reflective investigation and education. Reflective investigation of our situatedness will lead to the realization that neither the individual nor society is primary, but that the activities of the individual and their associations with others are inseparable. Awareness of our embeddedness frees our critical powers and give us the necessary ground for being effective in directing our future. Reflective investigation provides the basis for such an awareness. Education, then, must promote and sustain reflective investigation. Dewey presents a method for structuring such investigation and developing the needed democratic citizens in Logic: The Theory of Inquiry. He argues that a person becomes a knowing subject, an organism capable of directing its future when it engages in controlled inquiry. Such inquiry requires a recognition of the continuity and connectedness of live creatures and their environment, and of each experience to possible future experience. “The process of inquiry reflects and embodies the experiential continuum which is established by both biological and cultural conditions. Every special inquiry is ... a process of progressive and cumulative re-organization of antecedent conditions.”22 In order to use prior experiences and judgments in directing the future people must agree to standards and methods for testing and verifying the conclusions they have reached. As in scientific inquiry, social inquiry needs a community in agreement as to methods so conclusions can be verified and future inquiry given intelligent direction and foresight. It is this sense of inquiry that Dewey seeks to embody in his theory of education. Education must not try to perpetuate the present or achieve a particular closed and static future state. Either goal limits education to a particular end and so then to limited means. This means the future has more limited options than if critical and experimental reflection were the means and end of education. Education should be seen as a process, not as end in itself, nor simply as a tool. It is an enabler. It is to enable people to become the critical thinkers they are capable of being. By immersing people in a task, in the process of resolving conflicts, critical intelligence and imagination will be called into action. Then they can be directed toward an understanding of their embeddedness and encouraged to participate in forming and directing their

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future. Education must perpetuate social conditions that encourage and prepare people to be involved in decision-making. They must not bow to experts, or defer to authority, but participate intelligently in the decisions that affect their lives. Until secrecy, prejudice, bias, misrepresentation, and propaganda as well as sheer ignorance are replaced by inquiry and publicity, we have no way of telling how apt for judgment of social policies the existing intelligence of the masses may be.... No matter what are the differences in native intelligence (allowing for the moment that intelligence can be native), the actuality of mind is dependent upon the education which social conditions effect.23 People must learn how to see their opinions as opinions rather then the only right choice, and remain open to discussing and consulting with others to achieve a joint need or desire. In other words, education must foster open and flexible habits of mind. How can human beings, creatures who prefer habitual sameness to radical change, be encouraged to remain open and flexible when faced with momentous decisions about their present and future lives? Is education enough of a safeguard? Dewey proposes that in addition to this active education we need to return to smaller face-to-face communities. If people are to be deeply aware of their interconnectedness to the point that it forces them to honestly consider views different from their own and prompts them to consult with those with whom they disagree, they need to recover that sense of direct accountability, reciprocity, and continuity with others. With the Great Community as an endin-view Dewey believes that we will be encouraged to develop critical and flexible habits of mind. He believes that we will become immersed in social inquiry, recognize our embeddedness, and become engaged in directing our future. For the Great Community to be a realistic end-in-view, however, for it to be an end-in-view that can prompt us to action rather than despair and apathy, we must realize, and satisfy to some extent, the need for deep and close connections with others. With our interconnectedness in the local community a daily reality rather than an abstract ideal or fantasy, Dewey believes we will be prepared to see our interconnectedness to those we have never seen. So, back to the question posed in the title of this paper. Pluralism and democracy do require a strong individual, but not the abstract individual of classical liberalism. In other words, pluralism and democracy require the individuality and critical perspective of Dewey’s integrated individual, but not individualism. Dewey’s democratic education is a central part of making individuality without individualism possible.

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NOTES 1. LW 5: 49. References to The Collected Works of John Dewey, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967–1990) are indicated by EW (The Early Works), MW (The Middle Works), or LW (The Later Works), followed by volume and page numbers. 2. LW 5: 45. 3. LW 5: 56. 4. LW 5: 121. 5. LW 5: 104–105. 6. Much of what follows is taken from McKenna, The Task of Utopia: A Pragmatist and Feminist Perspective (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000). 7. Ibid., p. 297. 8. MW 13: xv. 9. MW 15: 275. 10. Robert B. Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991), p. 109. 11. Charlene Haddock Seigfried, Pragmatism and Feminism: Reweaving the Social Fabric (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 58. 12. LW 4: 201. 13. LW 4: 29. 14. MW 1: 19–20. 15. MW 9: 131–32. 16. MW 12: 186. 17. Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy, p. 164. 18. LW 13: 187. 19. LW 2: 278. 20. Joseph Ratner, Intelligence in the Modern World: John Dewey’s Philosophy (New York: The Modern Library, 1929), p. 428. 21. LW 2: 332. 22. LW 12: 246. 23. LW 2: 366.

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Fifteen STEPS TOWARD AN ECOLOGICAL CONSCIOUSNESS: LOYALTY TO THE INHERITED MATRIX OF EXPERIMENTAL INTELLIGENCE Vincent Colapietro

“And yet the intimation never wholly deserts us that there is in the unformed activities of childhood and youth the possibilities of a better life for the community as well as for individuals here and there.... For with all its extravagancies and uncertainties ... it remains a standing proof of the life wherein growth is normal and not an anomaly, activity a delight not a task, and where habit-forming is an expansion of power not its shrinkage.” John Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct

In The Future of an Illusion, Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) invites us to think of “the depressing contrast between the radiant intelligence of a healthy child and the feeble intellectual powers of the average adult.” Then he asks: “Can we be quite certain that it is not precisely religious education which bears a large share of the blame for this relative atrophy?”1 These words might have been written by one of Freud’s proximate contemporaries. Indeed, John Dewey (1859–1952) was no less than Freud disheartened by just this contrast. He even pointed to traditional religion as a significant factor in the premature calcification of human immaturity, a point to which I will return below. At the outset, however, my concern is with the contrast itself, not its causes. Recall that for Dewey: “The primary condition of growth is immaturity.” But the prefix im- here does not designate “a mere lack or void.” Our tendency to take immaturity in a negative or privative sense “is due to regarding childhood comparatively, instead of intrinsically.” To capture its positive sense, however, this condition must be taken in terms of what it is in itself (what immaturity “absolutely” or intrinsically is). “Taken absolutely, instead of comparatively, immaturity designates a positive force or ability, – the power to grow.”2 In light of this, it seems reasonable to suggest that the problem of education, beginning with the care of the infant, does not concern overcoming or reducing immaturity. Rather education concerns maintaining and ideally

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augmenting the power to grow, i.e., immaturity in its intrinsic and positive (rather than its comparative and thus privative) sense. The comparative perspective and hence the privative sense are, unquestionably, “legitimate enough for some purposes.”3 But this perspective and sense are subordinate to the process of growth itself, to the inherent, irrepressible power of the human organism to become variously engaged in the complex, variable scenes of its everyday endeavors (in a word, in situations in Dewey’s richly textured and finely nuanced sense). The criteria for judging the quality of such engagement are to be found only proximately in the level of excellence embodied in culturally recognized exemplars. Such criteria are however to be discovered ultimately in the selftransformative possibilities of natural processes and human practices. In other words, these criteria are not antecedently fixed but historically emergent. Indeed, they are in the living present emerging criteria characteristically possessing the power to call into question the experiential adequacy of our prior understanding and even of the most consolidated forms of cultural authority. The activities of parents, other educators, citizens, investigators, and artists (to take five examples central to Dewey’s philosophy) are, when properly understood, such historically reflexive undertakings that the very meaning of these activities is not infrequently a matter of deliberation. To take but one example, the ongoing histories of our experiments in self-governance continuously render problematic, in some manner and measure, even the most authoritative form of our historical achievements. The practice of democracy enforces, time and again, reflection on the meaning of this practice. The experiential value of our historical achievements is their variable contributions to experience itself, i.e., what they do in and for the lived experienced of human actors in their various engagements. This value is, though ultimately secondary, far from either slight or dispensable. Even so, the ultimate pedagogical question is: Do these exemplars facilitate or frustrate growth, deaden or intensify, the spontaneous impulses of the live creature? The question of education is, at bottom, one of vitality. Comparatively, then, immaturity designates a lack, whereas intrinsically it signifies a capacity. To repeat, the “comparative standpoint is legitimate enough for some purposes.”4 But if this standpoint is made final, “the question arises whether we are not guilty of an overweening presumption” – a debilitating knowingness. Hence, the comparative perspective and along with it the negative meaning of immaturity needs to be subordinated to the unknown possibilities of human growth. The Socratic face of human authority is the one accompanying unblinking confession of radical incompetence (of candidly acknowledging one does not know what one is doing), however episodic or situational the confession of such incompetence might turn out to be in the case of truly experienced practitioners. Parents concerned with the vitality, thus the health, of their children, so too educators truly concerned with the vitality of

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their students, know how delicate a task it is to initiate the immature into the various forms of human practice, especially when these forms are accorded the respect they typically deserve. The diverse forms of human practice have been given their contemporary shape, in no small measure, by the exemplary performances of historical predecessors (e.g., contemporary philosophical practice is to varying degrees defined by Platonic dialogues, the formal disputations in the medieval university, Cartesian meditations, Deweyan reconstructions, and Foucaultian genealogies).5 Hence, according these practices the respect they deserve is inseparable from treating (at least) some of these exemplars as worthy of imitation, perhaps even impersonation. There is wisdom in reminding ourselves that we do not judge the classics; rather they judge us.6 But the classics measure us above all because they so compellingly allow us to glimpse the immeasurable reach of human creativity. Paradoxically, classics, by being beyond what we would have imagined possible apart from them, invite us to imagine what might yet be beyond their truly exemplary status. Let us return to the disheartening contrast identified by Freud, that between the radiant intelligence of the healthy child and the prematurely arrested immaturity of the typical adult. This contrast has prompted us to consider the important distinction between immaturity in a comparative, privative sense and in an intrinsic, positive sense. In response to the “overweening presumption” of adult authority, children, “if they could express themselves articulately and sincerely, would tell a different tale; and there is excellent adult authority for the conviction that for certain moral and intellectual purposes adults must become as little children.”7 Deweyan pragmatism is, to no slight degree, the more or less systematic attempt to tell this “different tale,” to defend the experiential ultimacy no less than experiential primacy of human immaturity in the positive sense. For this and other reasons, Dewey might be viewed primarily as a philosopher of natality. Hence, I am disposed to suggest that we encounter, at the very center of Dewey’s vision, an animating sensitivity to the disheartening contrast noted by Freud – the contrast between the unmapped potentiality manifest in the radiant intelligence of a healthy child, on the one hand, and the narrowly bounded actuality of the adult mind, on the other. The all too often harsh lessons of the “immediate” experience suffered by the uninitiated yet irrepressible experimenter (the infant and very young child) are a contributing factor to the constricted forms of adult “intelligence.” Such, at least, is the position of Peirce, as put forth in one of the essays (“The Fixation of Belief”) inaugurating the earliest public phase of the pragmatic movement. Most of us ... are naturally more sanguine and hopeful than logic would justify. We seem to be so constituted that in the absence of any facts to go upon we are happy and self-satisfied; so that the effect of experience is continually to contract our hopes and aspirations. Yet a lifetime of the

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These experiences are not mediated by memory or forethought (the present experience of the very young child is not informed by funded experience). Thus, these experiences befall the experimenter in inexplicable and unavoidable, perplexing and often frustrating, ways. The bearing of one thing upon another – above all, the bearing of exertions and gestures upon pleasure and pain, upon consummatory experience and intensifying frustration – utterly escape the infant and mostly elude the very young child. The example of the child reaching for the flame of a candle is one encountered in William James’s The Principles of Psychology but also Dewey’s “The Reflex Arc in Psychology.” The flame, so visually enticing, turns out to be violently painful to the grasping fingers. Removing the fingers from the flame does not eradicate the pain. Very often events have consequences, injurious or beneficial, extending beyond the time of their occurrence, often far beyond this time. The vital meaning of human experience is, in no small measure, implicit in this commonplace example. Part of Dewey’s abiding relevance to contemporary culture stems from articulating just this meaning of experience for a variety of practices, above all, our epistemic, political, and pedagogical practices, beginning with the unsuspected meaning of seemingly superficial examples such as a child burning her fingers. Vitality outstrips intelligence except in those cases when the spontaneous impulses of the vital organism become so routinely channeled and effectively deadened that intelligence in its present form is more or less adequate to the demands of a narrowly circumscribed life. But humans are troublemakers. Not least of all, they make trouble for themselves by more or less unwittingly putting themselves into predicaments for which neither their biological endowments or cultural inheritances enable them to act effectively.9 Homo sapiens is thus the name of a troublesome species. The cognitive and social value of humans putting themselves into such predicaments cannot be underestimated. The problem of assessing, in any concrete situation, the value of any instance of troublemaking is often a delicate, difficult task. The very criteria for making such assessments can be among the factors that are unsettled by the troublemaking. But we can make too much of – we can celebrate too uncritically – the fluid and emergent character of experientially derived and applicable norms and ideals. At the outset, I myself stressed the distinction between antecedently fixed and experientially emergent criteria, noting how for Dewey exemplars or models of maturity are ultimately subordinate to the protection and indeed nurturance of immaturity as such (immaturity as the power to grow in new and unpredictable ways). At this point, accordingly, I want to emphasize the opposite side of this important distinction. In particular,

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I want to bring into sharp focus Dewey’s own explicit endorsement of the indispensable (though, in the end, provisional) role played by antecedently established environments and, within such environments, historically authoritative standards. Though ultimately subordinate to the ongoing process of human experience, what is already in place plays a vital role in imparting to human vitality its recognizable humanity. This bears directly on the need for loyalty to the matrix of our own becoming. In a passage too seldom noted, Dewey asserts in Human Nature and Conduct (1922) that civilized activity demands a congenial, antecedently prepared environment. Without it [such an environment], civilization would lapse into barbarism in spite of the best of subjective intention and internal good disposition. The eternal dignity of labor and art lies in their effecting that permanent reshaping of environment which is the substantial foundation of future security and progress. Individuals flourish and wither away like the grass of the fields. But the fruits of their work endure and make possible the development of further activities having fuller significance. It is of grace not of ourselves that we lead civilized lives. There is sound sense in the old pagan notion that gratitude is the root of all virtue. Loyalty to whatever in the established environment makes a life of excellence possible is the beginning of all progress. The best we can accomplish for posterity is to transmit unimpaired and with some increment of meaning the environment that makes it possible to maintain the habits of decent and refined life. Out individual habits are links in forming the endless chain of humanity. Their significance depends upon the environment inherited from our forerunners, and it is enhanced as we foresee the fruits of our labors in the world in which our successors live.10 This passage quoted at length from the first chapter of Human Nature and Conduct is one intimately associated with climactic moments in later chapters, including the final paragraph of the last chapter (another text especially worthy of being cited in full). The little part of the scheme of affairs which is modifiable by our efforts is continuous with the rest of the world. The boundaries of our garden plot join it to the world of our neighbors and our neighbors’ neighbors. That small effort which we can put forth is in turn connected with an infinity of events that sustain and support it. The consciousness of this encompassing infinity of connections is ideal. When a consciousness of the infinite reach of an act physically occurring in a small point of space and occupying a petty instant of time comes home to us, the meaning of a present act is seen to be vast, immeasurable, unthinkable. This ideal is not

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An emotionally charged awareness of the sustaining context(s) of human exertion and aspiration can deepen and steady the meaning of our actions and hopes. Such an awareness deserves to be identified with ecological consciousness in a robust sense, a consciousness of our vital, vivifing connections with an encompassing, sustaining whole. What secures and strengthens this awareness fulfills what might legitimately be called a religious function. What undermines or deadens this consciousness thereby diminishes or destroys religious sensibility in its most clearly experiential form. The penultimate moment in Dewey’s Human Nature and Conduct concerns the baleful consequences of institutional religious for religious consciousness. Consciousness of the whole has been connected with reverences, affections, and loyalties which are communal. But special ways of expressing the communal sense have been established. They have been limited to a select social group; they have hardened into obligatory rites and been imposed as conditions of salvation. Religion has lost itself in cults, dogmas and myths. Consequently the office of religion as sense of community and one’s place in it has been lost. In effect religion has been distorted into a possession – or burden – of a limited part of human nature, of a limited portion of humanity which finds no way to universalize religion except by imposing its own dogmas and ceremonies upon others; of a limited class within a partial group; priests, saints, a church. Thus other gods have been set up before the one God. Religion as a sense of the whole is the most individualized of all things, the most spontaneous, undefinable and varied. For individuality signifies unique connections in the whole. Yet it has been perverted into something uniform and immutable. It has been formulated into fixed and defined beliefs expressed in required acts and ceremonies. Instead of marking the freedom and peace of the individual as a member of an infinite whole, it has been petrified into a slavery of thought and sentiment, an intolerant superiority on the part of the few and an intolerable burden on the part of the many.12 These considerations return us to the text from Freud, the one quoted at the outset of this presentation (“Can we be quite certain that it is not precisely religious education which bears a large share of the blame for this relative atrophy?”). But Freud is very likely an example of what Dewey in A Common

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Faith identifies as a militant atheist, an ontological naturalist deficient in what Dewey calls natural piety. Militant atheism along with traditional supernaturalism is “affected by a lack of natural piety. The ties binding man to nature that poets have always celebrated are passed over lightly” or, worse, loudly denied. In contrast, the religious attitude of a pious naturalists encompasses “the sense of a connection of man .... with the enveloping world that the imagination feels is a universe.”13 Hence, Dewey’s naturalism is more hospitable toward the religious dimension of human experience. He refuses to identify religion or, more accurately, the religious too quickly or completely with a delusion or any other form of pathology, though he is no less than Freud sensitive to the extent to which traditional religions have had an infantilizing effect on human development. Part of the paradox here is that the most salient trait of infancy or, at least, very early childhood – the positive sense of immaturity – is undermined and, in its atrophied form, is designated by a word (infantilization) that actually signifies exactly the opposite condition of “a healthy child” or infant (the condition of being so arrested in development as to preclude the possibility of growth). While traditional religions have been all too often infantilizing, a religious sensitivity can assist the maintenance or recover of immaturity in its positive sense. In any event, an important step toward an ecology of pragmatic intelligence (or creative mindfulness) is an experiential recovery, not merely a theoretical reconstruction, of an animating sense of the encompassing whole from which human life has emerged and in which it is destined by its quotidian acts and extraordinary aspirations to assume its singular shape. In other words, a crucial step toward an ecology of creative intelligence is an ecological consciousness of our own individuality. Recall that, for Dewey, “individuality signifies unique connections in the whole.” A truly experiential consciousness of this encompassing and indeed sustaining totality is an affective consciousness, a felt sense of the natural world in its remarkable capacity to generate and sustain myriad forms of animate beings and, among these animate forms, diverse species of intelligent animals (or animal intelligence). In The Closing of the American Mind, Alan Bloom calls John Dewey a “big baby.”14 He supposes this pragmatist adopts an utterly naïve attitude toward the power of science to rectify social ills. Moreover, Bloom charges Dewey with exerting a disastrous influence on American education (an old, old charge) and, in particular, with effectively disparaging the disciplined study of history and geography. It is, however, ironic that someone who so strongly advocated the allegedly disparaged practice of close reading should have read so poorly, if at all, Dewey’s major contribution to American education – Democracy and Education (1916). In the chapter on “The Significance of Geography and History” Dewey emphatically asserts that “History and geography – including in the latter [geography] ... nature study – are the information studies par excellence of the schools.”15 The meaning of

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information here is distinctively Deweyan, for the study of geography and history has the capacity of informing and thereby transforming activity in the here and now. Dewey observes: “Individual experience ... is capable of taking up and holding in solution the net results of the group to which it belongs – including the results of sufferings and trials over long stretches of time.”16 This capability provides contemporary actors with an animating sense of the more than contemporary import of their present undertakings. “The meanings with which activities become charged” mainly concern nature and humanity (thus the history of the cosmos, our species, and the variety of cultures in which our biological inheritance assumes the dramatic form of a historical task).17 This makes a vital resource of a detailed, sustained, and more or less comprehensive study of human temporality and locale. “The function of historical and geographical subject matter ... is,” as Dewey emphasizes, “to enrich and liberate the more direct and personal contacts of life by furnishing their context, their background and outlook.”18 A more general point regarding experience enables us to bring into even sharper focus my central concern: “It is of the nature of experience to have implications which go far beyond what is at first consciously noted in it. Bringing these connections or implications to consciousness enhances the meaning of the experience.”19 The work of bringing these connections to consciousness experientially enhances the import of experience for individuals caught up in the myriad involvements of everyday life. The deliberate cultivation of ecological consciousness is attained through the ongoing effort to bring these connections to consciousness, paying especially close attention to geography and history. “Geography and history are the two great school resources for bringing about the enlargement of the significance of a direct personal experience.”20 For they enable us to ascertain the enabling conditions of our definitive engagements (the activities and undertakings in and through which we are disposed to define ourselves). Dewey was, accordingly, anything but a big baby. Indeed, he was not only a philosopher of natality (a thinker enthralled by “the radiant intelligence of a healthy child”) but also an adult with the capacity to become, time and again, a small child, susceptible of rapturous wonder and immune to the overweening presumption of all too many recognized authorities. He acknowledged that history “deals with the past” but stressed “this past is the history of the present.” Moreover, he suggested: “Perhaps the most neglected branch of history in general education is intellectual history. We are just beginning to realize that the great heroes who have advanced human destiny are not its politicians, generals, and diplomats, but the scientific discoverers and inventors ... and the artists and pots who have celebrated his [humanity’s] struggles, triumphs, and defeats in such language, pictorial, plastic, or written, that their meaning is rendered universally accessible to others.”21 It is deeply ironic that Bloom, who made such a profitable career out of being an intellectual historian, should miss not only Dewey’s celebration of history but also his

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explicit endorsement of intellectual history, for reasons akin to Bloom’s own passionate preoccupation with historical figures. Dewey notes, “The use of history for cultivating a socialized intelligence constitutes its moral significance. ... The assistance which may be given by history to a more intelligent sympathetic understanding of the social situations of the present in which individuals share is a permanent and constructive moral asset.”22 The value of history for cultivating a socialized intelligence is one with its value for fostering an ecological consciousness. These are indeed the same process under different descriptions. Ecological consciousness in the broadest sense is a detailed, nuanced awareness of the actual context out of which human intelligence has emerged and in which it operates. It is thus, at once, historical and geographical consciousness. It will perform for contemporary actors what religious consciousness provided in previous times – a centering sense of the expansive significance of our seemingly insignificant lives and undertakings. In contrast to the vast majority of traditional religions, the cultivation of ecological consciousness will not demand strict adherence to previously established rites, tenets, or practices. Indeed, it will require just the opposite – the willingness to break with these when they contribute to the premature arrest of human immaturity in the positive sense. Even so, the cultivation of such consciousness will require a loyalty to whatever in our inherited environment – our cultural no less than natural environment – that makes a life of excellence, given gross stupidity and even grosser barbarity, possible. This embraces inherited religions insofar as they enliven, sustain, and deepen our loyalty to the matrix of our own becoming. The cultivation of such consciousness however embraces far more, nothing less than the natural and cultural matrix in its encompassing and sustaining presence in the ongoing evolution of experimental intelligence. Deweyan piety accordingly marks a critical break with the characteristic hubris of the modern epoch, the overweening pride of the isolated individual and also human agents who are all too ready to portray themselves in abstraction from the natural world. Positively, such piety traces a trajectory toward what today identifies itself as ecological consciousness.23

NOTES 1. Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion, trans. James Strachey, p. 47. 2. MW 9: 47. References to The Collected Works of John Dewey, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967–1990) are indicated by MW (The Middle Works) or LW (The Later Works), followed by volume and page numbers. 3. MW 9: 46.

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4. Ibid. 5. William James, “The Social Value of the College-Bred” in Essays, Comments and Reviews (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), pp. 106–112 (see especially p. 107). 6. J. M. Coetzee, Stranger Shores: Essays 1986–1999 (London: Secker & Warburg, 2001), pp. 16–19. 7. MW 9: 47. 8. Charles S. Peirce, The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1934), vol. 5, para. 366. 9. See Peirce, Collected Papers, vol. 5, para. 511. 10. MW 14: 19. 11. MW 14: 180. 12. MW 14: 226; 226–227. 13. LW 9: 36. 14. Alan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), pp. 194–195. 15. MW 9: 218. 16. MW 9: 216. 17. MW 9: 216. 18. MW 9: 218. 19. MW 9: 227. 20. MW 9: 226. 21. MW 9: 226. 22. MW 9: 225. 23. For two excellent works by contemporary scientists, see Christopher Uhl, Developing Ecological Consciousness: Paths to a Sustainable Future (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003) and also Ursula Goodenough, The Sacred Depths of Nature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).

Sixteen EDUCATING FOR AUTONOMY: IDENTITY AND INTERSECTIONAL SELVES Kathleen Wallace

1. Introduction An autonomous self is able to establish guidelines (norms) for directing itself into the future. This ability is rooted in a reflexive, self-mediating capacity. Thus, autonomy is not only a capacity for critical self-reflection, but the capacity for producing norms and directing oneself by them. In a previous article I used Josiah Royce’s notion of interpretation and Justus Buchler’s notion of reflexive communication to develop the idea of reflexive self-mediation.1 I will briefly summarize that idea in section 3, and then introduce the notion of norm-generation as the productive aspect by which that process can become autonomous. A word on pragmatism is perhaps in order. Buchler eschewed any characterization of his work as a “pragmatism” although he readily admitted that it was informed by the classical pragmatists.2 Royce’s characterization of his work as an absolute pragmatism might be thought to be an oxymoron. But, as Mary Mahowald points out, there is reason to think of Royce’s work as having a “pragmatic element.” “The guiding question of the pragmatic method – what practical difference would this idea make? – illustrates a common and essential accent on future experience as the criterion for human judgments. Such an emphasis marks the properly pragmatic attitude for both James and Peirce. While other philosophies may also stress future experience, none claims this as its defining characteristic ... [this emphasis] will likewise define the pragmatic element in our study of Royce.”3 The account of autonomy in this paper could be similarly characterized as having a “pragmatic element.” The account suggests that autonomy involves not simply a reflecting, back through critical reflection on beliefs, desires, and aspirations that one already has. Rather, it involves a constructive or “inventive” process of norm generation by the self; a norm in turn guides selfprojection into the future. 2. Autonomy: Contemporary Discussions There are a variety of contemporary approaches to the concept of autonomy: for example, as a right to noninterference in defining and leading one’s own

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life4; or, as the possession of certain “procedural” capabilities, such as (1) critical reflection on desires, capacity for reflection and identification with “first order” desires, and/or a capacity for legislation or (2) the development of a repertory of “autonomy skills” or equal capabilities among persons;5 or, more substantively, as the aiming for, or realization of, certain kinds of goals, such as self-fulfillment, self-realization, and personal integration.6 Some accounts of personal autonomy argue that it depends on developmental, historical, and social factors that are external to the agent. Other accounts argue that genuine autonomy is not ultimately explained by anything external to the agent (such as education, peer pressure, the state of the world prior to the agent’s birth or development as an adult agent), but depends on the possession by the agent of particular (mental) abilities, values, beliefs, and dispositions, regardless of how they were acquired. In this paper, I will frame the discussion in terms of a contrast between “proceduralist” and “substantivist” approaches. According to a “proceduralist” approach (as found in the work of Harry Frankfurt and Diana Meyers), personal autonomy consists in the possession or exercise of certain abilities, irrespective of the substantive content of the choices. A “substantivist” theorist worries that an apparently autonomous choice might merely express inculcated values or beliefs over which one has exercised no control or ones which, even though endorsed, are repressive or stultifying. One example would be that of a wife who unreflectively endorses submissiveness to her husband’s wishes;7 another would be that of a husband who unreflectively insists on his wife’s submission. A “substantivist” approach argues that only certain kinds of choices constitute autonomy or that choices ought to conform to objectively autonomy-conducing standards. A “proceduralist” worries that self-determination has been compromised because standards are being imposed on, rather than shaped by, the self. If autonomy means the capacity for “self-governance,” then the substantivist is right that autonomy involves norms. But, a “substantivist” approach is limited if it doesn’t account for norms themselves as being selfproduced. “Norms” are not simply universal standards of rationality or consensus (even if there may be some contexts in which universal norms are appropriate). Norms must also be seen as produced by selves; and they may be diverse, revisable and generated by human selves in specific contexts or for specific purposes. The limitations in proceduralist and substantive approaches to personal autonomy parallel some accounts of democratic deliberation. Noelle McAfee identifies three models of democratic deliberation: a preference-based model, a rational proceduralist model, and an integrative model.8 The first she identifies as originating in economic choice or preference maximizing theory, the second as inspired by John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas and the third as Deweyan in character. Preference-based models of deliberation, like proceduralist accounts of autonomy, do not evaluate the merits of preferences; they simply seek (1) to

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determine that they are freely held, and (2) to determine how to satisfy conflicting ones. Rational proceduralist models of deliberation, like substantive accounts of autonomy, claim that only some preferences or reasons count as “rational” or legitimate and worthy of pursuit. What counts as rational or legitimate is determined by universalist presuppositions about what counts as “objectively” liberating or what could be universally agreed to. The “pragmatic” and naturalistic approach to autonomy that I propose here suggests that norms and ideals may be generated “from the bottom up.” Norms are generated in and through human reflexive and inventive processes. They are revisable and plural. This is like the Deweyan model of deliberative democracy discussed by McAfee, in which communicative problem-solving by communities in context determines the norms and directions for public life. On the approach I develop, educating for autonomy in a democratic society would mean cultivating the skilled practice of reflexive norm generation. What I mean by reflexive norm generation is a capacity of, borrowing a term from Diana Meyers, an “intersectional self.”9 By this I mean, that a self is a community of interrelated traits. Each trait is a position in a perspective or network of relations. For example: someone as mother (spouse, aunt, daughter, sister, niece, etc.) is located in a familial perspective, as feminist is located in a perspective of feminists and social progressives, as novelist is located in a perspective of writers, as someone fluent in English is located in the perspective of English language speakers, as a possessor of a driver’s license is located in the perspective of licensed drivers, as a lover of music is located in a perspective of music lovers and so on. The unique combination and interrelation of traits constitutes the person as a community of traits or locations. This unity is the overall unified determinateness of the person. On this view, a self is a community or communities of (sub-)selves or traits. (Among the classical American philosophers Mead, too, developed a relational or social model of the self, but for the purposes of this paper and the focus on autonomy, I have omitted a discussion of Mead.10) Royce’s view of interpretation presupposes the idea of a self as a community of temporal selves – the past, the present and the future selves. Buchler’s theory of reflexive communication, which was in part inspired by Royce’s theory of interpretation and upon which I shall rely to develop the idea of reflexive norm generation, grows out of a theory of self as a unified community of selves. 3. Reflexive Self-mediation11 The Roycean theory of interpretation conceptualizes the processes by which an “I” is capable of temporally thick self-direction.12 Interpretation is logically or formally triadic; psychologically it is social. An interpreter interprets an object to a third, an interpreter. The third is both another self (interpreter) and a sign

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that mediates, or “gives the mental realm definiteness and self-control.”13 This process shows us ourselves as we are and thus is a process of self-revelation as well as one of self-control. The will to interpret is “the will to be selfpossessed,” the will to “pass from blind leadings to coherent insight and resolute self-guidance.”14 Royce also suggests that interpretation is a cognitive process that a self undergoes distinct from perception and conception.15 Interpretation is triadic and social whether it occurs between individuals or within an individual. For Royce, a self is internally differentiated because it is temporal, in the sense that a self interprets itself into its future. Interpretation as it occurs within an individual can be schematized as (a) the Present Self (Interpreter) interpreting an idea of (b) the Past Self (Interpretant) for (c) the Future Self (Interpretation). In so doing the (Present) Self interprets itself, lends itself control and self-direction as it moves into its future, a self-positing of its own self-interpretation that defines its progression into the future. Interpretation is an ongoing process; every interpretation becomes the basis for another interpretive process, allowing for revision and redefinition. If autonomous activity is thought of as something like interpretation, autonomy would consist in a capacity for self-mediation and redefinition as the self projects itself into the future. Buchler’s notion of “reflexive communication,” abstracts from and builds on the Roycean idea of interpretation. (Buchler is also indebted to the Peircean theory of signs, which debt I will not pursue here.) Think of interpretation as a process that occurs within an internally differentiated self – a self that is a community of its locations – so that we have a process of self-interpretation: a self interprets an aspect of itself to another aspect of itself. The self moves into a future to which it has itself lent definition and direction. Communication is defined by Buchler as the process: 1. by which an object is a dominant (meaning, salient) object for each of the selves involved in the communicative process; 2. that generates signs (interpretation) for each self; and 3. in which each self is an object (sign) for the other self. Buchler’s self is plurally constituted not only in virtue of being temporal, as with Royce, but because in any present cross-section a self occupies many perspectives (is many traits or integrities). For example, a self is a daughter, a professor, a hiker, a citizen, a feminist, a spouse, and so on. Each of those constitutes a perspective of the self. Communication has, like Royce’s notion of interpretation, a triadic structure. In reflexive communication, one selflocation or -perspective is an object for another self-location (and vice versa) with respect to a common dominant (or salient) object.16 From each perspective the self generates signs that assimilate and can transform the communicative meanings and forge a third self-perspective. This process

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becomes norm-generating in so far as the third self-perspective produces a policy which guides the self in its future judgments. (For Buchler, the concept of judgment is meant to encompass decisions, actions, choices, that is, any instance of a human self taking a position that articulates or actualizes a relation between the self and some aspect of its world.17) Suppose a self aims to articulate for itself how to be both a feminist and a spouse. A communicative relation is established between the self as feminist and the self as spouse. Each self-perspective communicates to itself and to the other, and generates signs about a dominant object, namely, marriage-in-lightof-feminist-concerns. In the process of reflexive communication these aspects of the self articulate a third self-perspective, e.g., self as “feminist/spouse.” In Buchler’s theory, the communicative relation can be schematized as doubly triadic, for it involves both the relation between self-perspectives and the sign-generating relation between self-perspectives and the dominant object. Using the feminist and spouse example: (1) Each self-perspective is related to (is an object for) the other selfperspectives. (Abstracting from the process as temporal, these relations are formally symmetrical.) Thus, (a) self-as-feminist is an object for self-as-spouse (b) self-as-feminist is an object for self-as-feminist/spouse (the projected self-perspective); (c) self-as-spouse is an object for self-as-feminist/spouse (the projected self-perspective) (2) In addition, each self-perspective is related to each other in virtue of its sign-generating relation to the dominant object, marriage-in-light-offeminist-concerns. I will use the symbol < – > to represent the sign-generating relation. (Abstracting from the process as temporal, these relations are formally symmetrical.) Thus, (a) self-as-feminist < – > marriage-in-light-of-feminist-concerns < – > self-as-spouse; (b) self-as-feminist < – > marriage-in-light-of-feminist-concerns < – > self-as-feminist/spouse; (c) self-as-spouse < – > marriage-in-light-of-feminist-concerns < – > self-as-feminist/spouse. That a self-perspective can be an object for another self-perspective means that a self can partially detach itself from any of its perspectives. This capacity is crucial for the ability to articulate for itself a new self-perspective, one that is partially constituted by what is “given” and partially constituted by the self’s own communicative and articulative processes. Reflexive communication may take place in a very general way or in a

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specific respect of marriage-in-light-of-feminist-concerns. It could take place in an action or active judgment (for example, filing a joint tax return under the woman’s name) or in an arrangement of jewelry (wearing or not wearing a wedding ring), an exhibitive judgment, and not only as a mental or linguistic assertion about how one is going to behave.18 Feminism and marriage as dimensions of the self have wider social and historical determinants; the process may thus have a dimension of collaborating with others, such as other feminists, other spouses, or one’s own spouse. The policy might also lead the self to initiate another process of self-definition, e.g., with respect to oneself as daughter or with respect to one’s participation in social and political activity. I want to suggest that autonomy, as a process of norm-generation, is rooted in this process of reflexive communication. Autonomous agency is possible because through reflexive communication a self can generate norms that guide its self-projection into the future; its future is its not because it is unrelated to or undetermined by its social and other locations, but because it has the capacity to partially detach itself from a role or perspective(s) in some respect and articulate another perspective for itself. On this approach, autonomy requires partial independence from social locations, while at the same time social locations may enable reflexive norm generation. This approach avoids a false dichotomy often found in accounts of autonomy as “independence from others and from social conditions”, so that socially related or involved selves are not “really” or “fully” autonomous. 4. Norm Generation I have represented reflexive communication in the preceding section as productive and positively transformative of the self. But, by itself reflexive communication does not guarantee autonomy; it is the natural root of it. Reflexive communication could result in self-deception, or reproduction (reinforcement) of oppressive, addictive, limiting or destructive patterns. For example, suppose a self aims to articulate how to be a professional colleague, but the process of reflexive communication involves internalization, imitation and reproduction of “the old boys club” patterns of behavior. The self in such a case may have engaged in reflexive communication but it may not have generated norms of its own. Such an example would be parallel to the housewife example discussed in some feminist literature, where the self internalizes and endorses socialized gender patterns and roles without generating norms of its own; instead the self simply reproduces given social roles or patterns. (The same is true for the politically or socially challenging positions. For example, someone could be a feminist in so far as one simply assimilated and reproduced the position, viz., the person who becomes a “knee-jerk” or merely “puppet” feminist, similar to the process wherein a traditional role is simply reproduced, instead of the person contributing to the

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articulation of such a position as one’s own norm.) I am not claiming that a “good-old-boy” or a housewife could not be autonomous. I am saying that whether either is or not depends on whether the reflexive communicative process is one that involves norm generation. Both the “good old boy” and the housewife could take on social roles that have been articulated as their own norms. Assimilation of social norms undeniably takes place; autonomy, let alone any reflexive activity with regard to social roles, would be incomprehensible without such assimilation. Assimilated social norms and roles may be a phase in the process of becoming autonomous, for example, as a starting point or framing of a context for reflexive communication. Thus, a dancer’s training in classical ballet may be a condition for inventive reflexive communication and the generation of norms for self-determination as a dancer. Autonomy consists in generating a norm for self-direction in at least some respect(s) into the future. On a standard procedural account autonomy consists in the endorsement and/or integration of desires, interests; for example, I endorse or integrate feminist desires or interests with spousal ones. The process is one of selecting and integrating what is already there, but it is not thought of as constructing or inventing a policy (norm) for self-guidance. On a standard account, the self appears to be static and the integration is not clearly transformative of the self. On the account I am proposing, norm-generation means that the self has not only assimilated social norms and made them one’s own (an internalization process), but has inventively manipulated them in some respect such that the norm is the product of the self’s own reflexive activity. Reaffirmation (as opposed to knee-jerk reproduction) of oneself as “a good-old-boy” or as a housewife could be an instance of norm-generation and hence, of autonomy. Norm-generation or autonomy does not require abandoning assimilated social norms, but it does require inventive manipulation of them in reflexive communication. There are two senses of norms.19 (1) Norms as procedures in the service of goals or results beyond judgment itself (e.g., the invention of methods and procedures for the production of food, for the sake of biological sustenance of the species). (2) Norms for the sake of judgment itself or for self-transformation through critique and extension of human judgment. Norms in this sense would be “unconditional” in the sense that they are not only instrumental, not only for the sake of results per se, but for the furtherance of judgment itself. The two senses of norm generation are not necessarily mutually

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exclusive. In the spouse/feminist example, a self might articulate a norm for being a spouse/feminist as an extension of feminist judgment and of selftransformation for their own sake (norm for the sake of judgment or selftransformation), or it might articulate a policy with respect to good daughterly conduct for the sake of sustaining or transforming some constellation of family relations (norm in the service of a goal or result). In the good-old-boy example, a self might articulate that as a norm of self-identity for its own sake, or as a useful norm for corporate advancement. Norm generation need not be intellectual or only the product of (rational) deliberation. A well-trained athlete develops in physical action norms by which she is able to self-direct her movements: assessment of the distance between herself and a hurdle, the adjustment of pace so as to clear the hurdle are all actions. Her physical movement capabilities constitute autonomy (selfdirection/governance) with regard to physical activity. Similarly, a carpenter may articulate methods in the process of crafting woodwork which serve as norms for her self-direction as carpenter. Each, the athlete and the carpenter, generates norms which are (self-)directing; each is engaged in a process of reflexive communication in the mode of active judgment. Neither may be able to state or tell someone else exactly what the norm is, although each is able to enact or exhibit it. Consider now another kind of human judgment (one that is not typically thought to have anything to do with autonomy), a parent interacting with his infant.20 He experiments with different ways of holding the infant. In his actions, he communicates with himself and with the infant, and in so doing develops norms by which he recurrently directs himself in the ongoing care of the infant. Of course, such an interaction could also be purely reactive or impulsive (just as a carpenter’s activity could be largely mechanical). But, it need not be; it can be attentive and reflexively communicative and when it is, judgment is able to generate norms and thus be self-directing or autonomous. There are unfortunately plenty of examples of reactive or impulsive caregiving, some of which are violent and destructive. But, there are also plenty of examples of norm-governed, self-directing care-giving. The parent’s reflexive communication is intertwined with interpersonal or social communication with the infant. (It could also be intertwined with communication with other caregivers.) He invents norms in his capacity to comfort, communicate with, and succor the infant. Presumably such norms evolve over time as the infant grows and the parent’s relationship to his child develops, but the point is, that this too is autonomous and no less so for being parental and social than more typical, paradigm examples of autonomous action, such as a person making a career choice.

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5. Educating for Autonomy

Educating for autonomy would not involve just learning critical reasoning skills. Autonomy doesn’t require becoming a philosopher or someone with high levels of abstract reasoning skills. Nor does it require becoming independent of social relations and involvement. Rather, this approach recognizes that autonomy is variously expressed. This suggests that educating for autonomy can be cultivated in many different ways in educational processes. Autonomy might require collaborating with others or being responsive to others (as in the parent example). Therefore, educating might involve cultivating capacities for collaboration as collective (reflexive) communication and norm generation. Self assertion is often thought as necessary for autonomy. This may be true; yet listening to, assimilating the views and experiences of others might also be necessary for autonomy, especially when autonomy involves social collaboration and the development of norms for a community. (This ties in with McAfee’s discussion of the Deweyan model of deliberative democracy mentioned earlier.) But it may be desirable for personal autonomy as well; for example, the capacity to engage in reflexive communication as a feminist may involve identification with and assimilation of a social perspective and communication with others about what feminism means and could mean in one’s own personal life. It might also involve learning from the experience of others. The following chart summarizes some of the “autonomy skills” that education for democracy might seek to instill. Traditional autonomy skills critical reasoning cultivate independence self assertion

cultivate integration of desires

Intersectional-self autonomy skills cultivate interdependence in social relations and involvement cultivate capacity for listening to and assimilating the views and experiences of others cultivate diversification ĺ development increase the richness of experience cultivate different perspectives ĺ enhance the capacity for norm generation cultivate capacities for collaboration as collective (reflexive) communication and norm generation

If the self is intersectional, or plurally constituted, then integration of desires and interests may not be the goal of autonomy. It may be a goal, but

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there may be other normative goals, such as cultivation of diversification, or the development of different perspectives in the self so as to increase the richness of experience or to enhance the capacity for norm generation. This may be important for social practices as well. If selves are plurally constituted then, social norms, too, may include recognition of and enhancement of diversity, and not simply integration, harmony, assimilation or consensus, particularly if the last means agreement on a single mode of acceptable social life. Obviously, neither fragmentation nor perpetuation of irresolvable conflicts is desirable either. However, rational proceduralist models of public deliberation (analogous to substantivist models of personal autonomy) that claim that only some preferences or reasons count as “rational” or legitimate and worthy of pursuit may have too restrictive and prescriptive a view of what is desirable and achievable in a democratic society. As noted earlier, this is a problem that MacAfee attributes to a Habermasian approach to public deliberation, namely, that what counts as rational or legitimate is determined by “universalist” presuppositions about what counts as “objectively” liberating or what could be universally agreed to. Moreover, diversification, conflict or a problem encountered may be essential for norm-generation. These may not always or only be social; a self may experience “internal” conflict or diversification (e.g., in experiencing a sexual orientation which is not recognized in the self’s social world) or may experience a biological source of a problem (e.g., in experiencing physical limitations in one’s own body). Autonomy might be expressed and achieved in different ways and to different degrees depending on the context. Perhaps autonomy is best thought of, not as attributable to a whole individual (or community), but rather as about the ways in which the individual (or community) articulates itself and generates its own norms. That a self is autonomous in some respects, does not entail that it is in others and conversely, that a self is not autonomous in some respect does not entail that it is not in others. So, to say that a quadriplegic is not autonomous with respect to (most) physical movement or activity would not entail that she is not autonomous with respect to verbal expression. Alfred Mele makes this kind of distinction, such that the quadriplegic lacks executive autonomy or autonomy with respect to action, but has psychological autonomy or autonomy with respect to mental/verbal possibilities, i.e., beliefs, values, decisions (even though they cannot be enacted).21 6. Conclusion A robust theory of autonomy would not reduce it to a mere endorsement of desires and interests or to adherence to pre-existing (social or other) norms, but rather, conceptualizes autonomy in terms of the (norm) inventive powers of the self. The approach I am taking allows for a broadening of what autonomy is and hence, for recognizing as autonomous behavior that has often been

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dismissed as “merely emotional, intuitive, natural, manual,” and so on. For example, if “emotion” is no less a contributor to autonomy than “reason” and if social and communicative processes can count as autonomous, then autonomy would not have to be defined as either an exclusively “male” (rational, individualistic) province or value and autonomy as a value would not necessarily be inconsistent with many feminist values (such as the value of relationships, of community, of collaboration). These are all a propos some of the challenges facing societies aiming to promote democratic processes among participants who may have been or would be excluded (for example, caregivers of dependent persons) from public deliberation on more traditional models of a rational deliberator or a self-concerned preference maximizer. These ideas are still quite preliminary. But, my thought is that this approach offers a much improved basis on which to understand and evaluate autonomy. NOTES 1. Kathleen Wallace, “Autonomous ‘I’ of an Intersectional Self,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 17 (2003), pp. 176–191. 2. See Nature’s Perspectives: Prospects for Ordinal Metaphysics, ed. Armen Marsoobian, Kathleen Wallace, and Robert S. Corrington (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), excerpt from a letter to Beth J. Singer, pp. 13–14. See also Justus Buchler, Nature and Judgment (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1985), p. 9, on the importance of the sign-studies of Peirce, Royce, and Mead, and the powerful work of Dewey. 3. Mary Mahowald, An Idealistic Pragmatism: The Development of the Pragmatic Element in the Philosophy of Josiah Royce (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1972), p. 24. 4. See for example Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” in Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969) and John Stuart Mill, On Liberty. See also Susan J. Brison, “The Autonomy Defense of Free Speech,” Ethics 108 (1998), pp. 312–339, for an identification of six meanings of autonomy. 5. For (1) see Harry G. Frankfurt, “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person,” in The Importance of What We Care About (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988); John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971); Thomas Scanlon, “A Theory of Freedom of Expression,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 1 (1972), pp. 204–226; Scanlon, “Freedom of Expression and Categories of Expression,” University of Pittsburgh Law Review 40 (1979), 519– 550; Gerald Dworkin, The Theory and Practice of Autonomy (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Lawrence Haworth, Autonomy: An Essay in Philosophical Psychology and Ethics (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1986). For (2) see Diana Meyers, Self, Society and Personal Choice (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989); John Christman, “Autonomy and Personal History,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 21 (1991), pp. 1–24; Amartya Sen, “Gender Inequality and Theories of Justice,” in Women, Culture, and Development, ed. Martha Nussbaum and Jonathan Glover (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); Sen, Inequality Reexamined (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992); Sen, “Well-being,

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Agency, and Freedom: The Dewey Lectures 1984,” Journal of Philosophy 82 (1985), pp. 169–220; and Sen, “Rights and Agency,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 11 (1982), pp. 187–223. 6. See, for example, Meyers’ Self, Society and Personal Choice for personal integration; Martin H. Redish, Freedom of Expression: A Critical Analysis (Charlottesville, Virg.: Michi Company, 1984); and C. Edwin Baker, “Scope of the First Amendment Freedom of Speech,” UCLA Law Review 25 (1978), pp. 964–990 for selfrealization. 7. Natalie Stoljar, “Autonomy and the Feminist Intuition,” and Paul Benson, “Feeling Crazy: Self-Worth and the Social Character of Responsibility,” both in Relational Autonomy: Feminist Perspectives on Autonomy, Agency and the Social Self (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 94–111 and 72–93, respectively. 8. Noelle McAfee, “Three Models of Democratic Deliberation,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 18 (2004), pp. 44–59. 9. Diana Meyers, “Intersectional Identity and the Authentic Self? Opposites Attract!” in Relational Autonomy, pp. 151–180. 10. But see Wallace, “Autonomous ‘I’ of an Intersectional Self.” 11. Sections 3 and 4 are condensed versions of the account which I developed in “Autonomous ‘I’ of an Intersectional Self.” 12. Josiah Royce, The Problem of Christianity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), p. 294. 13. Ibid., p. 305. 14. Ibid., p. 308. See also pp. 327–329 for Royce’s discussion of the rowers engaging in interpretation and self-guidance. 15. Josiah Royce, “Mind,” in The Basic Writings of Josiah Royce, ed. John J. McDermott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), vol. 2, pp. 735–761, especially p. 740 ff. 16. Justus Buchler, Toward A General Theory of Human Judgment, 2nd edn. (New York: Dover Publications, 1979). See especially chap. 2 on “Communication.” 17. Ibid., p. 48, 51; and Buchler, Nature and Judgment, pp. 12–15. 18. For a discussion of Buchler’s theory of judgment see Buchler, Nature and Judgment, and Kathleen Wallace, “Reconstructing Judgment: Emotion and Moral Judgment,” Hypatia 8 (Summer 1993), pp. 61–83. 19. I draw inspiration from the distinctions made by Michael J. McGandy, “Buchler’s Notion of Query,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 11 (1997), pp. 203– 224. 20. For a view which does recognize reflexive (autonomous) judgment as a component of care, see Joan C. Tronto, Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care (New York: Routledge, 1993), and Tronto, “Does Managing Professionals Affect Professional Ethics? Competence, Autonomy and Care,” in Feminists Doing Ethics, ed. Peggy Desautels and Joanne Waugh (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001), p. 189. 21. Alfred Mele, Autonomous Agents (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).

Seventeen LEARNING ABOUT POSSIBILITY John Lachs

The physical world is a vastly complex place; human institutions, history and traditional practices make it even more involuted. It takes the young many years to learn to operate in this environment. They get everything they know from others and from personal experience, but much more from the former because the latter is slow and limited in scope. Every human being we meet is in one way or another our teacher, conveying valuable information about the forces that surround us. But some humans educate us systematically or as a matter of their profession: their job is to teach us about how things stand in some area of life. Such teaching can be part of an institution, though it need not be: marriage partners teach spontaneously and over many years what they will not accept from each other. The support educational institutions receive from their communities is due to the need to convey in a speedy and organized way the knowledge, values and accepted practices of the culture. Professional teachers impart information and help their students develop useful skills for dealing with the complexities of the world. The emphasis is, understandably, on the actual: the function of education is to enable people to live longer and better lives. In spite of the charge of irrelevance, undergraduate courses are devoted to the exploration of reality. Physics, chemistry and biology deal with aspects or elements of the physical world; history lays bare what happened; sociology and economics uncover vast sets of interactions among human beings; even much of mathematics is focused on how it can help us understand the world. It may seem that fields of investigation specializing in the works of the imagination escape this tyranny of the actual, but students of literature are less interested in the luminous unreality depicted in stories than in how these symbols contribute to our ability to deal with the actual. This interest in reality is natural and appropriate; “What else is there?” one could reasonably ask. Since human life is precarious and easily snuffed out, we have more than adequate motive for learning everything we can about how the world works and for trying to tilt it to our advantage. Those who know more are typically, though not always, better at bringing about desirable outcomes; the likelihood of their controlling their environment and obtaining what they want is higher than that of people operating without special skills and information. The philosophical tradition has always maintained that the object of knowledge is the real. The veneration of knowledge, to which Nietzsche so vehemently objected, is

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therefore at once the veneration of reality, a quiet surrender to what unquestionably IS. As Leibniz and others knew, however, the actual is but a tiny fragment of totality, surrounded on all sides by possibilities. Reality is embedded in an infinite field of what might, or might not ever, be. This is the world of the imagination, though among humans even the imagination is finite and can never do justice to the richness of the absurd, the baffling, the unforeseeable, the unintelligible and the mind-numbingly large or complex. We cannot wrap our minds around the millionth prime number and cannot give content to how life might be different a hundred years from now. The unfortunate oversight of possibility is supported by the general sense that the actual is natural – that there is something right about how things are and it would be inappropriate to try to change them. This feeling is ubiquitous, showing itself in how we relate to the house in which we grew up, the language we have been taught to speak and even the table manners to which we have become accustomed. Alternatives to these and other habits tend not to occur to us: we simply don’t see that anything we do is a selection from innumerable other things we could be doing and that even how we do things is optional and has only the weight of actuality to recommend it. Educational systems are so busy teaching students about what is that they have no time and no taste for exploring alternatives. In any case, awareness of alternatives tends to make people think that everything is contingent, which might lead to questioning the status quo and thereby to destabilizing the entire system. Surely one of the reasons for discouraging speculation about how things could be different is that we might take matters in our own hands and change things to suit our desires. Even vision that differs from the conventional is considered illegitimate, as when her first grade teacher upbraided our daughter for having drawn a marvelously imaginative picture of the sun, in place of the conventional yellow orb with lines representing its rays. Hers was just an innocently different aesthetic vision; the presentation of alternative institutional arrangements, rules and values is met by far more vigorous disapproval. The guardians of the status quo do not welcome the consideration of possibilities because they make their living from existing arrangements. Institutions resist change even more mightily: they are conservative systems interested in safeguarding the actual, of which they are salient parts. Everything in the world seems to want to hold on to existence, which can be accomplished only by rejecting all other possibilities. Change is death to what exists now. Since it consists in the embodiment of some other possibility, the best way to stave it off is not even to acknowledge alternatives: the actual operates as if the myriad possibilities ready to replace it were not nipping at its heel. Schools typically reinforce the tendency to suppress the possible. Social and political changes, for example, are presented as matters of the past whose sole

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legitimacy lies in having conducted us to our current, excellent system. Language is taught as it is supposed to be written, scientific theories are presented as facts and even literary criticism restricts itself to a small number of canonical interpretations. Thomas Jefferson and his friends were inventive in how they spelled words; for us, any non-standard spelling counts as error. To be sure, some teachers announce proudly that they reject satisfaction with the actual and think of theirs as a subversive profession. They use ridicule or critical questioning to undermine the unthinking acquiescence of their students in whatever shape the world takes. They feel emboldened in their classrooms to say nearly anything they want and delight in creating the impression that in their opinion nothing is sacred. They want to invigorate their students by seeming to challenge every orthodoxy and to question the legitimacy of all authority. Young people also speak and act as if they wanted to revolt against the authorities that surround them on every side, but they learn to treat power with respect early in life. Their talk of rebellion is no more than that: soon they make their peace with whatever institution accommodates them and however many mad rules it imposes on them. Rebellious undergraduate drugheads become lawyers in three-piece suits; anarchist artists who painted frescoes on dorm walls learn to photograph cakes for magazine ads. Hardly any of them can imagine what will become of them precisely because no one taught them how to deal with possibilities and thereby fend off surrendering to what in their salad days they would have thought a nightmare. Sadly, the bold talk of teachers has no more substance than the rebellious grumbling and foot dragging of the young. Supreme courage in the classroom is little more than hollow discourse – in the hall and in the dean’s or principal’s office, teachers act as obedient officials of the institution. Principles seem to belong in the realm of discussion; reality demands compromise and adjustment. In this way, teachers learn to enact the living contradiction of mighty words and petty deeds, of never quite doing what they say one should. When students notice this, they lose all respect for their teachers. What good are words that never inspire acts? All of this goes a long way toward explaining the tenuous life of possibilities in human society. They are difficult to envisage in detail and it is never enough to articulate them in words. The actual surrounds us on all sides; in stable societies, the weight of the status quo is such that we can hardly believe anything could be different from what it is. The possible can gain a foothold against the everlasting IS only by being embodied in at least one life. It acquires credibility only by becoming actual or at least by having someone demonstrate the steps that will take it in that direction. The demonstration must be concrete and visible. Teachers who speak eloquently of social or institutional changes but never act on them fail to teach about possibility: outlining a future without embarking on bringing it about makes

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it look distant and unattainable. Literary critics who explain how novels should be written but never write one, social critics who stand on the sidelines observing the birth struggles of the new, and psychological counselors in the business of giving advice on which they themselves don’t act are enemies of the possible who masquerade as friends. They cheapen it by showing how little power it has to engage the soul and how easily those who profess allegiance to it can be discouraged from its pursuit. Not surprisingly perhaps, those devoted to possibilities of harm appear more ready to take vigorous and steadfast action in pursuit of their vision. The literatures of heaven and hell are uneven in their specificity and quality: we can describe the tortures of the damned in exquisite detail, but find ourselves oddly bereft of ideas when it comes to the rapture of the saved. Tamerlane, Hitler and Saddam Hussein entertained clear notions of preferred futures for their victims, as do thieves, rapists and masochist bureaucrats all over the globe. Such people have little trouble motivating themselves to act; their deeds and their imaginations appear to be welded together into a seamless, nasty whole. People of good will, on the other hand, tend to be faint of heart when it comes to doing what they know they should. They suffer from self-doubt, hesitate and talk themselves out of allegiance to a shining possibility by bringing to mind innumerable other alternatives. In the end, many of them find a proxy for action in an avalanche of words. This discrepancy is particularly puzzling because in many instances benevolent people are protected from the consequences of their actions taken on behalf of ideals. College and university teachers, for example, enjoy the benefits of tenure, meaning that they can be fired only for crushing incompetence or moral turpitude. Such job security is the perfect cover for speaking one’s mind and acting on one’s convictions. Criticism of the institution and of the society beyond is protected speech, and so long as correlated actions do not violate the laws, they can be performed with impunity. Given the threat of bad publicity and expensive lawsuits, the likelihood of institutional retaliation is slim; its consequences are negligible. For, after all, what could the administration of a university do to punish inhouse critics? They may be scheduled to teach at inconvenient times, forced to move their offices to the basement and ordered to have their salaries frozen. In the grand scheme of things, however, when one teaches is of little significance. If one’s office is a windowless cubicle, one can simply reduce the time spent there to the mandatory hour or two a week. Moreover, tenured professors earn a substantial salary, so making do without the annual two or three percent raise should not present a problem. At most, university administrators can make the life of critical faculty uncomfortable, which is a small price to pay for doing what a teacher should, namely explore possibilities so that a suitable ideal may be found and enacted.

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Relative invulnerability does not embolden faculty to think and teach the possible. Tenure protects much more than classroom speech: public criticism, peaceful protest and investment of one’s time and money are among activities one can relate to commitments supported by evidence derived from one’s field of specialization. Yet teachers show themselves to be a timid lot, always ready to sidestep commitment and find an excuse for not taking a stand. This lamentable lack of courage defines them as distant from the concerns of life and shining only so long as empty words suffice. Timidity makes it impossible for teachers to fulfill their mission. Teaching the young involves activities that pull in different directions: the culture’s practices and values must be handed on, but they must also be criticized and suitably revised. In doing the former, teachers act as servants of the past, giving a favorable account of the fruits of long experience. In doing the latter, they labor for the future, presenting ideas for how our practices can be improved. The first activity is centered on sketching the geography of what exists and explaining the rules governing it; the second is about the ways the possible can bring improvement to the actual. The first without the second yields stagnation, the second without the first creates chaos. When properly related, the two preserve what is of value from the past even as they encourage active dreaming about a better future. Making established practices look attractive is a favored activity; this is what makes teachers beloved in the eyes of students who grow up to be pillars of society. Criticizing our comfortable values, on the other hand, makes instructors seem alien in their own world or troublemakers ungrateful for the good society lavishes on them. They need courage not so much to give voice to their own beliefs, which can range from the idiosyncratic to the absurd, but to express their dreams and point thereby to possibilities that may otherwise escape us. Without daring, teachers can only repeat the well-worn wisdom of the past, much of which is, in any case, available in books. The critical stance toward current practices is as necessary in the sciences as it is in the humanities. Established methods and theories in physics, chemistry and biology invite periodic challenge: at least some of them may have served us well in the past but now stand in need of imaginative revision or replacement. The social sciences are in a unique position to offer ideas concerning novel economic, social and political arrangements, and the humanities have traditionally been a hotbed of new values and thoughts about better ways of treating our neighbors. At the very least, practitioners of all fields can have something useful to say about improvement of the institution in which they serve. Sharing those ideas is a minimal obligation and involves the development of possibilities considered, as it used to be said, under the form of the good. Tenure in universities and colleges was instituted largely to protect faculty members in their vital activity of offering unpopular possibilities to their students, to administrators and to the public at large. Some may think that tenure confers a

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right to speak on faculty members and a collateral obligation on the institution not to fire them for the views they hold as professionals. This, however, is only part of the story. The right conferred carries with it a duty: faculty members are not only permitted to speak their minds without retaliation, they must do so. By extending tenure, an institution of higher education hires critics and pledges to pay them for the trouble they give. Those who do not present possibilities constituting at least tacit criticisms of the status quo fail to meet the conditions of their employment. This failure is so widespread that at one point I suggested the possibility of requiring each tenured faculty member to advance at least two critical initiatives a year.1 Not surprisingly, this idea captured the imagination of no one: administrators did not want to have to deal with in-house critics and teachers were concerned about their next raise. Artificial as the method may be, it addresses the real problem of faculties taking little interest in the governance of their institutions and timidly avoiding criticism of deans and presidents. Such behavior may make more time for advancing one’s research agenda, but it does not improve the university one serves and whose care should be in all its employees’ hands. A more natural way to enhance the role of possibilities in our lives is to make teachers fall in love with them. The changes must begin in kindergarten. Fortunately, in young children the imagination is as strong as the reality sense; all we have to do for them is not to crush the free play of their images and thoughts. Beyond puberty, when the actual lays siege to their minds, we must aid their resistance by showing that their teachers know how to think alternatives and rewarding them when they do likewise. The undergraduate curriculum needs to be changed to teach not only how things are, but also how they might have been, and may yet become, different. Even graduate and professional training have to be imbued with a sense of what is not, in order to take a full measure of the nature and limits of the real. The education of teachers in the love of possibilities must thus stretch from the time they first enter school as young students to the time they take retirement. Embrace of possibilities may be confused with ready adjustment to inevitable change. But adjustment is serious work that belongs to the world of the actual. It lacks the free-ranging playfulness of considering alternatives and the excitement of the what-if. Moreover, there is a great deal of irrelevance in the range of possibilities: some have little or nothing to do with the world in which we live. We can imagine beings with eighty-two heads and kidneys, large as balloons, which encase them. We can think that clouds of methane gas sing the national anthem while small molecules scratch their tiny heads. Such fancies are certainly possibilities and they may have some use in the realm of humor. But they have little relation to the task of making life better and they make no contribution to recrafting reality. The possibilities we must always keep in mind are those relevant to the real but not now actualized, alternatives that help us understand the world in which we live or offer a blueprint for desirable change.

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The most intriguing possibilities, which are at once the most difficult to bring into focus, cluster around our current fashion of conceiving the world. The way things appear to us has the authority of the objective and the natural. This takes attention away from the contingency of current arrangements and the contribution our thoughts make to how things seem to be. The French and the American revolutions opened our eyes to the possibility of new social and political orders; Darwin made it possible for us to view biology, and human beings, in a novel way. American pragmatism and post-modernist challenges are bringing home to us that how we think about the world is a vital element in its constitution and that such thoughts are within our power to change or to retain. Inevitably, each new way of thinking freezes into place and, appearing natural and right, resists challenge. To counteract this tendency, we must keep reminding ourselves that modes of thought, no matter how entrenched, are optional. We can think of sex, for example, as duty within the context of holy matrimony or as casual recreation; of doctors as superior humans with unique access to the mysteries of the body or as useful health-consultants; and of bureaucrats as powerful agents of obstruction or as servants of the public. Each mode of thought defines appropriate behavior and leads to consequences we may or may not desire. In the end, how we think should be determined by the consequences we want to achieve. This requires that we stand ready to exchange conceptual structures as if they were useful instruments. This is what the contemplation of possibilities is all about: in thinking of alternatives, we add tools to our tool chest. Nothing has a more profound effect on the world than a good idea. NOTES 1. John Lachs, A Community of Individuals (New York: Routledge, 2003).

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ABOUT THE EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS Lyubov Bugaeva is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Philology at St. Petersburg State University, and during 2002–2006 she was a Guest Lecturer at the University of Salzburg. She is an author of over sixty articles (in Russian and English) on comparative literature, and philosophy and anthropology of literature. James Campbell is Distinguished University Professor at the University of Toledo. He has been a Fulbright Lecturer at the University of Innsbruck (1990–91), and the University of Munich (2003–04). He is editor of Selected Writings of James Hayden Tufts, and author of The Community Reconstructs: The Meaning of Pragmatic Social Thought, Understanding John Dewey: Nature and Cooperative Intelligence, and Recovering Benjamin Franklin: An Exploration of a Life of Science and Service. Vincent Colapietro is Professor of Philosophy at Pennsylvania State University. Recent articles include “Engaged Pluralism: Between Alterity and Sociality” in The Pragmatic Century; “A Gloss on Peirce’s Categories” in Explorations of Signs; “To Speak in a Human Voice” in The Review of Metaphysics; and “The Question of Voice and the Limits of Philosophy: Emerson, Dewey, and Cavell” in Metaphilosophy. He also co-edited John William Miller’s The Task of Criticism: Essays on Philosophy, History, and Community. Michael Eldridge is the Undergraduate Coordinator for the Philosophy Department at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. His Transforming Experience: John Dewey’s Cultural Instrumentalism considered Dewey’s proposal to intelligize practice in social and political life. He was the 1999 Center for Dewey Studies’ Democracy and Education Fellow, and he wrote the introduction for the second volume of the Dewey correspondence. He serves as treasurer for the newly-formed International Pragmatism Society. Richard E. Hart is Cyrus H. Holley Professor of Applied Ethics and Professor of Philosophy at Bloomfield College in New Jersey. He is editor or co-editor of three volumes: Philosophy in Experience: American Philosophy in Transition; Plato’s Dialogues: The Dialogical Approach; and Ethics and the Environment. His most recent articles and lectures have been on American author John Steinbeck.

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Dirk Jörke is lecturer in politics at the University of Greifswald, Germany. Recent publications include: “Demokratie als Erfahrung: John Dewey und die politische Philosophie der Gegenwart,” and “Politische Anthropologie: Eine Einführung.” Alexander Kremer is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Szeged, Hungary. Recent publications include “J. D. Caputo’s Hermeneutics,” “Foundation of Morals, What is The Origin of Obligation?” and “Why Did Heidegger Become Heidegger?” John Lachs is Centennial Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University. He is the author of such books as The Relevance of Philosophy to Life and A Community of Individuals. Erin McKenna is Professor of Philosophy at Pacific Lutheran University. She wrote The Task of Utopia: Pragmatist and Feminist Perspectives and co-edited Animal Pragmatism: Rethinking Human-Nonhuman Relationships. Her current work focuses on animals and ethics, using both pragmatism and feminism to rethink old debates and develop new positions. Don Morse is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Webster University in St. Louis. His articles include “Pragmatism and the Tragic Sense of Life,” “Philosophy as Criticism: John Dewey and the Practice of Philosophy,” and “Inversion: Heidegger on Theory and Practice.” Don is currently completing a manuscript on the relation between classical American pragmatism and continental philosophy. Sami Pihlström is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Tampere and Docent of Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Helsinki in Finland. His recent books include Naturalizing the Transcendental: A Pragmatic View and Pragmatic Moral Realism: A Transcendental Defense. He also co-edited Science: A Challenge to Philosophy? Carlos Mougán Rivero is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cádiz, Spain. He is author of Racionalidad y acción: actualidad del pensamiento de John Dewey, and has published several articles on civic virtues and democratic citizenship. John Ryder is Professor of Philosophy and the Director of International Programs for the State University of New York. Recent publications include Interpreting America: Russian and Soviet Studies of the History of American Thought, and he co-edited The Philosophical Writings of Cadwallader Colden and The Blackwell Guide to American Philosophy.

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Jane Skinner is Acting Director of the Education Policy Unit, University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. She is also a Senior Research Associate of the University of KwaZulu Natal. Her research interests involve cognitive issues within education and the upholding of democracy through educational and economic policy. She is working on a book titled Regaining Consciousness: An Antidote to Accepted Ideas. Kathleen Wallace is Professor of Philosophy at Hofstra University. She is also book review editor at the journal Metaphilosophy and co-chair of the Columbia University Seminar on Ethics, Moral Education and Society. Recent publications include “Autonomous ‘I’ of an Intersectional Self”; the entry on Justus Buchler in Blackwell Guide to American Philosophy; and “Morality and the Capacity for Symbolic Cognition: Commentary on P. U. Tse’s ‘Symbolic Thought and the Evolution of Human Morality’,” forthcoming. Gert-Rudiger Wegmarhaus is Private-Docent of Political Science at European University Viadrina, Frankfurt/Oder, Germany, and Director of EuroCollege, Tartu University, Estonia. Recent publications include “Komplementarität: Zivilgesellschaft und demokratischer Staat,” “Demokratie als Lebensweise – Bildung, Erziehung und Kommunikation. John Dewey neu gelesen,” and “Politik und amerikanischer Pragmatismus: John Dewey.” Krystyna Wilkoszewska is Professor of Philosophy and Aesthetics at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow, Poland. She is Head of the Department of Aesthetics and President of the Polish Association of Aesthetics. Recent publications include: Deconstruction and Reconstruction, co-edited with John Ryder; Transcultural Aesthetics; and Japanese Aesthetics. An Anthology.

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INDEX Ades, Dawn, 85, 86 Adler, Mortimer, 134 Adorno, Theodor, 3–4, 10, 33, 36 al Qaeda, 124 Aristotle, 14, 22, 23, 26 Austin, John, 21, 24 autonomy, 61, 165–175 Ayer, A. J., 24 art, 4, 8, 15, 65–84, 87, 139–140 Baker, C. Edwin, 176 beauty, 69, 75, 135 Beck, Ulrich, 12, 18 Benjamin, Walter, 82 Benson, Paul, 176 Bergson, Henri, 24 Berlage, H. P., 78 Berleant, Arnold, 89–90, 93 Berlin, Isaiah, 175 Bloom, Alan, 161–164 Böhme, Gernot, 90 Bolshevism, 78 Bond, Patrick, 36 Bradley, F. H., 54 Briski–Uzelac, Sonja, 85 Brison, Susan J., 175 Buber, Martin, 133–134, 136–141 Buchler, Justus, 165, 167, 168– 169, 175, 176 Bush, George, 124 business, 3, 29–31, 35 Campbell, James, 102 Caputo, John, 26 Carnap, Rudolph, 24 Cassirer, Ernst, 24 Christman, John, 175 citizenship, 11–18 education for c., 12, 14 civil rights movement, 127

Coetzee, J. M., 164 Cohen, L., 36 Colapietro, Vincent, 51 communication, 62, 74, 106, 108, 123, 125, 165, 167–169 reflexive c., 168–171 community, 53–61, 79, 106, 115– 116, 136, 143–152, 155, 167, 174 c. and the individual, 54, 143, 148–149 Conant, James, 51 consciousness, 1, 3–4, 7, 9, 13, 14, 27, 32–34, 36–37, 54, 74, 78, 80–82, 92, 97, 162 critical c., 33 ecological c., 155, 160–163 religious c., 160, 163 Constitution of the United States of America, 23, 27 Constructivism (Russian), 65–84 Cooper, D. R., 36 cooperation, 15, 61, 101, 105, 108 Corrington, Robert S., 175 criticism, 1–9 Cubism, 71 curriculum, 32, 61, 108, 121, 138, 141, 144, 182 Darwin, Charles, 183 Davidson, Donald, 24, 25 Davis, John B., 37 De Stijl, 67, 75, 76, 78 deconstruction, 4–9 d. and experience, 6 democracy, 1–10, 12, 14, 29, 53– 62, 99–101, 103–110, 114, 116–119, 123, 126, 156 d. as a way of life, 3, 14–15, 103–105

190 democracy (cont.) d. and communication, 18 d. and community, 54, 119, 146–152 d. and dissent, 115–117 d. and knowledge, 17 d. and pluralism, 143, 152 d. and science, 17 d. and the market, 107 “thick” d., 117, 119, 128 “thin” d., 116–119 democratic deliberation, 166–167, 173 Deneika, Alexander, 83 Dennett, Daniel, 37 Derrida, Jacques, 4–10, 23, 25, 26 Desautels, Peggy, 176 Descartes, Rene, 26 Deutsche Shell, 111 Dewey, Alice, 121 Dewey, John, 1–10, 12–18, 23, 24, 27, 29–36, 41–51, 53–63, 65, 69–75, 77, 79, 81–84, 85, 87– 92, 93, 97–102, 103–110, 113, 117, 119, 121–129, 133–134, 137–141, 143–153, 155–163, 166, 167, 173, 175 Dilman, Ilham, 41, 42, 47–49, 51 Dworkin, Gerald, 175 economics teaching e., 31–32, 34 Edelstein, Wolfgang, 110, 111 education, 57, 60, 105, 126 civic e., 11–18 e. and art, 78, 92–93 e. and autonomy, 165, 173 e. and criticism, 9 e. and community, 150 e. and dialogue, 133–40 e. and ethics, 41 e. and experimental method, 145

Index e. and growth, 155–160 e. and individuality, 143–144 e. and persons, 134–140 e. and philosophy, 21–27 e. and propaganda, 79 e. and teachers’ responsibility, 177–183 e. and social reconstruction, 97–102, 145 e. and training, 97 e. as political technology, 113– 120 e. in Germany, 103 distance e., 133–134, 136 for-profit e., 133 teacher e., 182 vocational e., 29, 99 Eldridge, Michael, 51, 129 equality, 2–3, 6, 8, 104 Erenburg, Ilya, 65–66, 74, 84, 85, 86 experience, 45, 49, 60, 70–72, 89, 105–108, 117, 134, 139–140, 146, 157–159, 165 aesthetic e., 15, 71, 74, 77, 87– 92 Derrida on e., 6–9 Dewey on e., 1–3, 6–9, 97, 122–123, 137–138, 148, 162 Falter, Jürgen, 111 fascism, 114–115 Fauser, Peter, 110, 111 Fodor, Jerry, 24 foreign policy, 124 Frankel, Charles, 122 Frankena, William, 141 Frankfurt, Harry, 166, 175 Frankfurt School, 33 freedom, 11–14, 26, 101, 114–116, 145, 160 Freire, Paulo, 29–31, 33–36

Index Freud, Sigmund, 25, 155, 157, 160, 163 Frey, Dieter, 111 Freytag, Roland, 111 Friedman, Milton, 35 Fromm, Erich, 27 fundamentalism religious f., 13, 118–119 Gabo, Naum, 66, 83 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 24, 26, 28 Gaita, Raimond, 41 Galbraith, John Kenneth, 34–35, 36–37 geography, 161–162 George, Susan, 36–37 Gibbons, Michael, 32, 36 Giddens, Anthony, 12, 18 Gleizes, Albert, 68, 71, 83, 84, 85, 86 globalization, 29 Glover, Jonathan, 175 Goodenough, Ursula, 164 Goodman, Russell B., 50 Gray, John, 14, 18 Green, T. H., 54 Greenspan, Alan, 35 growth, 16, 57, 60, 146, 155 Gutmann, Amy, 55, 62 Habermas, Jürgen, 24, 166, 174 habits, 15, 18, 53, 56–58, 60, 97, 106, 123, 144–145, 147, 149, 151–152, 159 Hart, Richard E., 141 Haworth, Lawrence, 175 Hegel, G. W. F., 7, 22, 26 Heidegger, Martin, 5, 22, 24–27 Heitmeyer, Wilhelm, 111 Hellens, Franc, 66, 84 Henry, Mildred, 137, 138, 141 Hickman, Larry, 51, 65, 72, 85, 86, 91, 93, 126

191 history, 161–162 Hitler, Adolf, 180 Hoffmann-Lange, Ursula, 111 holocaust, 26 Honneth, Axel, 63, 111 Horkheimer, Max, 304, 10, 33, 36 Hume, David, 70 human nature, 14, 116, 145 Hussein, Sadaam, 124, 180 ideas, as instruments, 138 identity, 165 immaturity, 155–163 individualism, 5, 143, 148–149, 152 individuality, 4, 54, 143, 146, 152, 160–161 inquiry, 6–7, 21, 25, 45–49, 51, 59, 72, 77, 83–84, 87–88, 117, 122–125, 134, 138, 151–152 intelligence, 2, 15, 17, 57, 97–99, 101, 105, 122, 123, 126, 144– 146, 149–152, 155, 157, 161– 163 interpretation, 167–168 irony, 25 James, William, 7, 41, 43–44, 47, 50, 123, 158, 164, 165 Jaspers, Karl, 21 Jefferson, Thomas, 179 Joas, Hans, 63 judgment, 169–172 Kallen, Horace, 61 Kant, Immanuel, 26, 47, 49 Kaplan, Abraham, 85, 86 Katz, Joseph, 137, 138, 141 Keynes, John Maynard, 34 Klutsis, Gustav, 81, 83 knowledge, 17, 30, 46, 69, 105– 106 Korsgaard, Christine M., 50

192 Kuhn, Thomas, 22 Kymlicka, Will, 11, 18 Lachs, John, 183 Lasch, Christopher, 12 Le Corbusier, 75, 86 Legér, Fernand, 68, 72, 75, 84, 85 Lehmann, Rainer, 111 Leibniz, Gottfried, 178 liberalism, 11–16, 25, 33, 54–56, 59, 105, 152 Lipchitz, Jacques, 71, 83, 85 Lippmann, Walter, 125 Lissitzky, El, 65–69, 72–74, 76– 80, 82, 84, 85, 86 literature, 15, 70, 100 Locke, John, 11 Macedo, Stephen, 55, 62 Mackie, J. J., 43–44, 51 Mahowald, Mary, 165, 175 Maier, Jürgen, 111 Malevich, Kazimir, 67, 73 Manion, L., 36 Margolis, Joseph, 29, 36 Marquard, Odo, 90 Marshall, T. H., 11 Marsoobian, Armen, 85, 86, 175 Marx, Karl, 77 Marxism, 33, 114–115 McAfee, Noelle, 166, 167, 173, 174, 176 McDermott, John, 117, 176 McGandy, Michael J., 176 McKenna, Erin, 153 Mead, George Herbert, 57, 97–99, 102, 167, 175 media, 3, 4, 18, 53, 62 electronic m., 88–89 Mele, Alfred, 176 Meltzer, Wolfgang, 111 Messensee, Caroline, 85 Meyers, Diana, 166, 167, 175, 176

Index Mill, John Stuart, 175 Misak, Cheryl, 45–47, 49, 51 modernity, 12, 53 Moholy-Nagy, László, 73, 76, 80, 83 Montague, William Pepperell, 123 moral realism, 41–50 morality, 56–58 Murdoch, Iris, 45 music, 15, 70 naturalism, 37, 127, 129, 161 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 25, 177 Niiniluoto, Ilkka, 50 Noack, Peter, 111 Norman, Wayne, 11, 18 norms, 165–175 Nussbaum, Martha, 175 Oswald, Hans, 111 Oud, J. J. P., 75 Overy, Paul, 85, 86 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 47, 123, 157, 164, 165, 175 Pevsner, Antoine, 66, 83 Phillips, D. Z., 41, 42, 52 Pihlström, Sami, 50, 51, 52 Plato, 22, 23, 26, 97, 119, 135 pragmatism, 7, 9, 24, 103, 121– 123, 165, 183 p. and moral theory, 41–51 p. and aesthetic theory, 65–84, 87–92 p. and political technology, 113–120 p. and politics, 124–129 press, 118 problematic situation, 41, 47, 50, 56–58, 60, 71, 76, 146 public, 53, 62, 125–126 p. and the private, 12, 15 Putnam, Hilary, 41–51

Index Quine, W. V., 24 Rabinowitz, Lisa, 141 Ratner, Joseph, 153 Rawls, John, 13–14, 18, 33, 166, 175 Reagan, Ronald, 32 Redish, Martin H, 176 religion, 24, 53, 62, 155, 160–161 responsibility 6, 8, 11–13, 34, 98, 101, 104, 138, 144, 149, 151 r. and liberal virtue, 13 teachers’ r., 177–183 Rhees, Rush, 41 Rodchenko, Alexander, 65, 67, 73, 78, 84 romanticism, 24 Rorty, Richard, 21–28, 37 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 22, 23, 119 Royce, Josiah, 165, 167–168, 175, 176 Russell, Bertrand, 21, 24 Russian (October) Revolution, 78, 80 Ryder, John, 85, 121, 127, 128, 129 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 21 Sayre-McCord, Geoffrey, 50 Scanlon, Thomas, 175 Schäfer, Mechthild, 111 Schindler, P. S., 36 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 22 schools, 29, 32, 35, 60, 61–62, 88, 93, 97–99, 101–102, 106–110, 118, 121–122, 126–127, 144– 146, 161–162, 178 Schubarth, Wilfried, 111 Schulz, Wolfram, 111 science, 8, 17, 30, 49, 58, 72, 76, 100 cognitive s., 29, 36

193 Seigfried, Charlene Haddock, 153 self, 5, 146, 151, 165–175 s. and feminism, 167–175 self-education, 21–22 self-realization, 16–17 Sen, Amartya, 175, 176 Shiva, Vandana, 36 Shusterman, Richard, 91, 93 Shutt, Harry, 36 Singer, Beth J., 175 Sittlichkeit, 55–56, 58–59 Skinner, B. F., 134 Skinner, Jane, 37 Smirnov, Igor, 86 Smith, Adam, 35 Smith, Michael, 50 social engineering, 113 Socrates, 22, 133–136, 138–140 solidarity, 25 Sophists, 134 Spinoza, Baruch, 24 Stanley, David, 129 Stoljar, Natalie, 176 Sturzbecher, Dietmar, 111 Tacitus, 26 Tamerlane, 180 Tatlin, Vladimir, 66 teachers, 177–183 technology, 72, 147 tenure, 180–182 Thatcher, Margaret, 32 Thompson, Dennis, 55, 62 Torney-Purta, Judith, 111 Towson, John, 141 Tronto, Joan C., 176 truth, 25, 47–48 Tufts, James H., 51, 97, 100, 102 Udaltzova, Nadezhda, 73 Uhl, Christopher, 164 values, 9, 12–13, 16–17, 22–23,

194 values (cont.) 26–27, 42–44, 48–49, 54–57, 59, 62–63, 74–75, 78, 99, 101, 104, 115, 119, 127–128, 133, 135–137, 139, 141, 166, 174– 175, 177 van Doesburg, Theo, 67, 73, 75, 77, 84, 85, 86 virtue, 11–18 Wallace, Kathleen, 175, 176 Waugh, Joanne, 176 Welchman, Jennifer, 63

Index Welsch, Wolfgang, 90–91, 93 Westbrook, Robert B., 153 Wild, Elke, 111 Winch, Peter, 41 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 21, 25, 26, 41–50 Wood, David, 7, 8, 10 Wright, Frank Lloyd, 76