pragmatism and diversity.dewey in the context of late twentieth century debates

Pragmatism and Diversity

10.1057/9781137010605 - Pragmatism and Diversity, Edited by Judith M. Green, Stefan Neubert and Kersten Reich

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10.1057/9781137010605 - Pragmatism and Diversity, Edited by Judith M. Green, Stefan Neubert and Kersten Reich

Pragmatism and Diversity Dewey in the Context of Late Twentieth Century Debates

Edited by Judith M. Green, Stefan Neubert, and Kersten Reich

10.1057/9781137010605 - Pragmatism and Diversity, Edited by Judith M. Green, Stefan Neubert and Kersten Reich

pragmatism and diversity Copyright © Judith M. Green, Stefan Neubert, and Kersten Reich, 2011. All rights reserved. First published in 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the World, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–33851–7 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Pragmatism and diversity : Dewey in the context of late twentieth century debates / edited by Stefan Neubert, Kersten Reich, and Judith M. Green. p. cm. ISBN 978–0–230–33851–7 (hardback) 1. Pragmatism—History—20th century. 2. Pluralism. 3. Dewey, John, 1859–1952. I. Neubert, Stefan. II. Reich, Kersten. III. Green, Judith M. B944.P72P725 2012 144 .3—dc23 2011027281 A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Integra Software Services First edition: January 2012 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

10.1057/9781137010605 - Pragmatism and Diversity, Edited by Judith M. Green, Stefan Neubert and Kersten Reich

We dedicate this volume to the memory of our colleague, the late Michael Eldridge, whose intellectual spirit, courage, and open-mindedness will be missed.

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Contents List of Contributors 1 Editors’ Introduction 2 The Roots of Diversity in Pragmatic Thought James Campbell 3 The Context of Diversity versus the Problem of Diversity William J. Gavin 4 The Genesis of Democratic Norms: Agonistic Pluralism or Experimentalism? Larry A. Hickman 5 Cultivating Pragmatist Cosmopolitanism—Democratic Local-and-Global Community amidst Diversity Judith M. Green 6 Democracy—Practice as Needed Michael Eldridge 7 Dewey and Levinas on Pluralism, the Other, and Democracy Jim Garrison 8 Reconstruction of Philosophy and Inquiry into Human Affairs—Deweyan Pragmatism in Dialogue with the Postmodern Sociology of Zygmunt Bauman Stefan Neubert and Kersten Reich 9 Diverse Communities—Dewey’s Theory of Democracy as a Challenge for Foucault, Bourdieu, and Rorty Kersten Reich 10 Concluding Conversation: The Future of Democratic Diversity James Campbell, Michael Eldridge, Jim Garrison, William J. Gavin, Judith M. Green, Larry A. Hickman, Stefan Neubert, Kersten Reich

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55 85 99

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Author Index

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Subject Index

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List of Contributors

Notes on Editors Is John Dewey still an appropriate philosopher for our time? The comprehensive answer to this question that the eight authors give in this volume is that with regard to diversity—a core and intersectional topic of our time—John Dewey’s pragmatism is still a strong and vital philosophical tradition that offers many important resources and contexts to improve our thinking. The book develops philosophical discussions about actual challenges of democracy and diversity from the perspectives of pragmatism and constructivism. The contributors engage in conversations with pragmatist thinkers from earlier periods and proponents of other philosophical traditions—as well as with each other—in order to reconstruct Deweyan pragmatism and its perspectives on democracy and cosmopolitanism in ways that are attuned to our lived experience of diversity as well as our hopes for a diversity-appreciating democratic future. Such conversations have spurred them to reflect on differing experiences of human living together that challenge us to rethink the meaning of and the means to achieve diversity, solidarity, democratic community, and cosmopolitan universality, guided by practical exemplifications of these ideals in thinking and action that suggest how we as culture-immersed individuals and members of diverse democratic “publics” can desirably adjust our lifeways and our institutions, at local and global levels. Their differing standpoints in experience and their differing focal concerns allow them to engage with diverse authors from other times, other places, and other theoretical backgrounds. In method and results, these conversations display the potentials of new versions of philosophical debate that emphasize differenceinclusive collaborations rather than abstract theoretical claims of universalistic univocity—a new way of doing public philosophy through the efforts of such diverse communities of inquiry, rather than the separate works of solitary individuals.

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Notes on Contributors James Campbell is a 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 the author of over 60 papers. Campbell is editor of Selected Writings of James Hayden Tufts (Southern Illinois University Press) and author of four books: The Community Reconstructs: The Meaning of Pragmatic Social Thought (University of Illinois Press), Understanding John Dewey: Nature and Cooperative Intelligence (Open Court), Recovering Benjamin Franklin: An Exploration of a Life of Science and Service (Open Court), and A Thoughtful Profession: The Early Years of the American Philosophical Association (Open Court). Michael Eldridge (1941–2010) taught at Queens College in Charlotte, North Carolina, from 1989 to 1995, and at the University of North Carolina Charlotte from 1995 until his retirement from full-time teaching in 2008. He was internationally known for his advocacy of American pragmatism and his tireless promotion of democracy and education as a way of life. Among his many publications are Transforming Experience—John Dewey’s Cultural Instrumentalism (Vanderbilt University Press); “Social Reconstruction and Philosophy,” Deconstruction and Reconstruction, edited by John Ryder and Krystyna Wilkoszewska (Rodopi, 2004); “John Dewey,” Biographical Encyclopedia of British Idealism, William Sweet, gen. ed. (Bristol, UK: Thoemmes-Continuum Press, 2007). Jim Garrison is Professor of Philosophy of Education at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia. He is the author of many book chapters and refereed papers as well as two books, including Dewey and Eros (1997). He is also the editor or coeditor of five others, including The New Scholarship on Dewey (1995) and William James and Education coedited with Ronald L. Podeschi and Eric Bredo (2002), which was translated into Chinese in 2005. Jim is a former president of the Philosophy of Education Society and past-president of the John Dewey Society. William J. Gavin is Professor of Philosophy, University of Southern Maine, Portland, Maine. He achieved his PhD in Philosophy at Fordham University in 1970. Among his many publications are In Dewey’s Wake: Unfinished Work of Pragmatic Reconstruction, edited by William J. Gavin (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003); William James and the Reinstatement of the Vague (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992); Context over

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Foundation: Dewey and Marx, edited by William J. Gavin (Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1988). Judith M. Green is Professor of Philosophy and Codirector of Women’s Studies at Fordham University. She is the author of many book chapters and refereed papers as well as a book-length work, Deep Democracy: Community, Diversity, and Transformation (Rowman & Littlefield). Her second book Pragmatism and Social Hope: Deepening Democracy in Global Contexts was published by Columbia University Press in 2009. Larry A. Hickman is Director of the Center for Dewey Studies and Professor of Philosophy at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. He is the author of Modern Theories of Higher Level Predicates (1980), John Dewey’s Pragmatic Technology (1990), and Philosophical Tools for Technological Culture (2001), as well as the editor of Technology as a Human Affair (1990), Reading Dewey (1998), The Essential Dewey (with Thomas Alexander, 1998), and the three volumes of The Correspondence of John Dewey (1999, 2001, and 2005). He has published dozens of essays on a wide variety of topics, including education, environmental ethics, gay and lesbian rights, medieval logic, American pragmatism, and film criticism. Larry is a former president of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy. Stefan Neubert is Senior Lecturer at the Faculty of Human Sciences, University of Cologne, Germany. He achieved his habilitation at the University of Cologne in 2010. He is the Director of the Office for International Relations, and member of the executive committee of the Dewey Center at the University. His research focuses on interactive constructivism, Deweyan pragmatism, philosophy of education, and the theories of culture and communication. He is the author of over 25 papers and a book on the philosophy of John Dewey, and coeditor of four books in German, including two on Dewey and interactive constructivism that have been translated into English for publication in 2006. Kersten Reich is Professor at the University of Cologne, Germany, and the founder of interactive constructivism, a brand of constructivism that stands in close proximity to pragmatism (especially Deweyan pragmatism). He is Director of the Dewey-Center at the University of Cologne. He is the author of over 70 papers and the author or editor of 21 books, including two on Dewey and interactive constructivism that have been translated into English.

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CHAPTER 1

Editors’ Introduction

D

iversity is both an inevitable aspect of twenty-first-century living and a powerful challenge to older philosophical traditions that still assume as normatively universal a set of values, ways of thinking, institutions, and habits of living that emerged within earlier eras of more homogeneous cultures, less developed technologies, and more accepted forms of linguistic, legal, religious, economic, political, and military domination. In recent years, new styles of philosophical discourse, including deconstruction, postmodernism, feminism, postcolonialism, and critical race theory, have persuasively challenged these universalist assumptions. In doing so, they have revealed the important human differences that these universalist assumptions have marginalized and the silences that they have imposed both on individual dissenters and on whole cultural life-worlds whose languages they refuse to hear and whose experience they discount. Because these new discourses spring from long-denied, newly empowered dimensions of diversity in human experience that express loyalties to the past as well as fears and hopes for the future, some of their proponents have resisted projects involving collaboration across differences as dangerous to their newly won recognition and to the distinctive characteristics of the voices for whom they seek to secure hearings. However, experience-based appreciation of the mutually educative potential of diverse standpoints as well as sober concern about the perils of our present times—hydra-headed forms of war and terrorism, the coercive impacts of globalization, the growing gap between the rich and poor worldwide, and the impacts of climate change fostered by technological developments—have led other thinkers to turn to contemporary forms of pragmatism and cosmopolitanism. In these two perspectives they have found hospitable intellectual gathering places for urgently needed cross-difference conversations that may reflect and give substance to a shared vision of democratic diversity, which they view as a necessary guide for the kinds

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of reconstructive interactions that can generate world-changing energies within our diverse global contexts. Widely influential proponents of these two strands of democratic thought, including Richard Rorty and Juergen Habermas, have drawn on earlier thinkers like John Dewey to reaffirm the commitment to democracy that marked the revolutionary beginnings of modernity in various cultures and countries, while also arguing for the importance of progressively transforming democratic ideas and institutions in order to reflect the emergence of new qualities, opportunities, and challenges in the way we live now. The editors of this volume believe that in the context of these debates and global developments, it is helpful to reconstruct the necessary philosophical horizons in which modern debates on democracy, diversity, and participation are located, even if sometimes in face of pressing current issues and interests those comprehensive frames are forgotten or neglected. One of the most important components in reconstructing the philosophy of democracy is the legacy of Deweyan pragmatism. Among the reasons for this conviction, we reckon the following: First, Dewey understands democracy as a way of life, that is, as something that is realized in action. Institutions are necessary, but the heart of democracy is interaction, transaction, and communication. Contemporary approaches to the challenges to and developments in democracy have to come up to this claim. Second, Dewey intimately connects democracy with participation as well as diversity in human life-experience. This is especially relevant for presentday discussions about, for example, claims to inclusion and programs to overcome discrimination in all fields of social living. Third, Dewey connects the micro-cosmos of human face-to-face interactions and the macro-cosmos of social and political institutions on a local as well as global scale through his subtle theory of the role of democratic publics and the necessity of a vital civil society. Fourth, Dewey was a philosopher of reconstruction in the sense that he proposed that we must always be open to processes of change and try to use them as challenges for growth on a personal as well as societal level. His philosophy emphasizes the unavoidable tension in human experience between what he called the precarious and the stable to show how processes in social life are intertwined with experiences of contingency. Therefore democratic solidarity, to use Richard Rorty’s philosophical term, has to be reconstructed as change goes on. It is not surprising, therefore, that some aspects of Rorty’s version of neopragmatism and Habermas’s version of critical theory show many affinities

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with the Deweyan tradition despite their many differences. Rorty’s imaginative reconstruction of Dewey’s work has inspired many contemporary debates while at the same time striking other contemporary pragmatists as lacking important features of the original, giving rise to the need for a post-Rorty reconstruction of pragmatism. Likewise, although Habermas’s “pragmatist turn” in critical theory brought these once-rival discourses into conversation, many of those attached to his earlier program (and sometimes Habermas himself ) seem to have missed the curve where Kant’s insights feel the full gravity of diversity in living experience and his cosmopolitanism gets pulled in a new direction. Nonetheless, Rorty and Habermas have stimulated a global network of philosophers to participate in efforts to reconstruct interlinked versions of pragmatism and cosmopolitanism as diversity-appreciating spaces for collaborative conversations. Such exchange can foster the growth of a body of fruitful insights into what democracy must mean for us now if it is to guide feasible and desirable changes in our institutions, in our habits of living, and in currently dangerous global concentrations of economic, political, cultural, religious, and military power. As participants in this global network, the eight authors in this volume engage in cross-difference conversations with other thinkers from earlier periods and other philosophical traditions, as well as with each other, in order to reconstruct pragmatism and cosmopolitanism in ways that are more attuned to our lived experience of diversity as well as our hopes for a diversity-appreciating democratic future. Such conversations have spurred these thinkers to reflect on differing experiences of our shared humanity that challenge us to rethink the meaning of and the means to diversity, democracy, and cosmopolitanism. The conversations have been guided by practical exemplifications of these ideals in thinking and action that suggest how we, as culture-immersed individuals and members of diverse democratic “publics,” can desirably adjust our life-ways and our institutions, at local and global levels. Their differing standpoints in experience and their differing focal concerns allow them to engage with diverse thinkers from other times, other places, and other theoretical backgrounds in a multidimensional common project that goes beyond the scope of any single thinker, however gifted. In method and results, these conversations display the potential of new versions of pragmatism and cosmopolitanism that emphasize differenceinclusive collaborations rather than abstract theoretical claims of universalistic univocity—a new way of doing public philosophy through the efforts of such diverse communities of inquiry, rather than the separate works of solitary individuals. Toward that common end, James Campbell engages in a transhistorical conversation with six diverse American pragmatists from the early years

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of the twentieth century for the purpose of rethinking the meaning of diversity for democracy. In his chapter, he explores the ideas of William James, John Dewey, Jane Addams, Randolph Bourne, Horace Kallen, and W. E. B. DuBois on the topic of democracy. In particular, he considers their ideas on the means for, and possibilities of, establishing a multicultural democracy. In each of their cases, there is something that contributes to a clearer understanding of diversity: the importance of the self, the fundamental role of education, the dangers of “homogenization,” the importance of openness to change, and so on. Writing many generations after these thinkers, Campbell notes that America has not yet fully achieved its shared democratic ideal by becoming the equal, free, and inclusive society they advocated. However, he points out that pragmatism offered them a philosophical framework for engaging one another in cross-difference conversations, and that “its particular approach to the key issues of nature, experience, possibility, and community” makes it “especially adaptive to change and open to the suggestions of multiple perspectives,” in our time as well as theirs. William J. Gavin continues the conversation by bringing the contemporary American philosopher Martin Jay into a discussion of the epistemological as well as the political senses of diversity that a more diversity-attentive version of pragmatism must respect. With Jay, Gavin argues that the broad concept of “experience” that is the touchstone of Deweyan pragmatism should be fractured into discrete categories that are helpful in understanding differing contexts, but that cannot be meaningfully unified. Gavin argues further that we should think pluralistically about diverse kinds of situations, including those he evokes as “the Kafkaesque” and “the tragic,” which cannot be approached in terms of a problem-solving model of Deweyan inquiry without serious distortion. On the political level, Gavin argues, diversity is more than a problem—it is a good and a goal to be upheld and preserved, though it always carries a tragic dimension as an aspect of the democratic ideal that is ever-incomplete, requiring us to continuously renew our Jamesian “will to believe” in it beyond the present facts of its actualization if we are to continue our efforts. Thus, Gavin argues, the diversity of experiences as well as our aspirations toward democratic diversity both require pluralizing Dewey’s pragmatist methods to include existentialist and phenomenological philosophical approaches that foster adjustment in ourselves to situations in which we encounter human limits, losses, and failings that call for honesty, acceptance, and witnessing, rather than efforts to change what is beyond our limits. While responding that inquiry’s limits and powers can only be known through experiences of trying them, Larry A. Hickman argues that in the absence of an effective faculty of “reason” that can disclose timeless truths

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about these matters, we must take diverse contexts into account in the process of inquiring toward universal norms of humanly fitting forms of life. Hickman advances this view in conversation with Chantal Mouffe, focusing on the contextualism/universalism debate about the status of democratic political norms that has developed in, and with reference to, the works of such diverse thinkers as Ronald Dworkin, John Rawls, Juergen Habermas, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Michael Walzer, and Richard Rorty. After highlighting important insights on both sides of the debate, especially those related to democratic forms of life, Hickman considers two attempts to carve out a “third way” between the two positions. Agonistic pluralism, as advanced by Chantal Mouffe, is a nonrationalist understanding of the political constructed on a Derridian-type account of undecidability in which social division constitutes a field in which new objects and relations between objects become thinkable. Experimentalism, as advanced by John Dewey, provides for a genetic analysis of political norms as arising out of experimental practice, rather than “reason,” and as potentially universalizable across otherwise quite diverse cultural contexts. In response to Mouffe, Hickman suggests that several of Dewey’s texts offer an earlier, complementary, and ultimately preferable guide for living that can foster the emergence of objective, conflict-reducing, potentially universalizable democratic norms in experimental practice. He offers a pragmatist approach to the omnipresence of social-cultural contexts and influences within the activities of human selves that focuses on the inseparability of the ethical from the political. It builds, among other things, on the transformative importance of educative experiences for individuals and their cultures—the objective, experience-based, progressive warrantability of the belief in democracy and its practices as experimentally universalizable across diverse cultural contexts. Judith M. Green’s contribution begins with her suggestion that, in spite of differences in focus and in philosophical methodologies, diverse contemporary cosmopolitanisms share a broad set of ideal goals as well as a long and complex history that they appropriate with different patterns of emphasis. She argues that contemporary pragmatist cosmopolitanism can help us to critically analyze and bridge these differences in ways that allow diverse cosmopolitans to collaborate more effectively in helping to transform the global crisis of our times. After critically re-reading Seyla Benhabib’s account of legal cosmopolitanism to show why bridging these differences matters, Green outlines key features of contemporary pragmatist cosmopolitanism in relation to the shared cosmopolitan heritage, as well as to works by classical American pragmatist thinkers—especially John Dewey, Jane Addams, Alain Locke, and Martin Luther King, Jr.—whose insightful transformations of the earlier cosmopolitan tradition lead her analysis here in a different direction than

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Benhabib’s and those of many other influential contemporary cosmopolitan thinkers. Finally, applying her contemporary pragmatist cosmopolitan approach, Green analyzes and proposes intellectual and practical strategies for transforming our current fourfold global crisis that also contrast with those of Samuel Huntington, George Bush, and other American “conservatives,” as well as with those of Tony Blair and Barack Obama. Green’s overall argument shows why transforming our current global crisis in ways that advance shared democratic cosmopolitan ideals requires active, ongoing interventions by individuals, intentional communities, and various institutions of civil society, as well as social movements, nongovernment organizations, and governments at all levels. Michael Eldridge concurs with Hickman and Green that the process of evolving universal democratic norms through experiments in diversityembracing life-ways and institutions requires “practice,” concerning which Dewey and other pragmatists can offer valuable insights. He focuses in his discussion on a particular recent version of pragmatism, namely the approach of Robert Talisse and his characterization of Deweyan pragmatism as “neither pragmatic nor viable.” Eldridge believes that Talisse makes this claim in order to advance his case that Charles Sanders Peirce’s epistemic version of pragmatism offers preferable guidance for a theory of democracy. Eldridge sets out to challenge Talisse’s proposition. He observes that Talisse borrows conceptual tools from John Rawls to argue that Dewey’s allegedly substantive conception of democracy as a way of life is a “comprehensive doctrine” that cannot accommodate “reasonable pluralism.” Moreover, Talisse adds, contemporary Deweyan pragmatists like Larry Hickman and Charlene Haddock Seigfried limit the scope of the diverse viewpoints with which they are willing to engage in collaborative inquiry in order to sustain the belief that it will reach eventual consensus, including Jeremy Waldron’s “every last individual.” Because a Deweyan conception of democracy cannot meet these Rawlsian liberal tests, Talisse suggests preferring Peirce’s focus on the kinds of epistemic habits and social institutions that guide the seeking of truth and giving of reasons for one’s views to others as a preferable way to advance democratic theory. To settle the question of whether Talisse reads Dewey correctly, Eldridge engages in a close reading of texts to show that Dewey supported the same kind of diverse, deliberative democratic inquiry that Talisse advocates, though Dewey believed that it might on occasion require selective use of coercion within wider, mutually educative practices of inclusion that can democratically reconstruct both the views of participants and their institutions. Eldridge notes, however, that Dewey’s view of inquiry was broader than Talisse’s, aiming toward discovery or reconstruction of more adequate beliefs and practices to meet the purposes in living that motivate particular

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inquiries, rather than the justification of hypothetically adopted beliefs as true. Eldridge concludes that Dewey’s version of pragmatic inquiry is more effective as a guide to the kind of public philosophy that aims to resolve lived problems in situations in which diversity is both a problem and a resource. Dewey’s conception of democracy is a multifaceted pragmatic resource that we can employ in various ways in our efforts to extend democratic practices that help us live well. In the globalizing world of the twenty-first century, issues of pluralism, the Other, and democracy are of immense concern. At the dawn of this century, discussion regarding the relation between the “Same” and “the Other” is for many readers associated with the work of Emmanuel Levinas, who also contributes to discussions about democracy. Meanwhile, no name is more associated with democracy than that of John Dewey. Jim Garisson argues in his article that pluralism, sameness, and otherness are essential to Deweyan democracy and focuses on a necessary dialogue with Levinas to explore affinities and differences between both approaches. He discusses why Dewey’s cosmopolitan vision of the democratic community is, when suitably modified by interactive constructivist considerations, deeply desirable for our world today. Entering the conversation from a different national-historical context and with somewhat different theoretical sensibilities, Stefan Neubert and Kersten Reich generally agree with their American colleagues about the value of Dewey’s critical-pragmatic approach to ameliorating modernity-induced problems in living that have been both rationalized and obscured by modern philosophy. Yet, they reconstruct and extend the implications of Dewey’s approach somewhat differently in their Cologne program of interactive constructivism. In their chapter, they reconstruct Dewey through an encounter with contemporary philosopher-sociologist Zygmunt Bauman. First, they show important connections and complementarities between Bauman’s critique of the modern “quest for order” and Dewey’s rejection of modern philosophy’s “quest for certainty,” noting that Bauman focuses more on modernity’s “dark side,” whereas Dewey focuses on a critical reconstruction to harvest modernity’s gains and accomplishments while overcoming its problematic aspects. Then Neubert and Reich use Bauman’s strong emphasis on the ambivalence of progress to bring out more subtle aspects of Dewey’s critique of societal developments, both contrasting and fruitfully interconnecting Bauman’s retrospective focus on the experiences of modernity’s victims with Dewey’s prospective and reconstructive critique of the cultural contradictions of capitalism. Lastly, they draw out implications of such a critical interworking of Bauman’s and Dewey’s perspectives for current issues, for example, concerning the role of experts in public decision

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making and democratic communication within a (post-)modern “knowledge society.” In the process, they demonstrate the fruitfulness of this book’s “public” philosophical method of fostering cross-difference conversations that test and critically expand our understanding of the experiences and issues that must guide our pursuit of diverse democracy as an ethically and politically preferable reconstruction. They show the ambivalent relation between what Bauman calls solid and liquid forms of modernity and argue that we— as contemporary pragmatists and constructivists—should be aware that our approaches from the start are involved in this tensional context. Kersten Reich concludes the collection of chapters in this book by drawing on Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, and Richard Rorty to aid us in assessing how well Dewey’s reconstruction and extension of the meaning and methods of democracy hold up in twenty-first-century conditions of difference within and between communities. Reich notes that Foucault’s analysis of power has shed new light on the conditions of democracy, emphasizing that discourses are never free of power. Then Reich shows that Bourdieu gives us a somewhat different perspective than Dewey on social complexity and its consequences on democratic diversity. Finally, he argues that Rorty’s account of postmodernity points to new contexts of democratic living together and new ambiguities in reconstructing democratic consensus. Reich concludes that Dewey’s basic criteria for democratic development—as expressed in his globally influential 1916 work, Democracy and Education—are still a powerful conceptual tool that can be productively reconstructed for our own times with contributions from these three and other democratic theorists. As other participants in these conversations have noted, Dewey’s theory of democracy was never intended to be a timeless and unchanging doctrine, but rather a useful contribution to ongoing, inclusive, collaborative processes of seeking continuously improvable perspectives that reflect diverse, sometimes troubling experiences. It can guide the emergence of better (if always in some ways tragic) ways of living together as members of increasingly diverse communities whose best hope of responding to the challenges of the twenty-first century is constructing norms and practices of democratic participation. The book concludes with a conversation among the authors in which they clarify points of difference as well as similarity in their visions of the meaning and methods of democracy in contemporary contexts of diversity. They discuss ways in which the differing theoretical standpoints of pragmatism and constructivism can productively inform each other. They explore issues, experiences, and some core questions that they believe should be included in future cross-difference “public” philosophical conversations about democracy and diversity.

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All references to Dewey’s writings use The Collected Works of John Dewey. The critical edition of the Collected Works has been provided by the Center for Dewey Studies, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale (USA) under the lead of Jo Ann Boydston. It consists of the following three sections: The Early Works (EW 1–5): 1882–1898. Carbondale & Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press/London & Amsterdam: Feffer & Simons. The Middle Works (MW 1–15): 1899–1924. Carbondale & Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press. The Later Works (LW 1–17): 1925–1953. Carbondale & Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press.

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CHAPTER 2

The Roots of Diversity in Pragmatic Thought James Campbell

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n this chapter, I would like to discuss a few figures and ideas that should help indicate both the roots of diversity in the pragmatic tradition and the democratic import of this diversity. One place to begin is with the Cambridge Metaphysical Club of Chauncey Wright, Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and others. All of them were graduates of Harvard and members of its extended intellectual community, and their interactions fostered the common development of pragmatic themes. Of the Metaphysical Club, Philip Wiener writes that one of its “most striking features” was “the rich diversity of interests and training of its members in natural and social sciences, logic, ethics, metaphysics, history, and legal practice.”1 I would especially emphasize Wiener’s use of the term “diversity” here because, in the context of early 1870s Cambridge, “diversity” means no more than what Wiener points to: an opening up of the old-time college’s narrow curriculum of Latin and Greek, mathematics and bits of science, and other largely “cultural” subjects, all presented as part of the tapestry of a religious understanding of life. The new Harvard, the Harvard to which the members of the Metaphysical Club belonged, was making room for more deliberate inquiry into the natural and social sciences, but also into humanistic studies like logic, ethics, history, and legal practice, all approached in a more naturalistic fashion. Moving on to the next generation of pragmatists, the individuals who gathered themselves into the Chicago School in its heyday from around 1894 to 1904, we find the same initial narrowness of personal background. They too graduated from old-time colleges—John Dewey from Vermont, James

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Hayden Tufts from Amherst, and George Herbert Mead from Oberlin—that were at best showing some signs of intellectual diversity as well. One question that deserves further consideration is the following: How did we get from this limited sense of diversity of intellectual interests to the broader sense of diversity behind our contemporary inquiries? My assumption is that there is something about pragmatism as a philosophical perspective that has helped to bring us there. First, of course, I should offer a clearer sense of what I mean by “pragmatism.” Any attempt at formulating the criteria for membership in what James calls “the pragmatistic church”2 is a risky one; and I hope that, in emphasizing four central aspects, I do not omit any of the keys to this rich approach to thinking and life. The first aspect is a fundamental interest in nature, and in humans as in and of nature. We humans are experimenters, who wish to understand, control, and sometimes celebrate our natural situation. For the evolutionary pragmatist, emphasis upon the embodiment of the live organism led eventually to a reconceptualization of our place in nature. Nature is both our home and a place of great danger. We find ourselves “living in an aleatory world,” Dewey writes, where our continued existence involves “a gamble.”3 Over the ages, the diverse human community has developed a virtually infinite array of adaptations to aspects of our natural place; and we anticipate that continued human existence will require, and provide, more. The second aspect of pragmatism that I wish to emphasize is the primacy of experience. For the pragmatists, we must pay attention to the ongoing stream of experience to see what it has to tell us. James emphasized the creative aspect of this attentiveness when he indicates that, although “[p]rima facie the world is a pluralism” with little unity, “our higher thinking consists chiefly of an effort to redeem it from that first crude form.” Working within the diversity of the stream, we postulate unities, and in our experimental actions we sometimes “discover more.”4 Pragmatism also emphasizes that we must develop a critical stance of evaluating experience to find the desideranda among the many competing desiderata. Third, pragmatism returns ever to the fundamental role that possibility plays in our natural existence. The reality of “absolute chance” in our natural existence—what Peirce calls “tychism”—is “a factor of the universe.” Our world is never without novelty or randomness; variety and emergence are fundamental traits of life. This “pure spontaneity” gives rise, as Peirce writes, to “infinitesimal departures from law continually, and great ones with infinite infrequency”; and recognizing tychism enables us, he continues, to “account for all the variety and diversity of the universe.”5 Further, when we encounter a problem—whether it is practical or intellectual, moral or aesthetic—we know that it contains aspects that can be rendered otherwise, and that a

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better human future lies within the possibilities of our melioristic action. A fourth prominent pragmatic theme is community as the social ground of a fulfilled human existence. Here, pragmatism emphasizes both the role of the individual in the life of the society, and the creation and reconstruction of institutions that make more permanent the contributions of individuals. As Tufts writes, “the individual’s span at best is short. His working years are soon counted. He can accomplish little alone. But man has learned to build institutions. Through these he gives cumulative strength and enduring life to aims and ideals of generations and ages.”6 With this better sense of the meaning of “pragmatism,” we can return to our attempt to explore the roots of diversity in pragmatic thought. I would like to discuss the ideas of a number of individuals to further refine these general themes of nature, experience, possibility, and community. My interpretation of the resources that the representatives of pragmatism make available will, I hope, lead to a greater appreciation of the richness of this philosophical tradition and its particular usefulness to us in our attempts to foster a pluralistic society. I will begin with James and Dewey, and then consider, in somewhat less detail, Jane Addams, Randolph Bourne, Horace Kallen, and W. E. B. DuBois. Again, I ask your indulgence for focusing on these individuals and omitting so many other worthy figures.

* * * I would like to begin with William James (1842–1910), about whom Alain Locke writes thus: “James carried the pluralistic position definitely and perhaps permanently beyond the traditional metaphysical pluralism based on the recognition of a plurality of principles or elements to the discovery and vindication of a psychological pluralism stemming from a plurality of values and viewpoints.”7 As Locke indicates, James’s metaphysical pluralism moves beyond an understanding of nature as monistic or encompassed in an Absolute to an understanding in which openness and a “more” are ever present. At the same time, James’s psychological pluralism calls on us to incorporate the values of various cultural, ethnic, racial, and gender contributions to which we are often blind. To better understand this psychological pluralism, we will need to familiarize ourselves with what James writes about the social nature of the self, especially as he explores this theme in the chapter “The Consciousness of Self ” in his 1890 masterpiece, The Principles of Psychology. In this chapter, James explores the plasticity at the core of the human individual. He notes that as social creatures, we have many places within many social groups: “a man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him and carry an image of him in their mind.” Our social roles are

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diverse. We are all children of someone and citizens of somewhere and sharers of the Earth; we are often worshipers and employees and spouses; and we are sometimes authors and tourists and outlaws. James continues that we choose some of these social selves, and with these choices come responsibilities. If I aspire to become a teacher, for example, my goal must be to succeed under the appropriate criteria. He writes of this self-imposed social responsibility that “a layman may abandon a city infected with cholera; but a priest or a doctor would think such an act incompatible with his honor.” As a consequence of these recognized responsibilities, we also come to evaluate ourselves in terms of our performance of these chosen roles: “I, who for the time have staked my all on being a psychologist, am mortified if others know much more psychology than I. But I am contented to wallow in the grossest ignorance of Greek.” He continues that his deficiencies in Greek give him as a psychologist “no sense of personal humiliation at all.” If he had, however, “‘pretensions’ to be a linguist, it would have been just the reverse.”8 Such is the diversity of possible selves. When we select our potential selves, and modify these selections as we move forward in life, we are forced to choose among life’s possibilities. I find myself, James writes, “standing by one of my empirical selves and relinquishing the rest.” For example, he notes that the average man would, if it were possible, “be both handsome and fat and well dressed, and a great athlete, and make a million a year, be a wit, a bon-vivant, and a lady-killer, as well as a philosopher; a philanthropist, statesman, warrior, and African explorer, as well as a ‘tone-poet’ and saint.” The reason why we wind up only parings of what we might have become is that it is “simply impossible” for one person to fulfill all of the promises of his or her initial plasticity. Choices must be made in life; and conscious and voluntary choices are best. In this way, James understands fundamental conversions as indicating the reorientation of life justified by a new self-evaluation: “when, as a protestant, I turn catholic; as a catholic, freethinker; as a ‘regular practitioner,’ homeopath, or what not, I am always inwardly strengthened in my course and steeled against the loss of my actual social self by the thought of other and better possible social judges than those whose verdict goes against me now.” Thus, the person who is supposedly standing individually against all of society—for example, Henry David Thoreau or Sophie Magdalena Scholl—is, in fact, appealing to ideal judges who support the values he or she now advocates. Our pursuit of this “ideal social self ” has been connected historically with religion and with what James calls “the highest possible judging companion, if such companion there be.” We need not be religiously inclined, however, to recognize the power of this “Socius”9 for bringing some sort of order to the strivings of our diverse self; and it may be that these ideal judges are derived from social

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values. As George Herbert Mead phrases this point, “self-criticism is essentially social criticism, and behavior controlled by self-criticism is essentially behavior controlled socially.”10

* * * Another important source to consider in our search for diversity in pragmatic thought is the work of John Dewey (1859–1952), especially his emphasis upon the role that education can play in human betterment. Beth Singer notes that Dewey “tried to develop a new concept of individuality which took into account the interdependence of the individual and society.” He was driven to do this, she continues, because he saw “better than James . . . that individuality is operative within a social and cultural context, by which it can be fostered or inhibited.”11 Building upon the social self that James has presented, Dewey emphasizes the central importance of interaction between our selves and our fellows: “To learn to be human is to develop through the giveand-take of communication an effective sense of being an individually distinctive member of a community.”12 He does not here sacrifice the uniqueness of the individual that James has perhaps overemphasized. Rather, he stresses, on the one hand, the social import of James’s recognition of the plasticity at the core of the self and, on the other, the belief that, in a society that values democracy, future generations can be educated to value democracy even more. Dewey seeks to engage us in this quest to reconstruct our institutions to foster democratic community through the institution of the school. Pluralism is a fundamental value for Dewey; and, as he writes in Baldwin’s Dictionary, pluralism means “the possibility of real change, or an objectively valid dynamic view,” “the possibility of real variety, particularly in the differences of persons,” and “the possibility of freedom, as a self-initiating and moving power inherent in every real qua real.”13 These pluralistic possibilities reappear again and again in his work. In his 1919 essay, “Philosophy and Democracy,” for example, Dewey writes of the importance of equality to democratic life. He notes that the idea of equality means that “the world is not to be construed as a fixed order of species, grades or degrees,” and thus that “every existence deserving the name of 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.” It exists, rather, as an instance of natural variety that can mature only with freedom. In our context of diverse individuals, democracy promises an education for growth to create “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.”14

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In his 1916 essay, “Nationalizing Education,” Dewey explicitly takes up the theme of America’s social diversity. He writes that “the American nation is itself complex and compound . . . interracial and international in its makeup.” He is thus offering us a new interpretation of the familiar American motto: e pluribus unum. Rather than seeing its meaning as the merging of the 13 former-colonies into one new nation-state, Dewey wants to stress that twentieth-century American unity requires the ongoing remaking of an evolving community from its various changing components. Thus, it must value and nourish its pluralistic possibilities. “Our unity cannot be a homogeneous thing,” he writes, “it must be a unity created by drawing out and composing into a harmonious whole the best, the most characteristic which each contributing race and people has to offer.” He then addresses the question of the hyphenated American, whose loyalties in 1916 were suspect. “The way to deal with hyphenism,” he writes, “is to welcome it, but to welcome it in the sense of extracting from each people its special good, so that it shall surrender into a common fund of wisdom and experience what it especially has to contribute.” Dewey is able to offer this view because he believes that “the genuine American, the typical American, is himself a hyphenated character.” He does not mean that each is “part American,” with some “foreign ingredient” added in, but rather that “the American is himself Pole-German-EnglishFrench-Spanish-Italian-Greek-Irish-Scandinavian-Bohemian-Jew- and so on. The point is to see to it that the hyphen connects instead of separates.”15 In an education for democracy, where diversity is valued as a key ingredient, Dewey emphasizes that we have to convert the diverse elements into functional components of the community.

* * * Now that we have explored the importance of James’s social understanding of the self and Dewey’s emphasis upon education for democracy, we can turn to some other major proponents of diversity in pragmatic thought. Jane Addams (1860–1935) is perhaps the most obvious individual to consider. She was a Midwesterner who rose to prominence as an exponent of what might be called the Quaker Social Gospel. By this, I mean that she sought the inner light of each individual, over reliance upon scripture, as a guide for her attempts at social reform. Her approach to improving society was to immerse herself within the situation of her local neighborhood and in this way to discover what its problems were. In particular, she emphasizes that the members of her diverse local community in Chicago—however downtrodden and disorganized they seemed—were still capable of contributing to their own betterment. In fact, no betterment was possible without their

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contributions. For Addams, each person’s viewpoint should be cherished, and each person’s contribution must be respected, if we hope to succeed in our attempts at social reform. She stresses as well that the major problems of contemporary society were social problems. We can consider her 1902 volume, Democracy and Social Ethics, in which Addams contrasts individual and social approaches to moral advance. “To attain individual morality in an age demanding social morality,” she writes, “to pride one’s self on the results of personal effort when the time demands social adjustment, is utterly to fail to apprehend the situation.” Apprehending the situation adequately thus requires, she continues, that those who desire to attain an adequate social morality “must be brought in contact with the moral experiences of the many in order to procure an adequate social motive.” What each of us gain from this immersion is the ability to recognize the impact of social problems on the lives of others, or as she puts it, to “see the size of one another’s burdens.” Apprehending the situation adequately also requires that we come to recognize our own place within the array of social problems. This recognition entails our “identification with the common lot which is the essential idea of Democracy.” Apprehending the social situation adequately further requires, Addams maintains, an ongoing recollection of that diversity of possible social goals that will enable us to recognize when “the good of yesterday is opposed to the good of today.”16

* * * Randolph Silliman Bourne (1886–1918) published an essay in 1916 entitled “Trans-National America.” In this essay, Bourne addresses the strains that the World War was placing on American society as the various immigrant concentrations of our diverse land experienced conflicting loyalties in the face of the sad events then unfolding in Europe. He further indicates that, given this new consciousness of ethnic diversity in America, those Americans of British descent—whom he characterizes as only “the first permanent immigrants”— were mistaken to be troubled by the presumed disloyalty of later immigrant groups who refused to be melted into “100% Americans.” In fact, he rejected the metaphor of the homogenizing melting pot entirely, and its intended product as “a tasteless, colorless fluid of uniformity.” America, he thought, had a greater potential: “As long as we thought of Americanism in terms of the ‘melting-pot,’ our American cultural tradition lay in the past. It was something to which the new Americans were to be moulded. In the light of our changing ideal of Americanism, we must perpetrate the paradox that our American cultural tradition lies in the future.” In other words, Bourne’s title of “Trans-National America” was referring not to any current reality but

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to a possible future—one that we still have not attained. “It is not what we are now that concerns us,” he continues, “but what this plastic next generation may become in the light of a new cosmopolitan ideal.”17 He hopes that by taking advantage of this plasticity, the next generation of Americans would create from within its range of diverse customs and ideals a new, transnational America that retained greater pluralism. In enacting this ideal, Bourne emphasizes the Deweyan theme that freedom alone is not an adequate criterion of democracy. The new, transnational America would require the fuller participation of the diverse immigrant groups—the mixing and sifting of inheritance and hopes; the cross-fertilizing of traditions—to facilitate the creation of a new type of collective life. If we are to concentrate exclusively upon the value of freedom, Bourne writes, it must not be the freedom of isolation, but rather the freedom of the diverse elements of American society to take an active part in the construction of America’s future: “freedom means a democratic cooperation in determining the ideals and purposes and industrial and social institutions of a country.”18

* * * Horace Meyer Kallen (1882–1974) addresses many of the same themes that Bourne does in his writings on pluralism. In fact, in his 1915 essay “Democracy versus the Melting-Pot,” Kallen anticipates many of Bourne’s themes. He challenges, for example, the idea that America is essentially British. “The first immigrants in the land simply through the accident of being first, have become its aristocracy,” he writes, and the “non-British elements of the population have been practically voiceless.” Kallen further presents his own notion of a “trans-national” America in which the United States is “in the process of becoming a federal state not merely as a union of geography and administrative unities, but also as a cooperation of cultural diversities, as a federation or commonwealth of national cultures.” What he believed had to happen before this commonwealth could become a functional reality, however, was that America’s actual cultural diversity had to become self-conscious throughout the land. Kallen introduces here a new musical metaphor for what he has in mind as the self-conscious realization of the new America. “The spirit of the land is inarticulate,” he writes, “not a voice but a chorus of many voices each singing a rather different tune.” There are, for example, many different versions of what Americans mean by “justice” and “art,” by “literature” and “philosophy,” and we need somehow to preserve this diversity while at the same time minimizing the resultant discord. Kallen asks here the poignant question: “What must, what can, what shall this cacophony become—a unison or a harmony?” Do we want to create “a unison, singing

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the old British theme ‘America,’ the America of the New England School? or a harmony, in which that theme shall be dominant, perhaps, among others, but one among many, not the only one?”19 There was in 1915 America a danger, Kallen feared, that the country was increasingly willing to accept a nationalized and Anglicized “unison.” He writes that, because of the American response to the unsettling European War, “the whole situation is favorable as it has never been at any time elsewhere” to such a stampede. All that stood in the way of this stampede, he thought, was the self-conscious articulation of the reality of America’s diverse traditions. What is necessary to prevent this rush to mistaken fusion, in other words, is a recognition of “the basic law of America itself, and the spirit of the American institutions. To achieve unison—it can be achieved—would be to violate these.” Should it happen, this feared “unison of social and historic interests” could only be the result, on the other hand, of “the complete cutting-off of the ancestral memories of the American populations, the enforced, exclusive use of the English language and English and American history in the schools and in the daily life.” For his part, Kallen advocated the recognition and self-conscious articulation of a more diverse society. The attainment of this alternative, “a harmony,” would similarly require public action; but this action “would do no violence to the ideals of American fundamental law and the spirit of American institutions nor to the qualities of men.”20

* * * In this limited exploration of the roots of diversity in pragmatic thought, we can consider only one more figure. I have in mind William Edward Burghardt DuBois (1868–1963); and I introduce him because he presents us with a particular problem—one that the other figures did not ignore, but thought could be overcome. DuBois points to the possibility of a permanent minority that may never be melted or harmonized. (The metaphors at this point break down completely.) His experiences, and those of his fellows, suggested to him that Americans of African descent were never going to be accepted fully within the larger American community. In theory, in a free, Lockean state, there would be a general mixing of various levels of economic success. Thus, bank presidents and nurses, grocery-store clerks and airplane pilots, university professors and fire-fighters, and the children of all of them would succeed (or not) independently of such factors as religion, gender, and race. Experience had taught DuBois, however, that while wave after wave of immigrants had entered the American community and been assimilated with greater or lesser success, the children of the former slaves had been excluded from the process of assimilation.

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The source of this problem was, of course, race. As DuBois writes, “ in the latter part of the nineteenth century when I was born and grew to manhood, color had become an abiding unchangeable fact,” and African Americans suffered from the evil of racial prejudice “because a mass of self-conscious instincts and unconscious prejudices had arranged themselves rank on rank in its defense.” All of the institutions of American society, from the top to the bottom, were “based upon and determined by the color line.“21 Moreover, unlike the lowly immigrant status that could be virtually eliminated through generations of incremental economic success, DuBois emphasizes that, since the low status of African Americans was based upon their skin color, it is permanent. As he noted in 1942, in a statement that is sadly not yet false: “One could hardly be born in America, North or South, and not subconsciously regard color and low social status as inevitably connected.”22 We know that DuBois maintained his support for a more diverse America, and repeatedly called for African Americans to tell their own story, as in his celebrations of the Harlem Renaissance. He seems, however, to have been far more pessimistic about the possibilities for a future multicultural America than were our other figures. Returning to where we began with the social self of James, DuBois emphasizes more strongly the reality of conflicts than James did. Setting aside for the present those conflicts between and among individuals, we can consider DuBois’s discussion of the conflicts within the self, especially as they are present in African Americans. He points to what he calls their “double-consciousness,” which he describes as a “sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.” Unlike James’s sense of the wholesomeness of multiple perspectives, DuBois finds problems in this “double-consciousness.” This self is not making choices as James’s was; it is attempting to avoid sanction while at the same time to maintain self-respect. “One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”23 Even this doggedness, however, cannot prevent the recognition, he believes, that African Americans constitute a permanent minority beyond the limits of acceptable diversity.

* * * I began with the question of whether there is something about pragmatism as a philosophical perspective that enables it to present an understanding of democratic society that is especially open to the contributions of a diverse population. We have seen that there are, in fact, many things about pragmatism that make it particularly useful to us in our efforts to foster a diverse

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democracy and to challenge non-pragmatist approaches that might undermine diversity. Its particular approach to the key issues of nature, experience, possibility, and community makes pragmatism especially adaptive to change and open to the suggestions of multiple perspectives. Among the authors whom we considered, diversity is a central theme. For James, the issue is the possibilities within the self, and between and among selves; for Dewey, it is the possibilities of the school and the other institutions of society to help create more cooperative selves, and eventually a more cooperative society. For her part, Addams urges us to respect the contributions of each. Bourne and Kallen both focus on the possibilities within multicultural America for living out its actual diversity. This vision remains, of course, unattained; and, as DuBois reminds us, America’s greatest ongoing failure—because it violates its own ideals of equality and freedom—has been its inability to fully integrate its African American citizens. Notes 1. Philip P. Wiener, Evolution and the Founders of Pragmatism (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1949), 18. 2. William James, The Meaning of Truth (Cambridge: Harvard UP [1909] 1975), 9 n.3. 3. John Dewey, Experience and Nature, rev. ed. (1929), Later Works, 17 volumes, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1981–1990), vol. 1, 43. 4. James, The Will to Believe (Cambridge: Harvard UP [1897] 1979), 5–6. 5. Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Papers, ed. Charles Hartshorne, Paul Weiss and Arthur W. Burks (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1932–1958), 8 volumes, 6.201, 6.59. 6. James Hayden Tufts, “Reunion Letter” (1939), Selected Writings, ed. James Campbell (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1992), 344. 7. Alain Locke, “Pluralism and Ideological Peace” (1947), The Philosophy of Alain Locke, ed. Leonard Harris (Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1989), 96. Locke’s own ideas, well presented in this volume, also played a role in the development of diversity in pragmatic thought. 8. James, The Principles of Psychology (Cambridge: Harvard UP [1890] 1981), 281–282, 296. 9. James, The Principles of Psychology, 295, 300–301. 10. George Herbert Mead, Mind, Self, and Society from the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist, ed. Charles W. Morris (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934), 255. 11. Beth J. Singer, “Pragmatism and Pluralism,” Monist, vol. 75, no. 4 (October 1992), 485. 12. Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, Later Works, vol. 2, 332. 13. Dewey, “Pluralism” (1902), Middle Works, 15 volumes, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1976–1983), vol. 2, 204.

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14. Dewey, “Philosophy and Democracy” (1919), Middle Works, vol. 11, 52–53. 15. Dewey, “Nationalizing Education” (1916), Middle Works, vol. 10, 204–205. 16. Jane Addams, Democracy and Social Ethics (New York: Macmillan, 1902), 2–3, 5–6, 11, 172. 17. Randolph Silliman Bourne, “Trans-National America” (1916), reprinted in his History of a Literary Radical and Other Essays, ed. Van Wyck Brooks (New York: Huebsch, 1920), 268, 278, 284, 271–272. 18. Bourne, “Trans-National America,” 276. 19. Horace Meyer Kallen, “Democracy versus the Melting-Pot” (1915), reprinted in Culture and Democracy in the United States: Studies in the Group Psychology of the American Peoples (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1924), 98, 116, 104, 118. 20. Kallen, “Democracy versus the Melting-Pot,” 118, 120. 21. W. E. B. DuBois, Dusk of Dawn: An Essay toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept (1940), Writings, ed. Nathan Huggins (New York: Library of America, 1986), 556. 22. DuBois, “The Future of Africa in America” (1942), Against Racism: Unpublished Essays, Papers, Addresses, 1887–1961, ed. Herbert Aptheker (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1985), 173. 23. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), Writings, 364–365.

References Addams, Jane, Democracy and Social Ethics (New York: Macmillan, 1902). Baldwin, James Mark, ed., A Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology, 3 vol. (New York: Macmillan, 1901–1905). Bourne, Randolph Silliman, History of a Literary Radical and Other Essays, ed. Van Wyck Brooks (New York: Huebsch, 1920). Campbell, James, A Thoughtful Profession: The Early Years of the American Philosophical Association (Chicago: Open Court, 2006). Dewey, John, Experience and Nature, rev. ed. (1929), Later Works, 17 volumes, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1981–1990), vol. 1. Dewey, John, “Nationalizing Education” (1916), Middle Works, 15 volumes, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1976–1983), vol. 10, 201–210. Dewey, John, “Philosophy and Democracy” (1919), Middle Works, vol. 11, 41–53. Dewey, John, “Pluralism” (1902), Middle Works, vol. 2, 203–204. Dewey, John, The Public and Its Problems (1927), Later Works, vol. 2, 235–372. DuBois, W. E. B., Writings, ed. Nathan Huggins (New York: Library of America, 1986). DuBois, W. E. B., Against Racism: Unpublished Essays, Papers, Addresses, 1887–1961, ed. Herbert Aptheker (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1985). James, William, The Meaning of Truth (Cambridge: Harvard UP [1909] 1975). James, William, The Principles of Psychology (Cambridge: Harvard UP [1890] 1981), 3 vol.

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James, William, The Will to Believe (Cambridge: Harvard UP [1897] 1979). Kallen, Horace Meyer, Culture and Democracy in the United States: Studies in the Group Psychology of the American Peoples (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1924). Locke, Alain, The Philosophy of Alain Locke, ed. Leonard Harris (Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1989). Mead, George Herbert, Mind, Self, and Society from the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist, ed. Charles W. Morris (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934). Peirce, Charles Sanders, Collected Papers, ed. Charles Hartshorne, Paul Weiss and Arthur W. Burks (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1932–1958), 8 vol. Singer, Beth J., “Pragmatism and Pluralism,” Monist, vol. 75, no. 4 (Oct. 1992), 477–491. Tufts, James Hayden, Selected Writings, ed. James Campbell (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1992). Wiener, Philip P. Evolution and the Founders of Pragmatism (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1949).

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CHAPTER 3

The Context of Diversity versus the Problem of Diversity William J. Gavin

T

he context of diversity can be discussed in both an epistemological and a political sense of the term. Epistemologically speaking, there exists a diversity of experiences. This diversity should be both acknowledged and preserved. No single formula can do justice to the “experience of experience.” Professor Martin Jay has argued that, in the American pragmatic tradition, fracturing experience into discrete categories produces definite concrete benefits. We should, for Jay, resist “the cult of experience.” That is, we should resist the temptation to suppose that all experience has an invariant meaning or is of one kind, one that it is, for example, “problematic,” in nature, or at least is capable of becoming so. The modalization of experience . . . [allows] the inherent logic of each variant to be isolated and developed in its own immanent terms . . . [As a result,] it helped clarify the complexity of the states involved in the general appeal to experience against its various contrasting terms: theory, reason, dogma, innocence, discourse, and so on. By segregating one discursive subcontext from another, it also permitted the issues raised in each to emerge with a precision that would have been much harder to obtain if the boundaries were blurred.1

In a similar fashion, I too want to argue for the pluralization of experience— for the “experiences” of experience, if you will. There are situations, such as the Kafkaesque and the tragic, which are not capable of being turned into problems without significant distortion. On the political level, diversity is not merely a problem to be solved via appealing to quotas or assimilation to the melting pot. While some metaphors are better than others in dealing

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with the issue, there is no final metaphor. Going further, the need to uphold and preserve diversity has a tragic dimension to it, in the sense that it is an ideal—a part of democracy toward which progress can be made, but always with the realization that there is more work to be done. This realization needs to be reaffirmed on a continual basis through the exercise of a Jamesian “will to believe.” To sum up, “diversity” can be defined in many ways. One of these ways is to see it as a “problem,” that is, something that can be analytically solved like a mathematical equation. However, diversity is more complicated than this; it has both a “latent” and a “manifest” image. On the surface it may appear as something solvable, but at a deeper level, it shows itself as an ideal that we must commit to, and continuously reaffirm. This entails the realization and affirmation that the ideal, qua ideal, cannot be completely achieved. Part One: The Contextual In his 1931 article “Context and Thought,” John Dewey begins by giving an example of the need to take the context into account if we are to comprehend the meaning of a foreign language. He goes on to say that this need for seeking out the context is not only indispensable for thinking, but also for logic, and ultimately for philosophy itself.2 Going further, for Dewey symbols are not merely defined among themselves, intertextually. There is a context outside the text, so to speak. Concepts have meaning insofar as they have an existential context from which they arise and toward which they point back. Dewey then makes a very strong statement. He says, “I should venture to assert that the most pervasive fallacy of philosophic thinking goes back to neglect of context.”3 Contextualism for Dewey is the opposite of certainty—something that is neither feasible nor desirable in a continually changing universe. Analysis in and of itself is sometimes a desirable goal, but analysis taken as sufficient results in the fallacy of neglecting the context. So too does the tendency toward the fallacy of “unlimited extension or universalization.” In opposition to this, Dewey says, when “context is taken into account, it is seen that every generalization occurs under limiting conditions, set by the contextual situation.”4 Philosophic thinking, as contextual, includes the “background”—both temporal and spatial—of the conceptual system in question, and also the “selective interest” of the author and/or observer. Dewey clearly rejects objectivity or certainty here, and he might seem vulnerable to the charge of subjectivism. But he argues in response that “every occurrence is a concurrance,”5 that is, that events do not occur in isolation, and that they have both disjunctive and conjunctive transitions with other events; “an event is both eventful and an eventuation.”6

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He also argues that “one can only see from a certain standpoint, but this fact does not make all standpoints of equal value.”7 Several items are important to highlight in Dewey’s position. First, his discussion, Dewey tells us, “is meant to illustrate, though it cannot pretend to prove, that neglect of context is the greatest single disaster which philosophic thinking can incur.”8 Dewey’s position is a self-reflexive one; he cannot prove for sure that contextualism is right. He can only argue persuasively for its attributes. Second, one cannot “take account of . . . [a] context in the sense of making it a complete object of reflection.”9 A context is “tacit,”10 Dewey says, rather than clear and distinct. Phenomenologically speaking, it appears as “opaque” or as “absent.” Going further, while we can focus upon any context, “it does not all come into question at once.” Dewey recognizes that if everything were to be in disarray at once, “there would be nothing to which to tie those factors that, being unsettled, are in the process of discovery and determination.”11 As we shall see in the next section, contexts become problematic as one invents, that is, gives voice to what has gone wrong. While this may be true, it leaves open or ignores the possibility that what is unsettled or has gone wrong may be subject to simultaneous multiple interpretations, perhaps incommensurate in nature. Dewey may sometimes be guilty of stressing continuity over rupture, although he admits, in The Public and Its Problems, for example, that if “we look in the wrong place [in trying to find the correct problem] we naturally do not find what we are looking for . . . [As a result] ‘interpretation’ runs wild.”12 I will return to the “problem of ‘multiple problems”’ later on. In recognizing and affirming contextualism, and realizing that we are necessarily involved with rather than looking at our context, Dewey says that the philosopher “would learn humility and would be debarred from a too unlimited and dogmatic universalization of his conclusions.”13 “The contextual setting is vague,” Dewey says; and, like James, he wants to reintroduce the importance of the vague to its proper place in our experience.14 However, he tells us that the vague “is no mere fringe,” that is, that it has a solidity of its own. The vague, as such, is important. Going further, conceptual systems, as contextual, involve selective interest; they are, if you will, “biased” in nature. They exhibit care and concern on the part of those doing the thinking. Particular items of bias or concern may be focused upon and eliminated. But not all elements of selective concern can be eliminated. Nor should they be, for the opposite of the subjective is not the objective, but rather the “academic and mechanical.” Continuing in this vein, Dewey says that the context of philosophical systems should not be viewed as if it were previous philosophical systems, but rather “the perplexities, the troubles, and the issues of the period in which a philosophy arises.”15

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Philosophic systems for Dewey are not immaculately conceived. “The only alternative to the doctrine of the virginal birth of philosophies is recourse to the marriage of thinking with a tradition and a culture that are not in themselves philosophical in character.”16 Philosophy, in short, becomes arrogant when it claims certainty or seeks it. Philosophy ossifies when it claims to be self-sufficient. “Analysis falsifies when its results are interpreted as complete in themselves apart from any context.”17 Finally, there are, Dewey notes, ever widening contexts, but there is no final context, no context of all contexts. Something, as William James said, is always left out. “[A]bsolute unity, in spite of brilliant dashes in its direction, still remains undiscovered, still remains a Grenzbegriff. ‘Ever not quite’ must be the rationalistic philosopher’s last confession concerning it.”18 Relative continuity exists, as one passes from a small context to larger ones, that is, from the personal to the cultural, to the universal. Dewey is both attracted to and fearful of the last stage: the universal. He tells us that it is “dangerous” to begin here, that is, at the point of the “make-up” of experience itself, that “biology, psychology, including social psychology and psychiatry, anthropology all afford indications as to the nature of this structure.”19 These disciplines do not, in my opinion, contain this seemingly final structure, or complete it. For a context, as tacit, is incomplete and fundamentally so. Here perhaps Dewey wavers a bit, telling us that “the boundless multiplicity of the concrete experiences of humanity when they are dealt with gently and humanly will naturally terminate in some sense of the structure of any and all experience.”20 But this termination should not be taken as a new form of closure. If experience is to be heralded over thought, experience had over experience known, then we must be careful not to define how people undergo their experiences in advance. Saying that experiences are diverse may be a necessary step, but it may not be sufficient. Pluralism does need to be affirmed, but do all of the pluralistic elements have something in common? Are the constituents involved alike enough so that they are incompatible, that is, if one affirms one outlook, is it at the expense of another? Put differently, one must be careful of trying to solve the problem of contextualism, because the context is not a problem to be solved. As tacit, it remains at the edge, or fringe, of the problem. Part Two: The Problematic In “The Pattern of Inquiry,” the keystone chapter to his volume Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, written in 1938, Dewey is also at pains to show how things go wrong in our experience, and how concepts, once formed through transactions, themselves become formative, as they do, for example, in law and

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in art.21 An indeterminate situation becomes a problematic one through the process of inquiry. The fact—theory dichotomy is rejected. One has, instead, the facts according to this theory or hypothesis vis-à-vis the facts involved under hypothesis #2, and so on, with the “real” facts only emerging at the outcome of the situation at hand. Differently stated, all facts are theory-laden, and one has to shuttle back and forth in Clifford Geertzian fashion between experience-near and experience-distant concepts.22 However, the theories or hypotheses involved seem to be incompatible rather than incommensurate in nature. That is, the more we tend to settle on one, the more the others are excluded. One invents the problem rather abductively23 by turning an indeterminate situation into a problematic one. Like Peirce, Dewey realized that how an issue is given voice or allowed to arise linguistically or symbolically is itself constitutive of the outcome. “It is a familiar and significant saying that a problem well put is half-solved.”24 But what happens, we might ask, if the situation cannot be “put” as a problem, or if it yields simultaneous articulations of the problem, unable to falsify each other? In the process of outlining his position in “The Pattern of Inquiry,” Dewey refers to the image of an assembly hall to explain how things go wrong in our experience. He tells the reader, “When an alarm of fire is sounded in a crowded assembly hall, there is much that is indeterminate.”25 But, he continues, “the fire is characterized . . . by some settled traits. It is, for example, located somewhere. Then the aisle seats are located at fixed places. Since they are settled or determinate in existence, the first step in institution of a problem is to settle them in observation.”26 No situation is just “uncertain at large.” It has some particular identifying aspects. It is located “somewhere,” is temporally and spatially fixed, and so on. It is, in short, “uniquely qualified.” Dewey’s point is that, even in circumstances of extreme anxiety, one knows some aspects about his or her situation. He tells us that “unless a situation is uniquely qualified in its very indeterminateness there is a condition of complete panic.”27 And again, “no situation which is completely indeterminate can possibly be converted into a problem having definite constituents.”28 Dewey then seems to be saying that this doesn’t happen, or at least it shouldn’t happen, but that if it does, we have a situation of complete chaos. On the other hand, the Cartesian project suggested that we do exactly this: Doubt everything all at once, and act as if everything did go wrong all at once in our experience. The goal, as is well known, was to get past doubt and to attain certainty. Dewey, like Peirce, is suggesting that this scenario is a recipe for despair. Unfortunately, it is a recipe which has motivated the Western philosophical tradition for several hundred years.

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Like any image or metaphor, the fire in the assembly hall is both revealing and concealing at the same time. It assumes, for example, that the alarm really means “fire,” that it’s not a mistake—a false positive so to speak. Going further, it assumes, or at least privileges, a shared view as to what “observation” means. Does everyone, for example, neophyte and teacher, looking through an electron microscope “see” the same thing? I mention these points not to downgrade Dewey’s contribution to epistemology here, which is a formidable one, but rather to suggest ways, other than the Cartesian project, in which difficulties can arise in turning a uniquely qualified situation into a problematic one. First, a situation can be uniquely qualified and yet still be characterized socio-politically, psychologically, religiously, existentially, and so on. It can, in short, be susceptible to multiple paradigms that are incommensurate but not necessarily incompatible, in a manner not unlike that advocated by Paul Feyerabend for science in general.29 An example of this might be a situation that is overdetermined, where the problem cannot be identified. Therefore, no progress can be made. Let us call such a situation “Kafkaesque.” Second, a situation can be uniquely qualified and still not be a problem, that is, something that can be solved, at least via a postmortem analysis. This is exactly the situation that occurs in tragedy. An example of this situation might be one deemed “tragic”. In sum, then, things go wrong in our experience in different ways. Sometimes things go wrong one at a time. A difficulty appears, the problem is correctly named, and it is solved. But there are other times when everything goes wrong all at once, or when things go wrong from an infinite number of different perspectives, each of equal value. Finally, there are some situations where things go wrong and the problem cannot be analyzed because at bottom it is not characterizable as a problem. We now examine each of these two situations in turn. Part Three: The Kafkaesque In Franz Kafka’s novel, The Trial, we are presented with a text that allows for, and even demands, multiple interpretations of an incommensurable nature. At the very beginning of the text, the hero (or antihero) Joseph K. rings a bell and his trial commences. Does he put himself on trial? Or, is he brought to trial by the Law? He says later on in the text that the “guilt lies with the organization,”30 but this statement could be merely a diversion, that is, a form of repression. Is K. a representative of nineteenth-century bourgeois capitalism, or does he transcend this particular sociopolitical situation?31 If K. is alienated, is his alienation rooted in history, such that it has at least a possible historical solution? On the other hand, there is also some evidence for a more

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psychological interpretation of the novel, one suggesting that K. is repressing some more a-contextual truth or necessity—that the alienation is more fundamental to human nature at large. At the very beginning, he encounters two warders; one of them is named “Franz,” not coincidentally. As K. brushes by him, that is, as K. “crosses the threshold,” he encounters the second warder, reading a book, who tells him that Franz should have told him to stay in his room. The two warders show up later in the lumber room of the bank, where they are about to receive a whipping. In “real life” banks do not have lumber rooms, but Rumpelkammer in German carries with it the connotation of dead text and dry ink wells, that is, the image perhaps of Kafka as a failed writer—one who could not create.32 On an existential level, K. is guilty of “bad faith,”33 of not assuming the upright posture, of trying to become “thing-like,” an en soi. Twice in the novel he is treated as an object, and seems to find some satisfaction or, at least, relief in this.34 Indeed at the end of the novel, he is almost a thing—almost, but not quite a piece of matter being carried to the quarry by his warders. Yet, even here closure is not to be had, as Kafka tells the reader, on the last line of the text, that “the shame of it must outlive him,”35 that is, that even at the end there is not an end. K. will live on ignominiously, “like a dog,” in the reader/author’s mind. Finally, there is also a religious interpretation of the novel, ending with the famous parable of the doorkeeper, where a man from the country approaches and tries to enter a door being guarded by a doorkeeper. He is told that he cannot do so—at least not at the present moment, and therefore he ends up spending his entire life waiting at the side of the door and not trying to push through. At the end, when he is about to expire, he asks the doorkeeper why no one else has ever shown up at the door, and he is told that the door was only for him, and that it is now about to be shut.36 The parable, like the text, is susceptible to multiple interpretations. Did the doorkeeper lie to the man? Or was he to tell him the truth only when asked? Can he really shut the door? Earlier in the novel K. hired a lawyer to “help” him with his case. The lawyer’s name is Huld, which in German means “grace.”37 His activity or lack thereof in the text raises the religious issue of the covenant of grace vis-à-vis the covenant of works. Can one do anything about one’s “sinful” condition, or should one rather merely accept it on “blind,” that is, not “informed,” faith? There is a real question in Kafka’s text as to whether the attempt to investigate the situation is itself a form of pride, or hubris. Or is it rather the case that K.’s investigation is noteworthy and commendable, but that his refusal to act without certainty, that is, to engage in a Jamesian “will to believe,” is grounds for criticism. Kafka might reply that Joseph K. was incapable of acting otherwise than he did—that he was not quite up to being

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human.38 It was not, in short, that K. has existentially or religiously lapsed from a previous state or if so, that he could do anything about it. He was more “like a dog,” that is, prehuman or posthuman. In short, The Trial is a text capable of being interpreted in multiple ways— it is amenable to a set of hypotheses concerning Joseph K.’s situation. Does it go wrong in his mind, or in a social context? Should the problem be framed in religious discourse or psychological discourse or sociopolitical discourse or existential discourse? All are possible, none necessarily more probable. It is this overdetermination that forces the reader to choose one over the other, that is, to act. Ironically, this is precisely what Joseph K. can’t or won’t do in the text itself. To the extent that Joseph K. is representative of every person, what Kafka is saying to the reader, and perhaps to himself, is that action, that is, selection of a hypothesis, is impossible. Just how “typical” is Joseph K.? Is he “everyman”? Is there a Josephine K.?39 It is this last issue which is the crux of the situation. Is K. the exception to the rule? If so, we can assert that Dewey’s description of the problematic situation is the rule. Dewey might well agree to this, reminding us that this is a completely panic-laden situation, and, as such, merely a “literary” one. In brief, Dewey and Kafka present us with two different characterizations as to how things go wrong in our experience. These scenarios can be viewed either as mutually exclusive or as alluding to different degrees of extremity concerning how we undergo our experience. For Dewey, things do not go wrong all at once, and if they do there would be complete panic. For Kafka, if K. is representative, things do go wrong all at once—in the sense that the situation is overdetermined and one hypothesis cannot disqualify another. Dewey calls attention to the need to deal with the specificity of the situation—the importance of context. Things don’t go wrong vicariously in your head. Nor do they go wrong all at once. For Kafka things do or can go wrong all at once, and it is much more difficult to decide if they are going wrong inside your head or in the situation itself. Dewey would remind us that “[t]here are two sorts of possible worlds in which esthetic [i.e., problem solving or creative] experience would not occur. In a world of mere flux, change would not be cumulative [and] in a world that is finished . . . there is no fulfillment.”40 The first of these is, of course, precisely the world offered up by Kafka. Indeed the German title of the work, Der Prozess, means simply “proceedings”—process, as opposed to progress. For both thinkers, the world of the permanent has disappeared or fallen apart. Kafka seems the most upset by this—at least if we take the activity, or inactivity, of Joseph K. as representative of the author’s position. Like the other classic American philosophers, Dewey would have us believe that permanence, aka certainty, can be given up without this leading to the demise

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of the human condition. Indeed, for Dewey, the “quest for certainty” has been the cause of much that is inhuman and totalitarian in our everyday lives. Progress can be made if we proceed roughly in accordance with the rules prescribed by the scientific method. But in order for that method to work and indeed for Dewey’s philosophy (as critique) to work, Dewey must be able to emphasize equally both the disjunctive and conjunctive transitions among historical contexts. That is, he must be able to tell the story of how we got from there to here. This he does over and over again in his works, including Reconstruction in Philosophy, “The Need for Recovery of Philosophy,” and “An Empirical Survey of Empiricisms.” Philosophy, in other words, can only be “recovered” if one can get to the root of the issue, that is, if one can characterize the problem, or what has gone wrong, correctly. And, like the instance of the assembly hall, if there are multiple accounts of what has gone wrong, recovery, that is, progress, becomes impossible. Dewey needs to at least be able to “invent” the problem correctly if any solution is to be possible. In short, to the extent that the indeterminate situation is uniquely qualified by a pluralistic and incommensurable set of opposing paradigms, the invention of the problematic seems not to be possible. Part Four: The Tragic But there is also a second situation that seems not to be susceptible to “problematic” analysis, namely, the “tragic,” as found, for example, in the work of Frederick Nietzsche. Works like The Birth of Tragedy and Thus Spoke Zarathustra are too well known to need detailed commentary here. Suffice it to say that Nietzsche highlighted Greek tragedy not to dwell in antiquarianism, but because he felt that we all still have to deal with tragic situations in our present century. Here it is necessary to ask this question: What makes a situation “tragic,” as opposed to saying, its being merely “problematic”? Some have defined tragic situations as those involving decisions concerning “good vs. good,” as opposed to “good vs. evil.” If this definition is allowed, then Dewey is quite able to deal with tragedy.41 However, I would like to propose that what makes a situation tragic is not simply or exclusively good versus good. A tragic situation, for example, losing my daughter in a drive-by shooting, or losing my small son “because” he fell out an eleventh-story window when my back was turned, is a situation that, retrospectively analyzed, does not make sense, does not add up. Far from excluding rational analysis, or foregrounding what precedes rational analysis, that is, experience “had” or experience “undergone” in Deweyan terms, a tragic situation is one that just does not make complete sense; one is up against a “surd.”42 Professor Kathleen Higgins, in her book Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, puts it this way: “The

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province of tragedy is related to an extreme subset of the actual—the part of actual human experience that is painful and not susceptible to relief through analysis . . . The kind of suffering from which tragedy draws its material is not remedied by thinking the situation through.”43 And again, “the suffering of a mother who loses a child to a stray bullet in a store robbery is not mended by her thinking through the scenario a number of times. If anything, thinking about the situation is likely to intensify her pain and to make her more aware of the senselessness of her child’s death. Tragedy deals with situations that produce pain of this sort.”44 There are times when Dewey seems to appreciate this nonproblematic situation. In Experience and Nature, for example, Dewey, admitting that what he is saying “sounds pessimistic,” nonetheless says: Through science we have secured a degree of power of prediction and of control; through tools, machinery and an accompanying technique we have made the world more comfortable to our needs, a more secure abode. We have heaped up riches and means of comfort between ourselves and the risks of the world. We have professionalized amusement as an agency of escape and forgetfulness. But when all is said and done, the fundamentally hazardous character of the world is not seriously modified, much less eliminated. Such an incident as the last war and preparations for a future war remind us that it is easy to overlook the extent to which, after all, our attainments are only devices for blurring the disagreeable recognition of a fact, instead of means of altering the fact itself.45

Further, in Liberalism and Social Action Dewey says, “The conditions that generate insecurity for the many no longer spring from nature. They are found in situations and arrangements that are within deliberate human control. Surely this change marks one of the greatest revolutions that has taken place in all human history. Because of it, insecurity is not now the motive to work and sacrifice but to despair.”46 In short, in texts like these last two, Dewey comes very close to, if not actually, admitting that not every situation is capable of being rendered into a problematic one. Let us see what happens when we apply this to the theme of diversity. Part Five: Diversity On the political level, it is indeed appropriate, even necessary, to take steps to solve the problem of diversity, but we must be careful, yes “careful,” not to overessentialize it. On one level, there is no univocal problem of diversity, as there are many types of diversity—not just degrees of diversity but types— such as ethnic diversity, cultural diversity, linguistic diversity, generational diversity, religious diversity, and sexual diversity. Many of these might exhibit

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certain “family resemblances,” to use Wittgenstein’s term,47 but we should be wary of any sort of essentialist, that is, noncontextualist, account of the problem at hand. In Democracy and Education Dewey states, There is a strong temptation to assume that presenting subject matter in its perfected form provides a royal road to learning . . . Pupils begin their study of science with texts in which the subject is organized into topics according to the order of the specialist . . . Laws are introduced at a very early stage, with at best a few indications of the way in which they were arrived at. The pupils learn a “science” instead of learning the scientific way of treating the familiar material of ordinary experience.48 Applying this warning to the topic at hand, we must be careful not to start with diversity as a platonic form, or to commence with a “science” of diversity. In The Public and Its Problems, Dewey reminds us, “The local is the ultimate universal, and as near an absolute as exists.”49 In an earlier passage he says, “One reason for the comparative sterility of discussion of social matters is because so much intellectual energy has gone into the supposititious problem of the relations of individualism and collectivism at large, wholesale.”50 In other words, the context should not be neglected. But one may even want to go as far as questioning whether diversity should be discussed only in a scientific, that is, problematic, manner. Should it be discussed in another way, that is, as an item, the lack of recognition of which constitutes a tragedy for humanity? Epistemologically, not all experiences are problems. Politically, diversity may be discussed as a problem, but its absence should also be recognized as a tragedy. We have argued earlier that experience is not always of a problematic nature, that there are situations, that is, the kafkaesque and the tragic, which do not lend themselves to problematic analysis, even when such an analysis is situated in a specific context. The situation could be susceptible to multiple analyses or simply not susceptible to any analysis at all—save one that would mediate it by explaining it away “in the long run.” In a similar fashion, we would argue that diversity is not a problem to be solved, in an essentialist fashion. Diversity, in short, has a context. It is situated in time and place, and interpretations of its status and prospects are biased in nature. This is, if you will, the “manifest content” of the problem of diversity. But there is also what I want to call the “latent content” of diversity, one in which the entering “other” is “assimilated” into the dominant culture, and it discloses that diversity is not a problem at all or that it is more than a problem. It has a tragic dimension to it. The social reformer in Dewey would never admit that diversity is a tragedy, if by that we meant that nothing could be done about it. But there are hints in Dewey that he realized at times that diversity would

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not just be solved in a problematic fashion. If, in other words, contextualism teaches us humility, one of the things we should be humble about is how disparate voices are made room for in an existing culture. Democracy for Dewey was an ideal, and as such, something that would never be completely realized. In The Public and Its Problems, Dewey says, “Regarded as an idea, democracy is not an alternative to other principles of associated life. It is the idea of community life itself.”51 He goes on to say that, regarded as an ideal, “democracy . . . is not a fact and never will be.”52 Dewey is well known for his assertion that growth is the only moral absolute,53 but this statement should not be taken as movement toward a preconceived end. The Deweyan scholar Naoko Saito redefines growth in Dewey’s philosophy not as a gradualist and constantly changing process with emphasis on continuity, but rather as one that allows for rupture, loss, shame, and so on. This is done by recognizing and even highlighting the realization that every attainment is also accompanied by a sense of loss, of shame that, precisely as an ideal, it has not been achieved. Growth is not toward any given end precisely because the ends themselves are constantly changing. “Dewey’s idea of development in temporal continuity . . . is not merely a linear progression, repetitions, or ‘redistributions, rearrangements’ of what existed before.”54 It is, rather, a sort of “discontinuous continuity.”55 Saito’s redefinition of growth in Dewey along Emersonian lines as stressing something “attained yet lacking” allows her to highlight success while also recognizing and accepting a sense of loss or lack. The tragic can be “overcome,” at least somewhat, given enough time, in a sort of Jamesian will-to-believe fashion, that is, through resolve or hope. This is not a once-and-for-all-time decision, but must be continuously reaffirmed. In short, democracy is an ideal and we can make some progress, that is, experience some growth in its attainment, while realizing that the project will, in a sense, remain essentially incomplete. Dewey, as is well known, did not like the “melting pot” metaphor as a way of dealing with diversity. Stressing the need for cultural pluralism he says, “‘The theory of the melting pot always gave me rather a pang.”’56 The melting pot metaphor is one in which individual differences are explained by being explained away. Or rather, it is one in which the entering “other” is “assimilated” into the dominant culture. As a voice in opposition to this, the American intellectual Horace Kallen offered the alternative metaphor of an “orchestra.” Here each member plays his or her own instrument with the result being a harmonic whole not reducible to the sum of its parts. Dewey liked the orchestra metaphor, although he had two reservations about it. First, it might easily degenerate into a series of disparate musical voices. Second, the disparate musical voices might be assimilated not to one another but rather

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to a more “foundational” template of anglosaxondom. He wrote to Kallen, saying: I quite agree with your orchestra idea, but upon [the] condition we really get a symphony and not a lot of different instruments playing simultaneously. I never did care for the melting pot metaphor, but genuine assimilation to one another—not to Anglosaxondom—seems to be essential to an America. That each cultural section should maintain its distinctive literary and artistic traditions seems to me most desirable, but in order that it might have the more to contribute to others. I am not sure that you mean more than this, but there seems to be an implication of segregation geographical and otherwise [contained in the metaphor of the orchestra].57

The American Deweyan scholar and feminist philosopher Shannon Sullivan offers three metaphors as an extension of Dewey’s thought here: a melting pot, a tossed salad, and a stew. The melting pot “is like a good fondue, into which cubes of different cheeses are thrown, with the end result being a complete dissolving of the individual cubes so that the fondue is made possible.”58 In contrast, in the tossed salad metaphor “individual things are merely juxtaposed with each other.”59 Here individuality is maintained, but the whole runs the risk of being reducible to the sum of its parts. The items in the bowl are not changed by being placed there. Nor do they actively do anything to transform the environment. The stew metaphor, in contrast, allows for both differences and continuity, and identity and diversity; these “co-constitute” one another rather than existing in opposition. The specific vegetables alter their individuality through interaction, without losing their individuality per se; “ . . . as they are in the pot together, stew ingredients intermingle in such a way that each helps constitute what others are.”60 The metaphor of the stew is, therefore, more appropriate in highlighting both identity and diversity. However, Sullivan, to her credit, points out that “all analogies and metaphors have their limitations.”61 So, for example, the stew metaphor presents the vegetables in the stew as passive rather than active, when, in reality, “things are always in transition.”62 While this last point is descriptively true it masks something about metaphor in itself, or perhaps about language in general, that is, that it simultaneously reveals and conceals. Metaphors are contextual rather than problematic in nature, and their use discloses, at least indirectly, a fundamental inability to mirror or copy or describe a situation. They have to be used, and their use points out something essential to the American pragmatic tradition in epistemology, viz., a rejection of the copy theory of knowledge. The metaphors of the melting pot, the salad, the stew, and perhaps even the jazz band all serve a purpose. But they also cannot be taken literally—or

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they cease to be metaphors. Taken as metaphors they cast light on the subject matter at hand, namely “diversity,” but they also, in a self-reflexive manner, serve to remind us that diversity is not only or exclusively a “problem.” We cannot just “picture” the current situation and solve it. We cannot “picture the other” as other. The American philosopher C. Wright Mills put this point in another more forceful way in responding to Dewey’s articulation of problematic situations. Mills asked poignantly, “What happens when I am ‘the problem”’? Mill’s challenge to Dewey was that “What is a ‘problem’ to one ‘group’ is not at all problematic to another; it may well be a satisfactory ‘solution.”’63 In sum, the issue of diversity is more than a problematic one, though steps can be taken toward solving it in a piecemeal fashion. But the issue of diversity is also not a kafkaesque one, wherein everything goes wrong all at once and nothing can be done. The issue of diversity has a tragic sense to it, in that it continues or persists as a problem at all, and that while steps have been taken to alleviate it, there is still so much to be done in order to see matters from the point of view of the “other.” Conclusion In Experience and Nature Dewey tells the reader: What is really “in” experience extends much further than that which at any time is known. From the standpoint of knowledge, objects must be distinct; their traits must be explicit; the vague and unrevealed is a limitation. Hence whenever the habit of identifying reality with the object of knowledge as such prevails, the obscure and vague are explained away. It is important for philosophic theory to be aware that the distinct and evident are prized and why they are. But it is equally important to note that the dark and twilight abound.64

In this chapter, I have been concerned to call attention to, and to preserve, the dark and the twilight, or the vague, as these are found in Dewey’s article “Context and Thought” and elsewhere. For Dewey, contexts are tacit; and contexts should teach us humility, since they are always only partially available, incomplete, and essentially so. As tacit, contexts resist being described; doing so runs the risk of losing an essential characteristic of the context, and making it something too “overt.” And yet something must be said, and so perhaps the best method of “saying” might be via the use of metaphor. Going further, Dewey argues that anything that we interact with, or better, anything that is constituted through transactions in experience, can become

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the object of intellectual analysis. He says, in Experience and Nature, “It is not denied that any experiences subject-matter may become an object of reflection and cognitive inspection. But the emphasis is on ‘become’; the cognitive never is all inclusive: that is, when the material of a prior non-cognitive experience is the object of knowledge, it and the act of knowing are themselves included within a new and wider noncognitive experience—and this situation can never be transcended.”65 To repeat, while there is nothing that is in principle noncognitive, we will never arrive at a situation wherein everything is cognitive. Is this “blocking the road to inquiry,”66 as Charles Sanders Peirce would say? Or, is it rather an attempt to look into the abyss and laugh? Maybe to exercise a Jamesian “will-to-believe”? For Dewey, progress can be made, but we should not be bewitched into thinking that we will arrive at that ideal vanishing point wherein the real is the knowable and the knowable is the real. As he put it in “Context and Thought”: “When ‘reality’ is sought for at large, it is without intellectual import.”67 I have tried to suggest that not only do the dark and the twilight and the noncognitive exist but also that there are at least some situations that resist becoming “problematic.” If a problem well put is half solved, some experiences do not appear as problems but rather as tragedies or as kafkaesque situations. Some experiences just do not have meaning, or do not give rise to meaning, in the way that so many others do. Meaning in Kafka’s work is overdetermined, and meaning in tragedy is not available when the tragic situation is subjected to a postmortem analysis. Dewey gives us a glimpse of both of these, first, when he says that unless an indeterminate situation is uniquely qualified there is complete panic, and, second, when he realizes that democracy (hence diversity) as an ideal will never be realized completely. Progress is possible; all is not process, as in Kafka. But progress should not be defined in too linear a fashion. Dewey once said, “Progress [is] not necessarily an advance and, practically never an advance in all respects.”68 Commenting on this text, Naoko Saito says that “Deweyan growth can reemerge as holistic growth—growth toward a whole, with the irruption of departure and loss. Growth is the infinite process of self-overcoming in expanding circles.”69 As I noted in the beginning, Dewey’s article on “Context and Thought” ends with a reference to three expanding circles, “three deepening levels or three expanding spheres of context,”70 the personal, the cultural, and the general. These, as contexts, should be preserved as “tacit,” and hence “humbling.” Doing so will help to preserve the view of “growth” as both “attainable and unattainable.” Diversity is in some ways a “problem” to be solved, but it is more than that. Some situations do exist which require that we exercise the will to believe rather than solve a problem. These will-to-believe-type situations should be

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acknowledged and preserved, as well as the tragic and the kafkaesque. Only in this way will true diversity remain an option. Notes 1. Martin Jay, Songs of Experience: Modern American and European Variations on a Universal Theme (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), p. 261. 2. John Dewey, “Context and Thought” (LW 6:4). All references to Dewey’s work are to the critical edition, The Collected Works of John Dewey, 1882–1953, edited by Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969– 1991). These are published as The Early Works: 1881–1898 (EW); The Middle Works, 1899–1924 (MW); and The Later Works, 1925–1953 (LW). These designations are followed by volume and page number. Quotations are cited from The Collected Works of John Dewey, 1882–1953: The Electronic Edition, edited by Larry A. Hickman (Charlottesville, VA: IntelLex Corporation, 1996). 3. John Dewey, “Context and Thought” (LW 6:5). 4. LW 6:8. 5. LW 6:9. 6. LW 6:10. 7. LW 6:14. 8. LW 6:11. 9. LW 6:13. 10. LW 6:11. 11. LW 6:11. 12. LW 2:247–48. 13. LW 6:13. 14. See William James, The Principles of Psychology, 2 vols. (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1890), vol. 1, p. 254. 15. LW 6:17. 16. LW 6:18. 17. LW 6:6. 18. William James, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1897), Preface, p. viii. 19. LW 6:21. 20. LW 6:21. 21. See John Dewey, “The Pattern of Inquiry” (LW 12:105). 22. See Clifford Geertz, “From the Native’s Point of View: On the Nature of Anthropological Understanding,” in Interpretive Social Science: A Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow and William M. Sullivan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979). 23. For Peirce on abduction, see Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce 8 vols.; vols. 1–6 edited by Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss; vols. 7–8 edited by Arthur Burks (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1931–58), vol. 6, pp. 522–28.

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The Context versus the Problem of Diversity 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30. 31.

32.

33.

34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

39. 40. 41.

42.

43. 44. 45.

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Dewey, “The Pattern of Inquiry” (LW 12:112). LW 2:112. LW 2:112. LW 12:109. LW2:112. See Feyerabend, “How to Be a Good Empiricist—A Plea for Tolerance in Matters Epistemological,” in Readings in the Philosophy of Science, edited by Baruch A. Brody (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, Inc., 1970), pp. 319–42. Franz Kafka, The Trial (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), p. 86. See Paul Reimann, “Kafka and the Present,” in Franz Kafka: An Anthology of Marxist Criticism, edited by Kenneth Hughes (Hanover: University Press of New England for Clark University, 1981), pp. 53–59. See Henry Susman, Franz Kafka: Geometrician of Metaphor (Madison: Coda Press, Inc., 1979), especially the chapter entitled “The Dog in the Closet: Inversion, Supplanting, and Derangement in The Trial”; Anthony Thorlby, “Kafka and Language,” in The World of Franz Kafka, edited by J. P. Stern (New York: Holt, Reinhart, and Winston, 1980). For the notion of “bad faith” see Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, translation and introduction by Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1966), pp. 56–86. Kafka, The Trial, pp. 70, 131. Ibid., p. 229. Ibid., pp. 213–15. See John P. McGowan, “The Trial: Terminable/Interminable,” Twentieth Century Literature, vol. 26, #1, Spring 1980, pp. 1–14, especially p. 4. For a similar example, see Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, where the underground man is “not even equal to being thrown out” of a tavern window like another person engaged in a fight (Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground & The Grand Inquisitor, selection, translation, and introduction by Ralph E. Matlaw [New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1960], p. 43). See Heinz Politzer, Franz Kafka, Parable and Paradox (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1962), pp. 165–66. Dewey, Art as Experience (LW 10:22). See, for example, Sidney Hook, “Pragmatism and the Tragic Sense of Life,” in Moderns on Tragedy, edited by Lionel Abel (Greenwich: Ct: Fawcett Publications, 1967). A “necessity” is what Ray Boisvert calls it. Cf. “The Nemesis of Necessity: Tragedy’s Challenge to Deweyan Pragmatism,” in Dewey Reconfigured: Essays on Deweyan Pragmatism, edited by Casey Haskins and David Seple (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), p. 153. Kathleen Marie Higgins, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987), p. 19. Ibid. John Dewey, Experience and Nature (LW 1:45).

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46. LW 11:43. 47. See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, translated by G.E.M. Anscombe (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1953), par. 67. 48. Dewey, Democracy and Education (MW 9:228). 49. Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (LW 2:369). 50. LW 2:355. 51. LW 2:328. 52. LW 2:328. 53. See, for example, Democracy and Education, where Dewey says “in reality there is nothing to which growth is relative save more growth” (MW 9: 56). 54. Naoko Saito, The Gleam of Light: Moral Perfectionism and Education in Dewey and Emerson (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), p. 114. 55. Ibid., p. 114. 56. As quoted in Robert B. Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), p. 212. 57. Ibid., pp. 213–14. 58. Shannon Sullivan, Living across and through Skins: Transactional Bodies, Pragmatism, and Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), p. 14. 59. Ibid., p. 15. 60. Ibid. 61. Ibid, p. 16. 62. Ibid. 63. As quoted in James Campbell, Understanding John Dewey (LaSalle: Open Court Publishing Company, 1995), p. 243. Original source: C. Wright Mills, Sociology and Pragmatism, edited by I. L. Horowitz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), p. 412. 64. LW 1:27–28. 65. LW 1:431–37. 66. See Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, 8 vols, vols 1–6 edited by Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss; vols.7–8 edited by Arthur Burks (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1931–58), vol. 1, section 135. 67. Dewey, “Context and Thought” (LW 6:9). 68. Dewey, Art as Experience (LW 10:216). 69. Saito, The Gleam of Light, p. 161. 70. Dewey, “Context and Thought” (LW 6:20).

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CHAPTER 4

The Genesis of Democratic Norms: Agonistic Pluralism or Experimentalism? Larry A. Hickman

A

fter indicating what I take to be important insights on both sides of the “universalist–contextualist” debate concerning the status of political norms, especially those related to democratic forms of life, I consider two attempts to carve out a “third way” between the two positions.1 Agonistic pluralism, as advanced by Chantal Mouffe, is a nonrationalist understanding of the political constructed on a Derridian-type account of undecidability in which social division constitutes a field in which new objects and relations between objects become thinkable. Experimentalism, as advanced by John Dewey, provides for a genetic analysis of political norms as arising out of experimental practice, rather than “reason,” as well as potentially universalizable across otherwise quite diverse cultural contexts. One of the more interesting and persistent debates within recent social and political philosophy involves the ways in which democracies can be considered to be grounded, justified,2 maintained, and advanced. More specifically, the issue involves the nature of political norms. Generally speaking, on one side of this debate are the proponents of a “universalist-rationalist” approach. On the other side are “contextualists.” Among those who have mounted significant efforts to address this conflict is Chantal Mouffe,3 whose work is both widely known and highly regarded. As she has characterized the debate (62), there are those on one side, such as Dworkin, the early Rawls, and Habermas, who want to “assert that the aim of political theory is to establish universal truths, valid for all independently of the historico-cultural context” (63). On the other side of the

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debate are proponents of contextualism, who, she suggests, have been influenced by Wittgenstein, including Michael Walzer and Richard Rorty, and who deny “the availability of a point of view that could be situated outside the practices and the institutions of a given culture and from where universal, ‘context-independent’ judgments could be made” (63). In order to understand these two projects in proper perspective, it is worth noting, first, that Mouffe claims that she is following a “new style of theorizing” advanced by Wittgenstein, and more particularly (she writes) that has been laid out in the “pioneering work of Hanna Pitkin.” What is this new style of theorizing? “By examining the craving for certainty, [Wittgenstein’s] later philosophy is, [Pitkin] says, ‘an attempt to accept and live with the illusionless human condition—relativity, doubt and the absence of God’ ” (61).4 A review of Dewey’s published work, however, reveals that the style of theorizing Mouffe describes is hardly novel. Although John Dewey died in 1952, well before the universalist—contextualist debate reached its current status, his work also provides an intervention into that debate. Mouffe’s style of theorizing is adumbrated in the work of Nietzsche, to be sure. But it is worth noting that long before Wittgenstein turned his attention to the problem of certainty (probably 1949–1950), Dewey had already addressed the issue in his publications of 1910, 1929, and 1934. These are the years in which he published How We Think, The Quest for Certainty, and A Common Faith, respectively. In the first of these works, Dewey addressed the role of doubt as a substantial—and positive, it should be added —aspect of human experience. In the second—as I noted, several decades before the publication of Wittgenstein’s On Certainty—he addressed what Mouffe terms “the craving for certainty.” And in the third (as elsewhere), he addressed the question of how we are to form human communities that can flourish in the absence of belief in transcendent deities or other ideological commitments that claim to trump what is experientially and experimentally available. In all three works, Dewey provided suggestions concerning how we can “accept and live with the illusionless human condition” (to quote Mouffe quoting Pitkin). One of the most important motivations of agonistic pluralism is what Mouffe regards as the chasm that exists between the two extreme positions— universalism and contextualism—regarding the status of political norms. Agonistic pluralism is an attempt to construct an alternative view, a third position (but not the “third way” of centrist consentualism developed by Clinton, Blair, and Schroeder, which she rejects). Agonistic pluralism, which she claims is based on the insights of Wittgenstein and Derrida, and which has its roots in the work of Carl Schmitt, is “agonistic” in the sense that it provides for a

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model of democratic life that grows out of conflict, but not conflict that is “antagonistic.” The parties within agonistic democracies are not opponents in the sense of being enemies per se (shooting enemies, for example), but only opponents in the sense of “friendly enemies” who “share a common symbolic space” but who want to “organize this common symbolic space in a different way”—thus the genesis of democratic norms (13). As I write, the geopolitics of the Middle East appears to furnish appropriate examples of this distinction: The conflict between Hamas and Al-Fatah within the Palestinian Authority counts as an example of antagonism, and the conflict between Likud and Labor within the Israeli democracy counts as an example of agonism. Her point, following Schmitt, seems to be that even in democracies there must be some sort of an “enemy.” Agonistic pluralism thus rejects the position that Habermas and his followers advance. In Mouffe’s view, “the epistemological side of the Enlightenment is not to be seen as the precondition for its political side: the democratic project” (132). This is because there is a “dark side” to human sociability that Enlightenment thinkers and their heirs neglected, and that she thinks must be taken into account. As for the contextualists, although she expresses more sympathy for their project, she nevertheless complains that they “either avoid or do not emphasize enough the need to put some limits to pluralism, and they do not acknowledge the hegemonic nature of every possible consensus and the ineradicable violence that this implies” (134). Agonistic pluralism is thus constructed on top of a Derrida-type account of undecidability, according to which choices can never be fully justified and which “acknowledges the conceptual impossibility of a democracy in which justice and harmony would be instantiated” (137). In other words, “social division is constitutive . . . . New objects and relations between objects become thinkable, and this has crucial consequences for a non-rationalist understanding of the political” (139).

* * * At first glance, agonistic pluralism looks a lot like Dewey’s experimentalism, which involves active inquiry into the ways in which various publics do in fact interact and generate new ideas. Dewey took up these issues in The Public and Its Problems and as a part of his call for reconstruction of liberalism in Liberalism and Social Action. But further examination reveals some crucial differences between agonistic pluralism and experimentalism. What are these similarities and differences, and why are they important? First, it is implicit in agonistic pluralism, as it is explicit in experimentalism, that even though religious institutions and associations can

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and do play various important roles as constituent and constituting publics within democracies, their voices must not be privileged above those that are secular in nature. In democracies generally termed “Judeo-Christian,” such as the United States, for example, and even in democracies in which there is some form of state-sponsored religion, such as Germany and Italy, there must be a de facto “attempt to accept and live with the illusionless human condition—relativity, doubt and the absence of God” (at least in the space in which various publics interact with one another). In other words, theocracy and democracy are not compatible; in democracies even the most devout— perhaps it would be better to say especially the most devout—must learn to accept religious and other forms of pluralism as a condition for entering into the give and take of the activities that determine the contours of political arrangements.5 Second, both agonistic pluralism and experimentalism are keenly interested in the relation of the ethical to the political. For her part, however (and unlike Dewey), Mouffe draws inspiration from certain psychoanalytic models. Following Lacan, for example, she attempts to develop an ethics that “strives to create among us a new form of bond, a bond that recognizes us as divided subjects . . . ” (139). She argues that pluralistic-democratic societies will need, first, to recognize the basic facts of antagonism and violence and, second, to engage in “a never-ending interrogation of the political by the ethical” (140). One possible experimentalist response to this provision of agonistic pluralism would be to question the appeal to Freud or Lacan, whose views are controversial at best, in order to take into account the multiple vectors within the self. William James, for example, was among the founders of the type of functionalism that was more or less successful in banishing “soul” and “consciousness” as entities to be taken seriously within the new science of psychology. It is clear, moreover, that Dewey’s experimentalism (probably following the lead of his colleague G. H. Mead) accepted the model of a self composed of various “me’s” related to various individuals, groups, or objects, sometimes cooperating and sometimes competing among themselves. Experimentalist psychology is, moreover, ultimately more fluid and flexible than some (or even most) forms of psychoanalysis, since it rejects what it regards as both an altogether too highly structured tripartite Freudian model of the self and a lack of proper emphasis within certain alternative forms of psychoanalysis on the ways in which the self is historically constituted in a broad cultural sense and not simply one that is primarily the object of analysis in terms of intersubjectivity and speech.6 Given the controversial nature of most psychoanalytic theories, one is left wondering why agonistic pluralism needs to appeal to them as support for the claim that successful political

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ventures depend in part on a strong sense of community and that there is a dark side to humanity.7 When it comes to agonistic pluralism’s “interrogation of the political by the ethical,” experimentalism provides the basis for evaluating the ways in which various publics articulate themselves internally in terms of interests that are single or multiple, narrow or wide, stable or unstable, and the ways in which publics relate to other publics in terms that are isolationist or cooperative, appropriate or inappropriate. In all this, publics are subjected to the tests of continually evolving (but objective) ethical and political norms that have been generated by natural beings living in a natural world. Ethical and political norms, for the experimentalist, may thus be objective in the sense (a) that they are public; (b) that their warrant lies in the results of tests that have demonstrated their successes; (c) that they are applicable to relevantly similar cases in the present and immediate future; and (d) that they can be objected to in ways that allow for their reconstruction with a view to the accommodation to emerging conditions. It is important to note that this experimentalist characterization of objectivity avoids the extremes of both universalism and contextualism. On the experimentalist view, the genesis of these norms is not dissimilar to the genesis of the norms of agricultural practice, and especially the norms of constructing agricultural machinery. In a 1916 lecture presented at Columbia University, Dewey reminded his audience that agricultural machinery is generated not by farming but from farming (See MW 10: 94). Ethical and political norms, as natural and as objective, are generated in the same manner: not by ethical or political practice, but from ethical or political practice. The effect of this move from “by” to “from” is to move from the empiricism of Aristotle to the type of experimentalism inspired by the successes that the technosciences have enjoyed since the seventeenth century. The former, empiricism, involves what in agonistic pluralism amounts to “a manifold of practices and pragmatic moves aiming at persuading people to broaden the range of their commitments to others, to build a more inclusive community” (66). The latter, experimentalism, involves active, systematic, and controlled attempts to determine, for example, which forms of life—which language games and which pragmatic moves—are best positioned to achieve the desired balance between the goals of freedom and equality.8 In none of this, of course, does experimentalism ignore the many infelicitous ways in which publics often interact. Living in Chicago during the Pullman strike, for example, Dewey was acutely aware of “the basic facts of antagonism and violence,” which are also Mouffe’s concern. As I read him, however, he was unwilling to accept the idea put forward by Mouffe that “democracy does not require a theory of truth” (65). (This idea of Mouffe

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appears to be at the center of agonistic pluralism.)Truth in the sense of “warranted assertibility” is for Dewey’s experimentalism the outcome of inquiry when inquiry is successful. What has been warranted as assertible as a political norm is neither unconditional nor universal: It is conditioned on the ability and the willingness to accept the outcome of reputable research, and it is universalizable when relevantly similar conditions are present. One need not look far to find examples of political norms that have been developed as a result of experimental activity. In a basic and simplified way, for example, the laws of vehicular traffic exhibit significant features of the genesis of political norms: They are developed in ways that tend to balance liberty and equality on the basis of inquiry into the following: (a) conventions based on long-held custom (such as whether one drives on the left or the right side of the road); (b) research that has led to maximizing safe practices through institution of standards pertaining to right of way, for example, especially as they pertain to new types of traffic interchanges (so that the necessity for continual renegotiation is obviated); (c) agreement about procedures for enforcement that go beyond what is merely local, but not so far as to involve claims of universality (in the sense that policing practices are the object of study and improvement and thus increasingly universalizable); and (d) research into better ways to “delegate” certain tasks of enforcement to nonhuman objects (speed bumps provide one example, and traffic signals another). It is important to note that in agonistic pluralism’s contention that there must be “a never-ending interrogation of the political by the ethical”—the term “political” takes on a sense that is quite different from what one finds in experimentalism. For agonistic pluralism, the concept of “the political” has its roots in the work of Carl Schmitt, which in turn has its roots in conservative Christian theology. In both cases, one relatively malign and the other relatively benign, there is a tendency to hypostatize something called “the political” that lies behind the ethical. Experimentalism is much more radical in this regard: It takes into account the play of various publics whose larger function involves the activities of a state. Experimentalism is thus closer to the views advanced by antiessentialist sociologists such as Bruno Latour, for example, than to those advanced by Mouffe and Schmitt. Seen from the viewpoint of experimentalism, agonistic pluralism suffers from failure to give sufficient weight to the place of instrumentality in the social sciences. A thoroughgoing experimentalism would emphasize the

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instrumental aspects of human inquiry no less in social and political inquiry than in inquiry within the technosciences. The experimentalist alternative to the universalist–contextualist debate thus takes a very different turn from agonistic pluralism. It takes into account and emphasizes the objective (but not universal or universalized) norms of political life as well as their inevitable contextual (but not inevitably local) characteristics.

* * * In other words, experimentalism “softens” the rationalists’ account by reconstructing their notion of “universalized” as “objective” (thus introducing a crucial conditional element—that is, “universalizable” under certain conditions). This position leaves considerable space in which cultural differences can be honored, and it militates against the idea that democracy can be exported or treated as if it were a one-size-fits-all prescription. It also “stiffens” the contextualists’ position by embracing both historical–cultural contingency and a theory of truth that is rooted in the type of experimentalism that has been successful within the technosciences. What this means in practice is that, contrary to the claims of some of its critics, experimentalism holds that truth as it is related to political norms, and as it is related to norms of other sorts as well, involves satisfaction of objective conditions and not simply the subjective preferences and desires of individuals or groups who are involved in various language games or who are attempting to raise levels of solidarity. Viewed from an experimentalist perspective, this last condition is what is either missing or so thoroughly submerged in agonistic pluralism that it becomes invisible. “Indeed,” Mouffe writes, “we are led to acknowledge that democracy does not require a theory of truth and notions like unconditionality and universal validity, but a manifold of practices and pragmatic moves aiming at persuading people to broaden the range of their commitments to others, to build a more inclusive community” (65–66). This is a complex statement, some of which would seem to the experimentalist to work, and some of which would not. In any case, it should be noted that this statement alone aligns Mouffe’s position quite closely with that of Richard Rorty, and thus with his well-known contextualist emphasis on “solidarity.”

* * * Mouffe is, I think, right to criticize attempts of the heirs of the European Enlightenment—the Enlightenment of Kant and the French Philosophes—to achieve results based on unconditional universality and rationality. But it is also important to recall that there was also an Enlightenment in Britain that

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took a very different direction and that furnished very different models for understanding the genesis of political norms. This was the Enlightenment of Newton, Boyle, and the Royal Society, and it is very much in evidence in Dewey’s published work. Whereas the Enlightenment of continental Europe tended to promise the type of unrealizable universalism and unattainable rationalism to which the critics of Habermas and Rawls have rightly objected, the British Enlightenment developed a type of objectivity that was realizable because it was rooted in carefully constructed experiments for which concrete results were obtainable. Even if an attempt is made to tell the story of the Royal Society as a particular type of “language game,” the game is quite different than the ones that agonistic pluralism seems to recognize. Describing one aspect of this British Enlightenment, for example, Steven Shapin has written: The things whose testimony [Robert] Boyle wanted credited were his things. He gave them voice and he wrote their scripts. They spoke either through the mouths of men he knew to be trustworthy, or in texts emerging from experimental scenes over which he presided and the meaning of which he had the undeniable rights to set. Giving assent to pressure-gauges and pewter-bottles was giving assent to their spokesman. Not to believe what these things “said” was not to believe Boyle.9

This remark reveals the double impact that the type of universalizability developed by Boyle and other figures of the British Enlightenment has had on accounts of the genesis of democratic norms. The first concerns the development of experimental methods. The second concerns the results that such methods produce. To be sure, Boyle was interested in building “solidarity,” that is, in advancing the Royal Society as a “more inclusive community.” But this would not be just any community. It would be a community of what has been proven trustworthy and accurate by procedures that involved carefully controlled experimental procedures that trump nonexperimental efforts at building solidarity, however earnest those efforts might be. Viewed from this experimentalist perspective, then, it is simply not enough to advance the claim of agonistic pluralism that individuals should “broaden the range of their commitments to others, [and] build a more inclusive community” unless broadened commitments are based on what is trustworthy and accurate, and unless the more inclusive community includes the testimony of things. Failing this, there can be no objectivity. The type of solidarity that has been recommended by contextualists such as Richard Rorty cannot suffice unless it is grounded on what the experimentalist terms “knowledge of things as they are.” Such knowledge, Dewey says, “is the only solid ground for communication and sharing; all other communication

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means the subjection of some persons to the personal opinion of other persons” (LW 14: 229). In 1939 (a year that did not smile on democracies) Dewey wrote that democracy is belief in the ability of human experience to generate the aims and methods by which further experience will grow in ordered richness. Every other form of moral and social faith rests upon the idea that experience must be subjected at some point or other to some form of external control; to some “authority” alleged to exist outside the processes of experience. Democracy is the faith that the process of experience is more important than any special result attained, so that special results achieved are of ultimate value only as they are used to enrich and order the ongoing process. Since the process of experience is capable of being educative, faith in democracy is all one with faith in experience and education. All ends and values that are cut off from the ongoing process become arrests, fixations. They strive to fixate what has been gained instead of using it to open the road and point the way to new and better experiences. If one asks what is meant by experience in this connection my reply is that it is that free interaction of individual human beings with surrounding conditions, especially the human surroundings, which develops and satisfies need and desire by increasing knowledge of things as they are. Knowledge of conditions as they are is the only solid ground for communication and sharing; all other communication means the subjection of some persons to the personal opinion of other persons. Need and desire—out of which grow purpose and direction of energy—go beyond what exists, and hence beyond knowledge, beyond science. They continually open the way into the unexplored and unattained future. (LW 14: 229)

There is a great deal packed into these remarks. First, democracy is characterized as a belief, rather than a form or government or an existing state of affairs. Belief, in this sense, requires the positing of ends-in-view that are sufficiently flexible that they can take many forms, dependent upon cultural context and circumstances, for example. But at the same time such ends-in-view must not be so vague that they are merely arbitrary: Their genesis lies not merely in attempts to establish solidarity, as some have argued, but in the objective successes and failures of experimental activity related to the problems and prospects of associated living. Second, democracy is the belief in a particular type of activity: It is a commitment to work for the attainment of the object of belief, and a readiness to follow wherever experimental results lead. Within the context of well-known tensions between classical liberalism, whose interests tend to focus on liberty, and democracy, whose interests tend more toward equality, Dewey offers an

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experimentalism that provides the basis for finding balance points between these competing goals. This is in fact the major thrust of his arguments in Liberalism and Social Action, where he calls for a reconstructed liberalism that would be based on public initiatives, including public education, that would increase the liberty of all by increasing equality of opportunity. Third, democracy is belief that there is no place for the imposition of norms from putative sources that lie outside the realm of the empirical/ experimental dimensions of human life. In other words, democracy is belief that although publics based upon religious authority or political ideology can and do have legitimate places within democratic life, it is nevertheless the practical consequences of religious or political commitments, and not the origins or ontological commitments of such publics, that form the basis for assessing their contributions to enlarged and enriched experience. Fourth, democracy is faith that processes that are educational in the fullest sense of the word will generate the new “aims and methods by which further experience will grow in ordered richness.” This is the idea that it is not educational theory, but rather the educational process itself, that opens up new avenues of insight into the problems of associated living. Fifth, democratic norms are objective in the sense that they depend on a type of experimental inquiry that itself rests upon prior inquiries that have involved satisfaction of objective conditions. They are as objective as is any platform from which further constructive activities are performed. This is a point that tends to be conspicuously absent in the work of contextualists. Sixth, and finally, the type of experimentalism under discussion is not scientistic:10 Its explicit claim is that the needs and desires that motivate democracy as belief reach well beyond the physical sciences to the social sciences, the humanities, the arts, and the most basic hopes and dreams of humankind. Whereas the technosciences have blazed a trail for all who would engage in systematic inquiry, inquiry in the social sciences, the arts, and the humanities, for example, also have an important role to play in the maintenance of democratic societies. It should now be clear that although Dewey anticipated many of the ideas that have been advanced by proponents of liberal, or deliberative, forms of democracy, his emphasis, unlike theirs, was on the experimental bases that can be used to cut short what would otherwise be endless and often futile debates. And although his experimentalism balanced participatory and representative forms of democratic life, it is worth noting that he had little patience for those who seek to subvert democratic processes utilizing the subterfuge of “fair and balanced” treatment of public issues. It was in this regard that he advanced a preclusionary argument that not everyone who claims to be a participant in the deliberative process should be treated as such. In short,

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the type of experimentalism that Dewey advanced was not unaware of those agonistic tensions within democracies that play such an important role in Mouffe’s work. His experimentalist alternative, however, rooted as it is in the successes and promises of the technosciences and the social sciences, offers a constructive supplement to her agonistic pluralism, which by comparison appears to tend more toward the deconstructive.

Notes 1. Reprinted with revisions by permission from Democracy as Culture: Deweyan Pragmatism in a Globalizing World edited by Sor-hoon Tan and John Whalenc 2008, State University of Bridge, the State University of New York Press  New York, all rights reserved, as “The Genesis of Democratic Norms: Some Insights from Classical Pragmatism.” 2. To some it may sound strange to speak of a “justification” of democracy. Nevertheless, I believe that the current growth of theocratic and other a prioristic forms of government warrants increased discussion of this issue. 3. Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (London: Verso, 2000). Page numbers in parenthesis throughout this chapter refer to this work. 4. Mouffe’s reference is to Hanna Pitkin, Wittgenstein and Justice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 337. 5. When an earlier version of this chapter was presented at the international workshop on “Democracy as Art, Belief, and Culture: Dewey in Our Time” at National University of Singapore, several of the participants questioned my use of the term “must” in this paragraph. My claim is that the “must” signals a necessary condition for the type of associated living that Dewey termed “democracy.” 6. For a good discussion of Lacan, see Peter Dews, Logics of Disintegration: PostStructuralist Thought and the Claims of Critical Theory (London: Verso, 1987), 45–108. 7. It is one thing to recognize this “dark side” and to note that attempts to effect political order are prone to violence and hegemony. It is quite another to argue that this observation constitutes a significant objection to attempts to form democratic institutions. This is precisely the issue that Dewey’s student and colleague Sidney Hook took up in his 1944 essay “Naturalism and Democracy.” He pointed out that Mosca, Pareto, and others observed that political change usually “consists of the substitution of one ruling minority for another.” “This rule,” he continued, “rests upon three pillars: vital myths which cement human relationships and conceal differences of interest; fraud or manipulation which negotiates differences of interests; and force which ultimately settles differences of interest.” Their conclusion was that democracy can never be victorious. Hook pointed out what he took to be several significant errors in their position, and then noted that Mosca nevertheless admitted “the superiority of parliamentary democracy over all other alternatives.” See Sidney Hook, “Naturalism and Democracy,”

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in Naturalism and the Human Spirit, ed. Yervant H. Krikorian (New York: Columbia University Press, 1944), 62–63. 8. Without going into detail, I will just mention that two examples of such systematic and controlled experimental exercises that have so far been relatively successful in the United States in terms of balancing freedom and security are social security and federal insurance for bank accounts (the FDIC). 9. Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 265–66. 10. Scientism usually involves three claims: (a) the idea that the methods of the natural sciences are paradigmatic for all areas of experience, (b) the idea that the conclusions of the natural sciences are applicable to all areas of experience, and (c) the idea that the natural sciences are “value free.” Dewey rejected all the three claims.

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CHAPTER 5

Cultivating Pragmatist Cosmopolitanism—Democratic Local-and-Global Community amidst Diversity Judith M. Green

We are now faced by the difficulty of developing the good aspect of nationalism without its evil side . . . a nationalism which is the friend and not the foe of internationalism. Since this is a matter of ideas, of emotions, of intellectual and moral disposition and outlook, it depends for its accomplishment upon educational agencies, not upon outward machinery. (John Dewey, “Nationalizing Education,” 1916: 266) . . . Insecurity has overtaken all habitats since 9/11 from Paris to Bali. (Julia Kristeva, Murder in Byzantium, a Novel, 2004/6: 175)

Which Cosmopolitanism? In The Cosmopolitanism Reader (2010), Garrett Wallace Brown and David Held helpfully distinguish among five different focuses of contemporary cosmopolitan thinkers: global justice, culture, law, politics, and global citizenship.1 Despite their different emphases, and in contrast with their critics, these various contemporary cosmopolitans seem to share a set of ideal goals that I, as a contemporary pragmatist cosmopolitan, affirm and would express as follows: 1. Fostering an overriding ethical loyalty to all humanity that takes precedence over loyalty to one’s nation, culture, religion, tribe, clan, friends, family, and purely personal interests;

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2. Advancing democratic norms, institutions, and practices as the most effective cultural and sociopolitical modes of expressing and advancing this loyalty to all humanity; 3. Achieving concordance in theory and in practice among local, national, and transnational laws that aim to protect human rights while meeting basic needs and developing shared basic competences as well as the unique gifts of all world citizens; 4. Promoting transformation of civil society and traditional cultures as well as national and local governments to acknowledge these human rights while helping to meet these basic needs and to develop these shared competences and unique gifts of their own citizens, of resident aliens and sojourners in their midst, and of other human persons at a distance; and 5. Fostering adjustments in personal identities, habits, community memberships, and life goals that lead individual people to be open to, interested in, supportive of, and actively involved with diverse others in projects of liberation, reconciliation, and ongoing mutual benefit. However, in spite of our broad agreement on these ideal goals and our demonstrated willingness to engage with thinkers who do not share them, we contemporary cosmopolitans divide into differing schools of thought about how to interpret these goals, how to interrelate them, and how to actualize them. Perhaps, this is due in part to differences in how we read the long history of cosmopolitan thought, and in part to differences in our sensibilities and personal histories as individual thinkers that lead us to align ourselves with one philosophical camp or another as we think about how to advance the prospects for cosmopolitanism in our own troubled times. As Martha C. Nussbaum explains, the ancient Greek Cynics and early Stoics believed that the cosmopolitan sensibility of “the world citizen” requires denying that anything important in one’s personal identity and moral obligations arises from the historical “accident” of being the offspring of a particular family, community, or nation.2 Rather, they argued, the intelligent self could have been born and raised anywhere, and educated anywhere, because the universal laws of nature that govern the development of all beings, including those that share my human form and needs, ultimately regulate my becoming and call forth the kinds of adjustments on my part that will allow me to live well as a human being within the larger whole of nature. On the basis of different metaphysical backgrounds, ancient Buddhist and Taoist thinkers concurred with this cosmopolitan sensibility and its related ethical imperative, expressed even more

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broadly in terms of a life of continuous personal adjustment and loyalty to all living things. Aristotle, a lifelong sojourner in Athens and other places, partially shared such a cosmopolitan sensibility, speculating about the universal laws of nature and about a widely shared understanding of justice that had been reached by the many and the wise. However, he also gave weight to differences in cultures and in personal capabilities related to one’s natural formation as male or female and master or slave, treating the high levels of development of the most exemplary human communities and of gifted individual men as important achievements that reflect choice and that deserve others’ study, loyalty, and emulation.3 Both aspects of his work influenced the thinking of the great Roman Stoics of the imperial period, including Seneca, Cicero, and Marcus Aurelius, each of them loyal to Rome, yet each of them seeking to root his life of leadership and that of his great city in something wider and of more lasting importance. Their kind of thinking, and perhaps that of their Greek antecedents, profoundly shaped the worldview of a well-educated provincial Roman subject, Saul of Tarsus, who became Paul, the theorist of the cosmopolitan Christian community. Paul underwent a mystical conversion experience that brought his deep Jewish roots into relation with these cosmopolitan ideas, so that he could reimagine Jesus of Nazareth, a small-town carpenter-turned-rabbi and sojourner, as not only the long-promised Messiah who would liberate the Jews but also as the cosmic Christ who would heal the deep distortion in humanity and in the whole of nature that dated from the earliest days of this divinely created world’s history. “There is no such thing as Jew and Greek, slave and freeman, male and female,” he wrote, “for you are all one person in Christ Jesus.”4 Augustine of Hippo, a fourth-century convert to Paul’s Christian cosmopolitanism, developed these strands of Paul’s thinking into a model of human relations within the ideal city, as well as a set of principles for limiting the frequency, cruelty, and injustices of war in ways that would make reconciliation and future peace possible. These thinkers’ ideas and those of other “fathers” of the Christian Church were recombined in the thirteenth century with those of Aristotle, newly “recovered” during the Crusades, as well as those of brilliant cosmopolitan Jewish and Islamic philosophers of the intervening centuries, in the complex intellectual imagination of Thomas Aquinas. In turn, he emphasized the unifying and power-limiting role of natural law, the responsibility of political leaders for the welfare of their communities, and the shared human right and responsibility to listen to one’s own conscience as a divinely inspired guide to interpreting the natural law as a source of rational direction to one’s choices and actions.

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From our contemporary vantage point, it seems but a small step from this cosmopolitan “Great Medieval Synthesis” of Thomas Aquinas to John Locke’s early modern statement of universal human rights four centuries later— though in reality, many wars and struggles for empires, profound changes in technology and economics, and cultural transformations in Europe and other parts of the world laid the ground for Locke’s articulation of these universal human rights, and for others’ serious attention to them. One such attentive reader whose religious sensibilities took a more naturalistic turn was Thomas Jefferson, who grew up in the English colony of Virginia, and who read Locke’s ideas through the lens of his tutor’s teacher, Frances Hutcheson of the University of Glasgow, a leader of Scotland’s Enlightenment. Hutcheson transformed Locke’s three basic human rights of “life, liberty, and property” into “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” a formulation Jefferson eventually made famous to the world through his primary authorship of America’s “Declaration of Independence.”5 Like Aristotle’s, Jefferson’s cosmopolitanism was both local and global in its claims and loyalties, seeking to explain to reasonable people worldwide why the particular geopolitical location, achieved competences, and historical grievances of this ad hoc consortium of colonies were justified in ending their common subjection to England’s king, even at the cost of a war of revolution that required them to reinvent themselves as “one out of many.” In contrast, Immanuel Kant’s cosmopolitan vision, which emerged during the course of the American Revolution and the even more radical French Revolution, was in many ways a throwback to the Cynics and the early Stoics. Kant’s is an almost pure cosmopolitan vision in which no more limited loyalties can stand against the claims for respect for the dignity of all humanity by each of its individual exemplars. Kant treats all personal, cultural, and geohistorical differences as metaphysically and morally irrelevant “accidents” that can and should be ignored when we use a priori reason guided by the good will to determine the universal laws and general duties to others that will guide our conduct. In ideal conditions, these same a priori laws and duties will guide the conduct of all other rational persons of good will, our “coequal legislators in the kingdom of ends,” toward relations characterized by perpetual peace.6 This brief retelling of our shared cosmopolitan heritage, with all its abbreviations and gaps, may be sufficient to show why and where some unresolved differences divide contemporary cosmopolitan thinkers. Those who are drawn to the purer cosmopolitan visions of the Cynics, the early Stoics, and Kant, which tend to see other loyalties as interfering with a commitment to universal equality, responsiveness, and perpetual peace guided by reason and moral law, tend to emphasize different philosophical grounds and different practical methods for advancing our cosmopolitan goals than do

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those who are drawn to Aristotle’s and Jefferson’s diversity-acknowledging, local-and-global cosmopolitanism. Nonetheless, even though we take up our shared cosmopolitan heritage differently, the fact that so many contemporary cosmopolitans share the five ideal goals I listed above, as well as the belief that it is feasible and desirable for humanity to achieve them, make me believe that it is possible and important to bridge these differences in sensibility and emphasis in order to collaborate more closely in analyzing and helping to transform the challenges to cosmopolitan living we face in our times. My thesis in this chapter is that cultivating a pragmatist version of cosmopolitanism can be helpful in critically assessing and bridging some key disagreements among contemporary cosmopolitan thinkers by framing these in relation to our current four-fold global crisis and considering what our roles as philosopher-citizens may be in helping to transform it. Although its methods are closer to Aristotle’s and Jefferson’s, contemporary pragmatist cosmopolitanism keeps their empirical methods and local loyalties in a critical tension with the ideal guidance and global loyalty that make the Cynics, the early Stoics, and Kant attractive to many cosmopolitan thinkers in our troubled world today. To show how pragmatist cosmopolitanism can sustain this delicate balance between these differing perspectives, it is helpful to contrast this approach with the differing sensibilities and philosophical methods of Seyla Benhabib, an influential critical theorist who presents helpful examples in tracing what she sees as a recent historical tendency toward cosmopolitan thinking in Europe that has been advanced in part by the United Nations’ human rights regime, but who has been misguided by her Kantian and Hegelian sensibilities, I will argue, into thinking that the eventual triumph of cosmopolitan norms is inevitable, now that they have emerged into history. Critically Re-reading Benhabib’s Critical Cosmopolitanism As Seyla Benhabib points out in her influential short book, Another Cosmopolitanism (2006), the term “cosmopolitanism” means different things to different contemporary thinkers. The term “cosmopolitanism,” along with “empire” and “globalization,” has become one of the keywords of our times. For some, cosmopolitanism signifies an attitude of enlightened morality that does not place “love of country” ahead of “love of mankind” (Martha Nussbaum); for others, cosmopolitanism signifies hybridity, fluidity, and recognizing the fractured and internally riven character of human selves and citizens, whose complex aspirations cannot be circumscribed by national fantasies and primordial communities (Jeremy Waldron); for a third group of thinkers, whose lineages are those of Critical

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Theory, cosmopolitanism is a normative philosophy for carrying the universalistic norms of discourse ethics beyond the confines of the nation-state (Juergen Habermas, David Held, and James Bohman). (Benhabib 2006: 18)

Benhabib’s law-focused cosmopolitanism is closest to this third group, though she distances her views from theirs because of their failure to address issues of “discursive scope,” in particular what she calls “the paradox of bounded communities.” She argues that nations and other “bounded communities” go through ongoing processes of reiterating the meaning of their traditions, shared values, laws, and even their terms of membership. Nonetheless, Benhabib expresses a general confidence that such bounded communities are tending in recent years to be more inclusive because of increasing “democratic reflexivity” (Benhabib 2006: 71). As for the transnational authority of cosmopolitan democratic norms, she points to “the power of democratic forces within global civil society,” listing the “agencies of negotiation, articulation, observation, and monitoring” of the human rights regime, as well as the “processes of naming, shaming, and sanctions,” and even “the use of power” by the United Nations on behalf of the international community—which she at the same time criticizes as inconsistent and sometimes hypocritical, suggesting a need for “the constitutionalization of international law” (71–72). On the basis of these comments about the directional tendency of recent history, Benhabib makes a startling comment about “the ontological status of cosmopolitan norms in a post-metaphysical universe.”7 . . . Such norms and principles are morally constructive: they create a universe of meaning, values, and social relations that had not existed before by changing the normative constituents and evaluative principles of the world of “objective spirit,” to use Hegelian language. They found a new order—a novo ordo saeculorum. They are thus subject to all the paradoxes of revolutionary beginnings. Their legitimacy cannot be justified by appeal to antecedents or to consequents: it was the fact that there was no precedent for them that makes them unprecedented; equally, we can only know their consequences once they have been adopted and enacted. . . . Cosmopolitan norms, of which “crimes against humanity” is the most significant, create such new moral facts by opening novel spaces for signification, meaning, and rearticulation in human relations. (Benhabib 2006: 73)

Here Benhabib suggests that cosmopolitan democratic norms all by themselves have the power to change the world in a permanent way that does not depend upon or require detailed reconstruction of earlier phases of the cultural, political, religious, economic, or international history of bounded

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communities. Once cosmopolitan norms are articulated within a community and their meaning begins to be understood, Benhabib suggests, there is no turning back—they are as irresistible as laws of nature. Thus, where such a value breakthrough has occurred, cosmopolitan norms need no further justification of their legitimacy, no linkage to earlier phases of a community’s traditions, no active advocacy, and no fuller development. Would that it were so, but recent history shows the contrary: Something like Hegel’s dialectical struggle continues apace, with conservative and libertarian antithetical pressures fiercely pushing back against Benhabib’s cosmopolitan democratic legal norms, locally and globally, with no good grounds for assurance that a synthetically improved version of these norms will eventually prevail. Although she acknowledges the possibility that a conservative voting majority in a democratic nation might reject cosmopolitan norms or at least refuse to apply them to their own nation (as has actually happened in recent years in the United States), Benhabib offers no transformative remedy for the counterpressures of radically unequal power, adversarial nationalism, willful ignorance and bias about history, and indifference to others’ suffering that underlie such actual rejections of cosmopolitan norms. Instead, she advises us to place our confidence in civil society, the human rights regime, the United Nations, and a possible constitutional expansion of international law, all effortlessly moving in the right direction due to the power of the cosmopolitan ideal. To show why we should not and need not rely on the revolutionary power of cosmopolitan ideal norms and principles alone, I propose to add yet another cosmopolitanism to Benhabib’s short list that offers guidance for actual change processes at local, national, and global levels: contemporary pragmatist cosmopolitanism. My purpose is to show that contemporary pragmatist cosmopolitanism can guide us in actively cultivating the kinds of widely shared experiences that foster the widespread emergence of shared, progressively revisable, pluralistic cosmopolitan norms within global-andlocal struggles for inclusion, reconciliation, and restorative justice. Through democratic processes of cross-difference education, internal cultural critique, exchanges of cross-difference hospitality, and collaborative problem-solving among nations, within civil society, and in daily living, cosmopolitanism can become “second nature” to a critical mass of world citizens, even if it never becomes so obviously true and right to all. What Is Contemporary Pragmatist Cosmopolitanism? Contemporary pragmatist cosmopolitanism is both an evolving philosophical view with moral, communicative, and institutional aspects and an

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ideal-guided, pluralistic, practically oriented way of life with personal, cultural, transnational, and ecological implications and applications. Like other contemporary cosmopolitanisms, it draws on the long tradition that includes ancient Greek and Roman thinkers, especially the Cynics, the Stoics, Aristotle, and Paul, as well as their medieval inheritors like Augustine and Aquinas, and their modern liberal inheritors like John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, and Immanuel Kant.8 It differs from other contemporary cosmopolitanisms both by drawing on a wider range of non-Western sources9 and by taking what Richard Bernstein has called “the pragmatic turn” in a more radical way than have Jurgen Habermas, John Rawls, and others who build on their research platforms.10 It critically extends a worldwide intellectual tradition that dates from the first generations of American pragmatist thinkers after Darwin, including Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, Josiah Royce, Jane Addams, John Dewey, George Herbert Mead, W. E. B. Du Bois, Alain L. Locke, Horace Kallen, Martin Luther King, Jr., and others in dialogical relation with other contemporary cosmopolitans.11 While there are many important differences among these classical American pragmatists, it is helpful here to link them using Alain Locke’s diversity-emphasizing lens, because Locke explicitly labels their shared pragmatist sensibilities and activist commitments “cosmopolitan” while turning their insights toward the project of cultivating “cultural pluralism,” the intellectual movement that he and Horace Kallen led during the first half of the twentieth century. Locke’s “critical pragmatist” cosmopolitanism expresses a reflective sense of rootedness in one’s culture of origin that leads to a critical loyalty to it, simultaneous with and conditioned by deep interest in and concern for the well-being of other cultures, civilizations, and the processes of growth-promoting peaceful exchanges among them. In this critical loyalty to one’s native culture, Locke’s cosmopolitanism contrasts with Jason D. Hill’s and Kwame Anthony Appiah’s contemporary libertarian usages of the term “cosmopolitanism” to express a sense of freedom from inherited cultural ties and duties in framing one’s personal identity and life commitments.12 Locke’s early twentieth-century “rooted cosmopolitanism” reflects his personal experience of the importance of cultivating the kind of hopeful, democratic openness to diversity in America that could make room for his experienced needs and his potential contributions to his nation and the world as an African American, a homosexual, a lover of the arts, and an internationalist who formed deep friendships during his postgraduate studies at Oxford and in Germany with gifted young intellectuals who would become the leaders of postcolonial nations. Locke’s rooted cosmopolitanism also reflected lessons he learned from African American thinkers of previous generations, especially Frederick

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Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and W. E. B. Du Bois. Under the influence of Alexander Crummell, Du Bois wrote an essay for the American Negro Academy at its inaugural meeting, “The Conservation of Race” (1897), in which he developed a cosmopolitan vision of the creative contributions of African Americans as a hybrid people to an emerging cosmopolitan mosaic of world civilizations. He argued that the future contribution of “the Negro race” would be inextricably linked with its economic and cultural development and with the forging of more just relationships with other races and cultures, in America and worldwide. In the influential book that followed, Souls of Black Folk (1903), Du Bois announced a threefold transformative strategy—“Work, Culture, Liberty”—for overcoming “the color line,” which he called “the problem of the twentieth century, in America and worldwide. However, because of Europeans’ colonial brutality in Africa, the devastation of World War I, and America’s racist reaction to Black soldiers’ homecoming in the postwar years, Du Bois abandoned this hopeful strategy in favor of one emphasizing separate racial development in Darkwater (1920) and later works. In contrast, while continuing to greatly respect Du Bois and to value his lifelong support, Locke stayed the cosmopolitan course, pursuing practical solutions for the seemingly intractable national and global problems that he analyzed in terms of radical power inequalities and cultural as well as economic colonialism in a series of 1915–1916 lectures on “race contacts and interracial relations.”13 Locke also drew upon the works of his European American teachers at Harvard, especially the great pragmatists William James and Josiah Royce, working with his differently marginalized Jewish friend Horace Kallen to express James’s ethical and metaphysical pluralism in terms of a democratic “cultural pluralism.” The intention was to establish a cultivated attitude that frames loyalty to one’s own culture and nation in terms of Royce’s wider cosmopolitan “loyalty to loyalty.”14 In a famously difficult landmark essay dated 1935, “Values and Imperatives,” Locke explained how his conception of cosmopolitan cultural pluralism is to be understood in theory and cultivated in practice.15 In a later series of essays he wrote and presented during World War II and its aftermath, cultural pluralism also plays the role of a key hypothetical principle for a new interdisciplinary field of value inquiry that would seek “common humane values,” that is, functionally common even if differently expressed and embodied ways of advancing and uplifting humanity in diverse cultural and geopolitical contexts. Once acknowledged, these common humane values would serve as a basis for problem-solving collaborations among differing nations and cultures, and this in turn could lead to greater mutual trust, to the exchange of differing perspectives on their

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relational history, to individual and culture-wide transvaluations of values, and to progress toward lasting peace.16 Locke also shared John Dewey and Jane Addams’ activist concern to deter and transform the kind of narrow nationalisms that had fueled the two World Wars, by promoting “internationalism” through education, cultural exchanges, practical cross-difference collaborations among governments, and the forerunners of what we now call “non-government organizations.” All of these pragmatist thinkers aimed to promote new habits of individual living as well as new cultural norms; to create conditions for mutual understanding of others’ perspectives; to stimulate transformative inquiry about important problems of their times; to provide resources to help others meet their basic needs; and to empower others to participate actively in progressively reshaping the values and institutions of their communities, their nations, and the various world civilizations. These classical American pragmatist cosmopolitans would share my concern about Benhabib’s optimistic ontology of cosmopolitan norms as evolving as if with a life of their own, as well as her restriction of the scope of the concept of democracy to the formal constitutions, governance practices, and laws of “bounded” political communities. Cultivating cosmopolitan pluralism is a hard and courageous work, as Benhabib’s case studies clearly show, as do the mixed and still uncertain results of the interculturally influenced struggles for democracy in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Libya, and other Middle Eastern nations that flamed into visibility during January and February 2011.17 While it may encourage Benhabib’s readers to think that cosmopolitan norms must prevail eventually, the danger of her ontological claim is that it may lead to quietism in times of world crisis, instead of spurring on the particular kinds of efforts that we must make if our communities, our cultures, and our nations are to become more accepting of diversity and more effective in overcoming our historical-and-contemporary lines of inequality, resentment, violent tension, and practical division. Nor is it clear enough yet which universal cosmopolitan norms we need to guide us, how we will come to know these, and through what processes the world’s diverse peoples will come to accept them. This is why we need Alain Locke’s pragmatist processes of cosmopolitan value inquiry, as well John Dewey’s understanding that the always emerging, co-constitutive relationships between individuals and communities can be well guided by lifelong educational processes and aesthetically rich experiences that yield personal commitments to deeply democratic ways of life. As Dewey argued, we can extrapolate from our best experiences of democratic community living to frame a broader ideal vision of a better, more reliable model of cosmopolitan participatory democracy on local, national, and global levels. However, actualizing this vision will require radical cultural,

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economic, legal, and institutional changes, even in “experienced democracies.”18 What we need, Dewey suggests, are progressively emerging, feasible and desirable changes that can foster active and effective citizen interconnections into “publics” that can effectively influence the operation of the formal institutions of democracy to assure that these yield cosmopolitan public policies with crisis-transforming consequences.19 This is also why we need Jane Addams’s example of committed struggle with instead of for others in a process that yields mutual learning and mutual changes in habits.20 Finally, this is why we must share Addams’s reluctant conclusion that there is nothing inevitable about evolution toward a cosmopolitan world of positive peace grounded in democratic pluralism: This vision will be fiercely opposed, and we must be prepared to work for it creatively and with commitment for as long as it takes.21 In relation to our shared cosmopolitan tradition, classic texts by these earlier American pragmatists, and recent works by Nussbaum, Sen, Benhabib, Appiah, and other contemporary cosmopolitans as well as their opponents, contemporary pragmatist cosmopolitanism displays the following characteristic features: 1. In critical response to the Cynics, the early Stoics, and Kant, and in concert with the later Stoics, Aristotle, and Jefferson, it emphasizes a “rooted cosmopolitanism” in which one’s commitment as “a citizen of the world” must be expressed in one’s commitment as “a citizen of this place,” understood not as firmly “bounded,” but as always exchanging members, ideas, technologies, goods, language bits, and daily practices with other places and peoples, and as always responsible with them. 2. It resists metaphysical dualisms in favor of continuums, interactions, and useful distinctions. 3. It embraces evolutionary thinking rather than fixed, universal laws of nature, while regarding humans as interactive beings within the complex, value-laden natural whole, rather than as a separate kind of being governed or liberated by different kinds of forces. This gives rise to a conception of truth that is not absolute and unchanging, but rather provisional, revisable, purposive, and poly-perspectival—able to grow and to gain generality and power through cross-difference inquiry, collaborative engagement in transformative projects, and aesthetic deepening of shared experience. 4. It understands human individuals as made, not born—as developing social beings whose intelligence, habits, and basic worldview are educated through meaningful participation within various, intersecting,

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continuously developing local communities that reflect and contribute to cultures, religions, nations, transnational civilizations, and the global whole. Thus, there is no fixed human nature, but a range of evolving social-natural types of human characters, even though most of us may share broad human capabilities of the kinds about which Nussbaum and Sen have theorized. No a priori universal human rationality guides us, but only diversely developed kinds and levels of social intelligence. How and how far we as individuals develop depends on our particular courses of experience, including what others’ needs and support, as well as our own aspirations, call forth from us.22 It treats cultures as of basic importance in humanity’s continuous evolution, as alternative experimental frameworks for meeting human needs and developing human capabilities that require constant critical evaluation and revision, as interactive with one another rather than fundamentally separate, and as the basis of law, economy, government, and other institutions. It regards democracy, not fundamentally as a set of political institutions, but rather, first, as a still-evolving kind of cultural framework, “a way of life,” in Dewey’s phrase; second, as a criterion for the adequacy of various cultures’ ideals, roles, practices, laws, and institutions, understood as ways of meeting their members and sojourners’ human needs while developing their human capabilities within their bioregion’s and the world’s carrying capacity; and third, as a frequently useful kind of inclusive strategy for solving specific problems and for transforming dysfunctional cultural traditions, laws, and institutions toward those that better serve individual members, local communities, intercultural sojourners, and the whole living human-natural cosmopolis, which Dewey called “the community of life.”23 It understands heroic individuals, leaders at all levels, intercultural sojourners, intentional communities, and social movements as able to influence change significantly by using social intelligence to advance deliberatively clarified and integrated “ends-in-view.”24 It imagines the living cosmopolis both as already actual at the level of bio-systemic and socio-systemic interactions that have become increasingly complex, yet unbalanced and unsustainable in the last several hundred years, breaking out into a fourfold global crisis in the twenty-first century; and at the same time as potentially realizable in more balanced, more sustainable, and more richly various ways that will enhance the quality of human and other-than-human life, both existentially and by such objective measures as species variety and

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stability, human health quality and longevity, income distribution, educational attainments, and creative achievements. 9. It regards the welfare of the biotic community as inseparable from the welfare of its human members while relying on the evolving wisdom of its human members not to destroy its overall, shared quality of life, as well as the very possibility of life for many species. 10. Its transformative strategies focus on inquiry, educational experiences that cultivate shared social intelligence, and transformation of individuals, cultures, and the institutions of civil society and government at all levels in ways that contribute to rectification of past harms, reconciliation, mutual recognition, active and acceptable concern for diverse peoples’ interlinked futures, collaborative projects for mutual benefit, and effective communication across differences to promote positive peace.25 Cultivating Pragmatist Cosmopolitanism to Transform Our Fourfold Global Crisis We live in a time of fourfold global crisis, including culture clash, dystopian economic globalization, war and terrorism, and rapidly advancing global warming that threatens to rapidly worsen all three of the other dimensions of crisis. Focusing on the first of these dimensions, Samuel Huntington characterized an insuperable “clash of civilizations” as the key danger of the twenty-first century, caused in part by economic globalization and manifested in part in wars and terrorism.26 Like Richard Rorty, Huntington suggested that cross-civilizational understanding is impossible because there are no shared human values or common truths of history to which we can appeal for adjudication of our differences.27 Thus, Huntington saw only two options for the West: struggle violently for dominance, or “live and let live” in noninterfering separation, even if other nations and civilizations violate what we regard as the human rights of their members. Following the first branch of Huntington’s logic, after 9/11, George W. Bush led the United States and its reluctant allies into a war of revenge against Afghanistan (whose oppressive Taliban regime harbored the Al Qaeda terrorists who perpetrated the murders of thousands on 9/11) and then a wider “war against terrorism,” focusing on Iraq as one of three members of an “axis of evil”—nation-states that he claimed did not share “our values,” that “envied us our success” in the struggle for economic and cultural dominance in the contemporary world, and that “reliable intelligence” revealed were preparing weapons of mass destruction for imminent attacks on the West. Though Tony Blair rejected Huntington’s logic, he took the

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United Kingdom into Bush’s alliance, both because he ached in solidarity for the grieving American people (and all the other nations that lost citizens when Manhattan’s World Trade Center was totally destroyed on 9/11) and because he unwisely accepted the allegedly “reliable intelligence” about weapons of mass destruction (which were never found). Moreover, following the Catholic communitarian thinker John Courtney Murray, Blair deeply believed that globalization has created an interdependent, post-Westphalian world in which nations must interfere in others’ internal affairs when these violate universal human values in important ways, as did Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. During the following seven years of wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan, these philosophically opposed leaders of the invading Western allies lost popular support at home, and even those Iraqis who once welcomed their troops as liberators began to ask them to leave as it became clear to many that military might alone cannot resolve the underlying “culture clash” and probably had made it worse. However, many American “conservatives,” persuaded by Bush’s nationalistic reformulation of Huntington’s analysis and by constant, jingoistic ranting on talk radio and cable television programs against “unpatriotic” Americans who analyzed these matters differently, hardened the views they had adopted in a post–9/11 time of crisis into a self-insulating, absolutist ideology that refused any facts or values that did not support them, now embracing this ideology as a key element of their personal-cultural-national identity. They became examples of the kinds of people Alain Locke had in mind when he wrote in the 1940s that it is impossible for cosmopolitans to negotiate and collaborate effectively with absolutists. Fortunately, the majority of voting American citizens did not agree with these “conservatives” on Election Day in 2006, when Democrats replaced Republicans as the majority party in Congress; nor did they agree with them in 2008, when Barack Obama, our only African American U.S. senator, a former community organizer and constitutional law professor, was elected president after a hotly contested campaign, due in part to his public opposition to the Iraq War. This was one of those special moments of aesthetic experience Dewey wrote about, in which we who supported Obama glimpsed a more ideal future as really possible—a moment in which we felt like members of the “beloved community” of which King spoke. Many Americans wept for joy that night, seeing Obama’s achievement as living proof that racial reconciliation and an egalitarian future after America’s dreadful national history is possible, that peace matters enough to enough people to be really possible in a violent nation and a violent world, that the global economic crash that had preceded his election by less than two months had created an opportunity to pursue economic justice in America and worldwide, and that at last we would have a president who grasped the facts about global warming and

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would act promptly and properly to help guide its reversal. Unfortunately, too many of us believed that voting for “Change” was the same as achieving it, and that we could now leave “future matters” in Obama’s good hands as we returned our personal attention to wrestling with the global economic nightmare that had thrown more than 10 percent of all Americans out of work, nearly destroyed many of our nation’s base industries, and emptied out the retirement accounts of almost everyone who had ever had a good job. This was the opening edge of the wedge the so-called “Conservatives” and their radio and TV ranters used to stimulate the economic fears of their expanding base: Critics of their ideological version of capitalism, supporters of government stimulus of the economy and temporary takeovers of floundering mega-firms, and recipients of “big government hand-outs” became their new targets. Racial innuendo and nativist concerns that evoked America’s cruel old racial hierarchy were blatantly expressed by “birthers” who claimed that Obama was not a native-born American citizen, and thus, not constitutionally qualified to be the president. America’s continuing religious-cultural divide about abortion was reinflamed. Doubts about Obama’s commitment and competence to win the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were reiterated. Taken together, these fears, innuendos, cultural divides, and doubts gave rise to the Tea Party, which aimed to “take back government for the people” by returning America’s political life to the limits envisioned in the late 1700s by Jefferson’s revolutionaries and the framers of our Constitution, who excluded women from the electorate and affirmed chattel slavery, counting African Americans as partial humans. Almost unbelievably, the Tea Party became a force in the 2010 elections that returned control of the U. S. House of Representatives to the Republicans. Dewey’s comments about America’s political situation as Europe destroyed its past and its youth in World War I resonated eerily in this context of the Tea Party’s rise to power: Many influential and well-meaning persons attempt to foster the growth of an inclusive nationalism by appeal to our fears, our suspicions, our jealousies and our latent hatreds. They would make the measure of our national preparedness our readiness to meet other nations in destructive war rather than our fitness to cooperate with them in the constructive tasks of peace. They are so disturbed by what has been revealed of internal division, of lack of complete national integration, that they have lost faith in the slow policies of education. They would kindle a sense of our dependence upon one another by making us afraid of peoples outside of our border; they would bring about unity within by laying stress upon our separateness from others. The situation makes it all the more necessary that those concerned with education should withstand popular clamor for a nationalism based upon hysterical excitedness or mechanical

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drill, or a combination of the two. We must ask what a real nationalism, a real Americanism, is like. (Dewey 1916: 266)

Of course, it is now far too late to defend a “pure” American way of life, whether with the Tea Party’s xenophobic strategy or any other. Economic and technological globalization, in combination with the new forms of war and violence they have helped to spawn, already have changed our national, cultural, and personal identities, as well as our daily habits of living and our plans for living, in countless ways for which most of us were unprepared. Dewey rightly rejected all such nationalistic claims as expressing the meaning of “democracy,” both because the way of living such “dominant democracy” requires is ineffective in responding to the crisis it proposes to solve, and because only that something more we are capable of will be adequate to fulfill our deep human needs for meaning and efficacy in living, as well as for security and prosperity. Fortunately, a few months after the Tea Party’s day of triumph at the polls, “Arab Spring” taught Americans and the world a new global vision of democracy for which women and men in a series of predominantly Muslim nations demonstrated that they were prepared to sacrifice everything, losing their fears of violent despots as they stood together for days and slept together for nights to hold their claim on symbolic locations like Cairo’s Tahrir Square as places from where they were determined a new quality of life—national and global—would emerge. In several nations, their nonviolent democratic commitment carried the day, even when violently challenged by governmentbacked thugs; in others, despotic rulers sent their armies to kill protesters by the thousands if necessary to silence them and discourage others. Persuaded by the leading women in his administration, President Obama formed a coalition of Western and Arab nations to bomb government-controlled areas of Mohammar Quadaffi’s Libya in support of the human rights of rebels against his regime after he threatened to execute anyone suspected of supporting them. Shortly thereafter, on May 1, 2011, President Obama announced that U.S. Navy Seals had killed Osama bin Laden, the leader of Al Qaeda responsible for 9/11 and for countless subsequent acts of murderous terror. These events initiated a “reset” process in American politics and in other parts of the world. Barbaric as assassination is and far inferior in its moral meaning to judicial resolutions of international problems, bin Laden’s death seemed to lift a pall of fear and anger from the American people. Some believed his execution represented both justice and the renewal of American dominance. For others, this chain of events paradoxically revived their hopes that the cosmopolitan rule of law backed by international force may offer a

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possible and preferable path for transforming despotisms into democracies. As earlier passages in this continuing struggle have shown, however, such hopes are fragile, and their opponents are stubborn and numerous. It is time to recognize that the underlying “culture clash” in America and worldwide is not resolvable by adopting Huntington and Bush’s analysis and attempting to return to a Westphalian international order, not only because Blair and Obama are right that irreversible economic globalization has created patterns of interdependence among the world’s nations that cannot be ignored, but also because it has led to cultural diversity within the world’s nations—including the powerful nations of the West about which Benhabib has written—that links their various member individuals and communities to other nations and peoples around the world with ties of love and loyalty, mutual understanding and shared distrust, and shared hopes and willingness to run shared risks. These webs of cultural diversity within nations and of cultural linkages among nations have created alternative potentials, either for greater domestic insecurity or for greater cross-difference understanding among the world’s peoples than ever before. Which potential will be actualized depends in part on how hopeful sojourners far from home—immigrants, temporary workers, international students, and visitors—are received by their countries of destination. It also depends on how their countries of destination treat their countries of departure, not only concerning matters of war and peace but also concerning matters of cultural recognition and respect, and of economic and social justice, including still-unreconciled injustices of history that block the path toward a cosmopolitan democratic future of mutual benefit and lasting peace. Benhabib has insightfully analyzed the first part of the challenge that Western nations of sojourner destination face now: hospitality to aliens who are fleeing home contexts of conflict, democratic adjustments in laws to allow long-term resident aliens to vote in some elections in their nations of destination, including Germany, and rethinking what it means to be a citizen of a Western nation who does not share the majority culture, as in “the scarf affair” in France. Moreover, Benhabib, like Blair and Obama, is right about the necessity of cosmopolitan norms to guide cross-cultural and international relations in the twenty-first century. However, recent history shows that cosmopolitanism does not simply evolve on its own, any more than it can be enforced by might of arms. Instead, cosmopolitan norms evolve or are defeated within the experience of individuals, communities, cultures, and nations. Given the urgency of our fourfold global crisis, we must actively cultivate cosmopolitan experiences and effectively thematize culture-specific yet family-resemblant cosmopolitan norms as fallibilistic beliefs-in-action, to be revised through ongoing value inquiry and made

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actual in their guidance through relational education, active employment, and effective institutionalization. Drawing on contemporary pragmatist cosmopolitanism’s insights and methods, we must analyze and transform our current global crisis in different ways than all of these thinkers and leading political actors have approached it: We must make a positive democratic peace a global-andlocal way of life grounded in cosmopolitan norms that realistically reflect and respond to all four aspects of our current crisis, or violent struggles for dominance will escalate and destroy all hope for ecosystemic health and dignified, meaningful living. Culture clash reflects a long history of economic and political injustice that eventually leads people to stake their all to bring down the system. At the same time, the unjust model of law and economy that has fueled wars and the continuing quest for cultural and economic empire hasten the approach of ecosystemic disaster, exposing the least powerful people to the brunt of its impact while hardening the hearts of the temporarily secure who believe they are entitled to their socially derived wealth. Pragmatist cosmopolitanism can help us to understand and simultaneously transform all four aspects of our global crisis through democratic local-and-global processes of mutual education, respectful deliberation, rectification of historical injustices, reconciliation as partners in a new social order, and mutually beneficial collaboration in creating a preferable shared future. The transformative strategy Dewey proposed at an earlier stage of our current global crisis focused on nurturing in individual persons a deeper, more radical kind of democracy than the world has ever known—not just a knowledge of the rules and purposes of democratic government and a commitment to play one’s part within them, but a personal democracy of attitudes, of habits of daily living, and of practices of future-focused life experiments. Democracy is a way of personal life controlled not merely by faith in human nature in general but by faith in the capacity of human beings for intelligent judgment and action if proper conditions are furnished . . . Intolerance, abuse, calling of names because of differences of opinion about religion or politics or business, as well as because of differences of race, color, wealth or degree of culture are treason to the democratic way of life. For everything which bars freedom and fullness of communication sets up barriers that divide human beings into sets and cliques, into antagonistic sects and factions, and thereby undermines the democratic way of life. Merely legal guarantees of the civil liberties of free belief, free expression, free assembly are of little avail if in daily life freedom of communication, the give and take of ideas facts, experiences, is choked by mutual suspicion, by abuse, by fear and hatred. These things destroy the essential condition of the democratic way of living even more effectually

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than open coercion which . . . is effective only when it succeeds in breeding hate, suspicion, intolerance in the minds of individual human beings. (Dewey 1916: 341–342, emphasis added)

Like the breath-taking experiments of Arab Spring, the kinds of experiments in democratic living Dewey proposed involve some tradition-challenging and some risk-taking for the sake of richer and more complex integrations, and the creation of new opportunities that the old ways could not make possible. When these experiments are successful, the new habits of living they foster become sources of strength, stability, and flexibility for one’s nation and for our increasingly close-knit world, as well as for oneself, one’s family, and one’s valued communities of culture and interest. How can Dewey’s nation- and world-benefiting democratic habits of personal living be fostered in present local-and-global conditions of widespread antagonism, suspicion, and willingness on the part of some to resort to once-unthinkable forms of coercion, we might ask? Teaching tolerance, cooperation, and peace-making must become part of the program of the schools, Dewey would answer. With Alain Locke and Martin King, I would add: we must teach the disturbing realities of our nation’s and our world’s relational history, including the examples of those who have taken great risks for bringing about a more ideal actualization of social democracy, seeking reconciliation within our nation and with other nations’ peoples while acting with restorative justice. To shape the kinds of educational processes that will help to cultivate cosmopolitan pluralism now in diverse countries, cultures, and local contexts, we must start by acknowledging the purposes for educating children that have motivated their elders since time immemorial, then wrestle with the mixed heritage of modernity that all the world’s peoples must come to understand, and then commit ourselves to the process of active, lifelong learning to overcome deficiencies in our earlier education systems and to empower ourselves with the tools for collaborative, cross-difference inquiry about how we got into this fourfold crisis and what is to be done. Since ancient times, wise thinkers and ordinary people in diverse cultures worldwide have recognized the importance of processes of education that prepare young people for adult responsibilities within their families and their societies; that shape their characters in accord with desirable norms; that provide them with knowledge and skills to fit them for their future familial, social, economic, civic, and religious roles; and that teach them what is to be valued, preserved, and worked toward as sources of meaning and purpose in living. Change has come slowly in many ancient cultures. Even though periodic shocks of wars and natural cataclysms have broken up families and communities, and colonialism has distorted their cultures as well as their

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economies and their political relations, people have longed to re-establish the old and familiar ways, adapting to new circumstances as needed, but doing their best to preserve old values, visions, and cultural practices as eternal, even divinely ordered truths-in-living. The fast changes of modernity—which came to some peoples hundreds of years ago and to others only recently—have deeply shaken but not completely destroyed these ancient ways and shared longings. In fact, with the geographic relocations, individualization of life paths, wider exposure to differing cultural values, and continuous questioning of received knowledge that has been the precondition of scientific and technological advances have come a widespread longing for the secure sense of personal identity and of their social-natural place that premodern peoples had. At the same time, many long for reliable sources of mutual security from poverty and violence, for knowledge and habits of living that will prepare us to live well and in various ways “save” us, and for a sense of meaning and purpose in living that, as Viktor Frankl taught, some find in love, others seek in work, and still others seek in great causes.28 To these nostalgia-tinged longings, our ever-faster changing worldwide problem situation in the twenty-first century adds new sources of future-focused anxiety from which we cannot protect our children or ourselves: the personal, cultural, and national costs of the processes of economic and technological globalization that are currently transpiring; new forms of war and terrorism that accept and even seek to horrify through loss of noncombatant lives; the now deeply entrenched consequences of longembedded international and intranational injustices that many experience intimately and most experience as beyond their power to influence or resist; and the limited transformative options available to humanity as a whole due to the horrifying if not mind-numbing emergent dangers of global warming and related ecological disasters. The first dimension of our fourfold global crisis, culture clash, is expressed and fostered in the West by cultural, economic, and military forms of imperialism that lead to and are amplified by intercultural violence, related processes of cultural marginalization, and undesirable patterns of immigration into imperial centers in response to recent undemocratic processes of economic globalization. Beginning as early as the fifteenth century, imperial European nations and later, the United States, stripped new sources of wealth from culturally differing nations in the Americas and in Africa that paid for the West’s processes of modernization.29 Powerful Western nations’ now-traditional beliefs, feelings, and practices of domination over differing cultures—though demonstrably not derived from some allegedly universal, dominance-seeking aspect of humanity’s shared biological nature, as their proponents suggest— are deeply entrenched in these imperial cultures’ lifeways, including their

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built environments, their habits of consumption, and their schools’ officially approved educational texts and teaching methods. At other sites of cultural learning, including the mass media, adults as well as children learn that their nation, culture, dominant religion, favorite foods, preferred styles of domestic architecture, emerging land use patterns, and current habits of consumption are better than those of others and envied by them. In support of these attitudes, though with seeming scholarly neutrality, the “neo-classical” or contemporary capitalist economic model that millions of university students are taught each year in introductory economics courses worldwide reduces “labor” to a cost factor like any other, including time, raw materials, equipment and machinery, land and buildings, communication, and government regulations. Such courses also teach that it is “rational” for labor to flow to the location of its highest employment, as measured primarily in terms of what an employer will pay for its use, after deducting economic costs of relocation; however, emotional, physical, and cultural costs to workers, their families, and the communities they leave behind are not counted in this calculation. Students are taught that managers must minimize the costs of all of these factors in the processes of production, distribution, and sales in order for firms to profit by offering goods and services to consumers in the market transactions that assign their final values. Moreover, they are told that “opportunity costs”—the forgone return on the next-best alternative investment of such resources—must always be calculated and considered by “rational” business managers. To use a firm’s assets to pay higher-than-necessary labor or regulatory costs, they are admonished, is to give up potential opportunities to employ these same assets in other ways that may be more profitable. Thereby they fail in their fiduciary responsibilities to the firms’ owners, the nation, and even civilization. Prosperity supposedly advances most freely and efficiently through processes of evolution in technologies, goods, and services, as well as in consumers’ knowledge, tastes, and resultant demands, when minimally regulated markets determine the costs of all factors. This is why courses in capitalist business ethics assign managers positive duties to resist regulations and taxes that would increase their costs for labor, for natural resources, for communication with regulators and consumers, for environmental protection, and for contributions to public education. If they are ineffective in preventing the adoption of regulations and taxes, the corollary of this positive business duty is treated as separable from, if not superior to, rival duties to one’s fellow humans or to Earth’s wider biotic community; that is, it is acceptable and perhaps even mandatory for business managers to “outsource” some of all of their operations to locations where costs and taxes are lower, and regulatory limits on their options are fewer. If they do

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not do so, the rationale continues, someone else will, and competition will “extinguish from the game” any firm that operates with higher costs that are not offset somehow by higher returns on investment, perhaps through innovations that other firms cannot match for a time, or perhaps through successful “branding” that motivates consumers to pay more for goods that offer only psychological advantages over rival products. That these basic tenets of capitalist economics and business ethics rest on contestable theoretical postulates rather than matters of fact escape millions of students and their teachers every year. So does the equally contestable theoretical postulate of psychology that all human behavior is fundamentally self-interested. Yet, these basic tenets of capitalist economics rationalize current neo-liberal political processes of economic globalization, suggesting that everyone who behaves “rationally” benefits as much as is realistically possible while living most freely and contributing most advantageously to the evolution of his or her civilization. If this is so, however, why do violent culture clashes seem to be increasing rather than diminishing? Why have we not cooperatively averted the processes of global warming that now threaten to “extinguish” us all, though some faster than others? The consequence of adopting the capitalist economic conceptions of rationality and fiduciary responsibility, and of denying that anyone now living owes any debts to those who have been harmed by the continuing histories of colonial devastation, is that there is no basis for reasonable claims of restorative justice and peaceful redress. This leaves citizens of once-colonized, still-poor, as well as economically and culturally distorted nations with only three choices: to live with despair, to emigrate to locations in which they may be able to increase their wealth or at least meet their basic needs, or to resort to violence in order to remove the current occupiers of their lands and to shock the world into realizing the stability costs to all of past and continuing unredressed injustice. The first choice—living with despair—is not sustainable for the people or the ecosystem, because it leads to hunger; avoidable diseases and early mortality; lack of educational and economic opportunities that allow adults to provide better lives for their children; lack of necessary infrastructure improvements to remove these painful shortcomings and support local economic initiatives; depression and uncontrollable anger; domestic and civil violence; clearing too much forest land for agriculture; and killing rare species of other animals for food or because they eat crops, or threaten humans, or for the black market in their body parts. The second choice—extensive “labor flows to higher employments” through legal or illegal immigration to wealthier nations or to more “developed” areas within their own nations—creates great losses and transformative obstacles for their own nations and cultures, and at the same time, creates

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enormous problems for the urban regions or wealthier nations to which they immigrate. They leave behind families who grieve for them and often function poorly without them, whether the many African villages of women, children, and old people who must carry on subsistence agriculture and protect themselves without the daily presence of the able-bodied men who have gone away to the mines or the cities to find work or the many families in Mexico who miss the mothers and daughters who have gone to work in low-paying, dangerous, environmentally devastating maquilladoras run by transnational firms near the U.S. border; or the fathers and their sons who have illegally and in great danger crossed the border into the United States to find low-paying, insecure jobs in agriculture, construction, or food service that will let them send money home that may make the difference for their children’s future; or the many men and whole families who “flow” legally or illegally into chilly social climates of European Union nations where they may find work but no welcome, in the process draining their countries of origin of much of the talent and energy that might have helped them transform their local conditions. Those who make the third choice—to stay at home and to use violence in efforts to expel or at least share life’s terror with those who have gained control of their cities, their agricultural lands, and their economies, whether through the colonial usurpation of their ancestors or through relatively recent “legal purchases” that their nations’ leaders were too weak, too corrupt, or too short-sighted to prevent—usually lose their lives without transforming their nations’ economic and geopolitical situations. In the process, they may lose their ethical compasses, pervert their cultures’ ethical inheritance, and disrupt the strands of long-term experience from which we might weave the kinds of operable, intercultural, and international understandings of restorative justice that all the world’s peoples so desperately need. None of these choices is rationally acceptable—whether rationality is conceived in terms of the tenets of contemporary capitalist economic theory or in terms of a contemporary pragmatist cosmopolitan analysis that connects rationality or “intelligence” more directly to the humane maintenance of life—our own and that of the wider biotic community—which entails both restorative justice and ongoing responsibilities to share benefits and limit harms. The twenty-first-century consequences of applying the logic of mainstream capitalist economic theory—a theory that leads to only rationally unacceptable choices for nations, cultures, families, and individuals that still bear the burdens of colonialism—constitute a reductio ad absurdum of the economic, political, and historical analysis that denies these nations, cultures, families, and individuals better choices. To continue to teach this theory to millions of university students every year constitutes educational

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malpractice. To base national policies and individual life choices on it constitutes at least culpable ignorance, and perhaps willful irrationality and vicious irresponsibility. Nonetheless, so-called “conservative” ideologues in the United States and in many other nations insist on their entitlement to all they now have and simply deny the claims of so-called “less developed” or Third World nations and cultures, calling the employment of weapons of war “justified” against nations and cultures (and sometimes against their own people) who must choose among these three irrational alternatives. These ideologues argue that their wars are justified by their nation’s need for security from envious and immoral Third World nations and cultures, in spite of the facts that this claim has been rejected by virtually all of the member nations of the United Nations, and that it is incompatible with international treaty obligations that previous leaders of these nations undertook willingly. We have had many centuries since Machiavelli to consider the ways in which his famous dictum, “the end justifies the means,” is wrong: that is, morally wrong, unpersuasive in silencing dissent, and practically disastrous in creating unacceptable long-term consequences. Nonetheless, American movies and television programs now repeat Machiavelli’s dictum every day as if it were the most obvious common sense while displaying scenes of violent torture, humiliation, threats against interrogants’ families, and other examples of barbarism as if these were the new norm, and somehow pleasurable to watch at the same time. American society is being educated by these elements of our popular culture into rejecting the twenty-first-century relevance of the concept of basic human rights, including those specifically stipulated in the UN Declaration of Human Rights, as well as many hard-won expectations about democratic living that go beyond the right to vote. In a manufactured social climate of fear of supposedly alien, immoral others who seek to exact cruel, unwarranted revenge against us who have done them no harm, many Americans were willing for a time to support leaders who promised to protect the nation, even though it would require the sacrifice of many democratic civil liberties, of opportunities like education for American children and jobs for their parents that might have been funded with those same dollars, and of the lives of thousands of their sons and daughters, to say nothing of the many times more lives of Iraqi men, women, and children. President Bush and others like him have also denied the reality of global warming for many crucial years when we might have been advancing the science and making the lifestyle changes that would have allowed us to begin to transform it before it got to this stage. President Obama recognizes the dangers of global warming, but he has inherited such a complex global crisis and such a volatile political climate that his attention has been focused on

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advancing only one new initiative—health care for all Americans—and otherwise has been directed to putting out domestic and international fires on a triage basis, working with the tools of capitalist economics and neoliberal politics that helped to create the crisis, rather than developing new tools that might transform it. Contemporary pragmatist cosmopolitanism helps us to see that we must rethink such deficient postulates of capitalist economics, self-interested psychology, and neoliberal politics because their proponents’ claims for their scientific validity have been defeated by their consequences in recent events, as well as by the long-lived ethical traditions of justice and of concern for our common humanity. We in the West are not entitled to dismiss as “irrational” the demands of once-violently colonized nations and cultures for payment of enormous debts of restorative justice by now-living beneficiaries of their colonizers. With the support of their nations, these colonizers murdered, raped, and enslaved the ancestors of our current claimants, seizing their land, stealing the value of their labor as well as the intellectual property rights to their cultural innovations, and forcing them to undergo linguistic and religious conversion in order to make the process of colonization more efficient. Backed by their imperial nations, these pirates used their blood-soaked booty not only to strengthen their personal and national positions within the premodern economic and political system but to transform it into a new global system in which they and their inheritors would hold positions of perpetual dominance, supported by self-insulating ideological claims of property right as well as technological might. The problem with the once-colonized, stilldominated nations’ demands for restitution is not that the perpetrators of these past harms are all dead, because we who are living have inherited our situation of advantage from them, individually and collectively. Although no international court is competent to try such claims and to enforce its verdicts, the truths of history trouble current generations’ property rights claims, as children of the victors as well as the vanquished must acknowledge. Thus, reconstructing global economic relations in ways that factor in justice in rectification is both right and necessary for the kind of reconciliation among the nations and their peoples, which can lead to a positive cosmopolitan peace that promotes mutual human development and well-being. Such a theoretical and practical reframing of global must factor in the ways in which the personal, cultural, and national habits of empire also contribute to and block the resolution of global warming, with its devastating implications for the poor. The educational power of former vice-president Albert Gore’s movie, An Inconvenient Truth, has broken through this politics of denial about global warming for many educated Americans. At the same time, the now-undeniable inability of American troops and their primarily

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Western allies to win the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan by installing “democratic” governments and silencing their critics by force has aroused many Americans from their hypnotic trace, making them critical of such wars as a means of achieving peace, and leading them to seek democratic means of transforming our fourfold global crisis, especially since Arab Spring. Thus, just as in John Locke’s time, this is a moment in history when a large and attentive audience may be ready to hear new ideas about how widely shared cosmopolitan ideals can be actualized through new ways of thinking and new habits of living as a global-and-local community amidst diversity. In America, in Europe, in the Middle East, and worldwide, education is the starting place for reconstructing what cosmopolitan democracy means to us in ways that will be deep enough as well as far-reaching and inclusive enough to resolve our fourfold global crisis in time and in ways that allow us to save our humanity, the democratic ideal, and our ecosystem. We must expand already-existing inclusive processes of collaboratively imagining a deeply democratic cosmopolitan world. With this vision before us, we must actively cultivate cosmopolitan habits of living in our personal lives, our cultures, and our nations, and through transnational movements, nongovernmental organizations, and government at all levels. We must seek out opportunities to participate in collaborative, cross-difference problemsolving inquiries. Our universities must become centers for diversity-fostering pedagogy and service to our fellow human beings and to our ecosystem. Out of these diverse yet ideal-guided efforts, transnational friendships and new practical relationships will emerge that express, teach, and actualize the power and the promise of cosmopolitan democratic living. Notes 1. See Garrett Wallace Brown and David Held, The Cosmopolitanism Reader (Polity Press, 2010). 2. See Martha C. Nussbaum, “Kant and Cosmopolitanism,” in The Cosmopolitan Reader, ed. Garrett Wallace Brown and David Held, 27–44. 3. I am thinking here of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Physics, and De Generatione Animalium as speculating on cosmic universal principles that underlie the species characteristics of living things, including sex–gender and master–slave differences among humans. I am thinking of his Nicomachean Ethics and his Politics as applying these universal principles in discussing human beings’ shared social characteristics and developmental processes, while highlighting both their differing capabilities for achieving various forms of personal excellence and their differing potential contributions to the excellence of their communities, which can take various forms. 4. See Paul’s Letter to the Galatians (3:28). This translation is from The New English Bible (Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press, 1970).

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5. See Garry Wills, Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence (Doubleday, 1978). 6. Martha Nussbaum points out some aspects of Kant’s thought that suggest he may not have thought that such ideal conditions are practically possible. See her “Kant and Cosmopolitanism.” 7. Benhabib’s focus in Another Cosmopolitanism is on the recent growth of democratic legal norms to accommodate both cultural diversity and hospitality to noncitizens. Her brief discussion of the ontology of values comes at the very end of her brief, two-chapter exposition, following brief discussions of how to reconcile cosmopolitanism with diverse nations’ traditions and the authority of democratic norms, and preceding comments from three critics and her reply to each. 8. For a scholarly and insightful discussion of this history, see Nussbaum’s essay, “Kant and Cosmopolitanism.” 9. In addition to drawing on cosmopolitan Hindu, Buddhist, Confucian, and Taoist sources that were familiar to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and their classical American pragmatist successors, contemporary pragmatist cosmopolitanism draws upon Native American thinkers that influence its understanding of democracy, its nature-focused process metaphysics, and its environmentalist commitments. These Native American sources also may have influenced Jefferson and Franklin, the American Transcendentalists, and through them, classical American pragmatist thinkers like Peirce, James, and Dewey. See Scott L. Pratt, Native Pragmatism: Rethinking the Roots of American Philosophy (Indiana University Press, 2002); see also Robert Bunge, An American Ur-Philosophie: Philosophy B.P. (Before Pragmatism) (University Press of America, 1984); Douglas J. Rabb and Dennis McPherson, Indian from the Inside: A Study in Ethnometaphysics (Lakehead University Studies, 1993); and Bruce Wilshire, The Primal Roots of American Philosophy (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000). 10. See Richard Bernstein, The Pragmatic Turn (Polity Press, 2010). 11. King described himself as a “personalist.” On this basis, some of his interpreters have argued against my description of him as a philosophical pragmatist, which I read as including his personalism, based on his extensive writings as well as his sermons and speeches. For my contemporary cosmopolitan pragmatist reading of King, see the chapter entitled “Prophetic Pragmatism,” in my Deep Democracy: Community, Diversity, and Transformation (Rowman & Littlefield, 1999). See also Greg Moses, Revolution of Conscience: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Philosophy of Nonviolence (The Guilford Press, 1997). 12. See Jason D. Hill, Becoming a Cosmopolitan: What It Means to Be a Human Being in the New Millennium (Rowman & Littlefield, 2000) and Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (W.W. Norton & Company, 2006). 13. See Alain L. Locke, Race Contacts and Interracial Relations, ed. Jeffrey C. Stewart (Howard University Press, 1992?).

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14. See James’s A Pluralistic Universe, which Alain Locke and Horace Kallen heard as lectures during their postgraduate studies there as Rhodes Scholars, and Royce’s The Philosophy of Loyalty, especially the chapter on “Loyalty to Loyalty.” 15. For a very helpful discussion of Alain Locke’s ideas about how to intentionally cultivate cosmopolitan cultural pluralism, see Kenneth W. Stikkers’ essay, “Instrumental Relativism and Cultivated Pluralism: Alain Locke and Philosophy’s Quest for a Common World,” in The Critical Pragmatism of Alain Locke: A Reader on Value Theory, Aesthetics, Community, Culture, Race, and Education, ed. Leonard Harris (Rowman and Littlefield, 1999). 16. For a more detailed discussion of Alain Locke’s work on all these interrelated topics, see my chapter on “Cosmopolitan Unity amidst Valued Diversity: Alain Locke’s Vision of Deeply Democratic Transformation,” in Deep Democracy: Community, Diversity, and Transformation, ed. Judith Green (Rowman & Littlefield, 1999). 17. After eight years of George Bush’s presidency and two years of Barack Obama’s, including the emergence of the Tea Party to oppose all government efforts to assure the human rights of all American citizens and sojourners, the possibility that nationalist conservatives will expand their sphere of influence seems at least as likely to me as the possibility that my own cherished hopes for cultivated cosmopolitan pluralism as a key component of deep democracy will be actualized. 18. For the meaning of the term “experience democracies,” see Robert Dahl On Democracy (Yale University Press, 1998). 19. On creating “publics” and why they matter, see Dewey’s The Public and Its Problems (1927). 20. On Jane Addams’s careful expression of her desire to work “with” rather than “for” others, see her own Democracy and Social Ethics (1902), which greatly influenced John Dewey, and also Charlene Haddock Seigfried’s Pragmatism and Feminism: Reweaving the Social Fabric (University of Chicago Press, 1996). 21. For a detailed critical discussion of the evolution of Jane Addams’s pragmatist view about how to foster cosmopolitan peace, see my essay, “Social Democracy, Cosmopolitan Hospitality, and Inter-Civilizational Peace: Lessons from Jane Addams,” in Feminist Interpretations of Jane Addams, ed. Maurice Hamington (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010). 22. See Martha C. Nussbaum, Sex and Social Justice (Oxford University Press, 2000) and Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (Knopf Doubleday, 2000). 23. John Dewey used the idea that democracy is “a way of life” in many places, including The Public and Its Problems (1929) and “Creative Democracy—The Task before Us” (1939). Likewise, he often suggested that “the solution to the problems of democracy is more democracy,” including in “Democracy Is Radical” (1939). His reference to the cosmopolitan biotic community as “the community of life” is from the last pages of Human Nature and Conduct (1922). 24. On heroic individuals, see William James’s “The Will to Believe” and James Pawelski’s The Dynamic Individualism of William James (State University of

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New York Press, 2008). On what cross-differences sojourners offer their host communities and bring home to their primary communities, see Patricia Hill Collins’s “Searching for Sojourner Truth,” Black Women and the Search for Justice (University of Minnesota Press, 1998). Dewey uses the term “social intelligence” to contrast with Kant’s a priori conception of “reason,” often referred to by contemporary thinkers as hard-wired “rationality.” I learned the concept of “positive peace” from the writings of Martin Luther King, Jr. For a detailed discussion of what he meant by this, see my “King’s Pragmatist Political Democracy: Social Democracy, Economic Justice, Positive Peace” on the website of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy, american-philosophy.org. All of the sources upon which I draw in that essay are included in Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr., ed. James M. Washington (HarperCollins, 1990). See Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (Touchstone, 1996) and Who Are We? Challenges to America’s National Identity (Simon & Schuster, 2004). See Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge University Press, 1989) and Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth Century America (Harvard University Press, 1998). See also Rorty and Pascal Engle, What’s the Use of Truth? (Columbia University Press, 2007). See Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (Pocket Books, 1984). See Jack Weatherford, Indian Givers: How the Indians of the Americas Transformed the World (Fawcett Columbine, 1988).

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CHAPTER 6

Democracy—Practice as Needed Michael Eldridge

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ne may object to Richard Rorty’s failing to take seriously Dewey’s defense of participatory democracy (1997, 104), as does Judith Green (2004, 63–65), but while noteworthy, Rorty’s view is more or less in line with what many think. True, Rorty was an admirer of Dewey but the latter’s expansive notion of democracy is often not taken seriously. It is thought to be one of the impractical parts of Dewey’s pragmatism along with what is judged by many to be the unrealistic expectations that Dewey had of classroom teachers. But it was something of a surprise when Robert Talisse, who had endorsed Dewey’s approach to democracy in 2005 in Democracy after Liberalism, mounted a sustained attack on Dewey as a democratic thinker in A Pragmatist Philosophy of Democracy in 2007, in order to make room for a Peircean epistemic defense of democracy. Talisse can be polemical and at odds with conventional thinking, but his latter book represents a real turnaround from the former. Moreover, as Talisse concedes, “Dewey is the pragmatist philosopher who has exerted the most influence on democratic theory” (2007, 27). This is not to say that Dewey’s thinking is generally admired and employed by democratic theorists. As noted above even pragmatists disagree about the value of Dewey’s proposals, but no one, to my knowledge, has tried before to displace him as the representative pragmatist political thinker. Even those who disagree with Dewey have regarded him as the pragmatist that dealt with social and political matters. Talisse is certainly not uniformed about Dewey; nor is he a lightweight. He is an associate professor of philosophy at Vanderbilt University, an authority on Hook, the editor of Public Affairs Quarterly, and a coeditor (with John Lachs) of American Philosophy: An Encyclopedia. Moreover his recent books on democracy have been favorably received by some. Thom Brooks, for instance,

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asserts, “A Pragmatist Philosophy of Democracy is a genuine tour de force.”1 Yet, Talisse profoundly misunderstands Dewey’s advocacy of democracy, claiming that the view of the most prominent pragmatic exponent of democracy is neither pragmatic nor viable. His aim is to develop a “philosophy of democracy based on Peircean pragmatism” (Talisse 2007, 25), thus displacing Dewey’s expansive, unworkable view. Additionally, he finds Dewey’s bulldog, as Sidney Hook was known, to be an advocate of the modest epistemic democracy that Talisse develops from Peirce’s epistemology. Thus, Talisse provocatively attempts to topple Dewey from his pedestal and claim that his chief disciple was actually more a follower of Peirce than Dewey. I want to resist this attack because a consideration of Talisse’s Rawlsian— informed rationalism enables me to show just why Dewey’s practice-oriented approach is more useful. As irritating as it may be, it is helpful to have a sharp attack on that with which one is comfortable. Not only is it a motivator, it also provides a clear, informative contrast. Although Talisse looks to the Peircean pragmatic tradition for inspiration, his problematic is typical of contemporary political theory, specifically John Rawls’s effort to come to terms with reasonable pluralism. Talisses’s regard for Rawls’s proceduralist approach is sufficient for him to dismiss Dewey’s allegedly substantive account of democracy as being unable to accommodate pluralism. Since in a pluralist society there can be no pervasive, comprehensive doctrine, and Dewey’s democracy as a way of life is precisely such a doctrine, it is not a practical proposal; therefore, it is unworkable and hence unpragmatic. But surely, as Talisse anticipates, Deweyans will object that they are not antipluralist, for “the democratic way of life is essentially a life not of shared values and virtues, but of cooperative inquiry into common problems” (47). This rejoinder, however, will not work, argues Talisse, because Deweyans do not take pluralism seriously. They limit participation in the public discussion to those with “appropriately diverse viewpoints.” The words are Charlene Haddock Seigfried’s and Talisse takes them to mean that Seigfried is not genuinely open to the possibility of irreducible conflict. She and others, such as Larry Hickman, who Talisse also brings into the discussion, are allegedly unwilling to enter into inquiry with just anyone, and if they do so they then proceed with confidence that any disagreements can be overcome through the use of proper tools of inquiry. Thus, Deweyan democrats are unwilling to confront genuine pluralism. I recognize that there will always be individuals and groups who will disagree with one another, and I will grant that they may offer reasons for the positions they take. But this does not mean that overtime a majority cannot be formed around some practical way to proceed. It happens often enough to

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give us hope that there can be resolution of difficult issues. Even the seemingly most intractable problems, such as slavery in the United States in the nineteenth century and racial segregation in the twentieth century, were resolved more or less favorably. This is not to say that either was easily or completely “solved.” But the resolutions were such that the nation was able to move forward. Such is the nature of the democratic process. However, it is seldom as neat, rational, or satisfactory as one might hope. But, Talisse objects, democracy requires that for “coercive political power” to be “legitimate,” it must be “justifiable, at least in principle, ‘to every last individual’ ” (Waldron 1993, 37). These words are from Liberal Rights of Jeremy Waldron, who takes as a given the rights of every individual. In other words, the starting point is not one that a Deweyan, who takes sociality as the basic category, must share. Nor is a Deweyan concerned for legitimacy in the sense of a need to find a rational foundation for democracy. Legitimacy comes from the participation of the citizens and the sense that they have that their individual and common needs are being met through the political process. Notice, however, that in a way, I have reinforced Talisse’s pluralism point. Agreement about fundamental matters does not seem likely. Even if we achieve some consensus about a particular difficult issue, there could well be reasonable people who disagree. Although I am not inclined to use “reasonable” (in the strong sense) of those who would advocate slavery or segregation, I certainly think philosophical liberals such as Rawls and Waldron are every bit as reasonable if not more so than I. Hence, some form of reasonable pluralism would seem to be the reality, although I doubt that we can ever expect to achieve across-the-board agreement about basic philosophical disagreements. Even neglected philosophical positions remain available for novel articulation and thus become active research programs again. Social contract theory is an outstanding example of a view that had been set aside, only to be taken up by Rawls and given new life in the latter part of the twentieth century (Sayre-McCord 2000, 247–67). Nevertheless, as I noted in regard to the elimination of slavery and legal segregation in the United States, we can achieve, despite reasonable pluralism, some consensus about how to proceed. I will have more to say about this below in discussing modus vivendi. Despite Talisse’s Rawlsian rejection of comprehensive doctrines, he does think that there can be an epistemic approach that cannot be reasonably rejected. There will still be disagreements about a whole range of issues, but there can be no reasonable objection to the seeking of truth and the practice of giving reasons for one’s views. A Peircean democracy, according to Talisse, is one that limits itself to the development of “the epistemic habits and social institutions requisite to that kind of engagement” (Talisse 2007, 88). Hmm, this is odd. Talisse faulted Hickman for insisting that we need to use the right

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tools for inquiry; now he asserts that there are “requisite epistemic habits and social institutions.” It was also odd that he suspected Seigfried of being exclusionary when she has been a persistent advocate of a more open society. Talisse has converted Dewey and Deweyans into totalitarians. Here is an example, one that requires me to quote a rather long sentence: Insofar as the Deweyan democrat seeks to reconstruct the whole of society in the image of her own philosophical commitments, she seeks to coerce people to live under political institutions that are explicitly designed to cultivate norms and realize civic ideal that they could reasonably reject. (45)

This portrays the “Deweyan democrat” as shaping society according to her lights, forcing people to “live under” a political system that they “could reasonably reject.” This is preposterous. Where and how does this coercion take place? Talisse offers no example of coercion on the part of the Deweyan democratic oppressor. It is not coercive for one, whatever his or her comprehensive doctrine, to propose a policy or procedure. Of course, one might well object, and with good reason, to some proposals. But this is not coercion. Here is another distorting sentence: “The aim of Deweyan democracy is to reconstruct society according to Dewey’s particular social vision despite the reasonable objections of such persons” (Talisse 2007, 46). There is nothing antipluralist or antidemocratic with making proposals with full knowledge that some may “reasonably reject” them. This is the way democracies should work. This is not antipluralist. Instead, it is to accept that there are diverse points of view, and those involved try to work through them to arrive at some policies or procedures that the various parties can accept. This occurs all the time in our political process. Talisse has utterly failed to show how the possession of a comprehensive doctrine forestalls the deliberative, democratic process. Possession or even advocacy of ideal is not the same as imposition. Talisse has not shown Deweyans to be imposers of a comprehensive doctrine. Whatever vision of the good society that Dewey may have had he would not have instituted it against the will of the people affected, for to do so would be undeliberative, unreconstructive, and elitist. Talisse fails to provide the link between Dewey’s possession of a comprehensive doctrine and the coercive practices that this doctrine supposedly entails. Moreover, he cannot do so, for any accurate account of Dewey’s democratic proposal will not be objectionably coercive. Dewey, like other liberals, is willing to be selectively coercive, as can be readily seen in his eventual support for Woodrow Wilson’s war policy and his involvement in the New York Teachers Union, both of which I have discussed

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elsewhere (Eldridge 1998). Let me call attention to the latter here because it illustrates both Dewey’s deliberative approach and his willingness to be coercive. In 1932, the leader of Local 5 of the Teachers Union moved to expel the leaders of two factions for “disruptive behavior and repeated misrepresentations of the leadership’s action.” These leaders then filed a grievance. Dewey was chosen to head a five-person committee to consider the grievance. The committee met extensively over a several month period and heard over a hundred witnesses on both sides, as well as the six members who had filed the grievance. Eventually, the committee recommended at a meeting in April 1933 to suspend—not expel—the factional leaders (Eldridge 1998, 91). So Dewey was willing to take punitive action, suspending several members’ rights. However, we should also notice how carefully and deliberatively he did so. I have already noted the many meetings and the hearing of everyone involved. Note also his commitment to pluralism. In the statement that he made to the union in presenting the committee’s report, Dewey said: We believe in opposition. I might possibly become a member of the opposition, if it set forth its hopes and its aims frankly and candidly and tried to get them adopted by the Union by fair and open and above-board discussion, not permeated by misrepresentation, insinuation, and false attribution of unworthy methods of the kind that have been engaged in. (LW 9: 318)2

In the report itself, there is this expression of Dewey’s commitment to democratic change: . . . to effect a change of policy in any democratic organization, as the defendants clearly wish to do in the Teachers Union, requires a patient process of education. Such changes must come as a matter of growth and development, if it is to be done democratically, rather than through a fight resulting in victory for one side and conquest of the other. (LW 9: 345)

Dewey was committed to an inclusive, educative process of change. He would not impose his societal vision on anyone. In my consideration of this episode in Transforming Experience, I concluded: Although the facts were painful to talk about and difficult to establish to everyone’s satisfaction, the committee felt that democracy required an open, candid discussion of the issues and fundamental causes of the conflict. The report, in its length, the explicit account of the committee’s process, and the

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citation of evidence and fully displayed reasoning, modeled and encouraged open deliberation. Indeed, in exhibiting the social intelligence that Dewey continually recommended, the report illustrated the sort of democracy that he advocated. The report was a democratic means to a democratic end. (Eldridge 1998, 94)

Talisse’s Dewey is a straw man. The flesh-and-blood Dewey worked to bring about change through educative, political means. Talisse finds the Deweyan notion of reconstruction odd—Talisse’s word is “curious”—and his reaction is telling, for reconstruction is crucial to understanding Dewey’s project. Talisse writes, “Deweyan democracy involves the social prescription that all social and political institutions should be designed—or, to use a curious term that appears frequently in the literature, ‘reconstructed’—to help realize that particular vision of the moral life” (Talisse 2007, 44–45). Talisse, like Rawls with his idea of the “original position,” takes our political theoretical task to be one of creating or designing a suitable political system. It is as if the political philosopher is to start from scratch to institute a new political order. Dewey, on the other hand, understood us to be in a political situation and our task was to improve it as needed. He thought that this situation was one that had developed over time and could be re-made as necessary to meet our needs. Every institution—“government, business, art, religion”— has a purpose, thought Dewey. Each, in its own way, exists “to set free and to develop the capacities of human individuals without respect to race, sex, class or economic status” (MW 12: 186). In Experience and Education, Dewey considers why we prefer “democratic and humane arrangements to those which are autocratic and harsh.” He then suggests that the reason is that “democratic social arrangements” are more effective in bringing about “a better quality of human experience” (LW 13: 17–18; see also Pappas, “Democracy and the Quality of Experience, pp. 286–93). What legitimizes democracy is not some rational justification by a political theorist that could possibly satisfy every one; it is the actual, wellconsidered choices of people in a real society. They find democratic practices useful for living well. Admittedly, there will be those who opt out intellectually or behaviorally, but such is human nature. Talisse dismisses Dewey’s proposal as a “particular vision of the moral life” (Talisse 2007, 45). But it is more than this. It is a proposal that reflects actual experience and can be empirically tested. Dewey claims that democratic processes can enable us to live better than autocratic ones. So, rather than taking Dewey to be offering a candidate for the superior vision of the good life, one could take seriously his talk of proposing an experimentalist philosophy. This would involve us in the actual examination of democratic practices and their advantages

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and disadvantages rather than an exclusively intellectual consideration of democracy’s legitimacy. Talisse objects to Dewey’s “particular vision of the moral life,” for he is concerned that there can be no common vision and so any particular proposal will run afoul of “reasonable pluralism.” To be sure, Dewey had a comprehensive idea that he articulated in many books, notably, Democracy and Education, Reconstruction in Philosophy, Experience and Nature, The Quest for Certainty, A Common Faith, and Art as Experience. But Dewey did not require one to subscribe to his empirical naturalism before he would enter into conversation with him or her. What he did insist on was the need for social intelligence. Talisse takes “moral” in the conventional sense of that which is valued or considered obligatory, and Dewey did use the term in this way. But that which is considered good or right by Dewey is actually the product of deliberation (see Eldridge 1998, 60–62). In Reconstruction in Philosophy, Dewey specifies what he means by “a moral situation.” It is “one in which judgment and choice are required antecedently to overt action.” He then lays out the process of inquiry. When one is faced with “conflicting desire and alternative apparent goods,” one must search for “the right course of action, the right good.” This search involves observation, analysis, clarification, and so forth—that is intelligence. Moreover one does not through this process determine the answer. Rather, one arrives at a “hypothetical and tentative” decision as to what to do. One then anticipates the likely consequences (MW 12: 173). Only then does one act. And, of course, one then takes the actual consequences into account when he or she is faced with a similar situation. So Dewey has a proposal—not all that unlike Talisse’s epistemic one— about how to proceed that escapes Talisse’s fear of dogmatism and stalemate. Dewey would have us search collectively for ways to live that would enable all of us to live better. He has faith in democracy, but this general orientation is to lead to very specific courses of action. We are to test ideas of how to live, initially in prospective thinking but ultimately in actual practice. Through collaborative investigation, debate, and experimentation, we are to discover the ways that enable us to live as we would like. But there is an important difference in Dewey and Talisse’s understanding of inquiry. Talisse thinks that the primary aim is that of determining true beliefs:

Just as inquirers must attend to reasons, argument, and evidence in forming their beliefs, democratic citizens must engage each other’s reasons. In this way, the Peircean view is an epistemic view of democracy. It holds that democratic politics is aimed at reaching collective decisions that are truth-apt

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because reason-responsive; that is, democracy is the collective expression and manifestation of our individual epistemic commitments. (Talisse 2007, 71)

He recognizes that Dewey’s aim in inquiry is broader than this, for it attempts to transform situations and is inclusive of knowledge production. Moreover, he faults Dewey for having a conception of inquiry that presupposes a theory of experience and thus is “philosophically weighty” (16). He concludes at one point: Dewey has expanded a fundamental and philosophically modest insight of Peircean pragmatism into a full-blown philosophical system whose ambitions and domain extend far beyond the more modest Peircean project of making explicit the commitments implicit in our practices. (18)

I would argue that Dewey brings out “the commitments implicit in our practices,” thus developing Peircean insights about habits and beliefs. But be that as it may, it is clear that Dewey’s theory of inquiry is fuller than Peirce’s and the ultimate aim of a particular inquiry is not belief formation but situation modification. Talisse, on intellectual grounds, objects to this fuller notion of inquiry because it complicates his project of legitimizing democracy and because in a pluralist society there can be no pervasive, comprehensive doctrine. I have already insisted that whatever comprehensive view that Dewey has is not a precondition for engaging in pluralist give and take. He does urge that we be intelligent as individuals and as a society, but surely when one goes through the items of the suggested exercise of intelligence—observation, analysis, clarification, and so forth—Talisse would not object. I find nothing in the “ten ‘ground rules’ for democratic discussion” formulated by Hook and admired by Talisse to be inconsistent with Dewey’s understanding of inquiry. As for the legitimacy issue, Talisse is concerned about justifying democracy to every cranky—but reasonable!—individualist.3 Dewey is not. Dewey is concerned that we not neglect the possibilities of democracy for all aspects of our lives that can be enhanced by mutual deliberation. For him democracy is not a solution to an intellectual problem; it is a practical solution to many problems we encounter in life. We are concerned to reconstruct democracy to make it suitable for our needs. We engage in intellectual tasks to further this re-making of our democratic experience. Talisse does not take seriously the changed situation in which we find ourselves. It would not be correct to say that Talisse is doing armchair philosophizing, for he is very knowledgeable

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about current problems in our society, but he is nevertheless trying to construct an intellectual foundation for democracy in a world that largely accepts democracy in some form. While Talisse is worried about legitimacy, people are voting with their feet. They have come to take democracy for granted. Rather than speculating about what would justify democracy, we should be identifying (and attempting to solve) the actual problems that people are having as they attempt to live together. The issue now is the form democracy could and should take—not whether we should be democratic. Talisse takes pluralism to be a problem, and so it is in some ways. Deweyans, however, understand pluralism to sometimes be a problem, but at other times a resource. A pluralistic society is one that has diverse points of view that can clash, but they also enable people who are so minded, such as Seigfried, to learn from those who see things differently. A recent celebration of the valuing of differences is a report and reflection on classroom instruction in several societies. Barbara Thayer-Bacon visited Mexican, African and African American, Native American, Japanese, and Chinese schools both in the United States and in Mexico, Africa, Japan, and China, noting, as the subtitle promises, “the power of pluralism.” Even more pointed is Avigail Eisenberg’s analysis, in which she contends that Dewey is no communitarian precisely because he is a pluralist. She notes several similarities between Dewey and contemporary communitarians, but then argues that Dewey is to be distinguished from them because of his pluralism. “Communitarianism,” she observes, “fails to recognize what Dewey emphasized, namely, that precisely because groups play an important role in developing individuals, their power over individuals must be limited and fragmented” (1995, 28). Talisse had argued that Michael Sandel could not accommodate “reasonable pluralism,” and that Dewey was similarly vulnerable (Talisse 2007, 41). But, as Eisenberg points out, Dewey was not just a pluralist, but his understanding of democracy required multiple allegiances, in short, pluralism. One needs pluralism for self-development or realization. So, for Dewey, pluralism understood as multiple allegiances is not a problem but a solution. Similarly, in The Public and Its Problems, Dewey argues that majorities need minorities. It is through the give and take between competing points of view that a majority is formed. “It is true,” observed Dewey, “that all valuable as well as new ideas begin with minorities, perhaps a minority of one” (LW 2: 365). The discussion in this passage has to do with the proper role of experts and the value of majority rule, but the ideas expressed show that Dewey valued divergent points of view. Indeed, “the problem of the public,” he points out in the succeeding paragraph, “is the improvement of the methods and conditions of debate, discussion and persuasion” (ibid., 365). Not only does

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Dewey value pluralism for its role in informing the individual and enabling democracy to function well, but he insists that we need to pay attention to the processes of pluralist conflict and collaboration. His democracy is not one that denies pluralism; it exploits it. Talisse aspires to a rational resolution and is disdainful of what Rawls calls a “modus vivendi” approach to pluralism. This Latin phrase can be translated as “a way of life” but in political theory it has come to mean a temporary agreement entered into by hostile parties that enables them to coexist. This situation, however, lacks both stability and common interest. The self-interests of each party continually threaten the stability of this “mere modus vivendi” that has been brought about by “circumstances and exhaustion” (Rawls 2005, 147 and xxxiv-xxxv). A Deweyan, however, could regard a “mere modus vivendi” as a start toward a more tenable resolution of the conflictual situation. Diplomacy often results in a truce that the third parties hope will become more durable. Sometimes the truce holds, sometimes not. But the hope is that a way of living can be found in which there is less hostility and more shared interest. We cannot say in advance that a peaceful, sustainable society will come about, but we may work toward that end by consultation, and efforts to earn the trust of and satisfy the interests of the people involved. Duncan Ivison helpfully distinguishes between a “simple or static modus vivendi” and a “discursive and dynamic” one. Rather than thinking of the competing parties’ interests as static or fixed, Ivison thinks that our distinct political identities are “fundamentally interdependent in a number of complex ways” (84–86). Thus, there is potential for an emerging consensus over time. This will be a consensus that develops in fits and starts, in which the parties are keenly aware of their differences, but also recognize relationships that can be strengthened. Democracy then is not a once-for-all sort of thing, nor merely an intellectual project, so much as it is a tool that a modus vivendi society uses as needed to enable people to live together and potentially flourish. Speaking of tools, let me return to the matter of comprehensive doctrine. Dewey did have, as I noted above, a comprehensive understanding of experience. But to call it a “doctrine” in the context of his social and political project is to misrepresent it. Rawls was concerned about relatively fixed, private views that did not permit various groups to enter freely into public life. No consensus for how we should live could ever be found, for each group would inflexibly insist on its own “comprehensive doctrine.” But Dewey’s project was one of social intelligence and his ideals were not fixed. They were tools to be used to re-shape the present. There is nothing about Dewey’s project that would keep him or us from freely entering into the development of a sufficient modus vivendi, or way of life, that would enable all the would-be

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participants to live together. Other parties to the possible modus vivendi may be unwilling to come together. If so, then one would have to deal with that situation. We need to get away from the idea that the philosopher of democracy’s task is to justify and implement democracy as a fully worked out ideal. Rather, the task is to move forward in the situation in which we find ourselves, motivated by the ideal of democracy but understanding it as an intellectual tool and not as a fixed ideal. Our situation is not as Talisse understands it. We are not each in our own corner trying to decide if we are going to get in the game. The democratic game is on, and we, Deweyans or not, are the players. Our task is primarily not to legitimate it, but to realize it. Dewey would have us recognize the current situation and to extend and enhance it. This is not to suggest that it is inappropriate to ask about the value of democracy—representative or direct, national or communal, or political in a narrow or wide sense. It is always appropriate, when problems are identified, to ask if a practice is accomplishing what it is designed to do and should we even be engaged in the practice at all. We should be paying attention as philosophers to the practices in which we find ourselves, particularly as they become problematic. But the test is not ultimately an intellectual one; it is a practical one—does the practice contribute to our individual and social well-being? This is the reconstructive thinking—inquiry—that Dewey advocated and Talisse finds curious. Right now, the political practices in which we find ourselves are democratic in some sense. Our task is to clarify, specify, and assess these democratic practices. There may well have been a time when Rorty’s reservations about participatory democracy were justified. But it appears to me that there is renewed interest in the possibility of increased citizen participation and the extension of deliberative democracy to all areas of our lives where power— formal and informal—is exercised. I would not want Talisse’s unjustified assault on Dewey’s democracy as a way of life to go unresisted. Dewey appears to me to have been prescient. At a time when democracy as a nation-state polity was contested, he envisioned a broadening of democracy into our everyday lives, into schools, the workplace, and families, that is, wherever power is exercised. Now, as a result of various liberation movements, such as the ones advocating equality in civil rights, gender, and sexual orientation, as well as with respect to disabilities and developments in technology (cell phones, the Internet, etc.), we have an opportunity to experiment with increased democracy. A final thought: Talisse is very concerned about methods of inquiry, but his approach in A Pragmatist Philosophy of Democracy is problematic. To displace Dewey as the pre-eminent pragmatist philosopher of democracy and

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replace him with Peirce or a Peircean approach is a real challenge. To do so one would need very compelling arguments. As Michael Williams argues in Problems of Knowledge, some knowledge claims, depending on context, require more evidence than others (pp. 158ff ). If not much rides on the claim, then one can employ minimal standards. Say I could take a bus or my old truck to campus. Normally the bus comes every 45 minutes beginning at 8:09 a.m. But if I miscalculate when a later bus will come, it is no big deal. I would be inconvenienced by the time spent at bus stop and having to pay for parking at the university, but I would still get to campus at about the same time. But let’s say my truck is not available and I must be at campus by a certain time. Then there is more at stake, and I want to be more careful about schedule. So I might check the bus website to find the exact time of my bus. Or I might make it a point to be listening to the radio or checking the TV to see if there are transportation problems that could affect my route. Given Dewey’s stature, one needs to be not only provocative and clever, as Talisse is in this book, but also careful, plausible, and thorough. Talisse, however, in a text of just under 150 pages challenges the conventional view of Dewey and attempts to replace it with a novel Peircean one. But his effort is flawed because of his equivocal use of “reasonable,” his static, narrow understanding of pluralism, his selective interpretation of Dewey, and his intellectualist orientation. There is value in unconventional thinking and challenges to received opinion. But for one to bring down Dewey’s stature as a significant, if not the most significant, pragmatic, democratic thinker, one would need to be much more thorough and careful than Talisse has been. But my ultimate objective was not to show that Talisse’s criticism is flawed. It was to use Talisse’s misunderstanding to understand the usefulness of Dewey’s democratic thinking. We can, I think, assert with some confidence that Dewey is a significant, pragmatic resource for those of us who would like to extend democratic practice beyond electoral politics. Dewey’s work encourages us to employ democracy in a variety of ways—not because it provides a justification for our social and political practices but because it contributes to our well-being. Democracy should be practiced as needed in order for us to live well. Notes 1. Accessed via http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1107369, August 14, 2008; Brooks’s paper was a part of a panel on Talisse’s book at the Political Studies Association that met at Swansea University (April 1–3, 2008). Of course not all are as enthusiastic. Another paper from the Political Studies panel, that of Matthew Festenstein (http://www.psa.ac.uk/2008/pps/

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Festenstein.pdf, accessed August 29, 2008), raises some important questions about the execution of Talisse’s project. Even so, David Hildebrand, in Notre Dame Philosophical Review (http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id= 13965, accessed August 29, 2008), says that he “cannot recommend PPD highly enough,” and Colin Koopman is critical but thinks that Talisse poses “tough questions” for Deweyans, “Good Questions and Bad Answers in Talisse’s A Pragmatist Philosophy of Democracy,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 45 (2009): 60–61. 2. References to Dewey’s works are to the critical edition edited by Jo Ann Boydston and published by Southern University Press (Dewey, 1969–91). They were published as The Early Works (EW), The Middle Works (MW), and The Later Works (LW). The standard form of reference is to one of these designations and then to volume and page. Thus the text just cited is to volume 9, page 318, of The Later Works. 3. Festenstein faults Talisse for not being precise about what he means by “reasonable.” It is not clear whether “offering a reason” is sufficient to qualify one as being reasonable or if one must have a coherent theory. The former, in my opinion, seems too weak and the latter too strong.

References Eldridge, Michael. Transforming Experience: John Dewey’s Cultural Instrumentalism. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1998. Eldridge, Michael. “The Social Character of Obligation in Dewey’s Pragmatic Ethics,” in John Ryder and Alexander Kremer (eds.), Self and Society. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009. Hickman, Larry, ed. Reading Dewey: Interpretations for a Postmodern Generation Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1998. Pappas, Gregory. John Dewey’s Ethics: Democracy as Experience. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008. Rawls, John. Political Liberalism: Expanded Edition. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. Ringen, Stein. What Democracy Is For: On Freedom and Moral Government. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007. Rorty, Richard. Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998. Sayre-McCord, Geoffrey. “Contractarianism,” in Hugh LaFollette (ed.), The Blackwell Guide to Ethical Theory. Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 2000, pp. 247–67. Scott London, “Organic Democracy: The Political Philosophy of John Dewey” http: //www.scottlondon.com/reports/dewey.html (accessed August 31, 2008). Sen, Amartya. “Democracy as a Universal Value.” Journal of Democracy 10.3 (1999): 3–17. Shaprio, Ian. The State of Democratic Theory. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003. Talisse, Robert. A Pragmatist Philosophy of Democracy. New York and London: Routledge, 2007.

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Thayer-Bacon, Barbara. Beyond Liberal Democracy: The Power of Pluralism. New York: Teachers College Press, 2008. Waldron, Jeremy. Liberal Rights. Collected Papers. Cambridge: Cambridge University, Press 1993. Williams, Michael. Problems of Knowledge: A Critical Introduction to Epistemology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

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CHAPTER 7

Dewey and Levinas on Pluralism, the Other, and Democracy Jim Garrison

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n our globalizing world, issues of pluralism, the Other, and democracy are of immense concern. In the dawn of the twenty-first century, we most associate the discussion regarding the relation of “the Same” and “the Other” with the name of Emmanuel Levinas. Levinas served in the French army in World War II. When captured, the Germans assigned him a special barracks for Jewish prisoners. His wife and daughter survived the holocaust only by hiding in a monastery. Deported, his mother-in-law disappeared; the Nazis murdered his father and brothers in Lithuania. Levinas thought that the holocaust arose straightforwardly out of the violent tendency in Western thought to continually reduce the Other to “the Same.” Surprisingly, given his experience with totalitarianism, Levinas has little to say about democracy, much less pluralistic democracy. Meanwhile, no name is more associated with pluralistic democracy than that of John Dewey. As the most politically visible liberal intellectual in America, if not the world in his day, many still castigate him. Of course, he knew nothing like the persecution experienced by Levinas. This chapter will show that pluralism, sameness, and otherness are essential to Deweyan democracy, but not as Levinas conceives them. Pragmatism tends toward a robust pluralism that permits intimate relations with others without constantly reducing their differences to sameness. Further, we will see why Dewey’s vision of the democratic community is, when suitably modified by interactive constructivist considerations drawn from the Köln school of interactive constructivism, deeply desirable for our world today.

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Against proposals such as Dewey’s, Alphonso Lingis (1994), a prominent translator and interpreter of Levinas, argues that the very idea of “community” stresses commonality, including a common language, common self-concept, and common values that, supposedly, lead to Levinasian Totalization and Sameness (ix). However, Dewey’s pragmatist deployment of the concept of “the democratic community” evades such a critique by relying on two pluralistic criteria that set standards for any adequate normative account of social living. They are genuine mutuality of interests and free interplay across acknowledged differences. Dewey’s first criterion of “the worth of a given mode of social life” asks, “How numerous and varied are the interests which are consciously shared?” (MW 9: 89). It yields his first standard of democratic social life, which “signifies not only more numerous and more varied points of shared common interest, but greater reliance upon the recognition of mutual interests” (92). Dewey’s second criterion asks, “How full and free is the interplay with other forms of association?” (89). This criterion yields his second standard of democratic life, which means “not only freer interaction between social groups . . . but change in social habit [cultural custom]—its continuous readjustment through meeting the new situations produced by varied intercourse” (92). The second standard emphasizes otherness and difference. Contra Lingis’s Levinasian stance, Dewey’s second criterion for democratic community prevents the coercive reduction of all otherness and difference to “totalizing sameness.” Levinas is right in saying that without otherness, cultural customs (social habits) or individual habits can comprise a totalizing whole. In Dewey’s pluralistic universe, however, there are always other individual persons and societies with whom we have yet to interact. Later, we will learn that Dewey does not think we have potential for individual freedom and growth unless there are other individuals different from ourselves with whom we are yet to interact. Equally important, Dewey finds that all interactions are reciprocally transforming. After the interaction, we can never return completely to our previous identities, yet complete reduction of the Other to our Sameness is impossible. Of course, all interactions are as potentially violent as they are peaceful. Levinas seeks an idealized, phenomenological, and transcendental construction of a transcendent ideal that prevents all violence. Ideals are equally important to Dewey because they provide practical guidance, what he calls ideal “ends-in-view” as to how to ameliorate suffering in the natural world. Levinas’s ideal provides valuable guidance, but Levinas’s transcendent ideal limits its ability to perform actual concrete work in the everyday empirical world. Such transcendental constructions easily become otherworldly. They merely supervene on the world instead of intervening in it to practically

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alter the course of events. Such ideal ends become divorced from practical means for actualizing them. All too often, such supernal constructions provide escape from the hard work of practically constructing a better world here below. Although more explanation is needed to fully show how the framing of Dewey’s naturalism and democratic conception of community in response his two pluralistic criteria allows him to evade the Levinasian critique of sameness while engaging in practical amelioration, it is sufficient for the reader to keep these preliminary thoughts in mind to understand what follows. Levinas and those he influences sometimes think in exclusive either/ors, either Sameness or the Other, either Totality or Infinity, whereas Dewey seeks to overcome such dualisms with a both/and strategy that emphasizes both sameness and otherness, including both unity (but never Totality) and Infinity. In the following close comparison, I begin with a discussion of Levinas that explores his pluralism and his construction of “the Other” (l’ Autrui). I then critique his philosophical method and his deployment of key terms before turning to Dewey’s more balanced understanding of the same, the other, and pluralism. I conclude with a discussion of why it matters for his theory of democracy, drawing on the resources of Köln interactive constructivism. Levinas’s Account of Individuality, Pluralism, and the Other Levinas studied the philosophy of Husserl and Heidegger exhaustively, although he came to reject Husserl’s intellectualism. He long embraced Heidegger’s emphasis on historicism, being-in-the-world, social practices, and the distinction between being (what is) and the Being of what is. Ultimately, however, Levinas decided that Heidegger’s ontology does not exhaust our relations to existence; moreover, he concluded, the entire history of Western philosophy at least since Parmenides, and especially Plato, has always reduced the Other to the Same (the same cognitive structures, essences, and such) within a Totality (unity, system, wholeness), resulting in a metaphysical violence that sustains all kinds of imperialism. With this turn against Husserl’s intellectualism, Heidegger’s ontology, and the West’s philosophical tradition, Levinas began to develop his ideas about individuality (subjectivity), intellectualism, pluralism, Totality, the Same, and the infinite Other. In his alternative analysis, Levinas delineates a subject (individuality or interiority) that exists before socialization and the encounter with the Other. This is the task of Section II of Totality and Infinity (T&I) and the central chapter of Otherwise than Being (OB). In both books, Levinas builds on his earlier attempts to distinguish what he calls the “il y’a” from Heidegger’s “es gibt.” Both can be translated “it is,” but Heidegger’s analysis draws from the

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more literal German “it gives,” where the “it” is Being. Although Heidegger’s term “Being” (Sein) suggests a donation to the nature of human being (Dasein) from beyond ontology, Levinas thinks it simply reduces everything to the whole of Being. Being’s contributed unity to human being is not that of an “empirical ego,” Levinas argues but a “pneuma of the psyche” that “precedes this empirical, which is a part of being” (115–116). At the same time, Levinas wishes to circumvent Husserl’s intellectualism by insisting that the original unity of the human psyche is “presynthetic, pre-logical and in a certain sense atomic, that is, in-dividual unity of the self,” incapable of “splitting, separating itself from itself ” (107). Such an individual human psyche exists before all possible action involving “passivity more passive still than the passivity conjoined with action” (115). This original human psyche is neither complete actuality nor pure potential (110). It is nonthematizable subjectivity “prior to all reflection” and “other than interested” (111 and 118). Elsewhere, he insists that the human psyche is neither biological nor sociological (T&I, 120–121). “Our analysis,” Levinas declares, “claims to be in the spirit of Husserlian philosophy” (183), though his philosophical method and his conclusions differ from Husserl’s. Husserl sought to complete the Cartesian quest for certainty (see his Cartesian Meditations). In launching his own alternative quest, Levinas relies on Descartes’s Third Meditation, which is his ontological proof of God’s existence, to carry out his transcendental construction of the infinite Other. In his Second Meditation, Descartes had supposedly proven his own existence as an individual mental substance (the famous cogito ergo sum). In the Third Meditation, he shows there is an idea in his mind inadequate to its content; therefore, he argues, it must have originated externally: By the name of God I understand a substance that is infinite [eternal, immutable], independent, all-knowing, all-powerful, and by which I myself and everything else, if anything else does exist, have been created. Now all these characteristics are such that the more diligently I attend to them, the less do they appear capable of proceeding from me alone; hence . . . we must conclude that God necessarily exists. (Meditations, 165)

Descartes concludes God so understood cannot deceive him, so God grounds apodictic certainty. In addition, instead of the finite Cartesian cogito (or Husserlian noema) constituting its objects, an infinite God constitutes our finite subjectivity. Levinas notes that “things, mathematical and moral notions are also, according to Descartes, presented to us through their ideas, and are distinct

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from them. But the idea of infinity is exceptional in that its ideatum [the object of knowledge as known by mind] surpasses its idea” (TI, 48–49). Levinas identifies this idea of infinity with the Other: “Infinity is characteristic of a transcendent being as transcendent; the infinite is the absolutely other,” that is, “exterior, because it is infinite” (49). Further, he argues, “To think the infinite, the transcendent” is “not to think an object” (49). Levinas wishes to show that his “Other” is no ordinary empirical object or person, as most assume. On this account, the remarkable relation of the distinct individual with the infinite Other breaks the pattern wherein all differences are assimilated within the unity of the Same, such as we find, for instance, in Heidegger’s Being: The Cartesian notion of the idea of the Infinite designates a relation with a being that maintains its total exteriority with respect to him who thinks it . . . . The absolute exteriority of the exterior being . . . “absolves” itself from the relation in which it presents itself. (50)

Without reciprocity, Levinas argues, our relation to the infinite Other is absolutely incommensurable and asymmetric. While it may trans-form us, we cannot trans-form it. Presumably, if we could trans-form the Other we could reduce it to our categories, forms, and essences. While we must praise and retain Levinas’s sense of piety and reverence toward the incomprehensibleness of otherness and difference and concerns with the violent reduction of difference to sameness, we must nonetheless ask how his constructions work to practically ameliorate suffering. Such transcendent constructions risk providing ethical confidence, comfort, and security without actually securing concrete social amelioration. Levinas claims there is an incommensurable relationship wherein the “same and the other at the same time maintain themselves in relationship and absolve themselves from this relation, remain absolutely separated. The idea of Infinity requires this separation” (102). There are three key concepts involved in Levinas’s explanation of how this relationship in separateness is possible: Desire, “the Face” (le visage), and Discourse. Levinas describes a profoundly human Desire for something infinite, beyond all need: “The infinite in the finite . . . the idea of Infinity, is produced as Desire—not a Desire that the possession of the Desirable slakes, but the Desire for the Infinite which the desirable arouses rather than satisfies” (50). We have, he argues, “A Desire perfectly disinterested—goodness” (50). Instead of understanding ontological relations as primordial, Levinas treats ethical relations and the idea of the Good as establishing first philosophy:

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“Plato nowise deduces being from the Good; he posits transcendence as surpassing the totality . . . The Place of the good above every essence is the most profound teaching, the definitive teaching . . . of philosophy” (103). He relies repeatedly on Plato’s notion of the Good as being beyond the Forms of knowledge. Instead, infinite Desire generates a form of procreative erotic love wherein neither participant is trans-formed: “Here the relation connects not terms that . . . are reciprocally lacking to one another, but terms that suffice to themselves” (103). “The relation with the Other,” Levinas declares, “does not nullify separation” (251). Indeed: “It precisely signifies the absence of a third party capable of taking in me and the other” (251). Clearly, ethics in the conventional ontological sense of consequentialism or deontology does not engage Levinas; instead, it is the realization there is at least one infinite Other in the universe that establishes the ethical relation. The ethical rather than ethics is what concerns him. The shock of encountering the Other that we cannot willfully reduce to the sameness of our constitutive structures awakens us from our solipsistic egotism and to the possibility of relationship: “We name this calling into question of my spontaneity by the presence of the Other ethics” (43, emphasis added). He is concerned with what I call ethical “response-ability.” Whether we respond well or poorly, we must respond. Although Levinas speaks in terms of unqualified ethical obligation to Others and explicitly acknowledges Kantian transcendental influences, Levinas’s “ought” is descriptive rather than prescriptive. What distinguishes Levinas’s ethics from any other is that there is no reciprocity. His “ought” signifies “an obligation, anachronously prior to any commitment,” and this “anteriority is ‘older’ than the a priori” (OB, 101). Levinas finds that the “self, a hostage, is already substituted for the others” (118). In the primordial relation with the Other, the “self is through and through a hostage, older than the ego, prior to principles” (117). The ethical force of this relation, according to Levinas, is that the self ought to substitute for the Other to the point that “the outrage inflicted by the Other” demands “the expiation for his fault by me” (118). It extends so far that “The subjectivity of a subject is responsibility or being in question in the form of the total exposure to offence in the cheek offered to the smiter” (111, emphasis added). This is why Levinas speaks of the self ’s ethical “sacrifice” to the Other (120, inter alia). Levinas’s second key concept that explains the possibility of separateness in relationship is that of “the Face” or “visage”: “The way in which the other presents himself, exceeding the idea of the other in me, we here name face” (51). The Face “does not manifest itself ”; instead, it “expresses itself ” (51). There is a good deal of ambiguity in Levinas’s use of his key terms, but none more than in the idea of the Face. It is helpful in understanding what he means to

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remember his praise of Plato’s beginning of philosophy as an encounter with the Good beyond knowledge of the Forms. While Levinas writes as if he were speaking of visible human faces, he is clear that the “relation with the other alone introduces a dimension of transcendence, and leads us to a relation totally different from experience in the sensible sense of the term” (193). Inattentive readers of Levinas treat his notion of “the Face” as something visible. However, Levinas asserts, “The absolute experience is not disclosure but revelation . . . the manifestation of a face over and beyond form” (65–66). Presumably, if the Face were an Aristotelian empirical eidetic form, we could reduce it to the sameness of our preconceptions. Levinas argues that the Face awakens Discourse in us: “The face speaks. The manifestation of the face is already discourse” (66). Here we have a typical example of the kind of formidable complexity and apparent ambiguity in Levinas’s writing that tempts readers to attribute sensible form to his notion of “face.” However, he continues: Signification is not an ideal essence or relation open to intellectual intuition, thus still analogous to the sensation presented to the eye. It is preeminently the presence of exteriority. . . . It is the production of meaning . . . [I]t is said and taught by presence, and teaching is not reducible to sensible or intellectual intuition, which is the thought of the same. (66)

Levinas comprehends the presence of the Other pedagogically, where the pedagogue is a commanding presence: “This presence dominates him who welcomes it, comes from the heights, unforeseen, and consequently teaches its very novelty” (66, emphasis added). Linguistically, pedagogically, and morally, alterity descends from “height,” that is, from the primordial, authority, goodness, and ultimate power to evoke into new being of Descartes’s God. According to Levinas, it is the self ’s transformative encounter with the authority, priority, and primal power of the Other, felt as the Good, that gives rise in the self to new powers of response, evoking in the self a primal language that later can be expanded in its relational scope and expressed in bodily gestures. Levinas affirms, “Language, far from presupposing universality and generality, first makes them possible. Language presupposes interlocutors, a plurality” (73). He declares: One can, to be sure, conceive of language as an act, as a gesture of behavior. But then one omits the essential of language; the coinciding of the revealer and the revealed in the face, which is accomplished in being situated in height with respect to us—in teaching. (67, emphasis added)

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This response-evoking encounter with the infinite transcendence of the Other is “the first ethical gesture,” preceding and making possible bodily gestures (174). Levinas rejects the traditional metaphysical claim that the “meaning of individuals (invisible outside of this totality) is derived from the totality” (22). In his opinion, the originary relationship of the individual with the transcendence of the infinite Other is “a relationship with a surplus always exterior to the totality,” such that “the objective totality did not fill out the true measure of being” (23). Thus, this originary relationship with the transcendent, infinite Other prevents the individual subject or self from being absorbed into the totality of a rational, or any other kind of, system. Thus, individual “beings have an identity ‘before eternity,’ before the accomplishment of history” (23). Such transcendence cannot be “reabsorbed into the unity of the system”; therefore, our relation with the Other can always preserve our subjectivity from Totality and reduction to Sameness. Levinas asserts that the “ultimate event of being” is “enacted in the outburst of this exteriority,” which is incompatible with the traditional metaphysical claim that “particular beings yield their truth in a Whole in which their exteriority vanishes” (26). No concept framed by human beings can reduce the infinite Other to ontology; instead, it is the original and infinite Other who constitutes us in our irreducibly separate individualities. Later, we will find that William James and John Dewey fully agree that there is always a surplus to any conceptual totality. Levinas’s commitment to the radical alterity of the infinite Other leads him to a kind of antiformalist metaphysical pluralism: This relation, metaphysics, is brought about primordially by the epiphany of the Other in the face. Separation opens up between terms that are absolute and yet in relation, that absolve themselves from the relation they maintain, that do not abdicate it in favor of a totality this relation would sketch out. Thus the metaphysical relation realizes a multiple existing—a pluralism. But this relation would not realize pluralism if the formal structure of the relationship exhausted the essence of the relationship. (T&I, 220)

In Levinas’s pluralism, the various entities cannot actualize plurality if they exist in the Totality of some holistic system, such as Hegel’s Absolute (understood metaphysically), because this affects a reduction to the Same. Levinas’s critique challenges the entire Western monistic metaphysical tradition since Parmenides as falsely Totalizing. Against this tradition, Levinas is a very specific kind of metaphysical atomist who rejects attempts to understand individuals as members of

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metaphysical kinds, or tokens of broad types, because “Numerical multiplicity remains defenseless against totalization” (220). Even atomistic multiplicity, if understood numerically, can be brought back into a system of intelligibility wherein all the parts are placed within a totalizing whole. Although Levinas shows affinity for Leibniz’s windowless monads (219), even these, when understood as “echoes of divine substance, form a totality within its thought” (59). In contrast, Levinas wants to preserve an understanding of individual subjects or selves as atomistically absolute, as entering into relations from whence they may always absolve themselves unchanged. Nonetheless, like Leibniz, Levinas’s entire system of absolvable relations— for I do find it a totalizing system—depends on a quasi-theistic dualism between finite human beings and an infinite Other: An infinity that does not close in upon itself in a circle but withdraws from the ontological extension so as to leave a place for a separated being exists divinely. Over and beyond the totality it inaugurates a society. The relations that are established between the separate being and Infinity redeem what diminution there was in the contraction creative of infinity. Man redeems creation. Society with God is not an addition to God nor a disappearance of the interval that separates God from the creature. By contrast with totalization we have called it religion. Multiplicity and limitation of the creative Infinite are compatible with the perfection of the Infinite; they articulate the meaning of this perfection. (104)

The infinite withdraws from ontological extension allowing the finite to occupy the vacated space. For Levinas (1964/1996), in “Illeity is the origin of the alterity [otherness] of being” (64).1 It is divine in that we can frame no concept, idea, or image of its being. Hence, it may continually call us out of ourselves into the greater mystery. Ordinary everyday others may do the same. A Deweyan Pragmatist Critique and Alternative Reading of Levinas’s Key Concepts I will begin my Deweyan criticisms of Levinas here, with his claim that illeity is a condition of alterity. It is not clear that Levinas’s infinite Other is in fact infinite. Recall that Levinas insists that the “infinite is absolutely other” and “exterior, because it is infinite” (49). However, if the infinite Other does not contain the finite exterior to it, then it too is limited—that is, not infinite. There is an alternative notion of the infinite associated with the apeiron, “the unlimited,” of Anaximander. Such infinity is originally potential, not actual,

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achieving actualization only through creative interaction, including human creativity. Levinas does not consider this alternative construction. Levinas’s construction of the Other explicitly demands asymmetry, lest we reduce the Other to the Sameness of our Totalizing metaphysics and logos. However, because he treats the individual self as held hostage by and having to sacrifice to the infinite Other, it is unclear how Levinas prevents the subject from being reduced to the Sameness of the infinite Other, which means that metaphysical violence still occurs (e.g., “the cheek offered to the smiter”); thus, Being, or a Supreme Being, may yet rule. While God or any “infinite Other” may withdraw to make metaphysical “space” for us, to actualize our multiplicity of possible modes of being, we only occupy the space he defines. The result of Levinas’s asymmetry resembles, and perhaps is, a metaphysical hierarchy. It surly erects barriers to human ethical reciprocity. It could also easily lead to oppression, contrary to his most cherished ethical ideal. In “Violence and Metaphysics,” his critique of Totality and Infinity, Derrida (1964/1978) finds many problems in Levinas’s attempt to escape Western metaphysics. Indeed, Derrida claims Levinas is “very close to Hegel, much closer than he admits, and at the very moment when he is apparently opposed to Hegel in the most radical fashion” (99). Hegel showed us that ordinary others draw us out of ourselves. Even in the master–slave dialectic, the master strives to reduce the slave to his sameness, but ultimately the slave learns, grows, surpasses, and influences the master. In the Hegelian dialectic, both participants eventually lose their self-identity and undergo enduring transformation. Levinas’s play between the Same and the Other is almost dialectical in a very similar way, in spite of his protests. (The German “selbst und fremd ” captures this dialectical sense well.) Indeed, how can the Other reveal itself as anything else than the Other of some Sameness? As Derrida puts it, “Other than must be other than myself ” (126). This also reminds us that we ourselves may be the Other’s other. One wonders, what protects us from the reductive violence of the infinite Other. What should we do if the Other should seek to smite us on our face? Without reciprocity, Levinas cannot define mutually sustaining relations, only absolvable ethical ones, placed, as it seems, within the supposedly transcendent core of finite consciousness. Luce Irigaray (1991) recognizes that Levinas has trouble with the biological, the animalistic, and the intimate. She sees him as committed to detachment, wherein he only draws “the other ‘close’ to him in ‘duality’ ” (111). Such “solitary love” cannot correspond, she writes, to the loss of boundaries which takes place for both lovers when they cross the boundary of the skin into the mucous membranes of the body . . . In this

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relation, we are at least three, each of which is irreducible to any of the others: you, me, and our work (oeuvre). (111)

Levinas cannot comprehend the creative transactions of intimacy that always involve a third emerging simultaneously with the first two, wherein all are cocreatively trans-formed because of shared creative desire. There is something almost mechanical about his absolvable relations. Irigaray prefers a robust naturalism: The question of the face of the natural universe does not seem to me to figure much in the work of Levinas . . . We are not only culturally determined, we remain natural, and nature is the basis from which we can continue to create culture. (113)

In contrast, Levinas thinks dualistically and hierarchically in the quest for ethical certainty beyond the bounds of the natural, hence contingent and ever-changing, world. Moreover, there is no room for relationship building in Levinas’s purportedly ethical notion of hostages sacrificing themselves to the Other. My wife points out to me that women, especially those who have suffered actual blows to the cheek, are inclined to build relationships carefully. They think it is a good idea to get to know the specific other before getting too close. Further, much of the attraction in gendered relationships relies on their nonreductive difference not sameness. Finally, she points out, there is a subtle arrogance in assuming others are not also capable of ethical response to me. Such reflections help restore symmetry to ethical relations. It suggests that at best, Levinas is only half right. Of course, my wife’s observations will not prevent such horrors as the holocaust. However, they do point out something. Sincerely striving to know others and appreciate their differences while carefully building relations often helps avoid tragedy. Although, we must also admit that it may lead to unintended oppression given the Western tendency to reduce otherness to sameness. One only has to think of the role of the priest in European colonialism: They were often more useful than soldiers. Given the contingencies of our natural world, nothing can complete the quest for ethical certainty and security. However, striving to complete the quest in some supernal world may turn our attention away from the anguish in ordinary, empirical faces.2 We must agree with Levinas that ontology is not first philosophy, which means that our primary relation to existence always remains noncognitive.

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Still, why should we turn exclusively to ethics? Consider such aesthetic relations as horror, fascination, revulsion, and engrossment. There are also relations of reverent awe and wonder, as well as physical, chemical, biological relations, and many other kinds of relations.3 Why not respect them all? Levinas’s entire concept of the Infinite—the entirely exterior, incommensurable Other—is based on the Cartesian “thought of an idea whose ideatum overflows the capacity of thought” (49). However, this primal sense or experience of the sources of one’s own living individuality can be and has been expressed and developed in very different ways.4 There is a similar sense of “overflow” in the work of William James and John Dewey as well, but with dramatic differences in their philosophical method of analyzing its meaning and implications. In A Pluralistic Universe, James (1909/1977) states, “The treating of a name as excluding from the fact named what the name’s definition fails positively to include, is what I call ‘vicious intellectualism’ ”(32). Let us quickly make the critical distinction between existence and essence, essence being the distilled import of existence that comprises our concepts and categories. Concepts, categories, objects, meanings, and essences, all of ontology, are what we create for our purposes from otherwise meaningless existence. For James and Dewey there simply are no significant, cognitive meanings in the universe without finite meaning makers. Levinas would not agree. They would agree our concepts distort, or at least deplete, reality. For James (1890/1950), “the only meaning of essence is teleological”; that is, we strive to construct usable meanings, concepts, and categories from otherwise meaningless existence strictly for our purposes (335)—by which he does not just mean the shallow, self-serving “purposes” Bertrand Russell attributed to him, but rather shared human purposes of understanding, making preferable relations with things and people as they are or perhaps can become, and thereby living meaningful and creative lives. Nonetheless, James writes, “the reality overflows these purposes at every pore” (334). There is a significant difference between James’s sense of “overflow” and that shared by Descartes and Levinas. For Levinas, the font or source is only one special idea—the infinite. For James existence, the font or source of all ideas overflows every one of them because no idea can contain the ever-flowing stream of existence. All concepts resemble buckets of water drawn from the stream of reality whose contents we must never confuse with the stream itself. Like Levinas, James also rejects the notion of monistic Totality, or what he calls “the block-universe,” that claims to enclose everything and reduce it to the sameness of antecedently existing categories, concepts, and identities, but he does not attempt to escape it by constructing an infinite Other without external relations:

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[T]he only way to escape from the paradoxes and perplexities that a consistently thought-out monistic universe suffers from as from a species of auto-intoxication—the mystery of the “fall” namely, of reality lapsing into appearance, truth into error, perfection into imperfection; of evil, in short; the mystery of universal determinism, of the block-universe eternal and without a history, etc.—the only way of escape, I say, from all this is to be frankly pluralistic and assume that the superhuman consciousness, however vast it may be, has itself an external environment, and consequently is finite. (140, emphasis added)

Thus, even James’s God(s) all have external relations. Indeed, he goes so far as to insist that “there is a God, but that he is finite” (141). There is no infinite Other, but there are always infinitely many others. God(s) for James may be either good or evil. Of course, Levinas’s construction is necessarily good. Levinas (1964/1996) ends his section on “The Trace,” which concludes his crucial essay, “Meaning and Sense” by stating that God “shows himself only by his trace” (64). Here, we are not following a Husserlian semiotic trace. Therefore, to “go toward Him is not to follow this trace, which is not a sign; it is to go toward the Others who stand in the trace of illeity” (63). We may not move directly toward God, but only toward Others who bear his trace. Ultimately, even ordinary, empirical others bear the trace of “the Other” that in turn bears the trace of God. One senses the anthropomorphic character of Levinas’s construction, which seeks to complete a Cartesian-like quest for certainty and security through pure thought alone. The promise is false, but the human need that constructed it is real. Levinas so devises his transcendental construction as to provide a transcendent Other presumed, not proven, “the Good.” In so doing, he renders us entirely vulnerable to infinite Others and Gods that might be good or evil. For James’s God(s) are neither absolute nor infinite. There is no incommensurable “infinite Other,” although there are others almost incomprehensibly different. Nonetheless, her/his/their functions are “not wholly dissimilar to those of the other smaller parts” (144). These functions include: “having an environment, being in time, and working out a history just like ourselves” (144). James’s construction of “the Other” escapes “the foreignness from all that is human, of the static timeless perfect absolute” (144). In James’s pluralistic universe, all parts are potentially commensurable and interrelatable, unlike in Levinas’s universe. Nothing is entirely foreign. Intimate co-construction as well as destruction is always possible. There is no absolute univocal sameness, no Totality, no cosmic center to which everything tends reductively toward. That does not mean that the various centers

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may not vie violently to reduce each other to their sameness. We cannot eliminate violence from James’s universe anymore than we can eradicate creative cooperation. Compared to James, Levinas’s ideal provides much more ethical comfort. Insofar as the result of Levinas’s construction provides a valuable ideal to guide practical pursuit, I applaud it. My fear is that such a neo-Cartesian supernal construction remains unsustainable while tempting us away from taking concrete ameliorative action in our admittedly violent natural and social world. As said before, it may merely supervene on the world from without only to provide solace for suffering rather than intervene in the world to ameliorate it. We cannot eliminate violence and suffering from Dewey’s and James’s universe as we can from that of Levinas. However, the question remains open as to which construction provides the best promise for practical amelioration. James and Dewey do not think it possible to construct asymmetrical relations. For them, all actions are reciprocally transformative interactions. Besides, constructing asymmetric ethical relations wherein either party must accept blows to the face suggests that what is actually happening effects a reduction of the finite to the infinite Other. It comes close to simple dialectical negation of the problem Levinas correctly diagnoses. James portrays an unfinished and unfinishable universe wherein many kinds of unique individuals participate in an infinity of potential relations with each other. In a creative universe, making disconnections is as critical as making connections. Construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction are needed and continuous. (Think about relationships in your own life.) Every living individual in James’s pluralistic universe has needs, desires, interests, and purposes. As indicated earlier, Köln interactive constructivism always distinguishes observer, participant, and agent orientations in context, although it never attempts to entirely separate them in the abstract. Levinas constructs a decontextualized observer, what Dewey calls a supernal “spectator” stance. Unlike Levinas’s decontextualized observer perspective, actors and participants must engage the world to transform it. Of course, observing the activity in context is immensely valuable. What we would like to comprehend is what Levinas’s transcendental construction of a decontextualized observer offers participants and actors in the natural world. To live and live well, we must seek right relationship and avoid wrong ones. A sense of personal identity is an achievement, not a given as with Levinas. Moreover, for James, a fully achieved personal identity includes—more intimately than in Levinas—interpersonal understanding, loyalty, and commitment to others as distinctive members of interdependent humankind.

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James’s theory of cognition strongly influenced Dewey, as he himself acknowledges (LW 5: 157ff.). Less well known is that Dewey was influenced by James’s pluralism as well, and he explained it very clearly and insightfully: The animating purpose of James was . . . primarily moral and artistic. It is expressed, in his phrase, “ block universe,“ employed as a term of adverse criticism. Mechanism and idealism were abhorrent to him because they both hold to a closed universe in which there is no room for novelty and adventure. Both sacrifice individuality and all the values, moral and aesthetic, which hang upon individuality, for according to absolute idealism, as to mechanistic materialism, the individual is simply a part determined by the whole of which he is a part. Only a philosophy of pluralism, of genuine indetermination, and of change which is real and intrinsic gives significance to individuality. It alone justifies struggle in creative activity and gives opportunity for the emergency of the genuinely new. (LW 14: 101)

Dewey strongly endorses James’s pluralistic universe. Notice he correctly reads James’s pluralism as rejecting Totality as a whole entirely determining individual parts. Further, notice that James’s universe provides for a creative, artistic response to otherness that accompanies and enhances the ethical. Finally, Levinas’s construction tends to sacrifice the finite individual to the infinite Other, James’s does not. Dewey identifies what he calls the “fallacy of unlimited universalization” that occurs “when it is asserted . . . that the goal of thinking, particularly of philosophic thought, is to bring all things whatsoever into a single coherent and all inclusive whole” (LW 6: 8). We will see later that internally unified functional wholes are important to Dewey, but we must never universalize a contingent, evolving unity beyond the specific context wherein it holds. Stefan Neubert (2008), who calls attention to the foregoing passage in Dewey, remarks that ignoring the limits for which a generalization holds “violates an important principle of every pluralist approach—the relatedness of specific perspectives to specific contexts and thus the limitedness and incompleteness of any perspective that we take” (94). Neubert also refers to James’s pluralism to reconstruct and expand Dewey’s pluralism.5 Dewey praises James’s strong metaphysical individualism for aesthetic as well as moral reasons. This is a decisive difference from Levinas, who tends to denigrate participation and action, including creative action. For Dewey, “mind in an individualized mode” is responsible for every “invention, every improvement” (164). We need to distinguish immediate aesthetic appreciation of a quality, which Dewey calls “consummatory experience,” from artistic creation, which requires the use of mediating tools, techniques, language,

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signification, and such to creatively respond to the qualitative situations. Each ultimately depends on the other. This is how we should understand Dewey’s statement that “art, the mode of activity that is charged with meanings capable of immediately enjoyed possession, is the complete culmination of nature, and . . . science . . . conducts natural events to this happy issue” (LW 1: 269). Like James, Dewey also claims that “the great vice of philosophy is an arbitrary ‘intellectualism’,” by which he means the belief that “all experiencing is a mode of knowing” (28). It is not. Dewey distinguishes between meanings as “sense,” which refers to the immediate quality of some situation, from meanings as “signification” that refer to cognitive representation, which always involves mediated reference. When Dewey says that intuition “signifies the realization of a pervasive quality” and that “intuition precedes conception and goes deeper,” he is referring to the grasp of anoetic, immediate, sensed meaning (LW 5: 249). His position is similar to Levinas’s (1964/1996) in his essay “Meaning and Sense,” except that Dewey does not look for “the trace of illeity” (op. cit.). For Dewey, grasping the sense of a situation is intuitive and noncognitive, hence preontological. It precedes any conception whether ethical, aesthetic, or scientific, although prior conceptions may influence our intuitions. It is an immediate, ineffable, and consummatory or consuming experience. We are seized by the situations within which we ourselves are among the participants. We may have endless kinds of immediate aesthetic experiences of the horrible, the beautiful, the ugly, the religious, and the sublime. Although our primary relation to existence is noncognitive, upon reflection, we may conceive them as ethical, artistic, or scientific, or even a combination of all three. Indeed, each of the cultural domains of ethics, aesthetics, and science always influence the other. Useful distinctions often make bad dualisms. We must abandon the diremptions hidden in Kant’s claim that there are three entirely separate domains of culture and existence—ethical, cognitive, or aesthetic. Among other things, that should stop us from turning any one of them into the ultimate foundation or origin of the other two. Dewey distinguishes the value spheres of science, ethics, and aesthetics without sharply separating them. Finite beings require knowledge to artfully create connections (and disconnections) to secure ethical ends. Creating goodness always has a context and it requires passion and purpose. A perfectly decontextualized observer stance toward goodness could never embolden ardent participation and action. The observer stance needs to always articulate with that of the actor and participant within a context of action. In a discussion of the role of “sensitivity and thoughtfulness” in ethics, Dewey invokes the classical Greek “Kalokagathos”; the notion that the

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beautiful, the harmonious, and the good are one (LW 7: 271). He remarks that the “modern mind has been much less sensitivity to aesthetics in general and to these values in conduct in particular.” Levinas is modern in this sense. In Dewey’s view, we often begin our relations with the Other with an immediate, aesthetic intuition that we must then explore artistically, cognitively, and ethically. While Levinas understands that we make things common through linguistic interactions, he does not adequately appreciate the aesthetic and, yes, cognitive moments within ethical action, the felt immediacy of connection, and the creative, mediated character of an individuality-expanding response. This is because he has placed the ethical origin beyond action in a transcendental construction of a transcendent infinite Other. In “Time and Individuality,” Dewey notes there is “a growing recognition that scientific objects are purely relational and have nothing to do with the intrinsic qualities of individual things and nothing to say about them” (LW 14: 104). The examples on which he focuses are the new understanding of gravitation and mass in relativity theory as well as the Heisenberg uncertainty principle in quantum mechanics. Force as a concept has largely ceased to operate in physics and when someone uses the word in the contemporary sense, it stands for a set of functional interactions. What is critical here is that relations, including knowledge relations, constitute the individual objects that participate in them. The Heisenberg principle is a striking naturalistic example of the relational limits of knowability involving the system of the knower and the system of the known. Dewey thought the Heisenberg principle also provided a good illustration of why subject–object dualism is unsustainable (LW 4: 160–164).6 In his struggle to define the supposedly nonempirical unity of the “il y’a,” Levinas’s transcendental construction strives to capture something nonrelational that then enters absolvable relations with other entities. In contrast, Dewey defended codependent origination, wherein functional relations constitute not only our knowledge but also our personal identity. Levinas identifies a subject, an individual, as an interiority that exists before socialization through the encounter with the infinite Other. Irigaray, however, helps us understand why Levinas cannot sustain a naturalistic, living relation between the self (the il y’a, ego, or I) and the Other. A remote, philosophical abstraction, Levinasian individuality survives only if we hypostatize it. By contrast, Dewey only recognizes a precognitive, because prelinguistic, human being that requires socialization to acquire a mind and self, and reflection to critique the culture that created them. Unlike Levinas, Dewey further thinks all living things must act by virtue of being alive, so the notion of a subject before action makes no sense to him. Most importantly, he argues, the functional relations that we enter constitute

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us. Dewey’s commitment to democratic pluralism has its beginnings in the biology of our functional codependence. Once we recognize human beings’ codependent, co-constituting connections, we understand that to care well for ourselves, we must care well for others, and to care well for others, we must care for ourselves. For Dewey, a living function like caring is any “process sufficiently complex to involve an arrangement or coordination of minor processes which fulfills a specific end in such a way as to conserve itself ” (MW 6: 466). He observes that any “operative function gets us behind the ordinary distinction of organism and environment . . . It is primary; distinction is subsequent and derived” (377). Accordingly, “The environment of any organism consists of the sum total of conditions that enter in an active way into the direction of the functions of any living being” (MW 6: 438). It is important to understand that what surrounds someone, say our students, yet does not enter into their functioning, and is not part of their environment. Functions are not simply located: “if asked, ‘where’ a transaction is located, the only possible answer . . . appears in many cases to be that it is located wherever it has consequences” (LW 1: 156). Functions also have temporal distribution: As a moving equilibrium, a function is serial or temporal. This temporal phase introduces the ground of distinction between organism and environment; that is between those sets of factors that represent the maintenance of the function (organism) and those which intervene first as disturbing and then as restoring equilibrium (environment). (MW 13: 378)

Dewey persuasively argues that organisms and environments mutually constitute each other in reciprocal interactions (or more exactly, transactions) that constantly transform both. Thus, neither has ontological, epistemological, or ethical priority over the other. On this basis, Dewey does for the idea of “self ” what he does for the idea of “organism,” treating selves as reciprocally co-constitutive within functional relations. He declares, “The distinction of subject and object is not simultaneous but has reference to phases or stages in a series. The self, subject, individual, like organism, refers to just those factors in a moving and re-organizing function which at any point in the process immediately and directly determine the going on of the process” (379, emphasis added). What is the self and what is the other depends on what disrupts and restores equilibrium in the ongoing transaction. The positioning may reverse rapidly. What is external to our embodied existence is often internal to our functioning. Until those who are “the other” to us become part of the functioning of the self, they cannot reveal themselves

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to us; the converse also holds true. For Dewey, “the other” always has a much more intimate relation to the very constitution of the self than Levinas wishes to acknowledge. To survive and thrive, we must engage in good relationship with others. Thus, Dewey’s democratic construction has a biological, animalistic, and pluralistic beginning among co-constituting selves. For Dewey, all relations are reciprocally transformative transactions. If others reveal themselves to me, and if I respond, then this response may reveal me to them in ways that will make a difference to who they are and what they do in the future. Dewey’s functional transactionalism rejects the disadvantages of Levinas’s radical asymmetry. In transactional relations, there is nothing to prevent the reduction of the Other to the Same, but since it is a transaction, there is nothing to prevent the reduction of the Same to the alternative sameness of the Other. Actually, however, there is never a perfect or totalizing reduction. Every transaction, even the worst kind of master–slave relation, is reciprocally transformative. For instance, the master must do what the slave will obey. We live in a dangerous, sometimes violent, world, which is why many seek supernatural solace. On this topic, Dewey remarks, “The eternal and immutable is the consummation of mortal man’s quest for certainty” (LW 14: 99). Levinas seeks to complete the quest for certainty much as Descartes did—by constructing “the Other” that is a “trace” of an eternal, immutable, and infinite Other or God, rather than a living, vulnerable, evolving other that, like James’s God(s), somewhat resembles ourselves. Like James, Dewey will not accept transcendental constructions of transcendent comfort, even when removed to the other side of the Other. We must work out good relations in the course of natural, everyday events without any transcendental or transcendent assurance, which is why democracy is so important to him. Dewey’s codependent, durationally extensionally distributed, functional individual is still an individual. Internally, the individual is a transactionally interdependent unity. While the larger, functionally coordinated whole contributes to constituting the various subfunctions, through their various transactions, the subfunctions also contribute to constituting the whole. Furthermore, for Dewey as for James, in a pluralistic universe, there are always individuals with which any given individual (even God) has no connection at all. Dewey is not a totalizing holist building on the postParmenidean Western tradition like those on whom Levinas focuses his critique. Instead, Dewey advises us to avoid the fallacy of unlimited universalization, so that we will not be tempted to generalize what holds only imperfectly in any given context “into a single coherent and all inclusive whole” (LW 6: 8).

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Of course, Dewey acknowledges, without some internal functional unity, individuals cannot maintain themselves. The self, like its organic basis, is a functional homeostasis, a dynamic equilibrium. Even so, however, the restoration of equilibrium does not ever involve returning to the same exact state. Dewey proclaims, “The process of organic life is variation . . . Every movement of experience in completing itself recurs to its beginning, since it is a satisfaction of the prompting initial need. But the recurrence is with a difference” (LW 10: 173). When the biological being cannot sustain such a dynamic, functional equilibrium, it dies. When the self cannot do this, it becomes psychologically shattered. The same holds for societies, including democratic societies. Levinas acknowledges that relations with others are necessary to the acquisition of a specific, postprimal language as well as to its wider generalization. Indeed, he states that “the relation between the same and the other . . . is language” (1961/1995, 39). For him, such relations also bring about self-consciousness. Surprisingly, Dewey and his close colleague George Herbert Mead agree with Levinas that a human being’s relation with “the other” is more important in the development of language and a self ’s specific linguistic capability than the primitive behavioral gestures out of which these develop. There are major differences in their accounts of these processes, however. First, Levinas assumes an infinite Other descending from transcendent “height” as the original evoker or teacher of language, while Dewey and Mead give a completely naturalistic, empirical account in which the construction of meaning-functions, minds, and selves resembles the dynamic, pluralistic structure of a biological function. For them, the linguistically primordial “other” is an ordinary living creature, which is miracle enough. The second major difference is that whereas Levinas finds that the relation with the Other “does not nullify separation,” because there is no “third party capable of taking in me and the other,” there is always a mediating third in Dewey and Mead’s theory of language (Levinas 1961/1995). Recall Luce Irigaray’s remark that there is always at least “you, me, and our work (oeuvre)” (Irigaray 1991, 111). Finally, for Dewey and Mead, the same and the other are always involved in mutually transforming transactions. For Dewey, to have a mind is to have meanings, and we only acquire meanings by participating in mutually transformative sociolinguistic practices. The idea of participating in a social situation from the standpoint of others is the most crucial component in his theory of language. We may read the following vignette Dewey sketched as describing a dramatic dialogical transaction involving two emergent beings, (A) and (B), who are co-creating a namable object (O):

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The characteristic thing about B’s understanding of A’s movement and sounds is that he responds to the thing from the standpoint of A. He perceives the thing as it may function in A’s experience, instead of just ego-centrically. Similarly, A in making the request conceives the thing not only in its direct relationship to himself, but as a thing capable of being grasped and handled by B. He sees the thing as it may function in B’s experience. Such is the essence and import of [linguistic] communication, signs and meaning. Something is literally made common in at least two different centres of behavior. To understand is to anticipate together . . . [It is] a transaction in which both participate. (LW 1: 141)

Instead of demonstrating nonreciprocity, both (A) and (B) emerge together as they strive to coordinate their transaction around a co-created emerging object (O). As this vignette displays, while others are perhaps external to our embodied existence, they are always internal to our linguistic functioning. A great deal of empirical research now confirms that being able to take the attitude of others toward a third thing is vital to language acquisition (see Tomasello, 1999, 2008). Just as Dewey argued, such representative meaning functions involve “agreement in action; of shared modes of responsive behavior and participation in their consequences” (LW 12: 52). Levinas is right in his view that we owe our minds and selves to others, but wrong that we owe them to the infinite Other. Moreover, because of dependent co-origination, others owe their minds and selves to us, as well. Mead (1922/1964) extends Dewey’s thinking on these topics when he argues that self-consciousness emerges through agent-reflexive acts: The self arises in conduct, when the individual becomes a social object in experience to himself. This takes place when the individual assumes the attitude or uses the gesture which another individual would use and responds to it himself, or tends so to respond . . . He acts toward himself in a manner analogous to that in which he acts toward others. Especially he talks to himself as he talks to others and in keeping up this conversation in the inner forum constitutes the field which is called that of mind. (243)

For Mead (1932/1959), in “the process of [linguistic] communication the individual is an other before he is a self ” (168). For him, “others and the self arise in the social act together” (169). These points lead to Mead’s famous idea that the self develops by “taking the attitude of the generalized other” (245). The “generalized other” is simply an imaginative extension of actual, experienced, functional transactions with the expressed attitudes of specific

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others. Here is how Mead describes it: “In taking the role which is common to all, he finds himself speaking to himself and to others with the authority of the group” (245). If we take Mead’s analysis of the transactional process of emergence of the me, the I, and the generalized other seriously, we may agree with Levinas that others are necessary for the emergence of self-consciousness, but should insist that our self is necessary to the emerging self-consciousness of others as well. Once we understand this transactional fact, we should become as ethically concerned with maintaining good social relations as we are with good biological relations since both are equally necessary to sustaining our existence. For Mead (1934/1967), social objects (persons) emerge before physical objects: The child gets his solutions of what from our standpoint are entirely physical problems . . . through his social reaction to those about him. . . . The human individual thinks first of all entirely in social terms. This means . . . not that nature and natural objects are personalized, but that the child’s reactions to nature and its objects are social reactions, and that his responses imply that the actions of natural objects are social reactions. (377)

Instead of seeking a “trace” of Levinas’s illeity in the alterity disclosed in discourse, the pragmatist accepts that there is always a lingering trace of ordinary social beings and the things they create in common within our everyday language. Instead of seeking solace in a transcendental construction of a transcendent infinite Other, he seeks social amelioration in his empirical construction of a democratic ideal of social justice. In Democracy and Education, Dewey comments that what we “must have in common in order to form a community or society are aims, beliefs, aspirations, knowledge—a common understanding—like-mindedness as the sociologists say” (MW 9: 7). Alphonso Lingis is suspicious that these necessary aspects of thinking in common inevitably lead to Levinasian Totalization and Sameness. Taken in isolation they could. Dewey, however, insists on a pluralistic and transactional notion of communication: Not only is social life identical with communication, but call communication (and hence all genuine social life) is educative. To be a recipient of a communication is to have an enlarged and changed experience. One shares in what another has thought and felt and in so far, meagerly or amply, has his own attitude modified. Nor is the one who communicates left unaffected. (8)

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If communication transforms both parties, they cannot reduce each other to the same. This does not do away with the horrors of the master—slave dialectic, imperialism, and the rest of the evils that motivate the shared concerns of Levinas and Lingis. However, the transcendent ethical constructions they offer, such as nonviolence to the infinite Other, only provide a remote, abstract, and metaphysical position, when what we need is concrete political action that will transform the social relations these concepts delineate. His concerns with the concrete and the practical turns Dewey’s attention to the art of communication to evoke in our imagination new, liberating forms to social living in “democratic communities” that can become the focus of collaborative inquiries as well as passionately motivate creative changes in our habits and the customs of our culture. For Dewey, “All communication is like art” (9), and all communication is mutually transformative; to recall Irigaray’s comment yet again, in creative relations there are “you, me, and our work (oeuvre)” (Irigaray 1991, 111). We creatively make things common in desirable ways when we work to actualize a democratic way of life: A democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience. The extension in space of the number of individuals who participate in an interest so that each has to refer his own action to that of others, and to consider the action of others to give point and direction to his own, is equivalent to the breaking down of those barriers of class, race, and national territory which kept men from perceiving the full import of their activity. (93)

Dewey commits himself to a creative, pluralistic, and communicative mode of democratic social living that could satisfy the two criteria we discussed in the introduction to this chapter. Once we understand the codependent sociolinguistic construction of our minds and selves, we not only arrive at the core of Dewey’s constructivism, we also better understand his dedication to creative democracy. In “Creative Democracy—The Task Before Us,” Dewey declares: 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 persons but is a means of enriching one’s own life-experience, is inherent in the democratic personal way of life . . . For to get rid of the habit of thinking of democracy as something institutional and external and to acquire the habit of

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treating it as a way of personal life is to realize that democracy is a moral ideal and so far as it becomes a fact is a moral fact. (LW 14: 228–229)

Like Levinas, Dewey’s stance toward the other goes far beyond liberal tolerance because that individual has rights. Both realize we need the other if we are to learn and to grow. For both Levinas and Dewey, this is “a moral fact.” The difference is that, for Dewey, it is also an aesthetic and artistic fact about creative democracy: When we encounter others different from ourselves, we must work to create meaning in common, felt as such. The democratic faith is that such creative action is possible, which is not to say that violence will not often occur in the growth processes of struggle for democracy. We cannot live without others to sustain us, Dewey argues, and we cannot achieve self-expression, personal re-creation, and growth without others different from ourselves: When the idea that development is due to some indwelling end which tends to control the series of changes passed through is abandoned, potentialities must be thought of in terms of consequences of interactions with other things. Hence potentialities cannot be known till after the interactions have occurred. There are at a given time unactualized potentialities in an individual because and in as far as there are in existence other things with which it has not as yet interacted. (LW 14: 109)

This is a pluralistic, transaction-dependent notion of human potential. We cannot create novel meaning, including the meaning of our own life, without others different from ourselves. Meanwhile, transactionally, the other needs our otherness. For Dewey, unlike Levinas, social and moral individuality emerges via mutually modifying social transactions. Such individuality is not “an original possession or gift. It is something to be achieved, to be wrought out” (LW 2: 61). For him, a common and serious mistake occurs when “the individual is regarded as something given” (MW 12: 190). This eros leads to a failure to recognize the importance of specific environmental factors in the transactions that bring particular social and moral individuals into being: When the individual is taken as something given already, anything that can be done to him or for him can only be by way of external impressions . . . Now it is true that social arrangements, laws, institutions are made for man, rather than that man is made for them . . . But they are not means for obtaining

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something for individuals, not even happiness. They are means of creating individuals. Only in the physical sense of physical bodies that to the senses are separate is individuality an original datum. Individuality in a social and moral sense is something to be wrought out. It means initiative, inventiveness, varied resourcefulness, assumption of responsibility in choice of belief and conduct. These are not gifts, but achievements. As achievements, they are not absolute but relative to the use that is to be made of them. And this use varies with the environment. (190–191)

For Dewey, individuals constantly co-create each other. We do not find social and moral individuals; we make them. Since it provides the best social relations and institutions for creating the freest and wisest individuals, who are also the most grateful to others, we should desire and work for pluralistic, communicative democracy. Conclusion I want to conclude by reconsidering Dewey’s two criteria for evaluating the worth of social life and how they lead to pluralistic democracy. I do so by referring to the writings of Kersten Reich (2008), one of the founders of Köln interactive constructivism. Reich insightfully recognizes that Dewey’s two criteria leave him “confronted with a paradoxical task” and observes that this “paradox of the relation between diversity and commonality is but another manifestation of the fundamental democratic paradox between freedom and solidarity” (61). Remember, however, that a paradox is a seemingly absurd statement that, when explored, may prove perspicuous. In defending that Deweyan democratic communities are possible as well as desirable modes of social living, what we want to show is that they include both enough sameness to have a good conversation and enough difference to make it worth having. Reich writes, “Such [Deweyan democratic] discourse presupposes a pluralistic universe of interpretive communities” (66). In this way, we resolve Levinas’s exclusive either/ors—either sameness or difference, either Totality or Infinity. Reich approvingly characterizes Dewey’s two criteria for desirable modes of social living as “democratic metaperspectival.” However, he remarks that Dewey does not adequately comprehend the ambivalence of progress and overlooks issues of power in relational differences. Therefore, Reich reconstructs Dewey’s account of the meaning and methods of achieving creative democratic communities by multiplying the multiperspectival dimensions. As we saw earlier, interactive constructivism distinguishes observer, participant, and agent perspectives in context, although it never attempts to pull them completely apart.

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Employing this method, Reich suggests a simple reconstruction that helps us derive more meaning from the paradox of sameness and difference. He notes that Dewey “conceives his criteria mainly from a participant perspective” that does not expect to arrive at “any universally applicable [totalizing] theoretical solution” (71–72). All criteria, all facts, all social institutions, and so on are contingent social constructions. As participants in a democracy, we must co-create criteria, facts, institutions, and such. Reich remarks that as “a participant in a democracy, for example, we need first of all to decide what structural possibilities we need in order to live democratically” (73). As participants, however, we cannot readily recognize the contingency of our own, often hard-won constructions, for example, “revolution founded my nation.” Therefore, we need “critical observers of such participation” that “continually question who sets the criteria that seemingly determine our actions and observations” (73). As I understand Reich’s proposal, such a critical observer could provide a valuable third perspective outside the factual and interpretative frameworks of any two participating persons, interest groups, and so on. Instead of Irigaray’s “you, me, and our work,” there would be you, me, and other observers, participants, and agents who contribute to collectively de/re/constructing it. Finally, Reich writes, “We must recognize how in actions and interactions, such facts have been constructed by humans” (73). Thus, no appeal to putatively human-independent facts can substitute for the role of Reich’s critical observers within democratic discourse. Consider the history of the United States, my country. The participants who wrote the original Constitution socially constructed the political criteria, institutions, and facts of the nation to completely exclude slaves, women, and Native Americans from the participatory roles of full democratic citizenship. Decades of observer critique and political action led to the nation’s Civil War and the emancipation of slaves, the right to vote for Black males, and several constitutional amendments, thereby reconstructing the participation pattern. More decades of critique and action led to the right to vote for women and Native Americans. Today, these old struggles for civil rights and equality are far from finished, even as new challenges arise. Nonetheless, the inclusion of these previously excluded peoples has slowly reconstructed the facts and meaning of the nation and released a greater portion of its moral potential. Whether my own or any other nation continues to find ways to include otherness and difference is something philosophical theories can inform, but not decide. I am not currently confident whether many nations, and especially mine, have the ability to avoid reduction of otherness and difference to sameness, either domestically or internationally. Democracy may yet fail for many reasons. One of the most serious threats is failing to be sufficiently pluralistic.

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Philosophical theories like Dewey’s pragmatism and Reich’s closely related interactive constructivism are practical if they can provide critiques and inform creative actions that alter participation and release moral potential. Recognizing that all social constructions are contingent, we may hope to expose the workings of power in building them. Too often Dewey overlooked the unavoidability of conflict in a pluralistic society. Nonetheless, Dewey’s democratic criteria, suitably modified, can embrace the paradox of sameness and otherness to help us create meaning, even in conflict. In this way, we can appreciate the importance of Levinas’s insight into the tendency of Western thought to constantly reduce “the Other” to “the Same” and the importance of appreciating the incomprehensibility of the Other while also sharing his hope for a less violent world. Notes 1. “Illeity” implies the impossibility of any direct, intimate, personal relation with God. 2. There is massive empirical evidence that the ability to interpret facial gestures as signs of pain is culturally universal (although, of course, what it may mean to the interpreter is not). See Ekman (1973) and Garrison (2003). 3. For additional details of Derrida and Irigaray’s criticisms of Levinas’s views, as well as other concerns of my own, see Garrison (2008). 4. Elsewhere he writes, “In the Western tradition, meaningful thought is thetic. It thinks what is posited (to think is to posit)” and it “is expressed by the verb ‘to be’ ” (131). 5. Neubert (2008) explores aspects of Dewey’s pluralistic theory of experience with its emphasis on “qualitative individuality, originality, creativity, and incommensurability as inextinguishable traits of experience” (89). He also proposes a number of helpful reconstructions of Dewey by drawing on the resources of Köln interactive constructivism. 6. Dewey finds that the “actual force and significance,” of the Heisenberg principle, “is generalization of the idea that the individual is a temporal career whose future cannot be logically deduced from its past” (LW 14: 107).

References Derrida, J. (1964/1978). Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas. In Alan Bass (trans.) Writing and Difference. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 79–153. Descartes, R. (1641/2006). Meditations, Objections, and Replies. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. Ekman, P. (1973). Darwin and Facial Expression: A Century of Research in Review. New York: Academic Press.

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Garrison, Jim (2003). Dewey’s Theory of Emotions: The Unity of Thought and Emotion in Naturalistic Functional “Co-ordination” of Behavior. Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, Vol. XXXIX, No. 3, 405–443. Garrison, Jim (2008). Ethical Obligation and Avoiding Self-Sacrifice in Caring for the Other: Reflections on Levinas. In Denise Egea-Kuehne (ed.) Levinas and Education: At the Intersection of Faith and Reason. New York: Routledge, 272–285. Irigaray, L. Questions (1991). To Emmanuel Levinas on the Divinity of Love. In R. Bernasconi and S. Critchley (eds.) Re-Reading Levinas. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 109–118. James (1909/1977). A Pluralistic Universe. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Levinas, E. (1961/1995). Totality and Infinity. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Levinas, E. (1964/1996). Meaning and Sense. In Adriaan T. Peperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi (eds.) Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Levinas, E. (1978/1981). Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981. Lingis, A. (1994). The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Mead, G. H. (1922/1964). A Behavioristic Account of the Significant Symbol. In Andrew J. Reck (ed.) Selected Writings: George Herbert Mead. Chicago: The University Of Chicago Press, 240–247. Mead, G. H. (1932/1959). The Philosophy of the Present. LaSalle, IL: The Open Court Publishing Company. Mead, G. H. (1934/1967). Mind, Self, and Society: From the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist. Charles W. Morris (ed.). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Neubert, S. (2008). Dewey’s Pluralism Reconsidered—Pragmatist and Constructivist Perspectives on Diversity and Difference. In Jim Garrison (ed.) Reconstructing Democracy, Recontextualizing Dewey: Pragmatism and Interactive Constructivism in the Twenty-First Century. Albany, New York: State University Press of New York. Reich, K. (2008). Democracy and Education after Dewey—Pragmatist Implications for Constructivist Pedagogy. In Jim Garrison (ed.) Reconstructing Democracy, Recontextualizing Dewey: Pragmatism and Interactive Constructivism in the Twenty-First Century. Albany, New York: State University Press of New York. Tomasello, M. (1999). The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Tomasello, M. (2008). Cooperation and Communication in the 2nd Year of Life. Child Development Perspectives, Vol. 1, No. 1, 8–12.

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CHAPTER 8

Reconstruction of Philosophy and Inquiry into Human Affairs—Deweyan Pragmatism in Dialogue with the Postmodern Sociology of Zygmunt Bauman Stefan Neubert and Kersten Reich

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n this chapter, we want to open up a dialogue between Deweyan pragmatism and the postmodern sociology of Zygmunt Bauman (born 1925). Writing from the perspective of the Cologne program of interactive constructivism,1 we think that Bauman can be a promising dialogue partner not only for present-day Deweyan pragmatism but also generally for theories of culture and society in our time.2 We suggest that cultural and social theories are always constructions out of the contexts of their time. In accord with Deweyan pragmatism, we see the continual need of reconstruction and the need of taking into account the open-endedness of cultural and social developments in which we are involved. Bauman’s sociological descriptions and analyses of human affairs in modernity and postmodernity can be taken as a challenge and occasion for reconstructing pragmatic and constructive philosophy today. We proceed in several steps and discuss among other things both author’s contributions to themes like emancipation, individualism and capitalism, freedom and culture, work and labor, democracy, and education.

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1 Philosophy and Human Affairs In his new introduction to the 1948 reprint of Reconstruction in Philosophy (MW 12: 256–277), John Dewey says that today—some 25 years after the original publication—he would prefer the title “Reconstruction of Philosophy.” Philosophy, as he points out, is in constant need of reconstruction because “the distinctive office, problems and subject matter of philosophy grow out of stresses and strains in the community life in which a given form of philosophy arises . . . ” Accordingly, “its specific problems vary with the changes in human life that are always going on and that at times constitute a crisis and a turning point in human history” (MW 12: 256). Dewey cites the scientific, industrial, and political revolutions of the last few centuries as instances of crucial changes that amount to historical turning points in human life. In addition, he argues that in face of such unprecedented developments, the call for reconstruction in response to the new situation is not a sign of disesteem toward the “great systems of the past,” but a necessary attempt to save philosophy’s “actuality” (ibid., 257). Dewey thinks that one great challenge posed to philosophical reconstruction is constituted by the fact that modernity, as he sees it, is still “unformed” and “inchoate” (ibid., 273), caught up in contradictions, uncertainties, confusions, and ambiguities between “an old and a new that are incompatible” (ibid.). He does not claim that the task of finding constructive solutions to this entangled situation is a work that can be achieved by philosophers or any other group of experts. Rather, it is a practical task that needs to be done by “human beings as human” (ibid., 277). This conviction, of course, reflects Dewey’s deep commitment to democracy and democratic problem solving as the necessary response to the problems that arise in social developments. His commitment is closely related to his belief in the potentialities of social intelligence as a shorthand designation for the ideal of settling conflicts and solving problems by methods of experimentation, cooperation, and discussion under conditions of free and inclusive participation of all involved. In the 1948 new introduction, he insists that the ideal of social intelligence has so far been realized only partly in modern life: “Intelligence,” he claims about his use of the word, stands for “great and ever-growing methods of observation, experiment and reflective reasoning,” which have revolutionized the physical and physiological conditions of life, but “have not as yet been worked out for application to what is itself distinctively and basically human” (ibid., 258). The split also applies, according to Dewey, to inquiry in the more specialized sense of science: “The science that has so far found its way deeply and widely into the actual affairs of human life,” he complains, “is partial and incomplete science” (ibid., 269).

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What is needed in this situation is, according to Dewey, more intelligent and cooperative inquiry into “matters of supreme significance to man—those which are distinctively of, for, and by, man” (ibid.)—that is, social inquiry and inquiry into human affairs. He believes that in this situation one crucial challenge for philosophical reconstruction lies in contributing to and furthering a general intellectual climate or “atmosphere” that is supportive to the further development of methods and practices of intelligent and experimental inquiry in social matters and human affairs: “Here, then, lies the reconstructive work to be done by philosophy. It must undertake to do for the development of inquiry into human affairs and hence into morals what the philosophers of the last few centuries did for promotion of scientific inquiry in physical and physiological conditions and aspects of human life” (ibid., 266). Among other things, he mentions the state of sociological inquiry in his time and criticizes its positivist reductionism: “When ‘sociological’ theory withdraws from consideration of the basic interests, concerns, the actively moving aims, of a human culture on the ground that ‘values’ are involved and that inquiry as ‘scientific’ has nothing to do with values, the inevitable consequence is that inquiry in the human area is confined to what is superficial and comparatively trivial . . . ” (ibid., 268). And he claims that “if and when inquiry attempts to enter in critical fashion into that which is human in its full sense,” it will of necessity have to confront the present impact of traditions, institutional customs, and prejudices passed down from previous ages and have to respond to the deep contradictions and ambivalences that pervade modernity (ibid.). It is against this background that we want to open up a dialogue between Deweyan pragmatism and the postmodern sociology of Zygmunt Bauman. In accord with the need of reconstruction in philosophy, interactive constructivism distinguishes, among other things, between several perspectives in which such reconstructions take place and make sense. One perspective is that of observers and observations. This is a common viewpoint in the social sciences as far as they are interested in giving descriptions and empirical explorations of social reality and human affairs. The position of observers is a necessary condition in all inquiry and experimentation. Science cannot do without it. But already Dewey was quite aware of the fact that it is not sufficient to take only the perspective of observation into account. He rejected traditional spectator theories of knowledge, precisely because they isolated observation from contexts of participation and action. For him, observation always takes place in cultural contexts (cf. LW 6: 3–21), and we need additional categories to interpret and understand this relationship. Interactive constructivism here focuses on at least two more perspectives that have to be seen in their interrelation with observers and observation, namely the perspectives of participation and action. This distinction is not unfamiliar

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to Deweyan pragmatists,3 we think, although Dewey does not always use it explicitly and systematically. In the following text, we will employ this basic constructivist distinction, among other things, to show potential relations between the work of Dewey and Bauman. For Bauman as well as Dewey, the rejection of conventional copy theories of knowledge that neglect the inevitable connections between observation, participation, and action is a presupposition of their social and political thought. Bauman takes his contextualism to a large degree from Richard Rorty, to whom he often refers as one of the leading philosophers of our times. Comparing Dewey with Bauman, the focus of our analysis will be on the tension between philosophical and scientific theories on the one hand and inquiries into human affairs on the other hand. Both authors are particularly strong in showing how human affairs time and again pose a challenge to the further development of our cultural and social thinking. 2

Bauman and Dewey as Observers of Modernity and Postmodernity

Our intention is not to give a comparison between Dewey and Bauman in the strict sense, because this seems to be impossible for us from the start. Their approaches are too different in methodological frames, conceptual foundations, and contexts of orientation. Unlike Dewey, Bauman does not give us a comprehensive and systematical philosophical approach but his interest as a sociologist of postmodernity is to provide critical descriptions and sometimes provocative diagnoses of social reality and human affairs. Our main thesis in this chapter is that we can use Bauman’s contributions to refresh and inspire the reconstruction of Dewey’s pragmatism today. At the same time, we want to suggest that Dewey offers a broad and still relevant philosophical theory and perspective that can contribute to reflecting more comprehensively and systematically the grounds of critical social inquiry in our time. Therefore, what we intend to present is a more mutually productive dialogue than a comparison. In what follows, we will try to show how a connection of Bauman’s and Dewey’s perspectives can be a valuable and mutually beneficial endeavor. We will focus on some crucial affinities that make both approaches compatible, at least in important parts. Further, we will discuss some differences in conception, interpretation, and emphasis that make their respective contributions mutually complementary. Our hope is that the intended dialogue will appear to the reader as a productive border-crossing project. In this way, we wish to show not only the actuality of Dewey’s philosophy but also the possibility of using Bauman’s postmodern sociology as a theoretical challenge and resource for further developing pragmatism and constructivism.

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2.1 Modernity and the Challenge of Ambivalence Let us look first on modernity, the context in which Dewey articulated himself and on which Bauman critically reflects from some distance today. According to Bauman, one of the most crucial features of modernity is its quest for order. More specifically, the order that modernity strives for is something that must be brought about, intentionally, that is, something that must be produced and superimposed on the world through human endeavor. The quest for order therefore takes the form of a continual and progressive project. Modernity, according to Bauman, is marked by the discovery that order is not natural; it is a time when order is reflected upon and becomes a deliberate task (cf. Bauman 1993a, 4–6). Order is achieved by classification that involves acts of inclusion and exclusion that often follow a binary code of opposition. Any such “operation of inclusion/exclusion is an act of violence perpetrated upon the world, and requires the support of a certain amount of coercion” (ibid., 2). Order promises clarity, transparency, certainty of prediction, and control. Yet, ironically, the ordering work of classification also inevitably entails the emergence of ambivalence as a “side-product.” Bauman tells us that this is so because no “binary classification deployed in the construction of order can fully overlap with essentially non-discrete, continuous experience of reality. The opposition, born of the horror of ambiguity, becomes the main source of ambivalence. The enforcement of any classification inevitably means the production of anomalies . . . ” (ibid., 61) Hence, he concludes that ambivalence is “the waste of modernity, . . . arguably the modern era’s most genuine worry and concern, since unlike other enemies, defeated and enslaved, it grows in strength with every success of modern powers. It is its own failure that the tidying-up activity construes as ambivalence” (ibid., 15). Of necessity, the modern quest for order goes hand in hand with struggles against ambivalence—the passionate endeavor to get rid of indeterminateness, ambiguities, undecidabilities, excessive meanings, and overor underdefined entities. Since the task is itself impossible—a struggle that cannot be won—modernity, for Bauman, restlessly produces new attempts at building order and purging ambivalence. Bauman’s reference in the above quote to “essentially non-discrete, continuous experience of reality” as that comprehensive background against which modern order is constructed and simultaneously as that “touchstone” that sets limits to any particular construction of order may be used here as a first opportunity for connecting his approach with seminal insights of Deweyan pragmatism. Seen from a Deweyan perspective, the modern quest for order and the more general intellectual quest for certainty, which was a repeated target of Dewey’s philosophical critique, both suffer from the same

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disease—namely, failure to recognize and fully accept human experience in all of its diverse qualities, dark and apparent, ambiguous and settled, and precarious and stable. For Dewey, experience in an open and unfinished universe is of necessity characterized by order as well as contingency. Both are ineradicable traits of natural existence (cf. LW 1, LW 4). But modern thought, in its quest for order, rationality, and progress, often tends to neglect its necessary opposite. “Our magical safeguard against the uncertain character of the world is to deny the existence of chance, to mumble universal and necessary law, the ubiquity of cause and effect, the uniformity of nature, universal progress, and the inherent rationality of the universe” (LW 1: 45). Dewey observes (as Bauman does) that the most influential safeguard for this neglect in modern thought is scientific and technological progress. “Through science we have secured a degree of power of prediction and of control; through tools, machinery and an accompanying technique we have made the world more comfortable to our needs, a more secure abode . . . ” (ibid.). However, the very results of rationality and progress remain ambiguous in that they produce new solutions as well as new problems. The order they achieve cannot do away with the precarious phase of human experience because their solutions are always partial and selective. “Selective emphasis, choice, is inevitable whenever reflection occurs” (LW 1: 34). They of necessity involve omissions as to the possible consequences of constructed and applied solutions. “Strain thought as far as we may and not all consequences can be foreseen or made an express or known part of reflection and decision” (ibid., 28). Therefore, “when all is said and done, the fundamentally hazardous character of the world is not seriously modified, much less eliminated” (ibid., 45). And Dewey points to the destructive excesses of modern life to underline the inevitability of this concession. “Such an incident as the last war and preparations for a future war remind us that it is easy to overlook the extent to which, after all, our attainments are only devices for blurring the disagreeable recognition of a fact, instead of means of altering the fact itself ” (ibid.). Dewey’s theory of experience does not deny scientific claims to objectivity. His book on Logic (LW 12) extensively investigates the processes and conditions of inquiry in this and other respects. However, claims to objectivity are always connected with experience and its temporal and spatial contexts. Therefore, objectivity does not exclude selectivity of interests but represents a specific interest related to specific contexts of observation, participation, and action. In “Context and Thought,” he writes, “To be ‘objective’ in thinking is to have a certain sort of selective interest operative. One can only see from a certain standpoint, but this fact does not make all standpoints of equal value. A standpoint which is nowhere in particular and from which things are not seen at a special angle is an absurdity. But one may have affection for a

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standpoint which gives a rich and ordered landscape rather than for one from which things are seen confusedly and meagerly” (LW 6: 14–15).4 Bauman’s analysis and critique of modern culture, such is our thesis in this chapter, bears important affinities to this pragmatist cultural theory and critique. Bauman himself does not seem to note these affinities. Although he more than occasionally refers to the work of Richard Rorty, he does not in any details discuss the possible connections between his own approach and the classical pragmatist tradition. Nevertheless, similarities are striking, for example, when Bauman writes about the unfulfilled claims of modernity and its contradictions: “The ideal of the naming/classifying function strives to achieve is a sort of commodious filing cabinet that contains all the files that contain all the items that the world contains—but confines each file and each item within a separate place of its own . . . It is the non-viability of such a filing cabinet that makes ambivalence unavoidable. And it is the perseverance with which construction of such a cabinet is pursued that brings forth ever new supplies of ambivalence” (Bauman 1993a, 2). In this connection, he argues that modernity regards “fragmentation of the world” as one of its most important achievements and strengths (cf. ibid., 12). This is pretty close to the following account given in Dewey’s Art as Experience: “The institutional life of mankind is marked by disorganization. This disorder is often disguised by the fact that it takes the form of static division into classes, and this static separation is accepted as the very essence of order as long as it is so fixed and so accepted as not to generate open conflict. Life is compartmentalized and the institutionalized compartments are classified as high and as low; their values as profane and spiritual, as material and ideal. Interests are related to one another externally and mechanically, through a system of check and balances . . . Compartmentalization of occupations and interests brings about separation of that mode of activity commonly called ‘practice’ from insight, of imagination from executive doing, of significant purpose from work, of emotion from though and doing . . . Those who write the anatomy of experience then suppose that these divisions inhere in the very constitution of human nature” (LW 10: 26–27). The affinities are not limited to occasional details of inquiry but apply to the very core concepts that both authors use. They suggest a common attitude toward certain basic features of modernity as an open and contradictory project. Like Dewey, Bauman takes his start from concrete experience as it is lived by men and women in their times, although he does not provide a philosophical elaboration of “experience” that is comparable to Dewey’s. Writing as a sociologist, Bauman rather concentrates on the description and interpretation of life experiences in the changing contexts of society. Thereby he shows that the solid grounds that modernity attempted to establish have

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been subverted by increasing fluidity of living that brings their inherent contradictions to the fore. Bauman here speaks of the experience of uncertainty that has become a major source of discontent in postmodernity (cf. Bauman 1997). In his theory of modern culture, Dewey already extensively reflected on the tension between the precarious and the stable aspects of human life experiences. For him, this tension was important for philosophical reflection in many aspects, and he regarded “the precarious and the stable” as an important conceptual tool for philosophical perspectives on social as well as individual developments, for example, in culture, communication, education, and all kinds of practices, routines, and institutions. In comparison to Dewey, Bauman does not put the same emphasis on the theoretical reflection of continuity in experience, because he provides no theory of social action that is comparable to Dewey’s. His strong point rather consists in his accurate and very detailed descriptions of the role that contingency plays in social life in the transitions from modernity to postmodernity. In many regards, he does for our time what Dewey did in his, given Dewey’s continuous and lifelong dealings with social realities and human affairs in all their contingencies and contradictions. Dewey was already aware of cultural diversity, multicultural life conditions, and the import of difference in social life against the background of huge migration in America. He critically reflected on the implications of these developments for democracy as a way of life. In Democracy and Education (cf. MW 9: 89), he developed, among other things, two basic criteria for founding and assessing the democratic quality of communities or societies. Both criteria point to pluralism and the constructive recognition of difference. The first criterion asks thus: How numerous and varied are the consciously shared interests within a community? This points to the necessary appreciation of internal diversity within a community. The second criterion asks this question: How complete and unhindered is the exchange taking place with other communities? This points to the necessity of comprehensive exchange between different groups, cultures, and societies. Democracy can only grow to that degree in which these two criteria are actively realized and experienced by all members of a society. Dewey uses his criteria for an approach that is oriented in the first place toward solving problems and constructing viable solutions. Therefore, he insists that democracy is necessarily connected to education. Bauman’s discourse is more descriptive and seems to fulfill a sort of “therapeutic” function in the sense defined by Richard Rorty. He opens our eyes to often neglected, hidden, and concealed aspects of post/modern life. Bauman interprets the development of modernity and modern forms of individualization as a product of changes in social relations and structures rather

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than a mere product of enlightenment and liberal discourse (cf. Bauman 1993b, 6). Modernity can never reach the point of declaring the completion of its projects. As Bauman argues in his Postmodern Ethics, it cannot even achieve a “non-ambivalent, non-aporetic ethical code,” which every rational man will choose as the best chance to live (ibid., 9). Yet this dream has always been a moving force in modern thinking. Its surrender is one central principle of postmodernity for Bauman. This is a point where Bauman clearly thinks beyond Dewey and Dewey’s time. In what follows, we will try to show that both authors are comparable in their sense for the necessity of giving a multiperspective portrait of human affairs that also takes account of the dark sides of social developments. Both have a great sensitivity to ambivalence and the contradictions of progress. But speaking from their different historical contexts, they show a somewhat different emphasis in these affairs and portray them against somewhat different horizons. For instance, Bauman, writing about the ambivalences of postmodernity, shows progress as a game of gains and losses: “You gain something, but usually you lose something in exchange” (Bauman 1997, 1). He refers to one of Freud’s central messages in his famous critique of modern culture—published as Civilization and Its Discontents—which launched the skeptical diagnosis that modern culture’s achievements of security and order had only been reached at the necessary expense of human freedom and happiness. According to Bauman, the same message still holds true for postmodernity, only that in the transitions from modernity to postmodernity “the gains and losses have changed places: postmodern men and women exchanged a portion of their possibilities of security for a portion of happiness. The discontents of modernity arose from a kind of security which tolerated too little freedom in the pursuit of individual happiness. The discontents of postmodernity arise from a kind of freedom of pleasure-seeking which tolerates too little individual security” (ibid., 3). Dewey, too, speaks of gains and losses in the context of social developments, for example, when he writes about American civilization: So it is possible to itemize with more or less accuracy certain gains and losses in American life, and yet not know what they import for the prosperity of our social body . . . I mean . . . that when we list items of gain and loss in opposite columns, we find paradoxes, contradictions of extraordinary range and depth; and . . . that these contradictions are evidence of what seems to be the most marked trait of our present state—namely, its inner tension and conflict. If ever there was a house of civilization divided within itself and against itself, it is our own today. If one were to take only some symptoms and ignore others,

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one might make either a gloomy or a glowing report, and each with equal justice—as far as each went. (LW 3:133–134)

But speaking from a perspective of our time, Bauman’s view especially on the losses and failures of modernity that extend into postmodernity is more comprehensive, more sober, and also more specific. By comparison, Dewey sometimes shows a tendency to downplay the losses in light of his hopes for productive solutions and advancements of democracy. In Liquid Modernity, Bauman identifies five main traits of modernity that can exemplify the dark sides of modern life: Among the principal icons of that modernity were the Fordist factory, which reduced human activities to simple, routine and by and large predesigned moves meant to be followed obediently and mechanically without engaging mental faculties, and holding all spontaneity and individual initiative off limits; bureaucracy, akin at least in its innate tendency to Max Weber’s ideal model, in which identities and social bonds were deposited on entry in the cloakroom together with hats, umbrellas and overcoats, so that solely the command and the statute book could drive, uncontested, the actions of insiders as long as they stayed inside; Panopticon, with its watch-towers and the inmates never allowed to count on their surveillants’ momentary lapses of vigilance; Big Brother, who never dozes off, always keen, quick and expeditious in rewarding the faithful and punishing the infidels; and—finally—the Konzlager [concentration camp] (later to be joined in the counter-Pantheon of modern demons by the Gulag), the site where the limits of human malleability were tested under laboratory conditions, while all those presumed not to be or found not to be malleable enough were doomed to perish of exhaustion or sent to gas chambers and crematoria. (Bauman 2000, 25–26)

According to this interpretation, the Fordist factory, bureaucracy, Panopticon, Big Brother, and the Holocaust are not mere accidents of modernity but belong to its potentialities. The first four are necessary components of modern developments until today. The Holocaust stands for the worst catastrophes growing out of modernity (cf. Bauman 1989). Looking backward, Bauman is certainly more skeptical about the prospects of progress than Dewey who, looking forward, searches for opportunities of democratic reconstructions and consecutive steps to better life conditions. Dewey argues that the democratic belief is “belief in the ability of human experience to generate the aims and methods by which further experience shall grow in ordered richness” (LW4: 229). This attitude is called meliorism. It is a strength when we look

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to our necessary roles as agents and participants in society, especially with regard to democracy and education. With regard to the critical observation of society, though, such action and participation commit us to specific selective interests in our observations that may be broadened by turning to a more distanced perspective like Bauman’s. From the perspective of interactive constructivism, we should expect from the very start that observations of human affairs depend on contexts of participation and action, and clearly the subject-positions that Dewey and Bauman articulate differ considerably with regard to such contexts. Both articulations are constructions of reality that respond in viable ways to their respective contexts. Viability of observation is a core criterion in constructivism, but in interactive constructivism, we favor a cultural concept of viability that does not only focus on observation but at the same time takes account of participation and action in cultural contexts. If we compare Dewey’s and Bauman’s position, we can say that Dewey is much closer to a traditional participant position in modernity. From this subject-position, he—as a participant, agent, and observer—critically addresses the contradictions and ambivalences of his time with a view to democratic reconstruction. Compared to Bauman, he partly lacks the ironic distance of the latter who speaks in retrospection from the postmodern discourses in which he situates his observations and self-reflections as a participant and agent. As interactive constructivists, we think that Bauman’s irony—like the irony of Richard Rorty—can help us today to live with the unfulfilled expectations and great dreams of the twentieth century. But nevertheless the strong sense of democratic hope and vision that Dewey stands for, his acute sense for taking participation as a necessary foundation of lived democracy, and his insistence on the relevance of action and agency still seem significant in our time despite all ironic relativization. 2.2 Modernity and Postmodernity Many sociologists today regard Bauman as one of the internationally bestknown scholars. Some even think he invented the idea of postmodernity. This is an exaggeration—the philosophical use of the term goes back to Lyotard— but there is a true kernel to it because his approach has become so influential for postmodern discourses in the social science. His influence stems not only from the high number of his publications but also from his extraordinary ability to illustrate and explain postmodernity in many facets and largely accessible language. Using the term postmodernity, Bauman does not want to claim the end or abandonment of modernity. He thinks that the term postmodern is itself a transitional name given to a situation that lacks a more positive designation. In a 2002 interview, he observes,

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To start with, the concept of “postmodern” was but a stop-gap choice, a “career report” of a search—still on-going and remote from completion. That concept signaled that the social world had ceased to be like the one mapped using the “modernity” grid (notably, the paths and the traps changed places), but was singularly un-committal as to the features the world had acquired instead. “Postmodern” has done its preliminary, site-clearing job: it aroused vigilance and sent the exploration in the right direction. It could not do much more, and so it shortly outlived its usefulness; or, rather, it has worked itself out of the job . . . About the qualities of the present-day world we can say now more than it is unlike the old familiar one. We have, so to speak, matured to afford (to risk?) a positive theory of the novelty. (Bauman Yakimova 2002, 2)

Against this background, he believes that there was a certain weakness in using the term from the very start. It certainly was pregnant with the potential misunderstanding that modernity is over and gone. The most serious proponents of postmodernity, like Lyotard and Bauman, have always tried to counter such misunderstanding, but protests “did not help much, even as strong ones as Lyotard’s (‘one cannot be modern without being first postmodern’)—let alone my insistence that ‘postmodernity is modernity minus its illusion’. Nothing would help; if words mean anything, then a ‘postX’ will always mean a state of affairs that has leaved the ‘X’ behind” (ibid., 2). The concept was helpful to emphasize a “much needed break or rupture”: It allowed us to take a distance and reflect critically on “certain theorizing habits, cognitive frames, tacit assumptions” of modernity. It exemplifies that every age tries to clarify its own preconditions and presuppositions from new perspectives, and there have been several approaches that go by different names in our time. For instance, some would prefer to talk about late modernity, or reflective modernity, or as Bauman chooses in his recent books, of liquid modernity. As we have seen in section one, modernity is of necessity in an age of constant movements and changes. Bauman argues: “All modernity means incessant, obsessive modernization (there is no state of modernity, only a process; modernity would cease being modernity the moment that the process ground to a halt); and all modernization consists in ‘disembedding’, ‘disencumbering’, ‘melting the solids’ etc; in other words, in dismantling the received structures or at least weakening their grip. From the start, modernity deprived the web of human relationships of its past holding force; ‘disembedded’ and set loose, humans were expected to seek new beds and dig themselves in them using their own hands and spades, even if they chose to remain in the bed in which they germinated” (ibid., 4). If we prefer to use the term postmodernity in this chapter, it is not because we disagree with these observations but because we think that the term

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nowadays has found widespread acceptance not only in sociology but also in philosophy, education, and the cultural sciences. It would be difficult to find a common new term for all these fields. However, we insist like Bauman that “postmodernity” does not signal the end or surrender or overcoming of modernity. There is a continuity between modernity and postmodernity, as Bauman shows with regard to the quality of liquidness. What is new today, in postmodernity, is not this very quality itself but the fact that the contexts of its social containment have radically changed. “New is that the ‘disembedding’ goes on unabated, while the prospects of ‘re-embedding’ are nowhere in sight and unlikely to appear” (ibid., 4). In postmodernity, social relations and commitments are easily and quickly changed or even abandoned in favor of new opportunities. It might even turn out as a trap to stick too long and too insistently to them. Under these conditions, there is an increasing new pressure upon individuals to adjust themselves time and again to rapidly changing social bonds and ever new rules that change while the social game goes on. Interactive constructivism agrees with Bauman that the term postmodernity is an ambiguous and problematic term that must be qualified substantially to be viable and useful in discourses. In contrast to Bauman, however, who focuses his observations on the limited field of sociological analysis where it is comparatively easy to exchange names in discourses, we think that there are good arguments to hold on to the once established term “postmodern” if we look on a broader field of discourses in the humanities like philosophy, education, psychology, communication theories, cultural studies, and so on. What names we use is partly a question of how we construct our understanding of our participations, actions, and observations in our contexts. As to Dewey and Bauman’s contributions to such understanding let us look closer on some of the implications of their positions. 2.3 Post/Modern Culture and Its Contradictions The foregoing discussion has shown that there are quite a number of affinities between Dewey’s and Bauman’s outlook. Both authors appear as sophisticated critics of culture and societies, each speaking from the perspective and in the language of his time. In the following, we will venture to deepen the dialogue by connecting both perspectives with regard to some more specific questions of social and political, cultural, and philosophical criticism in post/modernity. The discussion will show that there are also crucial differences between both outlooks in detail. As a start, let us take seriously what was said above about Bauman as providing an opportunity for reconstructing Dewey. One way of approaching this opportunity is by addressing Bauman’s well-known metaphors that he

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introduced to characterize modern and postmodern life experiences. Bauman often confers to Richard Rorty’s neopragmatism and seems to follow, among other perspectives, Rorty’s idea of the strong poet when he develops several metaphors and narrative descriptions. He uses them as a method of transforming experience into language in order to deepen analysis. For example, he characterizes ways of life in post/modern societies by the contrast between different types like parvenu and pariah as the heroes and victims of modernity or tourist and vagabonds as the heroes and victims of postmodernity. Interesting about these metaphorical descriptions, seen from the perspective of Deweyan pragmatism, is that Bauman uses them for portraying and analyzing social experiences in important aspects of their diversity, contradictoriness, and uncertainty. The tension between order and ambivalence, transparence and ambiguity, and progress and contingency that we have talked about above becomes explicit here in concrete detail. Bauman shows us typical modern and postmodern formations of habits and explains how they grow out of changing life experiences and in turn affect the very structures and conditions of life and society. And he has a specific sensitivity to take into account the dark sides of social life and human affairs, as his talk about the victims of post/modernity already suggests. He often uses a very plain language in this connection. In his book Wasted Lives, for example, he writes: The production of “human waste”, or more correctly wasted humans (the “excessive” and “redundant”, that is the population of those who either could not or were not wished to be recognized or allowed to stay), is an inevitable outcome of modernization, and an inseparable accompaniment of modernity. It is an inescapable side-effect of order-building (each order casts some parts of the extant population as “out of place”, “unfit” or “undesirable”) and of economic progress (that cannot proceed without degrading and devaluing the previously effective modes of “making a living” and therefore cannot but deprive their practitioners of their livelihood). (Bauman 2004, 5)

Another way of addressing the dark sides of ambivalence in post/modernity is Bauman’s repeated and forceful discussion of the role of strangers in society and their precarious and oftentimes even dangerous position in-between. “There is hardly an anomaly more anomalous than the stranger. He stands between friend and enemy, order and chaos, the inside and the outside. He stands for . . . fallibility of order, vulnerability of the inside” (Bauman 1993a, 61). Surely influenced by his own life experience as a Polish Jew forced to leave his country, Bauman identifies the Jews as paradigmatic for the experience of the stranger in the history of European society. With extraordinary accuracy, he describes the traps and paradoxes to which the position in-between can

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capture the stranger. Using the example of the history of Jewish assimilation, he illustrates the contradiction between promises and expectations of being fully accepted in the community and the impossibility of ever reaching this acceptance. In Modernity and Ambivalence Bauman writes, “The effort to assimilate cast the Jews into a head-on collision with the very society into which they aimed to assimilate” (Bauman 1993a, 123). To make the comparison more systematic, let us focus on the descriptions of social reality that Bauman gives in his book Liquid Modernity. We will use some of his main categories and connect them with seminal insights of Dewey in an attempt to use present-day inquiries into human affairs as an instrument to forward the continual project of reconstructing philosophy. Especially interesting for Bauman and Dewey scholars alike are questions of freedom, solidarity, and democracy that will pervade the discussion of all selected categories. 2.3.1 Emancipation Emancipation has many aspects. In Liquid Modernity Bauman suggests that liberation of men from social constraints shows itself in the expansion of their abilities to act. He rejects one-sided individualist approaches and insists that freedom “cannot be gained against society” (Bauman 2000, 20). While in the tradition of critical theory (Adorno/Horkheimer) emancipation is understood from a self-critical enlightenment perspective that looks for universal solutions founded on reason and insight, Bauman challenges the very ideas of enlightenment, universalization, and all-comprehensive reason. He emphatically criticizes the dark sides and potentials that he finds, looking backwards, in this typically modern “producer-style version of critique.” He writes: That heavy/solid/condensed/systemic modernity of the “critical Theory” era was endemically pregnant with the tendency towards totalitarianism. The totalitarian society of all-embracing, compulsory and enforced homogeneity loomed constantly and threateningly on the horizon—as its ultimate destination, as a never-fully-defused time-bomb or never-fully-exorcised spectre. That modernity was a sworn enemy of contingency, variety, ambiguity, waywardness and idiosyncrasy, having declared on all such “anomalies” a holy war of attrition; and it was individual freedom and autonomy that were commonly expected to be the prime casualties of the crusade. (Bauman 2000, 25)

Against this background, Bauman portrays contemporary social criticism as “consumer-style.” This style of criticism has been developed, among other things, out of the deconstruction of Marxism. It radically opens perspectives beyond the economic sphere without claiming to have a privileged venue like

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the meta-narratives of class, production, progress, socialism, and others. From Bauman’s point of view this new criticism also abandons some of the most fundamental illusions of modern thought, namely the belief in the possibilities of unambiguous progress and improvement of human life conditions. At the same time, he insists that we take into account the increased deregulation and privatization of the modernizing tasks and duties (cf. ibid., 29). This has fundamentally changed social realities and the preconditions for thinking about emancipation. Deprived of the illusions of progress, the dark sides of post/modern developments appear all the more explicitly and in details. Bauman traces these dark sides in many of his works and thus provides a multifaceted picture of new contradictions, ruptures, dislocations, and antagonisms, for example, between poor and rich, uneducated and educated, wasted and prosperous, and victims and heroes. In his descriptions and sociological analyses, he takes pains to resist the temptations of moralizing and categorizing the social world into good and bad. This challenges traditional beliefs of emancipation and has attracted criticism from some corners against Bauman (cf. examples in Elliott 2007). But we think that for democracy today it is important to face and constructively respond to the challenge of ambivalence and reconstruct our models of emancipation accordingly. In liquid modernity, the constellations between individuality and social order have changed in some important respects. Individuality and increasing demands of individualization are now seen as necessary components of a social order that has become more and more fluid. Instead of the older antagonisms between individuality and social order, there is now, according to Bauman, a growing gap between what he calls “individuality de jure”—that is, the tasks of individualization that men and women are socially required to take upon themselves—and “individuality de facto”—that is, their abilities, dispositions, chances, and resources to make, articulate, and realize the choices they really want to make. Being an “individual de jure means having no one to blame for one’s own misery, seeking the causes of one’s own defeats nowhere except in one’s own indolence and sloth, and looking for no remedies other than trying harder and harder still” (Bauman 2000, 38). Bauman argues that in face of this situation, emancipation “in its present stage can only be described as the task of transforming the individual autonomy de jure into autonomy de facto” (Bauman 2000, 51) so that individuals can “gain control over their fate and make the choices they truly desire” (ibid., 39). He clearly sees that this task is a crucial challenge for democracy today. In this connection, Bauman can be helpful to discuss new constellations that seem to be important for pragmatism, too. Interpreting Bauman through a Deweyan lens, we may say that claims about individuality de jure and individuality de facto constitute a tensional relation. With Dewey, we can observe

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more forcefully than Bauman himself does that this is also an essential challenge for education in our time.5 But not only with regard to education, it is astonishing, for us, that Bauman does not connect his work with the pragmatic tradition, especially since Dewey has already developed elaborate theories and methods for understanding aspects of social reality as well as democratic processes that are crucial for Bauman, too. In many respects, Bauman could have taken up Deweyan pragmatism as a tradition of thinking about modern democracy as a dynamic and ambiguous process. This could have helped him to provide a more elaborate and systematic theoretical development of core concepts that underpin his acute descriptions of social reality. In the following, we will step by step discuss essential perspectives involved in this task. For Bauman as well as for Dewey, capitalism has produced social structures and conditions that partly sustain and support emancipation because they provide resources and platforms for producing wealth and prosperity as a necessary precondition for constructing and experiencing new ways and forms of freedom. This process has been a drive for modern reconstructions of democracy, but capitalism also repeatedly puts the democratic project at risk. Both Dewey and Bauman, recognize this ambivalence very clearly. For example, Dewey observes about the contradictions of emancipation under capitalist conditions: The democratic movement of emancipation of personal capacities, of securing to each individual an effective right to count in the order and movement of society as a whole (that is, in the common good), has gone far enough to secure to many, more favored than others, peculiar powers and possessions. It is part of the irony of the situation that such now oppose efforts to secure equality of opportunity to all on the ground that these efforts would effect an invasion of individual liberties and rights: i.e., of privileges based on inequality. (MW 5: 430)

Compared with Bauman, however, Dewey is more forward looking and hopeful in his attempts and aspirations of democratic reforms in the first half of the twentieth century. Also, he has a broader view than Bauman especially because he not only observes from a sociological perspective but also offers his views on society and culture as challenges for democracy and education and other related aspects of social amelioration. He always combines the necessary gaze at the darker sides with more optimistic accounts of what has already been achieved: “The increased political and economic emancipation of the ‘masses’ has shown itself in education; it has effected the development of a common school system of education, public and free. It has destroyed

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the idea that learning is properly a monopoly of the few who are predestined by nature to govern social affairs. But the revolution is still incomplete” (MW 9: 265). This is a main trait of his so-called “meliorist” approach that tries to keep a balance between the extremes of naïve optimism and destructive pessimism. It stands for a critical and self-critical position that rejects the self-complacency of optimism but keeps a strong sense of social hope for the future. Its basic tenet is to make things better and create more meanings independent of how problematic, contradictory, or troubled the present may be. With regard to the dark sides of social development in capitalism, for instance, Dewey observes in The Public and Its Problems that present difficulties and ambivalences call for a new solution through the construction of new forms of democratic publics: Progress is not steady and continuous. Retrogression is as periodic as advance. Industry and inventions in technology, for example, create means which alter the modes of associated behavior and which radically change the quantity, character and place of impact of their indirect consequences. These changes are extrinsic to political forms which, once established, persist of their own momentum. The new public which is generated remains long inchoate, unorganized, because it cannot use inherited political agencies. The latter, if elaborate and well institutionalized, obstruct the organization of the new pubic. They prevent that development of new forms of the state which might grow up rapidly were social life more fluid, less precipitated into set political and legal molds. To form itself, the public has to break existing political forms. (LW 2: 254–255)

And, as a most succinct conclusion: Indirect, extensive, enduring and serious consequences of conjoint and interacting behavior call a public into existence having a common interest in controlling these consequences. But the machine age has so enormously expanded, multiplied, intensified and complicated the scope of the indirect consequences, has formed such immense and consolidated unions in action, on an impersonal rather than a community basis, that the resultant public cannot identify and distinguish itself. And this discovery is obviously an antecedent condition of any effective organization on its part. Such is our thesis regarding the eclipse which the public idea and interest have undergone. (LW 2: 314)

Thus, Dewey offers us, among other things, an understanding of the problem of emancipation that takes its clue from the necessary task of democratic participation as realized, for example, in the development of democratic publics. He at the same time connects emancipation and participation with

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education when he argues that democracy as a way of life is itself an educative process. Here social emancipation stands in necessary connection with the actualization of personal liberties and the life of individuals. In this sense, “emancipation was coincident with the rise of ‘individualism,’ which was in effect identical with the reflective discovery of the part played in experience by concrete selves, with their ways of acting, thinking and desiring” (LW 1: 23). Against this background, Dewey’s pragmatism gives us a strong and profound understanding of the meaning of freedom: “Freedom is power to act in accordance with choice. It is actual ability to carry desire and purpose into operation, to execute choices when they are made. Experience shows that certain laws and institutions prevent such operation and execution. This obstruction and interference constitutes what we call oppression, enslavement. Freedom, in fact, the freedom worth fighting for, is secured by abolition of these oppressive measures, tyrannical laws and modes of government. It is liberation, emancipation; the possession and active manifestation of rights, the right to self-determination in action” (LW 3: 97). In short, it seems to us that Dewey presents a much more comprehensive and constructive approach to emancipation than Bauman who offers more critical and skeptical views on modern progress. Looking more closely, however, one finds small-scale proposals for emancipatory solutions in Bauman, too. And we think that some of these solutions can be attractive for Deweyan pragmatists today. For example, in Postmodernity and Its Discontents Bauman introduces the idea of culture as a “consumer co-operative” as a suggestion for contemporary self-organized bottom-up democratic processes in contexts of globalized capitalism. For Deweyan pragmatist and interactive constructivists the challenge here lies in rethinking and further developing our understanding of how to organize what Dewey called local publics. Certainly, we must find new solutions in our times that respond to the changed global conditions, social realities, new media, new forms of multiculturalism and migration, and so on. If Dewey helps us to remain hopeful with regard to the possibility of democratic reforms and shows still applicable ways of doing it, Bauman’s descriptions and critical reflections help us to stay sober and always connect our hopeful visions with concrete realities, trying to avoid the traps of the still lasting illusions of modernity. In diverse ways, Bauman’s inquiries into human affairs remind us of the conditions and limits of emancipation in our time. They show that emancipation as a social and personal process remains an ambivalent task under the liquid conditions of post/modern living. For instance, he discusses lessons from the Holocaust (Bauman 1989), the role of outcasts and the waste of lives in postmodernity (Bauman 2004), the heroes and victims of modern and postmodern developments (Bauman 1997), the precarious positions of strangers and others and questions of ethics

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(Bauman 1993a, b), the fragility of bonds and lived relationships (Bauman 2003, 2005, 2006), the paradoxes of assimilation (Bauman 1997) and globalization (Bauman 1998, 2007a), as well as the one-sidedness and illusions of consumerism (Bauman 2007b). From the perspective of interactive constructivism, emancipation is a social and political construction with deep roots in enlightenment thought that cannot apply today in simple and seemingly unambiguous ways. An elaborate discourse of emancipation has of necessity many perspectives. We think that Dewey and Bauman stand for two main perspectives in this connection. Depending on their different subject-positions as participants, agents, and observers, they highlight different necessary aspects in an ambitious concept of emancipation. We think that the differences between the two approaches can be shown, among other things, by using the interactive constructivist concepts of “construction,” “reconstruction,” and “deconstruction.” If we allow for some simplification, we could say that Dewey’s strength clearly lies in his emphasis on construction and reconstruction as elements of emancipation. This means that he insists on the educational and learning opportunities of individuals in self-governance as agents in transaction with others. Constructing their own learning, they at the same time reconstruct the social and cultural conditions, contexts, and resources that represent necessary conditions of their growth. By contrast, Bauman’s views pay more attention to the necessary component of deconstruction in emancipation. Most of his works deal with the illusions of modernity in one way or another. Therefore, he is skeptical as to our temptations to continue the dreams of modernity in our imaginations of a reconstructed better future. But even his deconstructivist position does not fully give up the hope of successful reconstruction as a necessary horizon that renders the deconstructive project meaningful. Although his postmodern treatment of social hopes is more sober and cautious than Dewey’s, we think that both authors with their different emphasis can be combined fruitfully, especially if we see their relative strengths and weaknesses. Interactive constructivism believes that we can take a perspective in-between that takes advantage of the achievements of both authors. 2.3.2 Individualism and Capitalism Capitalism requires free wage labor, free citizenship, and free consumerism for men and women who in turn use the capitalist system for their own liberties. Bauman distinguishes between heavy and light forms of capitalism. We can identify heavy capitalism with the Fordist model of industrialization, accumulation, and regulation (cf. Bauman 2000, 56). It uses heavy machinery for surplus value at large scale. Roughly speaking, we can say that this is what Dewey calls “the machine age.” Heavy capitalism dominates environments

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with solid structures that appear as stable but also inert, immobile, and bulky. The Fordist way of thinking focused on laws, routines, supervisions, and fixed and standardized ends and procedures. “For this reason it was also the world of authorities: of leaders who know better and of teachers who tell you how to proceed better than you do” (Bauman 2000, 63). Light capitalism is a consumer-friendly form of capitalism. Its general characteristic is that what appeared as stable in the heavy version has now become liquid. For example, authorities do not vanish altogether, but they now appear in multiplied roles and places, ruling for the time being, responsible in short sequence, quickly changing their appearances and assignments, thereby making it all the more difficult to oppose their authority. Individualism, too, changes its faces and conditions in light capitalism in some important respects: ●

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First of all, individualization is a social dynamic that cannot be reduced to personal freedom of decision, but always articulates social conditions and constraints. Bauman here refers to Norbert Elias and his theory of civilization. Individualization is a process that proves itself in successful consumption. In accord with light capitalism, postmodern societies conceive of their members rather as consumers than as producers (cf. Bauman 1996). Opportunities of participating in consumption have become the first criterion for social status as well as individual orientation. They define the split between those who have and have not, winners and losers, and heroes and victims in society. In short: “Divided, we shop” (Bauman 2000, 89). The release from traditional bonds of wage labor amounts to a loss of social security. The transition from vocation to the “job” implies the increased responsibility of individuals to organize their own life careers and biographies, learning careers and education, under conditions of increased flexibility, mobility, and disponibility. “To put it in a nutshell, ‘individualization’ consists of transforming human ‘identity’ from a ‘given’ into a ‘task’ and charging the actors with the responsibility for performing that task and for the consequences (also the side-effects) of their performance. In other words, it consists in the establishment of a de jure autonomy (whether or not the de facto autonomy has been established as well)” (Bauman 2000, 31–32). The need to construct one’s own biography also applies to lived relationships that are increasingly disembedded from traditional bonds, values, and constraints. Here, too, identities have to be constructed as patchworks and kept flexible. The individuals have to take their positions

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actively instead of being placed by authorities. This involves the risk of not finding one’s place as exemplified, for Bauman, by the vagabond (Bauman 1997, 83ff ). To illustrate the social game of roles and commitments connected with individualization in post/modernity, Bauman introduces metaphors of social acting like the stroller, tourist, player, and vagabond (Bauman 1996). He thus shows the liquid character of human affairs and the ambivalence contained in any position we can take in post/modern time. For example, the “tourist” represents conditions of increased mobility, liquid forms of consumerism, the appropriation and commodification of the strange, and the extreme reduction of bonds and responsibilities in lived relationships, too. Having abandoned traditional forms of authority and leadership, individuals must increasingly look “for examples, for counsel and guidance” (1997, 72) by themselves and take responsibility for their own life projects. They know that in case of failure they will be liable on their own behalf.

More than half a century before Bauman, Dewey has described the ambivalence of modern processes of individualization. He realized that these processes have to be understood in the context of capitalist development. For example, he discusses problems of individualization in his Individualism, Old and New by the title “the lost individual” and explains this loss against the background of social, economic, and corporate development in times of Fordist production: “The development of a civilization that is outwardly corporate—or rapidly becoming so—has been accompanied by a submergence of the individual” (LW5:66). The emphasis put on economic progress gives the impression that problems of individuality are problems of personal prosperity, in the first place. But if we look closer, Dewey argues, they turn out to have consequences that are deeply political: “The loss of individuality is conspicuous in the economic region because our civilization is so predominantly a business civilization. But the fact is even more obvious when we turn to the political scene” (LW 5: 70). The social and political implications that Dewey connects with the ambivalences of individualism are familiar with some of the traits depicted by Bauman above. For example, Dewey also refers to the weakening of commitments that leads to partial disembedding of social action: “The significant thing is that the loyalties which once held individuals, which gave them support, direction and unity of outlook on life, have wellnigh disappeared. In consequence, individuals are confused and bewildered. It would be difficult to find in history an epoch as lacking in solid and assured objects of belief and approved ends of action as is the present” (LW 5: 66).

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In this context, one potential danger, Dewey observes, lies in antidemocratic drawbacks into apparently stable and solid forms of identification, for example, in narrow religious communities or political ideologies. “Stability of individuality is dependent upon stable objects to which allegiance firmly attaches itself. There are, of course, those who are still militantly fundamentalist in religious and social creed” (ibid.). Dewey is also aware that there is a deep paradox in the attitude of those who try to escape ambivalence in these ways. He observes that “their very clamor is evidence that the tide is set against them” (ibid.) And even those who do not try to take refuge in apparently safe communities and identifications will have to find their responses to ambivalence and to balance out opposing claims. For them, “traditional objects of loyalty have become hollow or are openly repudiated, and they drift without sure anchorage. Individuals vibrate between a past that is intellectually too empty to give stability and a present that is too diversely crowded and chaotic to afford balance or direction to ideas and emotion” (LW 5: 66). For Dewey, individuality is always dependent on social relationships and public interactions that are mutual. The interdependence between social agents, even if they have different resources of economic, social, cultural, or political power, cannot be denied completely. Even those who seem to be in control, and to carry the expression of their special individual abilities to a high pitch, are submerged. They may be captains of finance and industry, but until there is some consensus of belief as to the meaning of finance and industry in civilization as a whole, they cannot be captains of their own souls—their beliefs and aims. They exercise leadership surreptitiously and, as it were, absent-mindedly. They lead, but it is under cover of impersonal and socially undirected economic forces. Their reward is found not in what they do, in their social office and function, but in a deflection of social consequences to private gain. They receive the acclaim and command the envy and admiration of the crowd, but the crowd is also composed of private individuals who are equally lost to a sense of social bearings and uses. (LW 5: 67)

Dewey is aware that democracy, freedom, and emancipation are dependent on contexts of capitalism and that this connection essentially puts their development and prosperity at risk. He asks thus: “Is freedom possible only in periods of transition from one economic era to another? Does it flourish only because of the relaxation of old economic ties and endure only as long as the new economic regime is not consolidated? Was the democratic movement, the liberal movement—or whatever name it should go by—not a general and inherently steady development but merely a temporary episode attending the shifting of control from agrarian feudalism to privileged capitalism?”

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(MW 12: 17) For him, capitalism involved important advantages for democracy insofar as it enhanced the chances even of ordinary people to participate in better education, economic transactions, social welfare, and public communication as basis of democratic processes. But he also doesn’t downplay the dark sides that go with it: “But the new economic order of capitalism that was superseding feudalism brought its own social evils with it, and some of these ills utilitarianism tended to cover up or defend. The emphasis upon acquisition and possession of enjoyments took on an untoward color in connection with the contemporary enormous desire for wealth and the enjoyments it makes possible” (MW 12: 184). Although Dewey’s melioristic outlook always stresses the opportunities for making things better, his democratic vision does not invite us to illusions: “The system that goes by the name of capitalism is a systematic manifestation of desires and purposes built up in an age of ever threatening want and now carried over into a time of ever increasing potential plenty. The conditions that generate insecurity for the many no longer spring from nature. They are found in institutions and arrangements that are within deliberate human control” (LW 11: 43). Dewey at times argued in ways that were familiar to Marxist positions. In the following quote, for instance, he seems to claim priority of economic and technological developments over politics: “Colossal increase in productivity, the bringing of men together in cities and large factories, the elimination of distance, the accumulation of capital, fixed and liquid—these things would have come about, at a certain stage, no matter what the established institutional system. They are the consequence of the new means of technological production” (LW 11: 57). According to Bauman, positions like this one build on an oversimplification of social reality. But generally speaking, Dewey was not committed to any of the prevailing social doctrines of his time, like capitalism or socialism. He tried to find a third and more democratic way out of the crisis of modernity than he observed in the systems of his age. In accord with his radical democratic belief, Dewey is extraordinarily sensitive to the consequences of the existing social and economic order on the quality of experience in the life of men and women of society. He is very explicit about democracy as a way of life rooted in the experiences of all people. In particular, the democratic process must not exclude ordinary people. Bauman, likewise, is eloquent about the consequences of social forces on ordinary experience, but in his case the democratic vision is rather implicit and not so much spelled out. From his perspective, it seems important, in the first place, to avoid the illusions of modernity when advocating democracy as a generalized claim. In liquid modernity, nothing is stable, not even democracy. There cannot be a universalized assertibility of democratic claims

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founded by enlightened reason. In this connection, we think that he could have turned to the pragmatic tradition of democratic thinking in the wake of Dewey because here we find arguments and criteria for sustaining democratic hope and belief without relying on universal reasoning. Bauman has a similar view and sensitivity to the dangers of capitalism as a social and economic order that often involves the submergence of individuals and wastes their lives. He particularly stresses the tension between the increase of freedom and choice on the one hand and the loss of security, stability, and orientation on the other hand. Here, too, he could have connected his work with Dewey whose experiences and theoretical reflections on capitalist crises still sound astonishingly until today. They brought him to doubt whether capitalism, in the long run, will be a sustainable basis for democracy. “One of the unsolved problems of capitalism is that of insuring measurable stability and security” (LW 7: 381). This is not at least a question of justice that is crucial for the sustainability of development in the future. “We have seen that capitalism has proved to be an effective method of increasing the total wealth and income of the countries in which it has had its fullest trial. The question which has been raised with increasing insistence is, how are the wealth and income distributed among the different members of the various peoples under this system? This is to raise the question of justice” (LW 7: 406). This diagnosis is indeed very close to Bauman’s criticism. Where they depart, though, is in their different expectations with regard to possible solutions. Dewey bets his hope on social and collective intelligence (rather than on universalized claims of reason that have become the target of deconstruction by postmodern critics like Bauman). For him, the “essential fact is that if both democracy and capitalism are on trial, it is in reality our collective intelligence which is on trial. We have displayed enough intelligence in the physical field to create the new and powerful instrument of science and technology. We have not as yet had enough intelligence to use this instrument deliberately and systematically to control its social operations and consequences” (LW 6: 60). This quote implies a rejection of enlightenment claims that could be sympathetic for Bauman. However, his orientation to solutions would be even more cautious than Dewey’s. We suppose that Bauman, for one thing, would question the use of the word “we” in the above quote, as well as the imagination of community that lies behind it. Likewise, he would bring into question the use of the very word “intelligence” as a summary phrase for a highly diversified spectrum of social phenomena. Interactive constructivism suggests that Dewey and Bauman both offer fruitful contributions to a post-Marxist criticism of capitalism today. We think such theories are important in our time especially because they

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give us new opportunities and resources to reflect critically on the tension between individualism and the social conditions of living. 2.3.3 Work and Labor According to Bauman, solid modernity and heavy capitalism have been mutually dependent. In light capitalism both sides, the social and the economic, have become much more fluid and former dependences have dissolved. This leads to insecurity: No jobs are guaranteed, no positions are foolproof, no skills are of lasting utility, experience and know-how turn into liability as soon as they become assets, seductive careers all too often prove to be suicide tracks. In their present rendering, human rights do not entail the acquisition of a right to a job, however well performed, or—more generally—the right to care and consideration for the sake of past merits. Livelihood, social position, acknowledgement of usefulness and the entitlement to self-dignity may all vanish together, overnight and without notice. (Bauman 1997, 23)

Behind the curtains, capitalism has changed: “The present-day ‘liquefied’, ‘flowing’, dispersed, scattered and deregulated version of modernity may not portend divorce and the final break of communication, but it does augur the advent of light, free-floating capitalism, marked by the disengagement and loosening of ties linking capital and labour” (Bauman 2000, 149). New forms of capital have emerged, and most of them have taken a lighter character than in former times: “Having shed the ballast of bulky machinery and massive factory crews, capital travels light with no more than cabin luggage—a briefcase, laptop computer and cellular telephone” (Bauman 2000, 150). As these examples show, ideas have become more and more important in light capitalism to produce profits. Bauman describes this development as a change from material objects to ideas (cf. ibid., 151). “Ideas are produced only once, and then keep on bringing in wealth depending on the number of people attracted as buyers/clients/consumers—not on the number of people hired and engaged in replicating the prototype” (Bauman 2000, 151). This observation seems to be prototypical of his understanding of “light capitalism.” However, we think that Bauman sometimes gets caught within the logic of his own metaphors. Of course, it is an old discussion in Marxism whether ideas by themselves can produce surplus value, but we do not need to go into details of this discourse here. Even an ordinary observation of profit making in global economies will show, we suggest, that Bauman’s description is at least in need of supplementation, because we must take the still working heavy forms of capitalist exploitation and accumulation into account as well.

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Things may have become more fluid in the age of shareholder values and speculative markets in neoliberal settings, but the actual financial crisis shows that deregulations in the end may entail the need of new mechanisms of control and regulation lest the market become too light and fluid to be sustainable for society. In a word, we think that what we have is always a mixture, to different and changing extents, of light and heavy forms of capitalism, fluid and solid forms of social life. Bauman puts the consumer in light capitalism in a privileged position because capitalism stands and falls with consumer transactions. The transition from the Fordist model to liquid modernity involves, among other things, a shift in the relations between production and service and the growing dominance of the latter. There is a temptation, however, that Bauman does not always sufficiently resist—namely to overemphasize the appearances of light capitalism and thereby underestimate its still existing solid forms and foundations. Here, again, Dewey can be helpful because in his time he had a clear view on the solid forms of capitalist production and at the same time already anticipated to a large degree cultural aspects of what Bauman calls light capitalism, like, for example, mobility, movement, speed of change, instability, and other traits. He often reflects on Fordism in ways like the following: It is a fancy of mine to picture the essence of our life in terms of the Ford car. On the one side, there is the acme of mechanization, of standardization, of external efficiency. On the other, there is, as the effect, a vast mobility, a restless movement of individuals. The resulting mobility is aimless and blind; it can be easily represented as exhibiting a mere love of movement for its own sake, an abandonment to speed of change for its own sake. But nevertheless the movement, the instability, is there. The industrial forces that would control it for their own purposes automatically, and as by some principle of fate, multiply and intensify it. Thus the division, the tension, increases. A standardized, regimented technology of industry continually releases unexpected and unforeseen forces of individuality. In its effort to control their operation, it redoubles its repressive and mechanizing efforts. (LW 3: 142)

In a broader sense, capitalism, for Dewey, appears as a challenge for democracy. He criticizes antidemocratic effects of heavy capitalism like the reduction of work to labor; the compartmentalization of social life; the fragmentation of experiences; and the separation of thought and action, ideals and real conditions (cf. LW 10: 27–34). Again, he combines his critical analysis with constructive orientation toward possible and more democratic solutions, for example, when he says about the Fordist factory: “The problem is that of minimizing the bad effects, and of supplying positive values to replace those

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which have been lost” (LW 7: 381). In Deweyan terms, the essential problem is to further social intelligence, creativity, and imagination in order to find new and extended ways of reconstructing democracy to enlarge the possibilities of all for participation and better living. But Dewey has a sharp sense of the fact that the democratic ideal cannot just be conceived as a fancy, but must be developed out of the conditions and constraints of actual living. It is the task and opportunity of democratic imagination and experimentation to elicit “the possibilities that are interwoven within the texture of the actual” (LW 10: 348). One of the “hard facts” of actual capitalism is competition. “To insure that the system of private ownership with freedom of enterprise works for the general good, the reliance has been chiefly upon competition” (LW 7: 376). Dewey believes that the democratic vision points beyond competitive individualism and the social risks involved in laissez faire, or what we now call neoliberalism. He observes about the financial and economic crisis of his own day: “The extreme individualism of laissez faire, with competition as the only regulator of the economic process, has been shown to be no longer tolerable in present conditions” (LW 7: 428). This sounds strangely familiar if we think of the recent global crisis that has considerably undermined the promised securities of late capitalism. Bauman, too, observes aspects and dimensions of precariousness that arise from neoliberal competition on a global scale in our time. “Precariousness is the mark of the preliminary condition of all the rest: the livelihood, and particularly the most common sort of livelihood, that which is claimed on the ground of work and employment” (Bauman 2000, 160). Livelihood in postmodern or liquid times has become more fragile and less reliable, as Bauman argues. Flexibility is a core demand. More and more people have to adjust their lives to it. Their world increasingly becomes liquid. “Precarious economic and social conditions train men and women (or make them learn the hard way) to perceive the world as a container full of disposable objects, objects for one-off use; the whole world—including other human beings” (ibid., 162). Since Dewey’s time, capitalist division of labor has ever more increased and the dependence on experts and expertise has pervaded more and more fields of production and consumption in the lifeworlds. Liquid life is a continuous succession of new beginnings, transformations, and reconstructions. Markets have become more fluid and extensive. What seems to be too stable does not sell. Modern sociologists like Max Weber and Norbert Elias have portrayed the capacities of acting in large perspective and postponing gratification or satisfaction on behalf of a comprehensive project as essential virtues of work in capitalism. Liquid capitalism tends to undermine these traditional virtues. Thereby it deprives the individuals of a sustainable and

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stable form of orientation and disposes them to new risks and anxieties. “The most acute and stubborn worries that haunt such a life are the fears of being caught napping, of failing to catch up with fast-moving events, of being left behind, of overlooking ‘use by’ dates, of being saddled with possessions that are no longer desirable, of missing the moment that calls for a change of track before crossing the point of no return” (Bauman 2005, 2). These anxieties are indeed phenomena and consequences of capitalism. Bauman responds to them from the standpoint of the Rortyan liberal ironist. According to Rorty, a liberal is a person for whom cruelty is the worst thing in the world. For Bauman, cruelty in light capitalism differs from earlier forms of capitalist exploitations. Nothing, he argues, “humiliates more than poverty, and no poverty humiliates more than poverty suffered amidst people bent on fast and accelerating enrichment” (Bauman/Tester 2001, 153). As a Rortyan ironist, Bauman believes that even if we can describe and criticize cruelty as a fact in social life, we can no more rely on a meta-narrative like humanism or socialism or else to justify our liberal claims on unambiguous and universal grounds. He conceives of his own works as a collection of “stories” that provides resources but not foundations for those who want to reflect critically on human affairs. These stories are not arbitrary language games because they are rooted in experience as lived, articulated, and examined. But, as a result of the loss of any comprehensive meta-narrative, they concede from the start to be partial, selective, narrated for the time being, and open to revision. The hope for solutions in Bauman has become modest and cautious in face of the failures and wrong tracks of modernity, but like in Rorty there are remains of social hope in Bauman’s work. He uses sociological imagination—in the sense of C. Wright Mills (1970)—to illustrate and reflect the ways in which the world (and the people living in it) could be very different than it actually is. In this connection, “Bauman’s work is important because it is committed and never deviates from its dedication to human freedom” (Tester 2007, 81). Similar to Deweyan pragmatism, freedom, for Bauman, is only possible in and through social relationships, and one of the threats of capitalism is precisely that it puts human relationships at risk. This is essentially a question of solidarity if we want to develop and strengthen democracy under capitalist conditions. For Bauman, solidarity first of all has to do with fighting against poverty. It implies active participation in civil society, democratic institutions, division of powers, and a basic income for all that is sustainable for active participation in social and cultural life. If we compare Bauman’s description with Dewey’s concerns about the lost individual quoted above, we find many commonalities and some differences between both accounts and orientations toward democratic solutions. Affinities concern not only the sometimes astonishingly close descriptions of

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human affairs but also the general expectations of how and where to find new options. The differences, we suggest, mainly go back to differences of style, emphasis, and outlook. As to style, the difference between Bauman and Dewey is mainly the difference between Rortyan neopragmatism and classical pragmatism. With regard to emphasis, we find that Bauman more insistently investigates into the dark sides of social developments while Dewey always stresses the need and opportunities of reconstruction. With regard to outlook, we see Dewey as proponent of a meliorist approach, oriented to chances of the future, while Bauman takes a more cautious attitude toward social progress without surrendering social hope and necessary claims to democratic values. From the perspective of interactive constructivism, the differences and affinities between Dewey and Bauman on issues connected with work and labor can again be used in a constructive way. Bauman is helpful to think beyond the classical Fordist versions of capitalism and especially his metaphors are well chosen and very productive to develop detailed and multilayered stories that tell about contemporary life without neglecting its abysses. Dewey, on the other hand, reminds us that the talk about becoming light and liquid should not be exaggerated to the degree that we forget all remains of the heavy and solid. Modernity still lives in postmodernity or liquid modernity. We have exemplified these affinities and differences with regard to work and labor, here, but similar arguments apply to questions of emancipation, individualism, and freedom, as we have seen above. Our discussion suggests that by contrast with Bauman, Deweyan pragmatism turns out to be particularly strong in its comprehensive conceptual and methodological approach as well as its strong vision of democracy. For Dewey, it is clear that capitalism is in dire need of democratic reform. We need “a modified capitalism—in which the democratic principle, embodied in our political and educational systems, shall have increasing recognition, and in which liberty, efficiency, and justice shall be combined so far as possible” (LW 7: 428). And it is also clear, for him, that democracy is an open process of development where we can never be sure, but have good reasons to hope to achieve better outcomes in the future: “We must doubtless, in any case, find our way experimentally” (LW 9: 74). Interactive constructivism agrees with this experimental approach to democracy, especially if we take figures like Bauman as a challenge to increase our critical awareness of the ambivalences even of experimental progress. 2.3.4 Democratic Community and the Public Both, Bauman and Dewey, recognize the necessity of communities for democracy as well as their potential ambivalences. Freedom and community are understood in a necessary correlation and tension. Bauman uses examples like nationalism, patriotism, and communitarism to show the need and the

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potential traps of the construction of a “we” as a collective agent that constitutes a community. Such communities can be very restrictive and have a homogenizing effect upon their members, as oftentimes in cases of communitarism that Bauman profoundly criticizes. Against such forms of community he insists on the advantages of a democratic way that can be understood as “an emergent unity which is a joint achievement of the agents engaged in self-identification pursuits, a unity which is an outcome, not an a priori given condition, of shared life, a unity put together through negotiation and reconciliation, not the denial, stifling or smothering out of differences” (Bauman 2000, 178). For Bauman as well as for Dewey, it is clear that the struggle for democracy is a struggle that must be fought out by all who want to live under democratic conditions. It cannot be won by one class or group, for example, of experts or elites alone. It belongs to the tasks of civil society to control governments and make them responsible to the democratic public. The criticisms discussed above represent challenges for civil society to fight against increase of poverty, insecurity, the waste of lives, and the growing exclusion of people from social, cultural, economical, and political partaking on a global scale. At the present juncture, we have witnessed a number of years when the majority of governments worldwide have largely preferred neoliberalist ways of deregulating capitalism and reducing social welfare. The financial crisis of 2008/09 has once again made obvious the high risks and costs of this strategy to a larger public. Democratic communities cannot survive in the long run if the gap between those who have and get more and those who have not and stand in danger of losing all exceeds a critical level. Bauman especially warns us, in this context, against “the renunciation, phasing out or selling off by the state of all the major appurtenances of its role as the principal (perhaps even more monopolistic) purveyor of certainty and security, followed by its refusal to endorse the certainty/security aspirations of its subjects” (Bauman 2000, 184). In a globalized world where markets transcend borders and economic players act on global fields, the nation-state is increasingly losing its previous dominance. The economical forces like multinational global companies need free markets in the first place and want to be free from restrictions imposed by the nation-state. But they are not united by a strong cosmopolitan intention in the sense of social growth, prosperity of all, and transnational democracy. They tend to support such intentions insofar as their economic interests are not put at risk, but they often put democracy and social welfare at risk in favor of their profits. Global and light capitalism, as Bauman describes it, produces gains and losses in faster changing ways than before. Especially for those in the precarious situation of losing the game or standing in danger

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of losing, the state and its social policy more and more appears as the only power that can grant them at least a minimum of security. Unfortunately, however, the decline of the national states in neoliberalism weakens its abilities to secure general welfare and social prosperity. Classical sociology, for instance in the works of Max Weber or Norbert Elias, has argued for the need of state monopolies of coercion (cf. Bauman 2000, 193) as an indispensable institution to secure common social interests in modern democracies. This necessity appears more and more complicated and paradoxical today. In the tension between neoliberal forces and free market policies on the one hand, and state institutions that provide social welfare policies on the other hand, the tendency today has largely been in favor of the former, although the present economic and financial crisis shows that we cannot do without the latter in the long run. One question here is this: What institutional changes and reconstructions can compensate for the decline of the national state? Or, What transnational political structures and institutions are possible and feasible with regard to both the necessary global mobility in connection with economic growth and social security and welfare? Dewey’s political philosophy in general and his account of the role of the state and the public in particular can again be helpful here. He insists that political institutions have to be understood as experiments that societies in their time and diversity have made. They are always partial and selective solutions for the time being. “But there is no a priori rule which can be laid down and by which when it is followed a good state will be brought into existence. In no two ages or places is there the same public” (LW 2: 256). Dewey explains that the democratic public necessarily stands in critical tension with political institutions like the state. “By its very nature, a state is ever something to be scrutinized, investigated, searched for. Almost as soon as its form is stabilized, it needs to be re-made” (LW 2: 255). Therefore the central question, for him, is how under changing conditions democratic publics can emerge that have the power as well as the resources to reconstruct the political and social life of the society through remaking its political institutions. Dewey’s melioristic position imagines the challenges of the public and its problems in his time as a crisis that can be overcome by intensified democratic engagement. He even articulates the imagination of a Great Community as a democratic vision of overcoming crude ways of capitalism. But this imagination is deeply pluralistic in Dewey who clearly saw the diversity of groups, communities, and societies, and the differences and conflicts of interests in modern societies. If we compare his view with Bauman’s today, we will find in the work of the latter a more systematic and precise analysis that is more skeptical than Dewey’s with regard to modern narratives like the image of a Great Community. On the other hand, Dewey is more eloquent about the necessity of having

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a democratic vision and reconstructing ways of democracy than Bauman. Most important in this connection is Dewey’s approach to democracy and education. 3 Democracy and Education Today One of the continuing strengths of Dewey’s pragmatism lies in his profound reflections about the crucial insight that “the relation between democracy and education is a reciprocal one, a mutual one, and vitally so” (LW 13: 294). He persistently elaborates on this theme in writings such as Democracy and Education (1916), The Public and Its Problems (1925) or Art as Experience (1934). He gives a condensed version of some of his thoughts in the 1938 essay “Democracy and Education in the World of Today” (LW 13: 294–303). There he insists that democracy, on the one hand, “is itself an educational principle, an educational measure and policy” (ibid., 294). Democracy, as realized and experienced through direct participation in communities of shared interests that cooperatively solve joint problems, has educative power for all those involved. On the other hand, democracy also depends on education. It “cannot endure, much less develop” without education because the latter “is the essential distributing agency for whatever values and purposes any social group cherishes” (ibid., 296). For Dewey, belief in the potentials of education is therefore an indispensable component in the democratic belief. Democracy can only prosper through being realized and appreciated in the experienced growth of individuals in communities. “Democracy is the faith that the process of experience is more important than any special result attained, so that special results achieved are of ultimate value only as they are used to enrich and order the ongoing process. Since the process of experience is capable of being educative, faith in democracy is all one with faith in experience and education” (LW 14: 229). In accord with what we said above about social and intellectual reconstruction in general, Dewey believes that democracy itself is in continual need of reconstruction. In the 1938 essay he critically observes, “We have had, without formulating it, a conception of democracy as something static, as something that is like an inheritance that can be bequeathed. . . . The crisis that we are undergoing will turn out, I think, to be worthwhile if we learn through it that every generation has to accomplish democracy 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 [changing] social life of which . . . we are a part” (LW 13: 298–299). Dewey points, among other things, to huge changes in material life conditions that have radically altered the social contexts of democratic living together. He cites the observation of

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one of his contemporaries that in his day the majority of the working people in shops and factories in the United States are already working in industries that did not exist 40 years ago. In the “material world, in the world of production, of material commodities and material entities, the progress of knowledge, of science, has revolutionized activity . . . in the last fifty years” (ibid., 299). One crucial challenge that goes with these changes is how to deliberately transform or “translate” the democratic tradition and inheritance “into the terms of the realities of present society which means simply our relations to one another” (ibid., 300). Because of the intrinsically mutual relation between democracy and education, this situation also constitutes a crucial educational challenge. Although Dewey recognizes that progresses toward more democratic education have been made in many respects, he insists that the necessity to reconstruct and improve the connections between democracy and education remains a recurrent task. The problem of teaching and learning what a democratic society means under present conditions continually needs to be addressed anew. With regard to the social situation in the late 1930s, Dewey observes that the changes in social life and human affairs brought about through the ambivalent processes of capitalist development have led to a situation “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 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 . . . ” (ibid., 300). At the same time, it is a problem in face of which “the relation of education and democracy assumes a very different form” than in earlier times (ibid.). From the perspective of the Cologne program of interactive constructivism, we suggest that Bauman’s more recent inquiries into social life and human affairs can be understood as occasions as well as resources for rethinking the relationship between democracy and education in our own time. The dialogue that we have tried to initiate between the approaches of both thinkers has shown the actuality of the Deweyan tradition that provides, among other things, a still appropriate framework for responding constructively as well as critically to more recent investigations into human affairs like the ones undertaken by Bauman. Notes 1. Cf. Reich (2007, 2008, 2009), Neubert (2008, 2009), Neubert and Reich (2006, 2008), online Neubert and Reich: http://www.uni-koeln.de/hf/konstrukt/reich_ works/index.html.

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2. Introductions to the work of Bauman can be found, for example, in Elliott (2007), Beilharz (1999, 2001, 2002), Blackshaw (2005), Jacobsen and Marshman (2006), Jacobsen and Tester (2005), Jacobsen, Marshman and Tester (2007), Smith (1999), Tester (2004, 2007). 3. In Democracy and Education, for example, Dewey distinguishes between spectators, participants, and actors (MW 9: 131). 4. Larry Hickman argues in his chapter in this book that Dewey’s theory of objectivity avoids the extremes of universalism and contextualism. In presentday scholarship on Dewey, there are different interpretations about inquiry and objectivity. Cf. the extensive discussion between interactive constructivism and Hickman’s interpretation of Dewey on issues of universalism in Hickman, Neubert, and Reich (2009). 5. As a sociologist, Bauman does not explicitly thematize education. We think that from a more transdisciplinary perspective Dewey’s approach of democracy and education makes a necessary and unavoidable connection for critical social thought today.

References Bauman, Z. (1989): Modernity and the Holocaust. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press (dt. Übers. Dialektik der Ordnung. Die Moderne und der Holocaust, Hamburg: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1992). Bauman, Z. (1990): Paradoxes of Assimilation. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Bauman, Z. (1993a): Modernity and Ambivalence. Cambridge and Oxford: Polity Press (dt. Übers. Moderne und Ambivalenz. Das Ende der Eindeutigkeit, Hamburg: Junius, 1992). Bauman, Z. (1993b): Postmodern Ethics. Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell (dt. Übers. Postmoderne Ethik, Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 1995). Bauman, Z. (1996): Life in Fragments. Essays in Postmodern Morality. Cambridge: Polity Press (dt. Übers. Flaneure, Spieler und Touristen. Essays zu postmodernen Lebensformen, Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 1997). Bauman, Z. (1997): Postmodernity and Its Discontents. New York: New York University Press (dt. Übers. Das Unbehagen in der Postmoderne, Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 1999). Bauman, Z. (1998): Globalization: The Human Consequences. New York: Columbia University Press (dt. Übers. Der Mensch im Globalisierungskäfig, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003). Bauman, Z. (2000): Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press (dt. Übers. Flüchtige Moderne, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003). Bauman, Z. (2003): Liquid Love: On the Fragility of Human Bonds. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bauman, Z. (2004): Wasted Lives. Modernity and Its Outcasts. Cambridge: Polity Press (dt. Übers. Verworfenes Leben. Die Ausgegrenzten der Moderne, Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2005).

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Bauman, Z. (2005): Liquid Life. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bauman, Z. (2006): Liquid Fear. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bauman, Z. (2007a): Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bauman, Z. (2007b): Consuming Life. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bauman, Z. and Tester, K. (2001): Conversations with Zygmunt Bauman. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bauman, Z. and Yakimova, M. (2002): A postmodern grid of the worldmap? Interview with Zygmunt Bauman. In Eurozine: http://www.eurozine.com/pdf/2002–11-08bauman-en.pdf (August 08, 2011). Beilharz, Peter (1999): Zygmunt Bauman: Dialectic of Modernity. London: Sage. Beilharz, Peter (ed.) (2001): The Bauman Reader. Oxford: Blackwell. Beilharz, Peter (2002): Zygmunt Bauman (Four-Volume Set, Sage Masters in Modern Social Theory). London: Sage Publications. Blackshaw, Tony (2005): Zygmunt Bauman. London: Routledge. Dewey, John: Collected Works. Edited by Jo Ann Boydston: The Early Works (EW 1–5): 1882–1898. Carbondale & Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press/London & Amsterdam: Feffer & Simons. The Middle Works (MW 1–15): 1899–1924. Carbondale & Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press. The Later Works (LW 1–17): 1925–1953. Carbondale & Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press. Hickman, L., Neubert, S., and Reich, K. (eds.) (2009): John Dewey—Between Pragmatism and Constructivism. New York: Fordham. Jacobsen, Michael Hviid and Marshman, Sophia (2006): “Metaphorically Speaking— Metaphors as a Methodological and Moral Signifier of the Sociology of Zygmunt Bauman.” Polish Sociological Review, 3 (155): 307–325. Jacobsen, Michael Hviid and Tester, Keith (2007): “Sociology, Nostalgia, Utopia and Mortality: A Conversation with Zygmunt Bauman.” European Journal of Social Theory, 10 (2): 305–325. Jacobsen, Michael Hviid, Marshman, Sophia and Tester, Keith (2007): Bauman beyond Postmodernity: Conversations, Critical Appraisals and Annotated Bibliography 1989–2005. Aalborg: Aalborg University Press. Mills, C.W. (1970): The Sociological Imagination. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Neubert, Stefan (2008): Dewey’s Pluralism Reconsidered—Pragmatist and Constructivist Perspectives on Diversity and Difference. In: Garrison, Jim (ed.): Reconstructing Democracy, Recontextualizing Dewey: Pragmatism and Interactive Constructivism in the Twenty-First Century, pp. 89–117. Albany: State University of New York Press. Neubert, Stefan (2009): Pragmatism, Constructivism, and the Theory of Culture. In: Hickman, Neubert, and Reich (eds.), pp. 162–184. Neubert, Stefan and Reich, Kersten (2006): “The Challenge of Pragmatism for Constructivism—Some Perspectives in the Programme of Cologne Constructivism.” Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 20 (3): 165–191.

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Neubert, Stefan and Reich, Kersten (2008): Perspectives of Pragmatism—The Cologne Video Project and the Dialogue between Pragmatism and Constructivism, http://www. hf.uni-koeln.de/dewey/31679 (August 08, 2011). Reich, K. (2007): “Interactive Constructivism in Education.” Education & Culture, 23 (1), 7–26. Reich, K. (2008): Democracy and Education—Pragmatist Implications for Constructivist Pedagogy. In: Garrison, J. (ed.): Reconstructing Democracy, Recontextualizing Dewey: Pragmatism and Interactive Constructivism in the Twenty-First Century. New York: State University of New York Press. Reich, K. (2009): Observers, Participants, and Agents in Discourses—A Consideration of Pragmatist and Constructivist Theories of the Observer. In: Hickman, L., Neubert, S. and Reich, K. (eds.). Tester, Keith (2004): The Social Thought of Zygmunt Bauman. London: Palgrave/Macmillan. Tester, Keith (2007): Bauman’s Irony. In: Elliot, A. (ed.): The Contemporary Bauman. London and New York: Routledge.

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CHAPTER 9

Diverse Communities—Dewey’s Theory of Democracy as a Challenge for Foucault, Bourdieu, and Rorty Kersten Reich

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ohn Dewey introduced a theory of democracy based on direct participation of all society members1 without questioning the principles of representative democracy.2 His theory of democracy builds on conditions of difference within and between communities in a society. (1) After a short description of Dewey’s approach, I will go on to examine how far we can still endorse Dewey nowadays. I will compare his approach with several newer theories and discuss the applicability of his basic criteria of democratic development, as presented in his 1916 Democracy and Education. This juxtaposition can help to critically examine the farsightedness of Dewey’s conception and to enhance the criteria if necessary. I will confine myself to analyzing core perspectives of these theories and examining some fundamental connections to pragmatism.3 (2) Michel Foucault’s analysis of power has shed new light on conditions of democracy. His criticism emphasizes that discourses are never free of domination. This insight has consequences on our understanding of democratic communities. (3) Pierre Bourdieu has characterized political and social systems as constructions of subtle distinctions and ambiguous capitalizations. Compared with Dewey, he gives us a somewhat different perspective on social complexity and its consequences on democratic diversity. (4) Finally, Richard Rorty’s account of postmodernity points to new contexts of democratic living together and new ambiguities of constructing democratic consensus. (5) My conclusion will be that Dewey’s basic democratic criteria are still a powerful conceptual tool that can be productively reconstructed for our times in light of newer theoretical developments.4

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1 Two Criteria of Democracy According to John Dewey In Dewey, there are two clear criteria for judging the democratic quality of any group, community, or society. In Democracy and Education, he develops these criteria as principles of democratic reconstruction (MW 9: 89ff ): (1) He points out that in any social group “we find some interest in common” (ibid., 89). But if we look for democracy, we have to ask an important question: How numerous and varied are the interests that are consciously shared within a community? Democratic growth presupposes the existence of diverse interests. Dewey says: “Diversity of stimulation means novelty, and novelty means challenge to thought” (ibid., 90). Diversity cannot develop when there are “rigid class lines preventing adequate interplay of experiences” (ibid.). Democracy needs “reciprocity of interest” (ibid., 91). Its prosperity rests on recognition and understanding of different interests within the frames of social control. This notion may be applied, for example, to scientific discourses. Discourses emerge and prosper more readily where plurality and diversity are developed within a communication about versions of reality constructions. The more simple and onesided an interpretive community develops its interests and restricts its perspectives, the less it can use its resources of growth with regard to scientific achievements and to the possibilities of democratic development in the competition of diverse discourses. Even in the case of strong shared interests of knowledge and a narrow paradigm, diversity is always necessary for development. For only through “numerous and varied consciously shared interests” scientific approaches can respond adequately to the change of contexts. In science as in society, the democratic principle stands against the danger of dogmatism. (2) Dewey argues that in any social group “we find a certain amount of interaction and cooperative intercourse with other groups” (ibid., 89). Again this involves an important question for democratic development: How complete and unhindered is the exchange taking place with other communities? Democracy can grow (in families as in nations) more efficiently if interaction takes place not only inside social groups of common interests, inside one local society or one nation. But it presupposes also that people develop the habit of continually creating and readjusting their diverse perspectives and interests through the exchange with external groups. Only in this way can they respond to new challenges in an increasingly interrelated

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global world. Again, this applies to society as well as to scientific discourses. The more scientific discourses cut themselves off in their own way of thinking and avoid substantial exchange with other discourses, the more they will fail to do justice to the plurality of knowledge in our time. Especially in the growing specialization of scientific discourses, there is always the danger to restrict diversity by neglecting contexts (cf. LW 6: “Context and Thought”). After we gave up the quest for certainty by looking for a metaphysics of final explanations, we increasingly recognized that even scientific discourses are constructions embedded in cultures. They depend on time and context. Since they can no longer provide universal support in final explanations, they must acknowledge the contingency and changeability of their own cultural emergence in theory and practice. Therefore, they rely not only on plural development in themselves but on exchange and competition with others. Both principles, Dewey argues (MW 9: 93), are decisive for education. Generally speaking, democratic societies following these principles are more interested in liberal education. Education, for Dewey, is a necessary condition of growth in society as well as in the sciences. Contrary to authoritarian relations, democratic interactions in diversity are the expression of free and comprehensible choices of and among consciously shared interests. Dewey insists that democratic life emerges through the ways of interacting and communicating with one another. Individuals can participate in very different constructions of realities, but in order to realize a common development individuals need communities in which they refer their interests to those of others.5 For Dewey, social inequalities like racism, class segregation, and nationalism stand against the increasing realization of democratic communities. Even if Dewey optimistically points to the possibilities of reconstructing democracy, he also sees very clearly the dangers of undemocratic developments in his time.6 He therefore connects growth and experience of individuals with acting in communities as the necessary foundation of all democratic life.7 All humans in a democracy have to partake in the process of democracy.8 This is a crucial condition for the continuity of democratic habits, (inter)actions, and personalities.9 A sense for democracy can only develop when it is widely accepted and practiced in the education of a culture.10 Although Dewey’s works on democracy are much broader, the focus in this essay will be on these two criteria because they are pivots at which Dewey’s theory can be brought to a productive exchange with other, more recent,

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theories. How can we today apply and reconstruct Dewey’s democratic criteria? In what follows, I choose three more recent approaches and discuss their implications for reconsidering Dewey’s ideas. 2 Democracy and Power (Dewey and Foucault) As to the relationship of democracy and power, Dewey observes, “What the argument for democracy implies is that the best way to produce initiative and constructive power is to exercise it. Power, as well as interest, comes by use and practice” (LW 11: 224). Here, power is the power of doing. This is astonishingly close to Foucault’s theory. Foucault, too, reconstructs power from the agents’ actions and practices. He thereby arrives at an amazing differentiation of the aspects of power. But this differentiation does not mean, as has often been insinuated in simplified terms, that Foucault would dissolve everything only into power. He rather reflects power as a central dimension in discourses, practices, routines, and institutions. He adds a new perspective without forcing everything into this new focus. Power in its different aspects is seen, among other things, as part and parcel of scientific discourses. Foucault’s very complex theory of power seems to me to imply the following challenges for a Deweyan understanding of democracy:11 ●

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Foucault’s analyses help us, first of all, to interpret historically the very subtle, changeable, complex, and seemingly violent (from torture to psychic pressure) effects of power and interests and describe their continuous importance in all practices, routines, and institutions. Thus, Foucault provides us with criteria for the observation and interpretation of power relations. He thus opens perspectives of critical reflection on effects of power and conditions of democratic struggles to delimit hegemonic power.12 At the same time, Foucault helps us to overcome the illusion of a noncoercive, power-free space or a discourse free from domination. He shows that all practices, routines, and institutions contain aspects of power, even if their cultural and historical expressions are diverse. Observation, interaction, and partaking are not only traversed by existing power but themselves produce power on their part.13 Although Foucault never neglects the brutal effects of exercised power, he rejects the simple schematizing in the common dualism of culprit and victim, of the powerful and the powerless. He also explains that there is a disciplinary power whose crudest expression is the execution of, for example, a sovereign’s direct violence against subordinates. In the

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course of historic development, however, disciplinary power has been developed as a panopticon, as a network of impersonal relations and an invisible gaze of power.14 The strength of disciplinary power lies in the fact that it not only has an effect on actions but is connected structurally and invisibly with all disciplines (including the sciences) and orders (like systems of knowledge).15 Disciplinary power implies that we normally perceive routines and institutions as a matter of course without observing the implicit power aspects in form of our own submission or the subjugation of others. Disciplinary power restricts the chances that the sources of power become visible. Therefore, reflective and critical resistances are necessary to have a chance to uncover parts of the invisible. For Foucault, such possible resistance or critical thinking is always part of the power struggles. In his later works, Foucault discussed technologies of the self. He clarifies perspectives that show how the self is situated between aspects of power and resistance.16 We have to come to terms with the powers surrounding us without ourselves becoming powerless. For the postmodern strategies of subjugation, it is important that those who are subjugated accept the effects of power upon them as their own free decision. Thus the power of subjugation avoids the rise of resistance. Power thereby takes a hegemonic form. This represents a major risk of democratic chances in our time. If we want to save democratic possibilities against hegemonic forces, we have to develop our own power in the context of hegemonic struggles to delimit hegemony.17 But the new dilemma is to determine who belongs to “us.” For Foucault, this can only be discovered in the struggle itself.18

If we follow Foucault’s theory of power, we will be able to learn how far our interpretations and versions of realities are in themselves imbued with power or embody our own claims for power. The less we reflect on our claims in their cultural contexts, the more naïve we will be in our understanding of scientific approaches and their cultural conditions. Foucault demonstrates in detail how orders, identifications, disciplinary actions, and systems of control set up a disciplinary frame to increase the efficiency of multiple and complex social developments. This frame always runs the danger of hegemony and a degeneration of democratic structures into an excess of power on just one side. But there is no alternative in the sense of communication free of domination as still dreamed of by Habermas as a counterfactual ideal.19 Basically, Dewey and Foucault do not lie too far apart in this respect.20 Dewey, too, has an extraordinary sense for power asymmetries as a menace for democracy.21

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But what does Foucault’s approach mean to his two criteria of democratic development? Numerous and varied consciously shared interests are, if we follow Foucault’s analyses, quite capable of delimiting hegemonic claims to power. But they are not sufficient for providing conditions free of domination. Even within a democratic community, power is exercised in multiple ways. If we use Foucault to reformulate Dewey’s first criterion, we can ask as follows: How much power is being played off against one another within the numerous and varied interests in a community and how can we prevent power from being acted one-sidedly in hegemonic forms against certain members of the community? At this point, for example, Foucault’s influence on gender or cultural studies and the discussions of underprivileged minorities shows that there are very subtle mechanisms of suppression often concealed under the guise of the wish for mutually shared interests. These mechanisms are often underestimated in social movements. Their actions often demonstrate how the common interests invisibly dissolve into unequally shared results for several subgroups. Generally, this is also true for bourgeois liberalism sharing common interests while paying too little attention to the practical consequences of real power relations. Thus the emergence of new inequalities is hidden. Today, the second criterion of exchange between different social groups in a society or between different societies is often discussed in the context of globalization. But this globalized world represents, to a large degree, the interests of global capitalism and provides the state and legal conditions necessary for supplying its demands. Behind this, however, there are local or national as well as ethnic and religious interests powerfully struggling against one another, again undermining the mutually shared interests. Even in themselves these interests are often highly contradictory. If Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996) expressed a rather onesided and many times undifferentiated view of culture, the impact of his ideas would underline that culture increasingly has become a site of political struggles. Huntington argues only from a narrow Western point of view, a position that Stuart Hall ironically called “the West and the Rest” (1992). From the viewpoint of global power, the emphasis on such cultural aspects often only touches the surface of power relations and conflicts. Here, Foucault’s analyses can help us to reflect more deeply on the connections and contradictions between different claims in societies and the power relations that support them. Power penetrates all dimensions of society and is not restricted to specific fields of politics or culture. With Foucault we are called upon to question all hegemonic claims, not only where they appear in universalistic forms but also where they are taken as expressions of common sense.

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With Foucault, then, Dewey’s criteria may be stated more precisely and be handled in a less utopian way. The crucial point is to regard even discourses about democratic criteria as part of power struggles. As such they contain presuppositions that have to be critically examined in order to reconstruct the criteria in accordance with changing social contexts. But there remains one important commonality between Foucault and Dewey. Even though Foucault reflects on power relations more critically and soberly than Dewey, both insist that the only way to delimit hegemonic power lies in empowering the participation of the self. Democracy means first of all to fight for conditions that give people the chance to develop their resources. Dewey here stresses the need of communities whereas Foucault puts more emphasis on the difficulties of power relations in communities and between them. Therefore, to live in a democracy implies the readiness to fight for democratic principles. If we take these principles for granted like something given to us from a higher authority, we will be disappointed in the end and lose the fight for democracy perhaps much quicker than we expected. 3

Democracy and Capital (Dewey and Bourdieu)

Dewey’s conception of democracy is rooted in the optimism that social intelligence can and must criticize and reconstruct existing practices, routines, or institutions at any time to realize the variety of democratic interests and pave viable ways for the development of democracy itself.22 Dewey was clearly aware, at this point, of the importance of “intellectual capital” (LW 5: 294) as a necessary instrument for solving human problems. Pierre Bourdieu is well known in our times for his use of the concept “capital” in understanding social relations. He distinguishes between different forms of capital. For him capital is not restricted to the field of material production and the exchange of goods that determines the wealth of people (with material and immaterial values). Instead, capital today must be understood in a different way if we want to comprehend the structure and function of the social world. Therefore, Bourdieu’s different forms of capital are essential for a description of democratic developments.23 Quite like Dewey, Bourdieu (1988) assumes that the social milieu and the fields of education, especially the family and school, constitute an essential role in the allocation of social positions. However, where Dewey focuses on the positive role of education in balancing out and compensating for different social starting points, Bourdieu introduces the distinction between economic and cultural capital.24 Economic capital represents the wealth and possibilities of action on the part of those possessing property. In modern societies it

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is always supplemented by cultural capital. “Cultural capital can exist in three forms: in the embodied state, i.e., in the form of long-lasting dispositions of the mind and body; in the objectified state, in the form of cultural goods (pictures, books, dictionaries, instruments, machines, etc.), which are the trace or realization of theories or critiques of these theories, problematics, etc.; and in the institutionalized state, a form of objectification which must be set apart because, as will be seen in the case of educational qualifications, it confers entirely original properties on the cultural capital which it is presumed to guarantee” (Bourdieu in http://www.viet-studies.org/Bourdieu_capital.htm). As well as in the case of economic property, the possession of cultural capital is a criterion for the possibilities of the prospects of life. It is a basis for the access to positions of power. Especially through cultural heredity in the family and a selective school system, it is also a decisive point for social advancement or decline. “Fine distinctions” have taken the place of raw class differences.25 Especially with regard to experts and bureaucracies, cultural capital is connected with positions of power, with social and political dominance linked with economic profit in return. Social capital, for Bourdieu, is a resource that represents relationship networks. It is the sum of cumulated effects—both cultural and economic—that result from being involved in social contexts of more or less institutionalized relationships. Mutual acquaintance and recognition are important for social capital. Equally, these networks must be maintained and nurtured continuously in order to be available as a resource. All sorts of capital exist not only on a material but also on a symbolic level. “Symbolic capital, that is to say, capital—in whatever form—insofar as it is represented, i.e., apprehended symbolically, in a relationship of knowledge or, more precisely, of misrecognition and recognition, presupposes the intervention of the habitus, as a socially constituted cognitive capacity” (Bourdieu 1986, footnote 3). With Bourdieu, we get a perspective on the role of the habitus in producing social perceptions and knowledge. Symbolic capital is subject to complicated regulations for the production of new inequalities and power relations.26 From this perspective, any free and independent intellectual standing in a supposedly neutral position toward society is an illusion. Economic and cultural capitals are crucial conditions for the realizations of social capital, that is, the networks of relations and liabilities that inform the habitus. This is true for the intellectual (as expert for the symbolic) as for everybody else. And as social sciences in the last decades have repeatedly observed, these networks actually rather tend to increase social inequalities than to delimit them. The state despite its supposedly neutral position itself produces relations of dominance and sets up advantages for certain groups of interest.27

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With regard to school systems worldwide and their development, numbers of graduates with academic degrees are raising. But almost everywhere in the world, in industrialized nations in particular, the power and influence of elites is increasing, too. If we compare this situation with Dewey’s hope for social intelligence and his warnings against the dominance of elites over democratic publics, the result is sobering. Social intelligence fails in the face of egoistic interests of power and aspirations to economic and social advantages without consideration for others.28 Where Dewey speaks of habits, Bourdieu uses the term habitus. Generally speaking, habits are cultural resources displayed in the conduct of individuals. In a different way than Dewey, Bourdieu emphasizes the dependence of these resources on social fields of interests and power relations.29 Like habits, the habitus is a system of dispositions, durably acquired schemes of perception, and thought and action directed toward a field of practice. It can be reinforced or weakened by changing social contexts. More decisively than Dewey, Bourdieu stresses the duration of a once acquired habitus even when the social, cultural, and economical fields are changing. But the main difference lies in Bourdieu’s account of the relation between habitus and the forms of capital. In this view, we observe the subtle ways in which power is implicated in all social relations as the articulation of fine differences. The habitus is, for Bourdieu, the central key to the understanding of societal and individual reproduction of culture. It stands for the regulation of practices in a more or less durable way and for the organization and the deployment of diverse forms of capital according to specific rules. With regard to Dewey’s two criteria of democratic development, Bourdieu’s perspective suggests that we investigate more thoroughly and critically into the preconditions implicitly contained in the interpretive communities that define and discuss the criteria themselves. Consciously sharing numerous and varied interests within a social group or community already imply a specific habitus. Freely and tolerantly exchanging viewpoints and interests between different groups equally presupposes a particular habitus. In the background of Dewey’s criteria stands the ideal of the liberal, openminded, and public intellectual. From Bourdieu’s perspective, this ideal must be considered as rather utopian even for the academic circles in Western societies. If we set up criteria for democracy we must at the same time investigate empirically how far the symbolic ideal accords with economic, social, and cultural conditions of capital. We must ask who benefits from these conditions. If the criteria are not used as an ideal but as perspective for empirical analyses, it has to be questioned in particular who gains economic profits, social recognition, and cultural benefits from the relations and hidden inequalities in and between communities. With this shift in perspective, we move

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from democratic vision or utopia to the sober and down-to-earth reality of competition, self-interest, and investing capital for surplus value. Although Bourdieu thus observes more critically and precisely what the conditions and resources of democracy are in view of the unequal distribution of capitals, Dewey gives us a more productive perspective as to democratic solutions. He insists that participation has to be developed in education if the project of democracy is to succeed at all.30 But in this connection, Bourdieu’s critical perspective can be used to specify our views of the contexts of applying the two criteria. If we want to further develop Dewey’s perspective for our time, we must, I suggest, claim a third criterion that explicitly insists on the inevitable connection between democracy and education that is already contained in Dewey’s approach.31 Education must be offered as equally as possible to all people in a society that provides support for all learners. It must enable them to participate actively in the contents and relationships of learning. Thus partaking in numerous and varied interests within a community and as well as vivid and unhindered exchange between communities must be recognized as fundamental principles in education. The claim for democratic education must require in all educational practices, routines, and institutions that the realization of the two criteria in educational communities is guaranteed. This is an educational principle of diversity that stands against the one-sidedness of elites’ powers, unequal distribution of resources, separation between public and private schools, egoistic or partial use of social networks, compartmentalization of lifeworlds, and lack of solidarity with the less privileged. Here the democratic paradox between freedom (diversity) and solidarity32 turns out to be an educational paradox: If all learners need adequate conditions and resources for individual growth in and between communities in order to realize diversity, this especially means that the socially deprived and marginalized need solidarity and compensatory support. It will be decisive for the survival and prosperity of democracy to meet this claim of balancing out freedom/diversity and solidarity. The more advantaged groups and communities worldwide must do justice to this claim if they are willing to support democracy at all.33 4

Democracy and Postmodernity (Dewey and Rorty)

Since Kant, philosophy has developed debates about the conditions of possibility of theoretical claims. The point was to argue that unless certain requirements are fulfilled, the truth of a statement about any phenomenon cannot be guaranteed. In his work “Perpetual Peace,” Kant tries to determine the conditions of the possibility of peace (and, implicitly, also of democracy).

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He did so from a perspective of universal reason. Even if his assumptions seem plausible in the context of Enlightenment discourses, the movement of Enlightenment, seen in retrospective, shows contradictions between theory and practice as two different areas of validity. The plausible principles of Enlightenment reason do not stand up to societal development. John Dewey’s pragmatism rejects the dualism between theory and practice, for example, between rational idealism and disillusioned practice. His pragmatic turn of the critique of knowledge takes into consideration that it is always experience and action in experience that we live and that, then, returns to our theories as experienced.34 For him, in this sense, there are no final values for the democratic process given to the community from without. Democracy means lived community whose standards and viabilities are developed from within. There is no transcendental justification of democracy. As experience, democracy is always an experimental affair.35 But this does not mean arbitrariness. Democratic communities must do justice to the conditions of possibility of an acceptable way of life for all. This implies to find the necessary values, norms, and standards by experimenting with democratic possibilities as well as the readiness to change those values, norms, and standards according to the viability of contexts. But community, to be sure, depends on a common good. Seen in a larger perspective, debates about this common good have taken considerable different forms. I will sum up three controversial contexts of debate: ●

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From the perspective of democratic experimentalism and liberal education as a main force to realize democracy, the participation of all members of a society seems inevitable in order to obtain a sufficiently liberal basis for democracy.36 This is the call for deep democracy in many variations. For Jack Crittenden (2002), it represents the deeply participatory approach as followed by Thomas Jefferson. In this approach we need a permanent critical awareness for democratic theories and practices.37 Democratic experimentalism requires liberal education for all people to create an appropriate basis for active and critical participation.38 However, as critical research has shown, it is precisely the educational sector where the claims for liberal equality and equity have failed most heavily.39 As practices failed to live up to the ideal, democratic theories based on technocratic or knowledge elites have been promoted. For Crittenden this is the representative branch propagated by James Madison. Proponents of this approach often argue that the masses are too irrational and they tend to overestimate the dangers of mass manipulation.40 They want to restrict the direct influence of the public by insisting

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on representative structures of democracy.41 To their mind, the ideal of participatory democracy builds on the unrealistic ideal that humans can avoid self-interest on behalf of rational judgments concerning public affairs. Therefore, the masses should not be allowed to have direct political influence.42 It is quite clear that these assumptions mirror the failures of democratic education and draw a negative conclusion. However, the practical consequence is that the masses often feel misunderstood by politics in representative government. The increase of political disinterestedness in Western societies today is sufficient proof that this model of representation over participation has largely become the standard. On the whole, different democratic theories have been developed in succession and juxtaposition, which not only lead to confusion and constantly further distinctions in detail but also result in uncertainty with regard to the essential criteria of democracy. In practice, too, democracy has undergone many different and contradictory movements. The concept of democracy thus shows an increasing opening and expansion with the spectrum reaching from direct participation on the one hand to elitist representation and neglect of the interests of the many on the other hand.

These three lines of discourse are playing an important role today. There are proponents of each line contesting each other and maintaining their claims without having last reasons, ultimate grounds or final and complete justification. Richard Rorty has been an influential philosopher who has given point to this controversy. In his reconstruction of pragmatism,43 Rorty concludes from a perspective of different versions of realities as viewed in the Western cultures nowadays, that there can be no solution, in the long run, as to which explanation of desirable realities is more justified or effective than others. There are no final reasons for choosing between different versions of common goods. No meta-narrative, no theory of human nature, no metaphysics, or even theology can establish an unambiguous foundation for the just community. All such establishments are open to interpretation. They are constructs, versions of reality made up by observers. And the performance of observing and constructing does not necessarily imply a general, universal, and correct criterion for all claims of validity. Warranty is found in the performances themselves in the context of the cultural and always ethnocentric interpretations of the ways we live.44 All we need is that these interpretive communities make majority decisions. The viability of interpretations and, thus, the acceptance or refusal of all constructions beyond mere subjective opinions—that is, decisions made in a community—are more important than fundamental

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reasons. There is no necessary rational a priori of democracy. However, Rorty does not deny the importance of democratic structures, because lived democracy, for him, is a practical condition for a free community. Therefore, his approach does not exclude the possibility of deep democracy if we could really show how to live it. This more contextual understanding of democratic communities is one result of our turning away from Kant, from metaphysical conceptions of the world and final explanations. There are many other theories that follow this turn today. We find a certain relativism not only in Rorty’s pragmatism, but in many other approaches in the cultural sciences and humanities as well. This relativism expresses social changes and developments in the last decades.45 In opposition, however, we find others who warn us against putting at risk core values of social progressivism as a heritage of the enlightenment. For them Dewey is a main reference. Dewey has developed a clear and critical perspective on the social conditions and movements of his time. In modernity, natural rights theories have been transformed into contractarian models (Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau). These rights are still important today. They articulate the quest and requirement to secure social justice and democratic order. Therefore, we need to stipulate norms, values, and laws. Most important for enlightenment thought is the enforcement of human rights. If we follow this line of discourse with and beyond Dewey, we encounter many sophisticated articulations of such claims, for example, in Rawls (1971), Habermas (1984, 1987a, b), Dworkin (1978), or Ackerman (1980). Their many differences notwithstanding, these approaches all emphasize that social justice needs a foundation more solid than majority decisions. Majorities may vary. But the grounds on which democracy builds must be more stable. The necessary norms, values, and laws must be at least founded and warranted by discourse. Thus, these theories argue for rational ideals critically developed out of the Enlightenment movement and articulated in new theoretical shapes. They concede that existing practices, routines, and institutions do not come up with the democratic ideal. Therefore it can only be articulated counterfactually. But this articulation and theoretical foundation are still indispensable if we do not want to surrender democracy altogether. The problem with these positions, to my mind, is that they tend to lose contact with conditions of living too easily by taking refuge in rational discourses. They avoid taking sufficient account of the social and cultural ambivalences of democracy. For example, they construct a rational and coherent logical account where, in reality, we rather find particular interests, one-sidedness, and contradictions. On one hand, this renders them blind to the actual conditions of life. On the other hand, they stand for

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indispensable claims and democratic hopes to overcome the very particular interests, one-sidedness, and contradictions that threaten democracy. Even if these positions often take reference to Dewey, they articulate only parts of his pragmatism. I see Dewey in a middle position between them and Rorty. In what follows I will clarify this judgment with regard to Dewey’s two criteria of democracy. Again, I will try to develop out of this critical discussion some perspectives for reconstructing the criteria in light of postmodernity: ●

Dewey‘s starting point is experience. Language is a necessary and generative medium of experience. But for Dewey language is always realized in actions. Language games cannot do away with experience. This is the very point where Rorty does not want to follow Dewey. Here he gives pragmatism a different turn. To my mind, he aptly criticizes pragmatism’s naturalism and its hidden consequences in the way of giving preference to natural sciences and technologies. The dominance of instrumentalism does not do justice to the diverse facets of culture as expressed, for example, in literature, art, and social sciences. Even if Dewey’s broad understanding of experience comprises these diverse facets, Rorty’s objection stresses that they cannot today be adequately articulated by reference to naturalism. Even the natural sciences succeed or fail in the context of language games. In the case of many technologies we must admit that these games are warranted by repeated experiments. Normally we do not doubt their viability. But their reliability concerns only a narrow field of practice (experience). Beyond this narrow field they often produce unforeseen effects that return to experience as the precarious side of life (risk society). Instrumentalism tends to block critical perspectives on such consequences. The point is not that instrumentalism as such is a wrong perspective but that it is often too one-sidedly connected with natural sciences and technologies. For Rorty, philosophy as critical discourse must be more comprehensive. Philosophical reflections have to deal with linguistic complexities, and they should do so in an edifying and diverse way. Here, instrumentalism and feasibility are not of primary import. What counts are vocabularies and discourses in which we reflect and find new articulations of diverse cultures. In this move, Rorty on the other hand misses to pay sufficient attention to the relevance of experience and action as contexts of all language games in culture. Thus the relativism of vocabularies and language games may easily turn out as arbitrariness. Here, to my mind, there are more and richer resources in Dewey’s pragmatic tradition than have so far been reconstructed by those who follow Rorty.

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Rorty radically contests the effectiveness of philosophical discourses. In the wake of the linguistic turn, philosophers have done much work in analyzing the linguistic conditions of modern thought and discourses. We have to admit, though, that philosophy upon the whole has not been very effective in solving concrete social, political, and economic problems in modernity. Therefore Rorty suggests that we be more modest in our expectations. His “pragmatism shares the Deweyan refusal to empower by appeal to ontological essences and natural rights, but it abandons the idea that philosophy can compensate by proposing effective means for social empowerment” (Shusterman 1997, 81). This changes the status of our two criteria. They have to be understood as critical offers, available perspectives that we can take to criticize actual conditions rather than readymade instruments for democratic reform. They are no readymade tools because they always imply a community, and communities differ in their interpretation and in the way they make use of these tools. Rorty more decidedly than Dewey points to the incommensurability and radical plurality of communities. Dewey stands for a more positive liberalism than Rorty. He prefers to focus on democracy as lived in actual, local, and participatory communities. The warranted assertibility of democracy as a way of life depends on the experience of local communities as the model of democratic interaction. Rorty prefers a negative liberalism that doubts the possibility to derive warranted assertibilities from the way we live. For him democratic values are always part of narrations, different vocabularies, and contingencies in language games.46 From the skeptical perspective on narrations, the criteria again seem to have a weak status. Especially, we miss the political conditions and forces that would enable us to use them as powerful cultural instruments. Rather, democratic practice shows that the criteria are most often called upon when democratic rights and liberties are under attack. They are then used as weapons of defense rather than tools of construction. Against this sober skepticism, Dewey has spoken of democracy as a struggle for active and free participation for all. This implies the responsibility to take care of sufficient democratic conditions and structures as something we have to create and reconstruct ourselves. In this connection, he did not hesitate to demand radical reforms of culture including the economical system. By comparison, pragmatists like Rorty are today much more cautious in their criticism. This weakens the case of political emancipation, because democratic freedom is understood as standing for tolerance rather than active reconstruction (cf. ibid., 72).

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For Dewey, the creation of social responsibility depends on a positive development of individuality in interaction within a community. Rorty here, too, sounds a more negative tone. Not only his idea of liberty but also his understanding of solidarity is defined in defensive categories. Where Dewey still holds on to the modern idea of the coherent subject as the necessary agent for achieving the common good, Rorty points to the postmodern experience of decentralized subjectivity and accentuates the necessity to avoid cruelty and suffering as remaining liberal strategy. This is a minimum requirement of solidarity that Rorty insists on. Where Dewey looks for commonalities of values and a unity in diversity, Rorty rejects this as illusionary. The unity looked for, after all, has always been more wishful than actual. In principle, the contingency of individual life forms and identities has increased considerably in the transition from modernity to postmodernity. Chance more and more becomes a crucial factor in the conduct of life. Against this background, Rorty expands the perspectives on democratic liberties especially in direction of an “aesthetic life” that furthers self-enlargement, self-enrichment, and self-creation. Where Dewey emphasizes the social ties that bind the different members of a society together, Rorty questions the unambiguousness of these ties and points to contradictions. For him, social ties and frames are still necessary, but we have lost secure grounds to argue for their legitimation. In these different accounts we partly can recognize the different ages in which Dewey and Rorty lived (cf. ibid., 73ff ).47 If we understand the two criteria in a too general way, they cannot stand up against the changes of times. Rather, the fact that they can be filled with different contents in different times should be regarded as a strength and not a weakness. Rorty is especially critical against any preconception on the side of philosophers as to how people should live together. Such predecisions have shown their futility too many times to be convincing anymore. Philosophers should keep their hands off people’s affairs and leave them alone (cf. Rorty 1991, 194); they should care about tolerance rather than emancipation (ibid., 213). In privacy one can cultivate irony that is necessary for critical reflection. The aim of irony, for Rorty, is not arrogance but modesty. But on the other hand such irony is not appropriate for public matters like government and constitution, for laws and justice, and for liberties in political life. Liberals must protect the existing political conditions to secure the possibility of ironical self-reflection and the diversity of aesthetic lives. For Rorty, the point is to organize private and public life in ways that support diversity and pluralism as

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concrete choice of people with democratic orientations. Rorty is right in warning us against the overestimation of the impact of critical thinking in our society. But the weak point of this position, to my mind, lies in his unclear distinction between public conditions and private affairs. This implies that it remains unclear in Rorty, what the concrete conditions for establishing liberal communities are. Here Dewey’s classical pragmatism has more resources than Rorty draws on. If we consider more closely the differences between Dewey and Rorty with a view on the reconstruction of the two criteria, we find some interesting shifts: Taken on the surface it may seem that the development of capitalist societies corresponds to the tendencies expressed in the two criteria. We have had an increase of diversity, pluralism, and differences in communities and an increase of interrelations between communities. Thus they still seem to be appropriate today. But if we look more closely we have to reconstruct them in order to employ them as critical perspectives today. With Foucault, we may recognize and analyze the power ties and power structures involved in this development. With Bourdieu, we have to acknowledge the effects of different interests articulated in different forms of capital and unequal expectations implied in the process. With Rorty, we can say that these processes and structures take their themes in various language games. But with Foucault and Bourdieu, we can emphasize that not only linguistic actions are important here. Even if the professionals of discourses act mainly in language games this does not mean that language games are disconnected from interests and power relations. And there exists a world beyond language games even if this world may be articulated only in such games. Especially economic differences have grown in the last decades compared to the progress made in educational systems and other symbolic forms of equity. The new economic inequality has built up new concentrations of capital and power. This affects the two criteria. Dewey’s vision of the use of the criteria as a concept of global democratic orientation on the basis of relative equality of society members is put to the test through the increase of differences between the rich and the poor, between the propertyless and the propertied classes, between the uneducated and educated. This test is critical for the development of democracy. The question is whether democracy destroys itself in the ecstasy of differences in groups or classes or whether it will succeed in providing diverse and real chances for all. Dewey was quite aware of this contradiction: “We are educating more citizens than ever before for participation in democratic processes of control, but there are influential forces ready to abandon even political

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democracy in order to prevent the extension of democracy into industry and finance” (LW 11: 536). Until now, Dewey’s criteria give a possible and reasonable frame to reflect this contradiction and possible solutions. Even if they cannot lead to a complete analysis, they are an entrance into the crucial reflection of democratic conditions that are at stake if we consider democracy not only as a given structure but as a contradictory process. Rorty implicitly uses the criteria and at the same time articulates a frame for the ecstasy of freedom—namely, solidarity. At this point Rorty is more pragmatist than many of his critics think. However, Dewey would argue that solidarity needs community life and cannot be restricted to mere language games. Already in his Early Works, he says, “It is community life, participation in the organized and continuous resources of civilization, which alone enables the individual to realize the high capacities that are latent in him. As mere individual, man cannot ascend above savagery. As an individual he is an insignificant affair, as social whole he constitutes a living miracle. It is through social relations that the individual emerges from his animal and natural state and becomes really a spiritual being” (EW 5: 378). Later he emphasizes that in such communities participation is a main aim in education and school: “Apart from participation in social life, the school has no moral end nor aim. As long as we confine ourselves to the school as an isolated institution, we have no directing principles, because we have no object” (MW 4: 271). Or in regard to society: “A society which makes provision for participation in its good of all its members on equal terms and which secures flexible readjustment of its institutions through interaction of the different forms of associated life is in so far democratic” (MW 9: 106). This democratic society is not yet achieved. We still have to fight for it. And there is no final orientation as well as no ultimate principle for this struggle. “Freedom is a growth, an attainment, not an original possession, and it is attained by idealization of institutions and law and the active participation of individuals in their loyal maintenance, not by their abolition or reduction in the interests of personal judgments and wants” (LW 3:103). At this point the circle of arguments in view of the two criteria closes: They are neither arbitrary figures nor just moments of a possible language game. They stand for a serious position and represent valid judgments within democratic practices, routines, and institutions as represented in language games. With Rorty, we may say that all language games are built on contingency and imply a certain amount of arbitrariness. But for a pragmatist and constructivist perspective this is not enough.48 We must ask more concretely (without having a final list of questions):

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What practices, routines, and institutions of democratic living are established and where do they fail? If we do not undertake critical analyses of our situation and look for sufficient warranted assertibility of what is functioning and what is not, we will miss important key points of democratic development. What idealizations of practices, routines, and institutions are necessary today for our democratic struggles? If we give no concrete answers to this question, we will run the risk of losing orientation of how to fight for freedom. What active forms of participation can we achieve in our local and global communities? If we do not organize partaking well we will increase the risks of a split of interests with new classes and future class struggles. What concrete forms of support do we develop for more equity in education and life opportunities? The rich and prosperous will be measured by how they promote the poor and less advantaged.49

For Dewey, the idea of the criteria is always already connected with the imagination of individuals in communication with others, that is, the imagination of a common ground. This position makes the articulation and realization of commonalities and differences possible. This implies a community that develops and sufficiently shares common values, a common good, and a common public life that save it from dissolving into disorder. Dewey could and would not imagine a community that disperses into fragments of extreme privacy and in which diversity dominates over commonality. For him the spaces of difference were comprehended by the ties of emancipative solidarity. Although he did not conceive of these ties as necessary historical laws like in Marxism, they gave a clear direction and orientation to his political hope. There is a trace of harmony in this perspective that tends to reduce the harshness of social conflicts, contradictions, oppositions, and ambivalences. Nevertheless, Dewey’s criteria themselves contain a critical potential against this very harmonization. In communities and between communities the differences can step to the foreground and can extend extremely. The criteria do not exclude extreme and radical forms of diversity. But Dewey could not imagine how disconnected and multioptional a society like ours can be. Therefore, we should today understand the criteria in a new context. We have to apply them to a much more fragmented culture and ask ourselves how we achieve minimum accordance between diversity and social justice. Even if we doubt the imagination of a community that comprises all, there still remains the question of how to involve as many as possible in the communities that we build.

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With Rorty, we are led to radicalize the content of both criteria. Implicitly, he still uses them. Like Dewey, he takes as the starting point that differences in a community are important for democracy. But the differences in postmodernity have increased in the direction of contingency, coincidence, chances, and arbitrary liberties. Insofar in view of the first criterion we more and more recognize not only chances but risks of disintegration of common interests. And in view of the second criterion, the increase of diversity and differences between communities make an increase of tolerance necessary. This tolerance is a presupposition for taking the chances of all liberties in a community. Even if equality in societies in the general sense has failed, it is still a prerequisite for democracy to maintain and nurture a minimum of solidarity that allows chances as fair as possible to all members of society. Rorty does not want to intervene from a philosophical standpoint in the societal development because he sees no chances for success. He bets his hope and confidence on the prosperity of diversity and, in face of his negative approach, he proposes to avoid attempts to delimit and regulate the increase of differences and the pluralism of language games. Thereby, however, he tends to neglect the increase of unequal chances and to downplay the damages to democratic communities generated by insufficient solidarity. In his view on America (cf. Rorty 1998b), he seems to trust that the two criteria could still be functioning. At the same time, he doubts that the current society is sufficiently social and democratic. As Dewey in his time, Rorty criticizes the unsocial and unfair conditions, the self-adulation and greed of many that endanger both—the chances of individuals and the democratic life in society. But Rorty also doubts that a critical theory can change much at that. Do we not have to admit that our criticism of cultural practices, routines, and institutions has achieved only very little? What grounds do we have to believe that it will change more in the future? For Rorty, this consideration forces us to admit that, at first, we should achieve the common good in our private and individual lives. What we hoped for in general can only be gained in particular. With this turn to the private, Rorty abandons the explanatory model of discourse on behalf of a therapeutic model. But from this position, the two criteria—which Rorty only uses by implication— can give but a very general orientation. Especially it does not seem necessary to determine the concrete ways of realizing liberties and to specify the concrete forms of solidarity. Dewey is more concrete here. For him, what counts are not only the growth of societies in direction of an increase of pluralism, diversity, individual chances but also the building of communities in local and more global contexts. In postmodern discourses, as elaborated, for example, by Rorty, we may see the consequences of pluralist growth as well as the

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problems of establishing communities. A new struggle appears: More than before we need a culture of tolerance in order to be able to live the new liberties. However, we cannot do without a culture of solidarity, lest the increase of liberties creates an increase of unequal chances that will in the long run subvert the grounds of tolerance. 5 Conclusion Looking back at the argumentation in this chapter, we may realize how problematic the justification of basic criteria for democracy has become today. The criteria, as proposed by Dewey, were built on a liberal approach led by a clear imagination of a free and solidaric community and an optimistic view on societal and individual growth. The position of freedom summarizes the emancipation struggles of centuries and is effective in the liberal orientation. Dewey says: The meaning of liberalism has undergone many changes since the word came into vogue not very much more than a century ago. The word came into use to denote a new spirit that grew and spread with the rise of democracy. It implied a new interest in the common man and a new sense that the common man, the representative of the great masses of human beings, had possibilities that had been kept under, that had not been allowed to develop, because of institutional and political conditions. This new spirit was liberal in both senses of the word. It was marked by a generous attitude, by sympathy for the underdog, for those who were not given a chance. It was part of a widespread rise of humanitarian philanthropy. It was also liberal in that it aimed at enlarging the scope of free action on the part of those who for ages had had no part in public affairs and no lot in the benefits secured by this participation. (LW 11: 364–365)

Participation is a main force for democratic orientation: “The very fact of exclusion from participation is a subtle form of suppression. It gives individuals no opportunity to reflect and decide upon what is good for them” (LW 11: 218). This judgment gives a clear frame to the two criteria. But Dewey is aware of the fact that the criteria and his liberal orientation are by no means realized in the society of his—and we may add—our times. They are ideal-typical. They represent critical norms, values, and perspectives that are necessary to give our actions an orientation. This orientation points on one side to diversity, pluralism, and growth of liberties. On the other side, it stands in need

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of more equity in societies and solidarity, that is, more equal growth of individual chances. This orientation is fundamentally connected with democracy itself: “Although it is not as yet universally or sufficiently recognized that a democratic society means fundamentally the right of every human being to an environment in which his own personal activity will have an opportunity of full participation and development in social relationships, yet it can hardly be denied that democracy becomes an actual human fact only in the degree in which social customs and institutions are moving in this direction” (LW 17: 55–56). What directions are at choice? Here, we discussed three exemplarily chosen perspectives to reconstruct Dewey’s view: (1) Foucault insists more decidedly on an analysis of power and power relations. This view helps to question critically the more harmonic view of communities in Dewey. But with Dewey, we can recognize more clearly than with Foucault that in education we find one resource to use existing power relations in a democratic sense. (2) Bourdieu analyzes different forms of capital and their effects on the habitus. For him, the habitus is always interwoven within the forms of capital and the interests represented in them. With Bourdieu we can critically reject idealized expectations of neutral expert roles and of a supposedly neutral science. This view helps to reconstruct Dewey’s concept of habits. Like Foucault, Bourdieu gives a description of practices, routines, and institutions but has no educational model to delimit hegemonies in the struggles between interests. (3) Rorty insists on contexts and language games in their import for critical thought in our time and culture. He focuses more on the hopes of increasing liberties than on a critical investigation of concrete social conditions. He warns us not to overestimate our theoretical ideas and expectations. But Dewey would not have been satisfied with a position that favors the private more than the public, because in the private the dangers of social forgetfulness are too big. Even if Rorty is right that intellectuals cannot change the world in a more or less utopian way right now, the acceptance of this statement leads to the risk of becoming a mere observer. We can only delimit this risk through our roles as participants and agents in the struggles for democratic progress.50 All three comparisons show how vivid and essential the debate about Dewey’s two criteria for democracy can be. With regard to democratic development, Dewey can still help us broaden our arguments and critically check if we

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missed important points. His work is important for the three exemplarily chosen perspectives. Equally, the three discussed positions are relevant to reconstruct Dewey with regard to actual debates and challenges. His pathbreaking move to relate democracy and education in contexts with experimentalism, inquiry, and action can still open a critical horizon to our questions and answers about democracy.

Notes 1. “Politically, democracy means a form of government which does not esteem the well-being of one individual or class above that of another; a system of laws and administration which ranks the happiness and interests of all as upon the same plane, and before whose law and administration all individuals are alike, or equal. But experience has shown that such a state of affairs is not realizable save where all interests have an opportunity to be heard, to make themselves felt, to take a hand in shaping policies. Consequently, universal suffrage, direct participation in choice of rulers, is an essential part of political democracy” (MW 10: 137–138). 2. “Representative government must at least seem to be founded on public interests as they are revealed to public belief. The days are past when government can be carried on without any pretense of ascertaining the wishes of the governed” (LW 2: 248). 3. Similar intentions can be found, for example, in Bernstein (1992) and Hollinger (1996). 4. I thank Stefan Neubert for discussing and suggesting ideas in writing and translating this chapter. 5. There are many introductions to the contexts of democracy in pragmatism (Dewey). Cf., for example, Bernstein (1998), Campbell (1992), Caspary (2000), Festenstein (1997), and Westbrock (1991). To liberalism cf. for example, Ryan (1995). Hollinger (1996) is very informative in analyzing the dark sides of liberalism in pragmatism. 6. See, for example, Dewey’s position in “The Public and Its Problems” (LW 2) and “Freedom and Culture” (LW 13). 7. Cf. for example, Bernstein (1992), Shusterman (1997, 71ff.), Langsdorf et al. (1995) who compare this acting in communities in the positions of John Dewey and Richard Rorty to show limits and chances of Dewey’s model for today. 8. The procedural, representative democratic model is opposed by a model of deep democracy in which direct citizen participation in the acts of communication and interconnectedness of individuals is the way of life. Cf., for example, Gutmann and Thompson (2004), Green (1999), and Barber (1984). I will discuss this aspect later in the section “Democracy and Postmodernity (Dewey and Rorty).” 9. “Individual participation in legislative authority and position is a guarantee of strong, free, and independent personalities” (MW 2: 65).

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10. “For the unsolved problem of democracy is the construction of an education which will develop that kind of individuality which is intelligently alive to the common life and sensitively loyal to its common maintenance. It is not an antithesis of social control and individual development which our education requires. We want that type of education which will discover and form the kind of individual who is the intelligent carrier of a social democracy—social indeed, but still a democracy” (MW 11: 57). And social means: “The defining or characteristic condition of a group as social is communication, participation, sharing, interpenetration of meanings.” (See Democracy and Education, pp. 94–100.) (MW 15: 239). 11. For a more extensive and subtle interpretation of Foucault, see Reich (1998). 12. See, for example, Foucault (1979, 1980, 1988). 13. Cf. as introductory works especially Foucault (1980) and Rabinow (1985). 14. As classic metatheories hereof cf., for example, Foucault (1970, 1972, 1981). 15. In “The History of Sexuality,” Foucault investigates such orders and patterns of interpretation in a subtly differentiated way. Cf. Foucault (1978, 1985, 1986). 16. This was one essential observation of Foucault’s late works. Cf. Martin (1988). 17. In this direction points a deconstructed Marxist analysis too. Cf., for example, Laclau/Mouffe (2001), Laclau (1990), Mouffe (1994, 1996, 2000). 18. Cf., for example, Foucault (1988). 19. On this, see, in particular, Habermas (1984, 1987a, b). 20. Many interesting ideas can be found, for example, in Auxier (2002), Stuhr (2002). 21. As one of many examples: “We are educating more citizens than ever before for participation in democratic processes of control, but there are influential forces ready to abandon even political democracy in order to prevent the extension of democracy into industry and finance. Americans, when they look at some of the totalitarian states, prize highly the greater freedom of this country, but in spite of this violations of civil liberties and assaults upon educational freedom seem to be increasing” (LW 11: 536). 22. “The essential fact is that if both democracy and capitalism are on trial, it is in reality our collective intelligence which is on trial. We have displayed enough intelligence in the physical field to create the new and powerful instrument of science and technology. We have not as yet had enough intelligence to use this instrument deliberately and systematically to control its social operations and consequences” (LW 6: 60). 23. Only a few aspects of Bourdieu’s work can be taken into consideration in these brief paragraphs. On the relation between his theory and theories of democracy cf., as an introduction, especially Wacquant (2005). 24. For an introduction cf. Bourdieu (1986). 25. Cf. especially Bourdieu (1984). 26. Cf., in particular, Bourdieu (1990, 1991, 1993). 27. Cf., as an introduction, Bourdieu (1994).

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28. With regard to the French school and university system, see Bourdieu (1988). For Bourdieu, equality of chances by educational means has turned out to be illusionary, cf. Bourdieu and Passeron (1977). For the actual discussion about equality and equity in school systems, cf. Hutmacher, Cochrane, and Bottani (2001). 29. For an account of the connection between habitus and practical fields, cf. Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992). 30. For example: “The argument that teachers are not prepared to assume the responsibility of participation deserves attention, with its accompanying belief that natural selection has operated to put those best prepared to carry the load in the positions of authority. Whatever the truth in this contention, it still is also true that incapacity to assume the responsibilities involved in having a voice in shaping policies is bred and increased by conditions in which that responsibility is denied. I suppose there has never been an autocrat, big or little, who did not justify his conduct on the ground of the unfitness of his subjects to take part in government” (LW 11: 223–224). 31. Cf. also my essay, “Democracy and Education after Dewey—Pragmatist Implications for Constructivist Pedagogy,” in Reich (2007b). 32. Cf. Bauman (1997) and Mouffe (2000). 33. In the German tripartite school system, early selection and the rigid separation between different tracks of qualification stand against more democracy in education, cf. Reich (2007b). 34. The combination of experience and cultural instrumentalism in Dewey’s theory is, for example, discussed in Eldridge (1998). 35. Cf., for example, Stuhr (1997). 36. Pragmatism is a main force in the struggle for democracy. Dewey had developed a complex cultural theory in connection with his philosophy of democracy. Cf. as introduction in the broad approach especially Hickman (1998). The revival of pragmatism today is discussed, for example, in Dickstein (1998). 37. In John Dewey, this stands in the context of his diagnosis of time. More general and within the range of leftist theories are the argumentations of, for example, McPherson (1966, 1975, 1977), Barber (1984), and Green (1991). Contrary to these approaches Talisse (2005) gives a minimalist account of deliberative liberalism that tends to overestimate the side of procedures and to neglect experience. Cf. to Michael Eldridge’s chapter in this volume. 38. A good introduction to Dewey’s educational theory is given by Garrison (1998). I tried to reflect more extensively on Dewey’s democratic criteria for education in Reich (2007b). 39. On the insufficient realization of equity in school systems of democratic countries, cf. in particular Bourdieu and Passeron (1977) and Hutmacher et al. (2001). 40. Westbrock, for example, writes “unlike Dewey, who believed that ‘the world has suffered more from leaders and authorities than from the masses,’ realists

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continued to fear most the threat they believed an ignorant and irrational public posed” (Westbrock 1991, 546). Or they claim in a more democratic spirit, like in Rawls’s egalitarian philosophy, utopian norms, values, and rules how we could live in equality and justice without taking sufficient notice of social constellations in life experiences. A classic theory is offered by Schumpeter (1942); cf. also Hollinger (1996, XIII). See Rorty (1979, 1989, 1991, 1998a). For an introduction to controversies about Rorty’s position in pragmatism, cf. Bernstein (1992, 1998), Kuipers (1997), Langsdorf et al. (1995), Shusterman (1997), Margolis (2002), Pettegrew (2000). See Rorty (2000). See, for example, Bauman (1993, 1997, 2000, 2004). This negative liberalism concerns all truth claims that are founded on consensus. But for Rorty, there are also truth claims based on scientific principles in hard sciences and technologies that are warranted as empirical findings. Even if they, too, are part of the cultural language games, they somehow seem to have a higher validity for Rorty. Shusterman observes: “Rorty’s view of the self as a random composite of incompatible quasi selves constantly seeking new possibilities and multiple changing vocabularies seems the ideal self for postmodern consumer society: a fragmented, confused self, hungrily enjoying as many new commodities as it can, but lacking the firm integrity to challenge either its habits of consumption or the system that manipulates and profits of them” (1997, 77). But Rorty’s description does not simply mirror contemporary life conditions. His skepticism as to the power of philosophers to change our ways of life does not mean that he would be saying we should live as we do. My own approach is called interactive constructivism (cf. Reich 1998, 2007a, b, c). It has its roots in pragmatism. The rich will be questioned by the poor—who lead “wasted lives” (cf. Bauman 2004)—whether solidarity has come to an end. A continuously negative answer could be the end of the democratic project at all. As to the positions of observers, participants, and agents cf. Reich (2007a, c).

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Foucault, M. (1981): The Order of Discourse, trans. R. Young. In R. Young (ed.): Untying the Text: A Poststructuralist Reader. London (Routledge). Foucault, M. (1985): The Use of Pleasure: The History of Sexuality, Vol. II, trans. Robert Hurley. New York (Pantheon). Foucault, M. (1986): The Care of the Self: The History of Sexuality, Vol. III, trans. Robert Hurley. New York (Pantheon). Foucault, M. (1988): Politics, Philosophy, and Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977–1984, edited by M. Morris and P. Patton. New York (Routledge). Garrison, J. (1998): John Dewey’s Philosophy as Education. In: Hickman, L.A. (ed.): Reading Dewey—Interpretations for a Postmodern Generation. Bloomington (Indiana University Press). Green, Judith M. (1999): Deep Democracy. Lanham, Boulder, New York, Oxford (Rowman and Littlefield). Gutmann, A. and Thompson, D. (2004): Why Deliberative Democracy? Princeton, NY (Princeton University Press). Habermas, J. (1984): The Theory of Communicative Action. Volume 1. Boston (Beacon Press). Habermas, J. (1987a): The Theory of Communicative Action. Volume 2. Boston (Beacon Press). Habermas, J. (1987b): The Philosophic Discourse of Modernity. Oxford (Polity Press). Hall, S. (1992): The West and the Rest. In: Stuart Hall and Bram Gieben (eds.): Formations of Modernity. Cambridge (Polity Press). Haskins, C. and Seiple, D.I. (eds.) (1999): Dewey Reconfigured. Albany (State University of New York Press) Hickman, Larry A. (ed.) (1998): Reading Dewey—Interpretations for a Postmodern Generation. Bloomington (Indiana University Press). Hollinger, R. (1996): The Dark Side of Liberalism. Westport (Praeger). Huntington, S.P. (1996): The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York (Simon & Schuster). Hutmacher, W., Cochrane, D. and Bottani, N. (ed.) (2001): In Pursuit of Equity in Education. Dordrecht/Boston/London (Kluwer). Kuipers, R.A. (1997): Solidarity and the Stranger. Themes in the Social Philosophy of Richard Rorty. Oxford (University Press of America). Laclau, E. (1990). New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time. London, New York (Verso). Laclau, E. and Mouffe, C. (2001, 2nd edition): Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. London (Verso). Langsdorf, L. and Smith, A.R. (eds.) (1995): Recovering Pragmatism’s Voice. The Classical Tradition, Rorty, and the Philosophy of Communication. Albany (State University of New York Press). Lyotard, J.-F. (1984): The Postmodern Condition. A Report on Knowledge. Minneapolis (University of Minnesota Press). MacPherson, C.B. (1966): The Real World of Democracy. New York (Oxford University Press).

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MacPherson, C.B. (1975): Democratic Theory: Essays in Retrieval. New York (Oxford University Press). MacPherson, C.B. (1977): The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy. New York (Oxford University Press). Margolis, J. (2002): Reinventing Pragmatism. Ithaca and London (Cornell University Press). Martin, L.H. et al (1988): Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault. London (Tavistock). Mouffe, Chantal (1994): The Return of the Political. London (Verso). Mouffe, Chantal (ed.) (1996): Deconstruction and Pragmatism. London/New York (Routledge). Mouffe, Chantal (2000): The Democratic Paradox. London, New York (Verso). Pettegrew, J. (ed.) (2000): A Pragmatist Progress? Richard Rorty and American Intellectual History. Lanham, Boulder, NY, Oxford (Rowman & Littlefield). Rabinow, Paul (ed.) (1985): The Foucault Reader. New York (Pantheon). Rawls, J. (1971): A Theory of Justice. Cambridge (Harvard University Press). Reich, K. (1998): Die Ordnung der Blicke. Vol. 1: Beobachtung und die Unschärfen der Erkenntnis. Vol. 2: Beziehungen und Lebenswelt. Neuwied u.a. (Luchterhand). Reich, K. (2005): Systemisch-konstruktivistische Pädagogik. Weinheim (Beltz). Reich, K. (2006): Konstruktivistische Didaktik. Weinheim (Beltz). Reich, K. (2007a): Interactive Constructivism in Education. Education & Culture 23.1, 7–26. Reich, K. (2007b): Democracy and Education—Pragmatist Implications for Constructivist Pedagogy. In: Garrison, J. (Ed.): Reconstructing Democracy, Recontextualizing Dewey: Pragmatism and Interactive Constructivism in the TwentyFirst Century. New York (State University of New York Press). Reich, K. (2007c): Observers, Participants, and Agents in Discourses—A Consideration of Pragmatist and Constructivist Theories of the Observer. In: Hickman, L., Neubert, S. and Reich, K. (eds.): John Dewey—Between Pragmatism and Constructivism. New York (Fordham University Press). Rorty, R. (1979): Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton (Princeton University Press). Rorty, R. (1984): Dewey between Hegel and Darwin. In: Ross, D. (ed.): Modernism and the Human Sciences. Baltimore (John Hopkins University Press). Rorty, R. (1989): Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge and New York (Cambridge University Press). Rorty, R. (1991): Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth. Cambridge, MA (Cambridge University Press). Rorty, R. (1998a): Truth and Progress. Cambridge, MA (Cambridge University Press). Rorty, R. (1998b): Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth Century America Cambridge, MA (Harvard University Press). Rorty, R. (2000): Philosophy and Social Hope. New York (Penguin). Ryan, Alan (1995): John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism. New York, London (W.W. Norton & Company).

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Schumpeter, J.A. (1942): Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. New Yorker (Harper and Brothers). Shusterman, R. (1997): Practicing Philosophy. Pragmatism and the Philosophical Life. New York/London (Routledge). Shusterman, R. (1999): Dewey on Experience: Foundation or Reconstruction? In: Haskins, C. and Seiple, D.I. (eds.): Dewey Reconfigured. Albany (State University of New York Press). Stuhr, J. (1997): Genealogical Pragmatism. Philosophy, Experience, and Community. Albany (State University of New York Press). Stuhr, J. (2002): Power/Inquiry: The Logic of Pragmatism. In: Burke, F.D. et al. (eds.): Dewey’s Logical Theory. Nashville (Vanderbilt University Press). Talisse, R.B. (2005): Democracy after Liberalism: Pragmatism and Deliberative Politics. New York (Routledge). Thompson, J.B. (1991): Introduction. In: Bourdieu, P. (ed.): Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge (Harvard University Press). Wacquant, L. (2005): Pierre Bourdieu and Democratic Politics. Cambridge (Polity Press). Westbrook, R. (1991): John Dewey and American Democracy. Ithaca, NY (Cornell University Press).

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CHAPTER 10

Concluding Conversation: The Future of Democratic Diversity James Campbell, Michael Eldridge, Jim Garrison, William J. Gavin, Judith M. Green, Larry A. Hickman, Stefan Neubert, Kersten Reich

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n the following conversation, the eight authors of this book discuss selected issues, challenges, and risks of democracy and diversity in our time and the relevance of Deweyan pragmatism as an intellectual resource for reconstruction of philosophical methods; personal habits; traditional cultures; institutions of government and civil society; and public policies at local, national, and international levels. They further clarify their position by responding to six general questions. 1 What are the Risks and Opportunities of Living with Diversity in Our Global Contexts Today?

Larry Hickman: This is a very important question, and one that requires some distinctions. There are many types of diversity. It would probably be hard to find anyone who objects to diversity in certain contexts. If I choose to travel from my home in the American Midwest to New York City it is in part because of the appeal of that city’s diversity of cuisines, dress, objects for sale, services, and even languages. Those are positives. On the other hand, it is possible for a situation to exhibit so much diversity, or variety, that there is a failure of commonality, of points of contact, of platforms for finding a way forward. Diversity in this sense connotes discord, distress, and rupture. So I take it that the crucial question has to do with differences in cultural practices and outlooks that involve the ways that people organize themselves

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along political and religious lines, for example. Although it is important to be aware of the changes that have taken place throughout history, if we focus on the situation today, then I think it is clear that there are some cultures that are able to deal with the problems of what Dewey called “publics” in ways that are better, more evolved than other cultures. Some societies have developed strong democratic institutions, for example, and some societies are locked in a past in which racist, sexist, and authoritarian institutions still prevail. Given the fact that physical movement across borders and virtual travel via the Internet are increasingly frequent phenomena, our current situation appears to present a danger as well as a great opportunity. It does seem clear, therefore, that there must be some sort of floor, or platform, for dealing creatively with diversity. A platform of this sort allows compromises to be made, bargains to be sealed, and the more general give-and-take of relationships to be advanced. What type of platform is required for productive approaches to diversity? That is the subject of the discussion questions that follow. As for risks and opportunities, however, it is probably fair to say that the opportunities that accrue to people the world over as they experience ever greater measures of diversity include a widened sense of the human condition, a growing respect for the plasticity of the human organism, especially in terms of educational opportunities for their children, and a sense of themselves as citizens of much larger “republics” than they could otherwise have imagined. These would include republics of letters, of environmental concerns, of personal responsibility, and of global citizenship, among others. The risks of diversity are of course real, and they are great. Diversity has the downside of exacerbating suspicion, friction, and even bellicosity. Diversity in this sense can also lead to isolation and extreme forms of nationalism and ethnocentrism. It is thus important that there be methods for teaching and learning about what is advantageous about our new globalizing situation, and that is where pragmatism and interactive constructivism have much to offer. Jim Campbell: We know that the human is a habitual creature, capable of a virtual infinity of cultural responses to the many problems of living. Different cultures have developed their own ways to sanction families and raise children, to structure economic relations among their members, and to demonstrate piety to the natural forces that support and challenge their lives. In the modern world, these cultural systems are increasingly thrown into interactions with other systems that create opportunities for mutual benefits. At the same time, these systems lose their traditional justifications and must search for new ones. Here is the focus of our problem: While we have a theoretical recognition of the value of diversity, many of our fellow human beings

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experience personal pain and cling to more familiar ways. Dewey framed the question of openness to diversity in terms of the two faces of community. There is both an inside and an outside to any community, and its long-term success requires that both sets of relations thrive. Kersten Reich: Already in classical pragmatism, especially in Dewey, we find a strong recognition of the importance of diversity for the democratic development of society. In Democracy and Education Dewey, among other things, exposes the variety of interests within a community and the multitude of exchanges with other communities as two fundamental criteria of democracy. These two aspects today still seem relevant against the background of our current global situation. This is why Stefan and I have chosen to pick up Dewey’s thoughts about democracy and connect them with more recent observations of society in the work of Zygmunt Bauman. In particular, approaches like Bauman’s are necessary to detect new contradictions and ambivalences of our time and contrast them with pragmatist cultural interpretations. Stefan Neubert: John Dewey’s philosophy is a deeply pluralistic approach. He has investigated the rich diversity of meanings lived in the concrete life experiences of humans in many comprehensive studies. One may only think of his extensive writings, for example, in fields like social psychology, theory of education, ethics, philosophy of communication, theory of art, and political philosophy that constitute a multilayered cultural theory, which is highly relevant to the present day. Basic to Dewey’s philosophical pluralism is his plea for “experience” as the starting point of all philosophical reflection. His appreciation for diversity is not restricted to his political theory of democracy, but is rooted in his generous understanding of human experience as rich and resourceful in meanings. He reminds us that what is had in experience is always much broader than that which is known at any time. His forceful comments on themes such as qualitative individuality, originality, creativity, and incommensurability as inextinguishable traits of experience testify to the genuine pluralism of his philosophy. The same can be said of his repeated insistence on the dark, obscure, vague, or twilight phases of experience that remain despite all our attempts to know. Belief and knowledge are necessarily surrounded by a context of ambiguous meanings from which they emerge through inquiry. Dewey urges us to address our world experimentally as an open universe that allows for an inexhaustible abundance of possible perspectives and interpretations. He rejects the traditional notion of reason as an organ to grasp “ultimate truths.” Instead, he proposes the more contemporary word “intelligence,” understood not as something ready-made, but as a designation for socially constructed methods of observation, experiment, reflection, and criticism that are continually open to further reconstruction in

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the processes of inquiry. The primacy of experimentalism against any claim to a supposedly superior or ultimate access to knowledge is essential to Dewey’s entire philosophical position. For Dewey, knowledge always presupposes interaction and communication. Inquiry is primarily a social affair that depends on a diversity of perspectives and observations brought to bear on the problems at hand as necessary resources for sufficiently complex solutions. Dewey’s suggestion to take “the Social” as the primary content of philosophy is a plea to appreciate the multitude of standpoints, interests, interpretations, and values implied in social experience. According to him, “the Social” in all this diversity is the most genuine subject matter for philosophical reflection. Taking experience as the starting point and end of philosophy, Dewey insists that we abandon the old philosophical habit of identifying reality with our unified systems or objects of knowledge. He believes that our existence is characterized by an ineradicable mixture of the precarious and the stable. Stability implies that we can make observations and construct theories that allow for order and orientation. But no matter how sophisticated our symbolic systems of knowledge may be, we cannot get rid of the precarious phase of our experience. Contingency and ambiguity are genuine traits of lived experience that is richer in potential meanings than any symbolic system or any single perspective can ever expose. To create and promote appreciation for concrete human experience and its potentialities, philosophy must therefore of necessity choose a pluralistic perspective. Against this background, contextualism is a core issue for Dewey. In “Context and Thought,” he concludes that it is indispensable for philosophy to take context into account in order to do justice to experience. Even if it is impossible for us to reflect all relevant contexts at any given moment, we need to recognize that all our observations and interpretations are contextbound. As humans we inhabit our world by means of habits formed in the intercourse with a natural and cultural environment. Habit means that our experiences are pervaded by a temporal and spatial background. Language and the use of symbols are powerful contexts that pervade our every thought. According to Dewey, there are also more “subjective” phases of context like selective interests, desires, motives, and predilections. Taken together, the cultural contexts of our experiences provided by language, traditions, habits, and selective interests are resources as well as limitations. They provide us with the necessary tools for acting and thinking, but they also hold us captives so that we often become oblivious about context and take it as a matter of course. In everyday life this forgetfulness for the most part does no harm and is, indeed, unavoidable. But Dewey thinks that there are specific dangers

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for philosophy that arise from neglect or ignoring of context. It is a characteristic of Dewey’s philosophical criticisms that he always took into account the social, cultural, and historical contexts of his time, especially with regard to their political implications. I think that what we have tried to do for Deweyan pragmatism in this volume is, among other things, to expose and critically reflect some of the more recent contexts and developments of our time. Our focus has been on questions of diversity that, according to the Deweyan tradition, always need to be explored contextually. Kersten Reich: In constructivism, we use the term cultural viability to further develop debates about diversity. This connects well with the pragmatic insistence on context just explained by Stefan. A Deweyan understanding of inquiry combined with claims to warranted assertibility can be maintained from a constructivist perspective, although the criterion of cultural viability is a more contemporary rendering of contextualism with some broader implications. Let’s take present debates about globalization as an example. Capitalism shows very often a destructive and cynical face in the struggles for global markets and influences. (Two dimensions here are discussions about social injustices and ecological damages.) If we think of critical theory in the German tradition, a figure like Theodor W. Adorno comes to mind. He criticized such development eloquently and claimed standards of minimal ethics to appeal to a generalized human conscience. In Adorno, we find moral standards to avoid destruction and cynicism, developed against the historical experience of fascism that stands as reminders for us until the present day. However, the contexts have changed and we are now in a new situation as to their interpretation and reconstruction. For constructivism, this is a question of warranted assertibility in the Deweyan sense and not of universalistic claims. Cultural viability here means that even the justification we give for our most cherished values and standards are always bound to time and context. This is not to involve us in arbitrariness because contexts are not simply relative but also substantial as platforms for our actions and inquiries. As platforms they have their stabilities even if as contexts they additionally have their limitations. To respect human dignity as well as natural resources is especially viable or warranted in our time because it expresses as well as reaffirms the chances for democracy in our ways of life. Even if democracy and claims to human rights are cultural constructions, we may nevertheless feel and accept the obligation to defend them as the context that we wish to chose. Informed by pragmatism’s rich tradition of thinking about democracy we will, I suggest, for instance identify as one major thread to democratic development the greed of predatory capitalism that in many cases exploits everything including human dignity and natural resources to maximize profits of the few. This is

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our new constellation of global destruction and cynicism to be fought against in order to secure more democratic solutions. In this process, we find ourselves already involved in the very contexts that must be critically addressed. Here, too, lies a force of pragmatism and its insistence on criticism as selfcriticism, because we all too often find in hindsight that what we have to struggle against is partly already a consequence of what we have been doing before. Judith Green: We experience diversity now as both a practical reality and a source of major cultural and political challenges in all of our global political contexts—but we must also learn to experience diversity as a source of everyday educational opportunities, mutually corrective angles of vision, richness and variety in living, and continuous improvement in our institutions and practices of democracy. It is challenging, of course, for communities that have been largely homogeneous monocultures for many years to adjust to the presence of newcomers in their midst, because like their new neighbors, long-time residents must adjust to the impact of living with new cultures, new languages, new religions, new needs, new social contributions on offer, new habits of living, and new public policy preferences. In many areas of the world, immigrants from other countries and cultures arrive every day with hopes of finding a sanctuary from political and military oppression, or an empowering education, or better employment opportunities, or living in the global mainstream that the old centers of empire still represent to many, instead of in the postcolonial margins where everything is still so difficult and the weight of history hangs heavy. Samuel Huntington saw this pressure of immigrants at home and new rivals abroad as so threatening to the “established democracies” of the West that he rejected the prospect of trying to inhabit a cosmopolitan democratic future, calling instead for fortifying ourselves against these threatening “others” by refocusing our national identities on our remembered pasts—a falsely monocultural past in the case of the always-multicultural United States of America, and in any case, a backwards orientation to future planning that blocks careful consideration of the consequences of the public policies we adopt now. In contrast, Seyla Benhabib calls for a carefully regulated process of choosing a cosmopolitan democratic future regulated by human rights, arguing that all communities have boundaries, and that democratic ones can choose together who to include and who to exclude; but I think our twenty-first-century problem situation is more complex than this, morally as well as politically. Powerful nations have debts from the past, and our informational boundaries are as porous as our social and political ones, so that we cannot prevent the flow of diverse peoples from place to place even if we want to. Therefore, we would be wise to

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be welcoming to all who have a rightful call on us or something useful to contribute to our communities, even if great changes come with their diversity. We must treat these “others” as teachers and prepare ourselves to learn from them, as Jane Addams and her colleagues did a century ago at Chicago’s Hull House. We must regard diverse others as collaborators, with whose help we can make our countries more deeply democratic and more adaptable to changing conditions in this global century. Such a hopeful yet sober melioristic attitude recognizes that change is difficult for all of us, even if it is necessary for growth, as John Dewey pointed out. Communities that do not change and grow lose their vitality and eventually die, as is happening now in remote places that cannot inspire and prepare their young people to make their futures there, and in urban centers that have lost their economic base and the jobs that go with them, as globalization has shifted whole industries to new places. New rural initiatives like Wangari Maathai’s Green Belt Movement in Kenya are needed to make the old rural places bloom again ecologically as well as economically, but these new opportunities carry cultural and political costs. As women gain more economic power than they have ever had before, gender roles shift, and those who previously dominated their communities politically by dominating economically are displaced. Likewise, new urban initiatives are needed to employ displaced industrial workers and new immigrants who must be offered socially valuable ways to make money to support their families without draining the public funds of their new home places and straining the bonds of mutual hospitality. As we work to create new opportunities for living together peacefully, productively, and democratically with “the new diversity” in current global contexts, we must continue to work to adjust still-unjust patterns of power, opportunity, and basic social goods among those who make up “the old diversity” in our countries, in which race, class, gender, sexual orientation, and disability still marginalize the many relative to the few. This is a moral, political, and educational challenge, not only in terms of law and public policy but also in terms of the continuing need to grow new “habits of the heart” that acknowledge that many hands have made our histories and are entitled to recognition, respect, and full inclusion in the shaping of our future. Educating ourselves for and through such openness to old as well as new “others” is the first and greatest challenge of democratic citizenship now, the hinge on which the doors to a more deeply democratic future and a more peaceful cosmopolitan world open or close. Bill Gavin: One of my big concerns is that we should not turn diversity into a “problem,” or at least not exclusively into a problem. Diversity, I argue, has a

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context that is tacit in nature. It can’t be totally problematized without significantly changing its nature. In addition, we must make room for the realization, highlighted by C. Wright Mills, that YOU might be seen as the problem by others—or by the “other.” Also, we must recognize the possibility/ actuality that there are alternative, perhaps incompatible, versions of the problem, in addition to situations that are not problematic in nature. In this regard it is interesting to compare Dewey and Kafka. Both thinkers lose certainty; only Dewey is happy about it. For one, progress is a definite possibility; for the other, there is only “process.” Stefan and Kersten show a similar if not identical context while realizing that, for Bauman, progress is not as seemingly possible as it is sometimes viewed by Dewey or by his followers. Bauman’s use of “the stranger” and the “in between” is a particular help here; it keeps us from painting too monochromatic a picture. Michael Eldridge: Echoing and building on Bill’s worry, we are keenly aware of diversity as a “problem.” Witness the issues posed by immigration—legal and illegal—in Europe and the United States, ethnic conflicts, genocide, radical Islamic fundamentalism, nativist extremist groups in the United States, and so on. We are not so aware of the opportunities that diversity provides, namely that we can develop as individuals and societies through consideration of alternatives. William James once declared, “. . . that philosophic study means the habit of always seeing an alternative, of not taking the usual for granted, of making conventionalities fluid again, of imagining foreign states of mind” (Essays in Philosophy, Harvard University Press 1978, 4). Clearly diversity can get out of hand; but a healthy society depends on diversity. Dewey uses the phrase “ordered richness” to speak of the aim of democracy (LW 14: 229). This suggests a tension between structure and pluralism and the need to strike a balance. Too much diversity is a problem; not enough is an impoverished experience. Jim Garrison: First, diversity has always involved risks. In John Dewey’s functionalism, organism, including the human organism, and environment are subfunctions of a single function. As living functions, we must trans-act with our environment, with what is other and different. However, what is other and different can poison us as well as nourish us. This is one reason why I find Emmanuel Levinas’s notion that we must engage in asymmetrical relations with an infinite other to which we must be prepared to sacrifice ourselves misguided. As living functions, we have always needed otherness and difference, but we must not ignore the genuine dangers, as does so much contemporary rhetoric. Engaging these issues at such an existential level provides some clarity on the complexity of the issue.

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Records show that diverse people have long enjoyed trade with each other. They also show they have conquered and enslaved each other. Of course, the history of Western colonialism is truly dismal. However, as Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel shows, whenever peoples that have domesticated animals and cultivated plants and have developed complex technologies, including social technologies, encounter hunters and gatherers, the results for the latter are usually terrible. The Bantu in Africa swept all before them. This does not excuse anyone from anything, but discloses the depth of the risks. Regarding opportunity, it is important to remember that for Dewey, we only have potential insofar as there are other individuals we have yet to interact with. Even so, there are lethal potentials we do not wish to actualize. Globalism increases the frequency of contacts among diverse peoples and with it the potential for risk and opportunity. Certainly, the issue of diversity has become more explicitly recognized and there seems genuine concern in many parts of the world to approach it more intelligently. The risks are greater, but so too are the opportunities. Thinkers such as Bauman and Serres and many others including Levinas, Derrida, and Irigaray grasp the distinctive importance of the issue. Kersten Reich: Jim, I agree with you that we need a variety of perspectives to pave ways for understanding the diversity of interests and selective orientations in our present world. We need to take the risk of recognizing and responding to orientations that are often ambivalent and sometimes overtly contradictory. As your chapter about Levinas has convincingly shown, Levinas’ ethics of the infinite other can be a constructive challenge for pragmatism and constructivism provided that we critically take the difference between our orientation to experience and Levinas’s orientation to a transcendental approach into account. This difference, among other things, has important consequences for democracy and education. The examples that you have discussed in your chapter suggest that an interactive approach like Dewey’s has many advantages for a balanced reflection on the ambivalences of experience especially in interpersonal encounters that are the very heart of all educational practice. Pragmatism insists that we not only need to orientate ourselves but also have to act. Here, I think we can connect with two core perspectives in Dewey’s approach to democracy: First, the growth of diversity in democracy must be a main goal. This means that we must seek for an agreement, as comprehensive as possible, on the advantages of diversity that offset its risks. Such an agreement cannot do away with the ambivalences and contradictions of gender, race, ethnicity, and social class. But Larry’s discussion about Chantal Mouffe has shown that, to my mind, we have to take political struggles about hegemony seriously in this context. Second, democracy

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must be understood as a process in which standards and goals for further development emerge from the very democratic experiences in practices, routines, and institutions. In this connection the relevance of education that Dewey emphasized is still key for us today because it can provide the necessary resources and opportunities for participation in individual and societal developments. Jim Garrison: I have been speaking in terms of diverse people and cultures, but of course, gender, race, ethnicity, and, yes, social class, and such are all part of the picture. I still think something like Dewey’s pluralistic democracy provides a strong reply to many issues regarding the risks and opportunities of diversity. Stefan Neubert: Diverse proponents in fields like cultural and postcolonial studies, gender studies, disabilities studies, or other fields that articulate minority positions in postmodern societies have developed powerful accounts and theoretical reflections on the experiences of those who live in ambivalent positions of inclusion and exclusion. In the background of these articulations are historical developments in twentieth-century cultures, for example, the diverse social and political movements around issues of human rights, civil rights, feminism, claims for equality and equity, and claims for inclusion and participation. This also includes an increased sensitivity for cultural diversity articulated through the often ambivalent and contradictory experiences of immigrants and other cultural minorities or marginalized groups. To my mind, these developments so characteristic of late twentieth-century democracies pose new challenges for Deweyan pragmatism especially in face of the fact that Dewey himself, as Charlene Haddock Seigfried has observed, often “fails to follow through with an account of the role that power plays in human affairs” and “how it alters the lives of those affected by it” (“John Dewey’s Pragmatist Feminism,” in Charlene Haddock Seigfried ed., Feminist Interpretations of John Dewey, University Park, Penn State University Press 2002, 55)—an observation that I think equally applies to the neo-pragmatism of Richard Rorty (see, e.g., Achieving Our Country, Cambridge, Harvard University Press 1999). Approaches like cultural and postcolonial studies also show the importance of Foucault and his critical theory of power as discussed in Kersten’s chapter. For the Deweyan pragmatist, the openness to dissent, as well as the willingness to cooperate across differences, and to see the expression of difference as a potential enrichment of one’s own life experience is a necessary part of the democratic way of life. From the perspective of this fundamental democratic

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claim, the articulation and interpretation of experiences of marginalized groups can be seen as a challenge to continually further develop our sensitivity and openness to the precariousness that goes with diversity. The rich pragmatic understanding of experience as a starting point and key concept of philosophical reflection is a particular advantage of pragmatism over many other contemporary approaches to welcome and take in the diverse articulations of living in real cultures in all their ambiguity, ambivalence, and contradiction. This is a point, among others, where interactive constructivism connects fruitfully with pragmatism.

2 Why Is the Classical Pragmatists’ and Interactive Constructivists’ Theory of Democracy as a Way of Life Helpful in Expanding Our Understanding of the Risks and Opportunities of Living with Diversity in Global Contexts? Jim Campbell: If we consider the theory of democracy as developed by Peirce, James, and Dewey, we have three distinguishable emphases. Peirce, for his part, emphasized the function of the community of inquirers to direct the society away from mistaken plans and toward better ones. James, on the other hand, emphasized the irreducible plurality of democratic practice: the value of the contribution of each individual. Dewey recognized both of these emphases as important and attempted to develop procedures—in education and politics especially—to preserve them both. Thus, the value of the pragmatists’ understanding of democracy with regard to the issue of global diversity is its recognition of the plurality of desiderata while at the same time striving for the social creation of desideranda. Larry Hickman: Classical pragmatism and interactive constructivism offer tools for supporting the positive valences of diversity, and minimalizing its risks. First, there is an emphasis on the role of human experience, as opposed to appeal to external religious or political authority, in the resolution of conflict. This point underscores one of the most difficult problems associated with dealing positively with diversity. Long ago, Francis Bacon recognized the power of the idols of the tribe, the marketplace, the cave, and the theater to subvert careful, creative analysis of problematic situations. Second, there is attention to the psychology and sociology of interpersonal relationships that take into account the ways in which true communication—and not simply rehearsing grievances or talking past one another—requires not only that we recognize and reflect the attitude of the other but that we begin to see ourselves as if from the standpoint (or view point) of the other. Third, there is

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a strong sense of fallibilism that requires continual readjustment to changing conditions. Together, these factors can provide a strong bulwark against ideological rigidity. Bill Gavin: The pragmatic theory of democracy recognizes that the only universal is in the particular, as Dewey noted. The rejection of certainty as a form of intolerance and the affirmation of pluralism teach us humility. This point is often underemphasized in Dewey’s work. Certainty breeds totalitarianism. Its opposite is uncertainty, better termed “contextualism.” Dewey was right in reminding us that the most pervasive fallacies in philosophy stem from neglect of context. If diversity is to be maintained and/or strengthened, contextualism must be not only initially but also continually affirmed and re-affirmed. Contextualism acknowledges that all viewpoints are constrained and partial, while still rejecting the thesis that one view is as good as another. Jim Garrison: My contribution emphasizes ideas that Dewey borrowed from William James’s A Pluralistic Universe along with some of George Herbert Mead’s thinking about how the self only comes to self-consciousness through a relation with others. It is an example of how I believe that the three aforementioned classical pragmatists provide a powerful voice in the current dialogues concerning pluralism, sameness, the other, and democracy. Other chapters in this collection do the same. Stefan Neubert: Maybe it is helpful at this point to spell out in more detail the three perspectives of construction, reconstruction, and deconstruction that interactive constructivism employs in order to distinguish crucial processes in democracy and education. Education as construction work is the most obvious perspective for constructivists. They stress and support the possibilities of learners to attain their own constructions of reality in active and self-determined learning experiences. Constructivists think that humans are the inventors of their own realities. This emphasis on the constructive potentials of learners has its subjectivist implications in that each individual constructs her or his symbolic and imaginative reality in a somewhat unique and personal way that can never be completely and exhaustively commensurate with the realities of others. For interactive constructivism, though, the recognition of these subjectivist aspects is qualified by the assumption that every observer (as constructor of her or his reality) is at the same time an agent within a cultural context and a participant in an interpretive community. Thus learning is not only a subjective endeavor but a discursive process as well. As an activity, it involves interaction; as a construction, it relies on coconstructions within a community of learners; as a self-determined process, it presupposes communication and coordination within a social environment.

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Such interaction, co-construction, communication, and coordination would of course be impossible if each individual had to invent her or his purely subjective reality completely on her or his own. Education as a constructive process always implies the reconstructive use of cultural resources that exceed purely individual disposal and invention although they represent the indispensable means of each individual’s constructions of reality. Education as reconstruction work means that learners come to discover the abundant richness and wide variety of reality constructions that have already been accomplished by others. These reality constructions are now available as symbolic resources of the lived cultures that the learners inhabit. Given the diversity and heterogeneity of discourses and symbolic representations in postmodernity, education as reconstruction work must be highly selective. Constructivists claim that already the selection of subject matter for reconstructive learning is a task not only of administrators and curriculum experts but primarily of those actively involved in concrete learning situations—that is, the teachers and students themselves. Constructivist educators must, first of all, take account of the different viabilities of their learners—their specific educational situations, interests, needs, and requirements. Second, they need to select and develop the reconstructive materials most appropriate for co-constructive learning processes with as high a degree as possible of active participation in the processes of selection and development on the part of their learners. To deepen the educational response to diversity, an additional perspective besides constructions and reconstructions is necessary, namely education as deconstruction work. This perspective reminds us that, in an open and pluralist universe, our so far achieved cultural constructions and reconstructions of reality are always incomplete. They always exclude other possible perspectives and interpretations. The deconstructionist—sometimes ironically—suggests that just when we think we have understood something properly and thoroughly, it might be helpful to look at things from a different and hitherto neglected viewpoint. Such deconstructions make the familiar look strange, if only for a moment. Deconstruction in this sense is never an end in itself; it is no “-ism.” Rather, it should be a starting point to support new constructions and reconstructions in education. Kersten Reich: For interactive constructivism, the connection between democracy and education is as crucial as it is for Deweyan pragmatism. We think that it is a weakness of many political theories and philosophies that they all too much neglect the importance of education. This even applies to many of the contemporary approaches discussed in the chapters of this book. To understand education as a construction in culture, however, we need to develop refined theories of power, knowledge, discourse, and truth, and

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this is where I think that pragmatism as well as constructivism can learn some important things from authors like Foucault, Mouffe, Bauman, Levinas, Rorty, and others. For me, one question stands in the foreground in this connection. It is the question of power. Struggles about hegemony represent a recurrent challenge for democracy. Such struggles are often extremely complex and hardly allow for transparent, consensual, and exhaustive solutions that satisfy all interests. We have to develop perspectives on the ambivalences of power and power relations on the different levels of social reality. This includes, for example, direct face-to-face relations in educational situations, formations of communities, and the divisions of power on the comprehensive level of social, cultural, and political institutions. With regard to hegemony, it seems futile to try to do away with it altogether. The challenge rather consists in struggling against one-sided asymmetries of power that delimit and obstruct the realization of lived diversity in a democratic culture. For education this implies that against the background of their socialization learners must be given opportunities to participate in the negotiation of norms, values, rules, standards, and limits of living together under conditions of diversity. They must have the chance to develop their own powers and discover their limits in interaction with others. This form of relative freedom and autonomy relies for pragmatism as well as interactive constructivism on a democratic ethics that excludes violence and the denial of otherness by promoting respect for diversity and self-governance. To make the interplay between processes of construction, reconstruction, and deconstruction as free and rich as possible, we need to claim diversity of observer perspectives as a prerequisite of democratic processes. From the perspective of participants, in particular communities and groups, this may involve an enhanced demand of ambivalence. They must take the perspective of experiences sometimes largely contradictory to their own expectations and desires. This sense for ambivalence is a challenge that Bauman, as we tried to show in our discussion, especially shows as a characteristic of our time. Judith Green: Kersten is right that we must pay attention to power in our discussion of democracy and diversity—power as energy, as a source of stability, and as a barrier to changes that may be desirable or undesirable, depending on one’s perspective. Power per se is not a problem for democracy, but rather an important dimension of our social life in nature that may need to be adjusted or redistributed or relocated in order for communities and their individual members to sustain themselves, develop their capabilities interactively, and contribute creatively. Cultures traditionally have organized, evoked, and employed various powers in ways that served the human development or some of their members more fully than others, sometimes at the

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expense of others. Such socially structured inequalities have created a problem of maintaining and justifying this kind of diversity within traditional cultures, especially when their members encounter members of other cultures that structure power differently and more advantageously for people “like them.” In our global century, people everywhere are aware of such differences within cultures, as well as differences in relative power between cultures that may derive from past relations of colonial dominance. Part of the meaning of democracy for people in the twenty-first century is interrogating currently unequal power structures within and between diverse cultures, nations, and whole regions of the world, such as the global north and south. Part of what democracy as a way of life means now is enacting cosmopolitan connections of loyalty, concern, and responsibility to participate with diverse others in collaboratively reconstructing power relations locally and globally, so that all human beings (and perhaps all living things) can meet their basic needs while having adequate opportunities to develop their valuable capabilities and to live meaningful lives according to self-chosen life plans within diverse cultures. 3 How Do the Key Issues of Our Time Require Us to Expand the Meanings of Pragmatism, Democracy, and Transformative Practice? Larry Hickman: Although there might not be general agreement regarding a list of the “key issues of our time,” I believe that one of the items on almost everyone’s list would be how we are to live peacefully with one another in a multicultural world. It seems clear that this will not be possible absent a massive expansion of educational opportunities throughout the world. Hence, this would mean a concerted effort to expand literacy rates; to transcend narrow curricular offerings that are built around nationalistic and religious bigotry and intolerance; and to provide places where the talents, needs, and interests of each child can be developed to the maximum extent. These are, of course, some of the basic elements of John Dewey’s treatment of education, which he interdefined with democracy. Judith Green: I agree with Larry that the problem of how to live together peacefully in a multicultural world is a key issue of our time, but I would add two other elements to his way of framing it: dystopian aspects of economic globalization against the background of past injustices within and between the world’s nations and cultures, and dystopian aspects of human ecological impacts, including global warming, that differentially reflect various cultures’ and nations’ levels and kinds of power to choose technologies

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and to acknowledge or resist others’ calls to shared responsibility for living sustainably. Education in the classroom and in what Dewey called all the institutions of adult living is part of the answer to these aspects of the problem, too, but we need better, more historically sound and democratic models of economics and ecology to share with the world’s diverse peoples through the various modes of education. Otherwise, people will simply feel more confident in their actual ignorance, instead of practicing and contributing to social intelligence. Stefan Neubert: It seems to me that one crucial challenges of our time concerns Dewey’s notion of “social intelligence” in relation to democracy and diversity. He used the qualifier “social” to underscore that intelligence—a quality often narrowly understood as an individual property or possession—depends on processes of communication and participation in sociocultural environments. It is a factor in social practices that includes cultural contexts and resources as well as individual achievements. It has been developed out of human experiences in a long process of cultural history. The claim to experimentalism is an essential characteristic of Dewey’s notion of intelligence, and he connected this claim with his democratic faith. He argued that the experimental method “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” (LW 7: 329). Dewey insisted that the use of intelligence as an instrument for social welfare and prosperity constitutes a fundamental challenge for democracy. “The problem of bringing about an effective socialization of intelligence is probably the greatest problem of democracy today” (LW 7: 365–366). It seems to me that this observation still applies in our contemporary contexts, and that the task does not appear much easier today despite the technological advancements that have contributed, for instance, to facilitate communication. One important aspect in this connection is the furthering of educational opportunities on a global scale to which Larry has just pointed. Another important issue concerns the role of intellectuals and experts in relation to the democratic public sphere. According to Dewey, they have an important, but limited, role to play. He was highly critical of recommendations that modern democracy should be ruled or controlled by experts because he argued that a “class of experts is inevitably so removed from common interests as to become a class with private interests and private knowledge, which in social matters in not knowledge at all” (LW 2: 364–365). The democratic promise that the people shall rule implies that the multitude of

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people must be involved, as comprehensively as possible, in political decision making and ruling. They must have an effective share in government or else democracy runs the risk of degenerating into “an oligarchy managed in the interests of the few” (ibid.). To the degree that a democratic society relies on the self-governance of individuals, it must provide them with the necessary resources to evaluate the recommendations of experts and integrate them into articulations of public opinion. But not all people can have direct access to the often highly specialized information and knowledge that are necessary to solve the complex problems of living in a modern society. Therefore, the democratic public sphere needs experts to provide indispensable resources and tools. Dewey distinguishes, among other things, four important functions to be performed by experts, that is, public intellectuals in fields like science, philosophy, art, literature, journalism, and others: first, to promote an experimental attitude toward social events; second, to entertain systematic and continual inquiries into social and human affairs; third, to further free access to information regarding issues that affect the public; and fourth, to cultivate forms of free and full intercommunication as well as multilayered articulations of knowledge of public import, including, for example, artistic as well as discursive articulations (see LW 2: 339–350). These are still important and relevant functions to be performed by public intellectuals. But I think some of the dialogues developed in this book have suggested that Dewey’s account of the role of experts should be qualified and critically extended, today, especially with regard to questions of interest, ambivalence, and power in connection with the role of experts in postmodern societies. Kersten Reich: Yes, because they question as to how far free social intelligence is more an illusion than a reality? The claim to further social intelligence seems to be appropriate and necessary but maybe it has to be qualified in our time in somewhat different and reconstructed ways as compared to Dewey. Authors like Foucault and Bourdieu, for example, can be helpful to develop new critical perspectives on social intelligence, discourse, and practical reason. Among other things, Bourdieu’s discussions of the habitus of the intellectual and its involvement in societal fields and interests are instructive for a more contemporary view on the contradictions and ambivalences of social roles in which intelligence comes to play. With Foucault we are reminded that such roles, among other things, imply subject positions in discourses that are never, not even in an ideal-typical sense, innocent of power relations. I think that these observations are not necessarily at odds with Deweyan pragmatism, but they substantially extend its perspectives for our time.

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Stefan Neubert: And the dialogue with Bauman suggests that the role of experts and intellectuals in postmodern societies is necessarily ambivalent. We have to take into account the inevitable tension between interests of emancipation and other powerful social, economical, and political interests that represent important contexts of expertise in our time. Jim Garrison: But what time is it? I believe we are still within the limits of what we might call the crisis of late modernity. This crisis centers around two related ideas. First, there is Darwinism, which emphasizes existential contingency and randomness. It disturbs many because of the absence of God. Darwinism naturalizes all norms and values and, for some, it questions the very notions of justice and moral pursuit. It even challenges ideals of rationality that rest upon permanent and unalterable foundations. As Dewey observes, in “The Influence of Darwinism on Philosophy,” its rejection of permanence “was bound to transform the logic of knowledge, and hence the treatment of moral, politics and religion” (MW 4: 5). Those that understand Darwinian evolution know that modernity has been liquid ever since. Part of Bauman’s genius lies in grasping the fact that the pace of cultural evolution in morals, politics, religion, commerce, and such has now accelerated so rapidly that we experience evolutionary change within the span not only of a single lifetime but in years if not months. The second percussive event was Nietzsche’s announcement that God is dead, by which he meant all of Western and Eastern metaphysics (his first introduction of the theme refers to Buddhism). Of course, if “God” is an anthropomorphic projection, then its creator “Man” must also have expired. In my opinion, we are not even close to appreciating the quality, depth, and breadth of Dewey’s response to this crisis, which we will not be beyond for centuries. Dewey’s paper on Darwinism actually rejects almost all the ingredients of Western metaphysics: Essence (eidos), goals (teloi), including perfect teloi (entelecheia), and ultimate foundations (arche). Elsewhere, Dewey also rejects substance (ousia). He does preserve the actual (energeia) and the potential (dynamis), for without them there is no account of change. Even then, he rejects latent potential. Dewey does for all essences what Darwin did for species. He totally rejects substance, but preserves the other ingredients of metaphysics in his logic where they become contingent, evolving structures doing good honest work in preserving and enhancing our existence. Dewey’s response to the crisis of late modernity resembles that of Nietzsche as well as Foucault and Rorty in that it too is a creative aesthetic response, although he refuses to fall into nominalism or to accept a self-versus-society dualism, which are devastating errors common to most forms of so-called

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postmodernism. Instead of lonely, isolated monsters of creation, dandies, or liberal ironists, Dewey gives us social self-creation through intelligent inquiry. Remember, he thinks science is an art. For Dewey, the arts of making (techne) is the only alternative to luck (tuche), or as he puts it: “Intelligence is the key to freedom in act . . . Luck, bad if not good, will always be with us. But it has a way of favoring the intelligent and showing its back to the stupid” (MW 14: 210). More than 99 percent of all species that have ever existed are now extinct. Finally, I believe Dewey’s sense of religiosity with its commitment to natural piety for the relations that constitute and preserve our functioning along with his faith in imaginary ideals that lay moral claim to us may yet have wide appeal. With the resources outlined above along with many others not mentioned, I think the primary task is explicating Dewey’s philosophy in a contemporary vocabulary that addresses the specific context of our times and many different places. This means putting Dewey in dialogue with later thinkers such as Bauman, Foucault, Derrida, and, as in my chapter, Levinas. These dialogues should prove creative in ways that may transform the very meaning of the word “pragmatism.” At other times, we will find that Deweyan pragmatism simply has better answer to contemporary issues (as I conclude in my chapter). On the other hand, Foucault, for example, allows us to overcome some of Dewey’s naiveté about oppressive power just as Bauman teaches us to think about “light capitalism,” being “players” and “tourists,” in ways Dewey simply never thought about. There are many more examples. I have taught Michel Serres’s The Troubadour of Knowledge. Dewey never thought of education as requiring us to become like a harlequin, a crossbreed, or hybrid of one’s origins, yet anyone that appreciates Dewey’s Darwinism can follow the idea joyfully. Michael Eldridge: Whatever time it is, we need fuller understanding of pragmatism, democracy, and transformative practice than we now have. We must come to understand pragmatism as an attention to revisable practices, democracy as a way of life, and transformative practice as the object of inquiry. Or to put it another way, we must become lifelong learners who are continually and intentionally learning from experience and adjusting our practices to fit new situations. The sad truth is that the Darwinian revolution is incomplete. It is not just that the reactionaries in the United States are resisting the theory of evolution in biology, they are also unable to recognize the positive implications of the theory for life generally. Or take the criticism of President Obama for entrusting health-care reform to Congress, the complaint being that he should have developed and marketed a plan for Congress to ratify. It is a sad commentary on American society when its federal deliberative

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institutions cannot be trusted to deal with a major social, political, and economic problem. Clearly some transformative practice is needed. Pragmatism is the theory that can explain the disfunctionality and suggest ways to improve the situation. Kersten Reich: As to our selection of relevant dialogue partners for understanding more fully the contexts of our time, one explanation should be made. The contributions in this volume have not extensively referred to the work of Jürgen Habermas. His theory of communicative action has not only been an invaluable contribution to recent developments in German social thought but has also influenced international debates on democracy on a broad level. He insists on the necessary goal of mutual understanding on equal terms for which participants in a democracy must sufficiently develop communicative competences. This goal and its philosophical importance is something that pragmatism and constructivism can share although they cannot fully agree with Habermas’ ways of justification that partly build on universalistic claims. Habermas tries to find context-independent standards for assessing democratic processes and constructs criteria that are supposed to be uncontestable on the basis of their rational justification. Although pragmatists and constructivists can agree with much of Habermas’ democratic orientation, they are more cautious with regard to universal claims and even suspect the very approach of being too neglectful of contexts. This becomes especially evident from the debates between Habermas and Rorty that often circled around these issues. Larry Hickman: Indeed, Habermas—whom some have termed “the German Dewey”—would also have been an excellent dialogue partner for this volume. His work reveals an enormous breath of interests. He has addressed subjects as diverse as the reunification of post–World War II Germany, the Gulf War of the early 1990s, neo-conservatism, immigration, and even German national identity. In all these, as his commentators correctly point out, he is attempting to advance the project of the European Enlightenment. He is attempting to develop clear criteria for the type of unhindered communication that he believes can eventuate in the solution of social and political problems. From the standpoint of interactive constructivism and pragmatism, however, his project does seem to suffer from some debilitating problems. For interactive constructivists, as Kersten Reich notes, his program appears to attempt too much: It attempts to find context-independent, uncontestable standards. For those pragmatists who have been influenced by Dewey, his program suffers from a debilitating split between the sciences (as concerned with

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facts), on one side, and emancipatory and communicative action (as bearers of meaning and values), on the other. This fact–value split leads him to suggest that it is the role of emancipatory and communicative action to serve as a bulwark against colonization of the lifeworld by science and technology, as well as to expand the domain of the human sciences by pushing back against the influence of instrumental rationality, which he identifies with the methods of the sciences and technology. Some pragmatists, however, find in Habermas’s work a surprising and even disconcerting lack of interest in the scientific and technical contexts within which his noninstrumental action is said to operate. So it seems that interactive constructivists and pragmatists would agree that neglect of context constitutes a significant difficulty for Habermas’s project, although for slightly different reasons. Jim Garrison: In my contribution to this collection, I explicitly draw heavily on Dewey’s pluralistic theory of democracy and supplement it with some of the insights of Köln constructivism. I explicitly call on Kersten Reich’s recognition that Dewey’s criteria for evaluating the worth of social life that leads to this definition of pluralistic democracy are paradoxical. Often, embracing paradoxes proves the best way to handle ambivalent situations and ideas such as the risks and opportunities of diversity. The paradox disappears when we use a both/and logic that embraces both sameness and difference. Equally importantly, Reich shows the efficacy of taking an observer stance on Dewey’s criteria that allows him to respond to issues of the ambivalence of progress and issues of power in relational differences that his primarily participant and agent stance could not fully comprehend. This is a wonderful illustration of how we may extend the classical pragmatists’ (in this case Dewey) theory of democracy. So too are Judith Green’s ideas about deep democracy. Expanding Dewey’s concept of democracy this way makes it more responsive to our times. It also helps in regard to questions two and five. Dewey says at the end of his autobiographical essay, From Absolutism to Experimentalism, “I think it shows a deplorable deadness of imagination to suppose that philosophy will indefinitely revolve within the scope of the problems and systems that two thousand years of European history have bequeathed to us. Seen in the long perspective of the future, the whole of western European history is a provincial episode. I do not expect to see in my day a genuine, as distinct from a forced and artificial, integration of thought. But a mind that is not too egotistically impatient can have faith that this unification will issue in its season” (LW 5: 159–160). If we have lively imaginations, then we may have faith in the future of pragmatism, although it must continue to evolve if it is to survive and thrive.

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Bill Gavin: We must follow “in Dewey’s Wake,” so to speak; by this I mean we must take some small steps toward responsibly passing Dewey by, that is, applying his vision to new contexts or contexts that have sufficiently changed since the time that he wrote. Doing this requires first, acknowledgment of contexts as tacit and, hence, as humbling, and second, an application of Dewey to new contexts in the twenty-first century. I would suggest the themes of death and dying and ecology as important candidates for assessment that are inherently interdisciplinary in nature, and that have come to the fore in recent years as needing national, democratic debate and examination. The use of Bauman’s concept of “liquid modernity” as opposed to modernity or postmodernity as explained by Stefan and Kersten is an excellent example of this. Michael Eldridge also worries about the change of context, stressing that Talisse’s presentation of Dewey harbors a narrow understanding of pluralism and an “intellectualist orientation.” In contrast, he argues for a view of Dewey that stresses not “belief formation” but rather “situation modification.” Jim Campbell: One of the basic themes in Dewey is that all political language and practice—as systems of habitual institutions—remain ever in process. The terms pragmatism, democracy, and liberalism have many meanings at present, as they have had in the past. Some of these meanings help us to solve our current problems, others do not. One particular difficulty that we face at present is the delusion on the part of some that we should clean out this “confusion” (i.e., the diversity of meanings) and recover the “real” meanings of the respective terms, and then fashion our political practice to correspond with the terms’ “original intent.” The rhetorical advantage here seems to be in the hands of these monists—after all, who would not want to live in accordance with the “truth”?—and this rhetorical advantage has for far too long triumphed over pragmatic political practice. It must be continually challenged, and it is best challenged by efforts to solve political problems rather than to define them out of existence. The deep and abiding human desire for simplified closure must be addressed just as much today as in 1929 when Dewey published The Quest for Certainty. The members of each generation have to work to make sure that they and their children keep themselves open to diversity and re-learn the lesson of pluralism as often as it is necessary. 4 How Does “Deep” or Participatory and Deliberative Democracy Require and Respond to Diversity of the Kinds We Must Take Seriously Now? Judith Green: Deep democracy is the background and the product of participatory and deliberative democracy. Deep democracy is a personal way

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of life, as Dewey said, but it’s also a socially shared way of life that builds social intelligence and calls forth distinctive capabilities of individuals in response to the needs of their times. Deep democracy is an aspect of character of the members of a community who practice mutual respect for one another while recognizing the diversity in their beliefs, affiliations, talents, tastes, perspectives, and contributions as valuable. They learn it from one another and practice it together, even if some of their neighbors do not. Without this deep democracy, participating and deliberating with others about decisions within the institutions of government or civil society that affect them all will not be very effective or very meaningful to them—they won’t constitute what Dewey called a “public,” but only a collection of social atoms with various kings and levels of personal powers to affect events. But if some important aspects of their daily lives as well as their experience as participants and deliberators in civil and public decision making stimulate their education in deep democracy, they will value the diversity others bring to the table, they will speak confidently and listen well, and they will contribute something together that is more powerful and wiser than their earlier separate ideas. Almost all of us humans can be stimulated toward fuller growth and more creative insights by such experiences. Face-to-face experiences are really powerful for us, but experiences of virtual community that rely on the new social media through the Internet can also be significant in cultivating deep democracy and as opportunities to participate and deliberate with others. Larry Hickman: Deep democracy demands a balance between participatory and representative democracy. How is this to be accomplished? I believe that the pragmatists’ emphasis on the methods of the sciences shows us the way. Although this is a complex issue, it seems clear that participation in scientific communities is in principle open to anyone who has the talents and is willing to develop the necessary skills. Of course, it is the more established representatives of the scientific community who set the research agenda and present the public face of science through service in professional societies and governmental agencies. In wider democratic life, universal participation is of course neither obligatory nor even a realistic goal. But the norms of Deweyan-type deep democracy prescribe that participation be open to anyone who is willing to develop the skills necessary for good faith public debate and decision making. Of course, it is ultimately representatives who tend to set various agenda in response to citizen participation and to project the public face of their various constituencies. Much more could be said about the methods of scientific communities as models for balancing participation and representation in wider democratic venues.

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Michael Eldridge: One size does not fit all. The depth, extent, and quality of participation should be determined situationally. Thus direct and representative democracy, as well as formal and informal, workplace and legislative, and so on, are to be employed as needed. Democracy, which takes many forms, is a tool, or set of tools, to be used as the occasion requires. This is where Dewey’s instrumentalism comes into play. Show me the problem, then we will select the tool needed to do the job. For some jobs we need lots of people involved; for others not so much. Bill Gavin: We should constantly keep in mind that democracy is an “ideal” for Dewey. As such, it is never quite reached. There is progress made, or there can be, but democracy as an ideal never allows for complete closure. There is something poignant, even tragic, in this realization, which is highlighted by Saito in The Gleam of Light. In addition, Dewey astutely calls attention to the fact that our current insecurity is the result of self-inflicted conditions, and that this realization can lead to the possibility of despair. Stefan and Kersten use Bauman’s material to temper Dewey’s forward-looking approach even though Dewey’s approach can be seen as having a tragic dimension. The exposition of democracy and the difficulty of achieving it are brought out by Stefan and Kersten’s presentation of Bauman’s sense of irony akin to the irony of Richard Rorty. Their contribution does a good job of problematizing the notion of unambiguous progress; on the other hand, Dewey’s “meliorism” tries to walk a difficult line between “naïve optimism” and “destructive pessimism.” Jim Campbell: One of the advantages of a pragmatic democratic response— in contrast to that of, say, Reinhold Niebuhr—is that the pragmatic response holds out the possibility of transformative change. For Niebuhr, the human material is defective. We are unalterably selfish; and, although education and religion can tame us somewhat, no great changes are possible. The pragmatists, however, emphasize that the possibilities of transformative change come from socialization regardless of the initial state of the human material. Their method for advancing social transformation emphasizes political education through political participation. We all know that, as Niebuhr warns, sometimes this process goes awry. For example, Nazis, both historical and contemporary, have managed to enflame the worst aspects of the human material and to direct some of our fellows into antisocial actions. These activities continue to be directed against any appreciation of diversity and in the direction of some presumed “purity.” The message of Mead and Dewey— a message repeated in such volumes as Benjamin Barber’s Strong Democracy (1984)—is that the human material is far more plastic than Niebuhr would

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allow. Habits of openness to diversity can be developed; the transformation of smaller groups into a larger community can be carried forward. Jim Garrison: I think Köln constructivism shows us the limits of participatory democracy, while fully acknowledging its ability to handle some of the paradoxes regarding the same and the different. Participatory democracy provides a strong basis for responding creatively to the issue of diversity. Dewey’s commitment to communicative democracy emphasizes the co-construction of meaning. Primordially, Dewey thinks all language learning, all acquisition, is a three-term relation that involves two or more emergent, evolving participants in a situation coming to agreement in action regarding some third emergent, and evolving, object (perhaps another participant). It expresses Luce Irigaray’s wonderful realization that in community, “we are at least three, each of which is irreducible to any of the others: you, me, and our work (oeuvre)”; this I mention in my chapter. We may think of dialogues across cultural, gender, ethnic, and such differences this way as well. Deliberative democracy adds intelligent inquiry to the ideal of communicative democracy. For Dewey, democracy was always much more about the contingent rapidly evolving and diverse publics than about formal government, which existed merely to serve the people anyway. It is mostly a civic theory of democracy. He was fully aware of the dangers capitalism pose to democracy and, after World War I, militarism. He was also aware of poverty and racism, but should have said much more. Judith Green’s notion of deep democracy rooted firmly in local community allows democracy to contextualize itself without becoming parochial. It allows us to think globally while acting locally. By bringing Dewey into dialogue with critical theory black scholars like Alain Locke, Josiah Royce, and others, she shows us how to enrich the pragmatic theory of democracy. As other thinkers in other countries do the same, we cannot imagine what we will get, but it will be exciting. Köln constructivism is also an outstanding example of pragmatic democratic thought evolving through dialogue. 5 Why Is John Dewey’s Pragmatist Theory of Democracy Helpful Now in Expanding Our Understanding of the Risks and Opportunities of Diversity? Bill Gavin: Dewey’s pragmatic theory keeps us from explaining something by “explaining it away.” Applied to the diversity issue, it keeps us from interpreting diversity as assimilation—something Dewey did not like—and it promotes the metaphor of a salad or, better, that of an orchestra or

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a jazz band. The melting-pot metaphor explains difference by getting rid of it, that is, by explaining it away, out of existence, and so on. The orchestra metaphor is better, allowing for and nurturing both community and difference. The metaphor of the jazz band might be the best one, since it harbors no predetermined goal for the music being played—both communal endeavors and individual “rifts” are encouraged. Ultimately, we must acknowledge that all metaphors are partial, both revealing and concealing simultaneously—highlighting one aspect of the experience while marginalizing others. Kersten Reich: Dewey’s criticism of entrenched philosophical dualisms that resulted in artificial separations of different fields of experience is still a necessary precondition for advancing our understanding of democracy and diversity. This all the more applies because pragmatism sees reflection and action, thinking and practice, as mutually involved on the basis of experience as a continuum of doing and undergoing. Indeed, that move has been revolutionary in the history of philosophy and is essential for constructivism, too. The orientation toward the world of action has helped to foster an understanding of social reality that is less inspired by ideal-typical claims but based on inquiry as an open process that acknowledges the vague and indeterminate aspects of life that necessarily go with diversity. Pragmatism is aptly considered as a realistic account of life in so far as it avoids reduction of experience to idealized or purified expectations. Thinking beyond Dewey and his time, we today need to make strong and constructive use of this advantage of pragmatism while at the same time complementing the classical approach with new issues that make new theoretical perspectives necessary. This is the pragmatic and constructivist way of responding to current challenges of our time. For instance, it is against this background that I have chosen Bourdieu, Foucault, and Rorty as dialogue partners in my contribution. One point has received particular attention in this connection, namely the question of power. It has also been touched by Larry in his contribution, especially in his discussion of Mouffe’s more recent theory of radical democracy. The relation of democracy and hegemony, such can be said as a conclusion from both the chapters, is a core question of democracy under contemporary conditions of diversity. What seems to me to be the crucial lesson from Foucault is that power pervades the social field in all directions and all positions that may be taken herein. There is no innocent experience with regard to power. To my mind this view of power and culture is more radical than what we find in classical pragmatism. But it is not incompatible with Dewey’s views on democracy. Interactive constructivism attempts to detect theoretical as well as practical perspectives in which the more radical understanding of power can be

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brought to the foreground, for instance, in the field of education. Here we need to develop an acute sense of the ambivalence of communities in connection with lived diversities. Hegemony as a part of democratic processes implies that the tensional relationship between the two poles of community and diversity must continually be struggled over. Therefore, we need critical analyses like the one given by Bourdieu that expose actual relations and practices of power. These relations and practices take place not only in the political sphere but in the practices of everyday culture on the basis of unequally distributed economical, social, cultural, and symbolic capitals. In the long run, democracy can only flourish and survive if in the development of power relations the split between the winners and losers with regard to those capitals does not become too large and undermine the necessary fundaments of democratic solidarity. Solidarity in education depends on equity of participation. This is a lesson that we still can take from Dewey and apply to our own situation. Stefan Neubert: If Bauman writes, among other things, about wasted lives in postmodernity this is an acute and provocative sociological interpretation of the very dangers that Kersten just mentioned. It is one of the intentions why we included Bauman as a dialogue partner in this volume. We believe that his peculiar articulation of ambivalence in modernity and liquid modernity draws important conclusions from discourses on culture and power like the ones mentioned above in the discussions on Bauman and Foucault. What is fascinating about Bauman, especially with an eye on pragmatism, is that he always connects his sociological and structural analyses with accounts of experience in a highly ambivalent culture. We have focused on Bauman’s expositions of the dark sides of social developments because we think that it is here in the first place where pragmatism with its focus on democratic meliorism can profit. Although the orientation toward solutions is always necessary, it sometimes tends to underestimate those losses in experience that cannot be made up sufficiently even by democratic progress. Bauman’s themes of ambivalence like the winners and losers of postmodernity; the fragility of bonds; the precarious position of strangers; the paradoxes of assimilation as well as his metaphors of tourists, players, strollers, and vagabonds can be helpful to extend and deepen our understanding of what is at stake in social reality. To my mind, this does not stand in conflict but rather gives substance to our democratic beliefs, orientations, and struggles for the best possible solutions for living in diversity. Jim Garrison: My contribution seeks to show specifically how Dewey’s theory of democracy can expand our understanding of the risks and opportunities of

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diversity. As indicated in my answer to Question 4, suitably supplemented by some of the insights of Köln constructivism, and other work such as Green’s Deep Democracy, we have some clear guidance as to how we may expand Dewey’s pragmatist theory of democracy. My chapter only takes up how Köln constructivism can help. I discuss how deep or participatory democracy can contribute to responding thoughtfully to issues of diversity. Suitably expanded, Dewey’s theory of democracy does much to expand our understanding of the risks and opportunities of diversity in ways indicated in all chapters of this volume. For instance, in “Creative Democracy— The Task Before Us,” Dewey talks a great deal about the democratic faith. In particular, he discusses the need to go beyond tolerance of differences to the need to embrace them because they enrich our lives. This deeply held commitment depends, in turn, on his belief that individuals only have potential if there are other individuals with whom they are yet to interact. I would add that Deweyan pragmatism emphasizes the ideal character of democracy. So, like other ideals, we must have faith in its possibilities even as we act to secure it just as Martin Luther King Jr. had faith in the possibilities of racial justice even as he acted to secure it. We still do not have racial justice, but I would not go so far as to abandon the idea that we have made progress as the election of Barack Obama in the United States clearly indicates, although things are far from ideal. Our times have lost faith in the ideal of democracy. I merely mention King and Obama to illustrate that grounded faith in democracy intelligently pursued remains viable. Dewey’s basic vision for pluralistic democracy remains practically in use in our time, although it needs expansion and continuous reconstruction to fit new times, places, and circumstances. Larry Hickman: John Dewey’s pragmatist theory of democracy is helpful in expanding our understanding of the risks and opportunities of diversity. In expressing his hope for America, Dewey rejected the notion that it should become a homogenizing melting pot in which everyone would become more or less the same. He favored an alternative metaphor as an ideal: a symphony in which each member of the orchestra is able to contribute according to his or her own talents and abilities. It is clear that he also intended to apply this model of individuals living together in harmony to efforts toward achieving harmony among nations. This leads directly to the sixth topic, cosmopolitanism. Jim Campbell: Dewey’s understanding of democracy is as a way of life based on faith in the possibilities of others. This understanding immediately brings

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us to an embrace of diversity: Their possibilities are not ours. It is necessary to recognize, moreover, that Dewey’s understanding of democracy, because of its dual inside—outside emphases, also helps us to recognize and clarify the risks that come with diversity. It sharpens our attention on groups that would withdraw from dialogue and isolate themselves to cultivate their private “truth”; it reminds us of the danger of groups that would strangle scientific education in the preservation of religious dogma; it emphasizes the need to challenge groups that would reject change and call for a return to some prior state of presumed “perfection.” Judith Green: Especially when we read Dewey in relation to other classical pragmatists like Jane Addams and Alain Locke, Dewey helps us to see that diversity is a necessary precondition to democracy as well as a resource for our personal, social, cultural, national, and international growth. Emerson, Thoreau, many Native American thinkers, naturalists like Muir and Leopold, as well as contemporary ecologists have helped us to recognize the energy and joy we get from an ecosystem that depends on interactive diversity, and also to distinguish between differences that contribute to and those that undermine the sustainability of a whole social-natural system. As individuals, cultures, nations, and a biotic community, we need to grow to our fullest capabilities in ways that are sustainable for us, for our niche, and for the whole ecosphere. As humans, unlike many other life-forms, we can become sojourners in other national-cultural-natural niches if it does us good for a time, and we may even be able to transplant ourselves permanently. We may be able to contribute something valuable in our new location if we are met with democratic openness to diversity. However, we always take risks when we step outside the niche that formed us and when we let in an outsider: It’s hard to tell in advance who will enrich us and who may kill us. However, we are more likely to develop the habits of discriminating social intelligence that can tell the difference if we have wide experiences of diversity, either as sojourners or as practitioners of hospitality. In any case, we need diversity for our own growth, and we lack the power to exclude it from our lives. Deep democrats fare better in the long run, as do their communities. 6

How Does a Pragmatist Standpoint Reframe Cosmopolitanism?

Larry Hickman: Cosmopolitanism has several requirements. First, as I have already indicated, it requires the knowledge of other peoples and cultures that can come only from an adequate foundational education that makes possible a love of lifelong learning. Second, it requires tolerance—not tolerance of intolerance, it should be added, but tolerance of alternative ways of

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living that can pass the test of what proves to be productive and what holds promise for the future. Regarding this point it is important to stress that some ways of doing things have failed, and they have failed massively. There is no requirement that the cosmopolitan attitude include tolerance for slavery, for example, or for depriving females of educational opportunities. There is also no requirement that the cosmopolitan attitude turn a blind eye to structural inequalities that are fostered by laissez faire political and economic systems. Third, a healthy cosmopolitanism must avoid empty abstractions. Some have argued, for example, that human beings have infinite obligations to every member of the species. For the Deweyan pragmatist, this is an invalid concept because it cannot be operationalized. Dewey’s emphasis on what works, what allows for the future control of facts, must be a central component of any thick notion of cosmopolitanism. Finally, it should be said that the risks to a creative response to diversity are many. They include an everything-is-of-equal-value relativism; an appeal to empty abstractions that there is no practicable way of operationalizing; and ignorance of the hard-won values of democracy, religious tolerance, and universal education. These are not risks that are easily overcome. But I believe that pragmatism and interactive constructivism provide many of the tools that we will need if positive and productive approaches are to prevail. Jim Campbell: In some contexts, the term cosmopolitan has borne the negative connotation of rootlessness, of “not being one of us.” The danger of recalling this connotation continues whenever the focus of our discussion of diversity is primarily outward: on how we can become more like “them.” Our primary need at present is to be cosmopolitans at home. We need, in other words, to emphasize the extraordinary level of diversity that has long existed within our various national borders. This is a need that is hard to satisfy at present. Consider, for example, the effectiveness of the political ploy of rejecting anything that comes out of Washington (or Brussels) as being foreign or even “un-American” (or “unGerman”). Much of the contemporary fear of diversity—attacks on “illegals,” affirmations of the Christian foundation of the state, talk of secession—is a function of severe economic decline; but, in earlier economic declines, these negative appeals were not so successful. In recent economic history, for example, we embraced the adoption of Japanese business practices. Clearly, there is a need to increase the recognition that there is a long history of diversity within our countries. Jim Garrison: The idea that all of humanity belongs to a common community is a powerful one. However, it is fraught with all the dangers of reducing

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diversity to a totalizing sameness that worries many such as Levinas. What kind of common community? Is it one world government, one common morality, one religion, or one global economic system? Currently, elite, global capitalism with its sanitized Walt Disney stories of the good life or MTV images of pleasure threaten to define the very meaning of cosmopolitanism. My contribution addresses issues of pluralism, sameness, and difference, which may turn out to be the critical issues of the twenty-first century. Surely, it is the decisive issue of cosmopolitanism, although I do not mention cosmopolitanism in my chapter. Pragmatist approaches to cosmopolitanism can reframe cosmopolitanism to avoid totalization and reduction of all difference to sameness without falling into serious and dangerous errors as does Levinas. If they continue to evolve, pluralistic, pragmatist theories of democracy should provide intelligent backing and warrant for a faith in the possibility that individuals from varying locations (physical, economic, religious, etc.) with different beliefs and values (moral, government, etc.) enter transactional, functional relationships of mutual dependence, respect, and reciprocity to cocreate novel meaning and a more just and equitable world. I find thinkers such as Judith Butler, Levinas, Derrida, Daisaku Ikeda, Thich Nhat Hahn, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Seyla Benhabib, and many others good dialogue partners for pragmatists. Pragmatism lends itself readily to creative dialogues across difference. The more the defenders of pragmatist democratic theory dialogue with others, the more responsive it will become, and less likely the whole process will become totalizing. Bill Gavin: Cosmopolitanism is too essentialist or platonic a concept—left unanalyzed. It needs to be contextualized, as do all universals. We should do so keeping in mind Dewey’s admission that all philosophical fallacies come down to neglect of context and that all generalizations are made under trying conditions. In the chapters of Stefan and Kersten, we find that Bauman does a good job of contextualizing the concept of modernity. Michael Eldridge: Cosmopolitanism, as Bill and Jim suggest, can, if we are not careful, be taken to mean that there is a uniform way of being a citizen of the world. But, as they note, the one world presents itself in multiple ways. We as individuals, even individuals in the same locale, experience it differently. So we need to reframe cosmopolitanism as being open to others in whatever part of the world we find ourselves. This openness to other people should be more than receptivity. It is to be an active seeking of diverse experience past and present. Not so we can be cultured but so that we can enhance

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our lives. One is enlarged by living large, and this larger life will take many forms. Kersten Reich: Part of the necessary contextualization of the figure of the cosmopolitan is the old bourgeois tradition of interpreting others as transparent figures in the frame of one’s own horizon. Stuart Hall calls this attitude “The West and the Rest.” I agree with Bill that if this remains unanalyzed, we end up with uncritical passing down of prejudices. Therefore, cosmopolitanism in our time must include a self-critical working off of this tradition. Interactive constructivism insists that the role of the cosmopolite, like the role of the stranger, suffers from an endemic ambivalence as described by Bauman. If we once more apply our distinction of observer, participant, and agent, we may say that for the cosmopolite as an observer there seems to be a free access to multiperspectival visions of diversity and plurality. In fact, this has always been the fascinating aspect of the figure of the cosmopolite since the Enlightenment. If, however, we look at the cosmopolite as a participant, we will find that even his or her apparent freedom of observation is necessarily context-bound. It is a critical lesson to be learned from the errors of Enlightenment that neglecting this context on behalf of universalized claims leads to fallacies like, in the case of the cosmopolite, an unthinking ethnocentrism. A further danger of the cosmopolite position is that with regard to his or her role as an agent he or she may live in a relatively detached position to concrete cultural contexts of a given place and time. This complication further adds to the ambivalence of this figure and supports the tendency to neglect participation in favor of distant observation. Against the background of a sufficiently complex and self-critical understanding of the cosmopolite in these three perspectives, we can gain new insights about what is at stake when talking about diversity. It cannot be confined to one of the three perspectives: It is never only a question of observing the plurality of lived cultures, but it is at the same time also a question of living and partaking in plural and diverse cultures, and of realizing appreciation of diversity in one’s own involvement in cultural, social, political, and other practices. The full actualization of this rendering of the cosmopolitical attitude in our time will simultaneously represent the surrendering and overcoming of the illusions that we now in retrospect find in the bourgeois ideal of the cosmopolitan. Judith Green: It’s such a pleasure to carry on a conversation with such thoughtful and caring people! In my contribution, I outlined five goals that I think we, as contemporary pragmatists, share with diverse contemporary cosmopolitans, and ten distinctive characteristics of the kind of cosmopolitanism we as contemporary pragmatists can contribute to a wider theoretical

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and practical conversation about how to analyze and transform the important problems of our times. With help from the classical pragmatists, we get to our cosmopolitanism by a different route than the diverse paths that Martha Nussbaum, Amartya Sen, Seyla Benhabib, Jürgen Habermas, Tony Blair, Barack Obama, Jeremy Waldron, and David Held follow. Nonetheless, we as much as they are inheritors from and contributors to a long and culturally diverse philosophical tradition of cosmopolitanism that offers a hopeful and realistic ideal vision of how we must understand ourselves and others whose lives are almost unimaginably different from our own if we are to live in peace together with a sense of meaning, stability, and creative possibility in this troubled twenty-first century. I think the kind of contemporary pragmatist cosmopolitanism I’ve tried to explain and apply to the important issues of our times can bridge some philosophical and practical differences with others who share our ideal goals, and that the thinkers with whom I’ve had the pleasure of sharing this conversation can contribute critical and creative insights that would never occur to me to its development. Once again, we need one another in our diversity!

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Author Index

Ackerman, Bruce A., 177, 190 Addams, Jane, 4, 5, 13, 16, 17, 21, 22, 62, 64, 65, 82, 201, 223 Adorno, Theodor W., 141, 199 Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 62, 65, 81, 225 Aptheker, Herbert, 22 Aquinas, Thomas, 57, 58, 62 Aristotle, 47, 57, 58, 59, 62, 65, 80 Augustine, 57, 62 Auxier, Randall E., 188, 190 Bacon, Francis, 205 Baldwin, James Mark, 15, 22 Barber, Benjamin R., 187, 189, 190, 218 Bauman, Zygmunt, 7–8, 127, 129–43, 145–8, 150–63, 189–90, 197, 202–3, 208, 212–13, 216, 218, 221, 225–6 Beilharz, Peter, 161–2 Benhabib, Seyla, 5–6, 59–61, 64–5, 71, 81, 200, 225, 227 Bernasconi, Robert, 126 Bernstein, Richard, 62, 81, 187, 190–1 Bin Laden, Osama, 70 Blackshaw, Tony, 161–2 Blair, Tony, 6, 44, 67–8, 71, 227 Bohman, James, 60 Boisvert, Ray, 41 Bottani, Noberto, 189, 192 Bourdieu, Pierre, 8, 165, 171–4, 181, 186, 188–9, 191, 194, 211, 220–1

Bourne, Randolph Silliman, 4, 13, 17–18, 21–2 Boydston, Jo Ann, 9, 21–2, 40, 97, 162 Boyle, Robert, 50 Brooks, Thom, 85, 96 Brooks, Van Wyck, 22 Brown, Garrett Wallace, 55, 80 Bunge, Robert, 81 Burks, Arthur W., 21, 23, 40, 42 Bush, George, 6, 67–8, 71, 78, 82 Butler, Judith, 225 Campbell, James, 3–4, 11–12, 14, 16, 18, 20–3, 42, 187, 191, 195–6, 198, 200, 202, 204–6, 208, 210, 212, 214, 216, 218–20, 222, 224, 226 Caspary, William R., 187, 191 Clifford, Geertz, 29, 40 Clinton, Bill, 44 Cochrane, Douglas, 189, 192 Collins, Patricia Hill, 83 Critchley, Simon, 126 Crittenden, Jack, 175, 191 Crummell, Alexander, 63 Dahl, Robert, 82 Darwin, Charles, 62, 125, 193, 212 Derrida, Jacques, 44–5, 108, 125, 203, 213, 225 Descartes, René, 102, 105, 110, 117, 125

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Dewey, John, 2–9, 11–13, 15–16, 18, 21–2, 26–30, 32–55, 62, 64–6, 68–70, 72–3, 81–3, 85–97, 99–101, 106–7, 110, 112–37, 139–46, 148–51, 153–63, 165–71, 173–75, 177–87, 189–99, 201–7, 209–25 Dews, Peter, 53 Diamond, Jared, 203 Dickstein, Morris, 189, 191 Dostojewski, Fjodor, 41 Douglass, Frederick, 63 DuBois, William Edward Burghardt, 4, 13, 19–22, 41, 62–3 Dworkin, Ronald W., 5, 43, 177, 191 Egea-Kuehne, Denise, 126 Eisenberg, Avigail, 93, 115, 125 Ekman, Paul, 125 Eldridge, Michael, 6–7, 85–6, 88–92, 94, 96–8, 189, 191, 195, 202, 213, 216, 218, 225 Elias, Norbert, 147, 154, 158 Elliott, Anthony, 142, 161, 163 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 36, 42, 81, 223 Festenstein, Matthew, 96–7, 187, 191 Feyerabend, Paul, 30, 41 Foucault, Michel, 8, 165, 168–71, 181, 186, 188, 190–93, 204, 208, 211–13, 220–21 Frankl, Viktor, 74, 83 Franklin, Benjamin, 81 Freud, Sigmund, 46, 135 Garrison, Jim, 99–126, 162–3, 189, 192–3, 195, 202, 204, 206, 212, 215, 219, 221, 224 Gavin, William J., 4, 25–42, 195, 201, 206, 216, 218–19, 225 Gore, Albert, 79 Green, Judith M., 5–6, 40–1, 55–83, 85, 187, 189, 192, 195, 200, 208–9, 215–16, 219, 222–3, 226 Gutmann, Amy, 187, 192

Habermas, Juergen, 2–3, 43, 45, 50, 60, 62, 169, 177, 188, 192, 214–15, 227 Haddock Seigfried, Charlene, 6, 82, 86, 204 Hahn, Thich Nhat, 225 Hall, Stuart, 170, 192, 226 Harris, Leonard, 21, 23, 82 Hartshorne, Charles, 21, 23, 40, 42 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 108, 193 Heidegger, Martin, 101 Heisenberg, Werner, 115, 125 Held, David, 60, 80, 227 Hickman, Larry A., 4–6, 40, 43–54, 86–7, 97, 161–63, 189, 192–93, 195, 205, 209, 214, 217, 222–4 Higgins, Kathleen M., 33, 41 Hildebrand, David, 97 Hill, Jason D., 62, 81 Hobbes, Thomas, 177 Hollinger, Robert, 187, 190, 192 Holmes, Jr., Oliver Wendell, 11 Hook, Sidney, 41, 53, 85, 86, 92 Horkheimer, Max, 141 Huggins, Nathan, 22 Huntington, Samuel, 6, 67–8, 71, 83, 170, 192, 200 Hussein, Saddam, 68 Husserl, Edmund, 101–2 Hutcheson, Frances, 58 Hutmacher, Walo, 189, 192 Ikeda, Daisaku, 225 Irigaray, Luce, 108–9, 115, 118, 121, 124–6, 203, 219 Ivison, Duncan, 94 Jacobsen, Michael Hviid, 161–2 Jay, Martin, 4, 25, 40 Jefferson, Thomas, 58–9, 62, 65, 69, 81, 175 Kafka, Franz, 30–2, 39, 41, 202 Kallen, Horace Meyer, 4, 13, 18–19, 21–3, 36–7, 62–3, 82

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Author Index Kant, Immanuel, 3, 49, 58–9, 62, 65, 80–1, 83, 104, 174, 177 King, Jr., Martin Luther, 5, 62, 68, 73, 81, 83, 222 Koopman, Colin, 97 Kremer, Alexander, 97 Krikorian, Yervant H., 54 Kuipers, Ronald A., 190, 192 Lacan, Jacques, 46, 53 Lachs, John, 85 Laclau, Ernesto, 188, 192 Langsdorf, Lenore, 187, 190, 192 Latour, Bruo, 48 Leopold, Aldo, 223 Levinas, Emmanuel, 7, 99–115, 117–23, 125–6, 202–3, 208, 213, 225 Lingis, Alphonso, 100, 120–1, 126 Locke, Alain L., 5, 13, 21, 23, 62–4, 68, 73, 81–2, 219, 223 Locke, John, 58, 62, 80, 177 London, Scott, 97 Lyotard, Jean-François, 137–8, 192 Maathai, Wangari, 201 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 78 Madison, James, 41, 175 Margolis, Joseph, 190, 193 Marshman, Sophia, 161–2 McGowan, John P., 41 McPherson, Dennis, 81, 189 Mead, George Herbert, 12, 15, 21, 23, 46, 62, 118–20, 126, 206, 218 Mills, C. Wright, 38, 42, 155, 162, 202 Morris, Charles W., 21, 23, 126, 191–2 Mosca, Gaetano, 53 Moses, Greg, 81 Mouffe, Chantal, 5, 43–9, 51, 53, 188–9, 192–3, 208, 220 Muir, John, 223 Murray, John Courtney, 68 Neubert, Stefan, 7, 113, 125–6, 127–63, 187, 193, 195, 197, 204, 206, 210, 212, 221

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Newton, Isaac, 50 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 218 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 33, 41, 44, 212 Nussbaum, Martha C., 56, 59, 65–6, 80–2, 227 Obama, Barack, 6, 68, 82, 222, 227 Pappas, Gregory, 90, 97 Pareto, Vilferdo, 53 Parmenides, 101, 106 Passeron, Jean Claude, 189, 191 Pawelski, James, 82 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 6, 11–12, 21, 23, 29, 39–40, 42, 62, 81, 86, 92, 96–7, 126, 205 Peperzak, Adriaan T., 126 Pettegrew, John, 190, 193 Plato, 101, 104–5 Politzer, Heinz, 41 Pratt, Scott L., 81 Quadaffi, Mohammar, 70 Rabb, Douglas J., 81 Rabinow, Paul, 40, 188, 193 Rawls, John, 5–6, 43, 50, 62, 86–7, 90, 94, 97, 177, 190, 193 Reck, Andrew. J., 126 Reich, Kersten, 7–8, 123–6, 127–63, 165–94, 195, 197, 199, 203, 207, 211, 214–15, 220, 226 Reimann, Paul, 41 Rorty, Richard, 2–3, 5, 8, 44, 49–50, 67, 83, 85, 95, 97, 130, 133–4, 137, 140, 155–6, 165, 174, 176–82, 184, 186–7, 190, 192–3, 204, 208, 212, 214, 218, 220 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 177 Royce, Josiah, 62–3, 82, 219 Russel, Bertrand, 110 Ryder, John, 97 Saito, Naoko, 36, 39, 42, 218 Sandel, Michael, 93 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 41 Sayre-McCord, Geoffrey, 87, 97

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Schmitt, Carl, 44–5, 48 Scholl, Sophie Magdalena, 14 Schroeder, Gerhard, 44 Schumpeter, Joseph A., 190, 194 Sen, Amartya, 65–6, 82, 97, 227 Serres, Michel, 203, 213 Shaprio, Ian, 97 Shusterman, Richard, 179, 187, 190, 194 Singer, Beth J., 15, 21, 23 Stein, Ringen, 97 Stewart, Jeffrey C., 81 Stikkers, Kenneth W., 82 Stuhr, John J., 188–9, 194 Sullivan, Shannon, 37, 40, 42 Susman, Henry, 41 Talisse, Robert, 6, 85–97, 189, 194, 216 Tester, Keith, 155, 161–3 Thayer-Bacon, Barbara, 93, 98 Thompson, Dennis, 187, 192, 194

Thoreau, Henry David, 14, 81, 223 Thorlby, Anthony, 41 Tomasello, Michael, 119, 126 Tufts, James Hayden, 12–13, 21, 23 Wacquant, Loïc, 188–9, 191, 194 Waldron, Jeremy, 6, 59, 87, 98, 227 Walzer, Michael, 5, 44 Washington, Booker T., 63 Washington, James M., 83 Weatherford, Jack, 83 Weber, Max, 136, 154, 158 Weiss, Paul, 21, 23, 40, 42 Westbrook, Robert B., 42, 194 Wiener, Philip P., 11, 21, 23 Williams, Michael, 96, 98 Wills, Garry, 81 Wilshire, Bruce, 81 Wilson, Woodrow, 88 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 5, 35, 42, 44, 53 Wright, Chauncey, 11, 38, 42, 155, 202

10.1057/9781137010605 - Pragmatism and Diversity, Edited by Judith M. Green, Stefan Neubert and Kersten Reich

Subject Index

a priori, 58, 66, 83, 104, 157–8, 177 abortion, 69 Absolute, Hegel’s, 106 action, melioristic, 13 action, social, 34, 45, 52, 134, 148 actions, experimental, 12 activities, constructive, 52 activity, experimental, 52 actors, 72, 112, 147, 161 aesthetic(s), 12, 65, 68, 82, 110, 113–15, 122, 180, 212 African American(s), 20–1, 62–3, 68–9, 93 agent(s), 112, 119, 123–4, 137, 146, 149, 157, 163, 168, 180, 186, 190, 193, 206, 215, 226 agonism(s), 45–7, 73, 142 Agonistic pluralism, 5, 43–50, 53 agonistic, 44–5, 53, 72 Al Qaeda, 67, 70 alterity, 105–7, 120 ambiguity, 104, 105, 131, 140–1, 198, 205 ambivalence(s), 7, 129, 131, 133, 135, 137, 140–4, 148–9, 156, 161, 177, 183, 197, 203, 205, 208, 211, 215, 221, 226 amelioration, practical, 101, 112 amelioration, social, 103, 120, 143 antagonism, 45–7, 73, 142 anteriority, 104 appreciation, 1, 13, 113, 134, 197, 198, 218, 226 approach, interactive, 203 approach, practice oriented, 86

approach, transcendental, 203 approach, universalist-rationalist, 43 Arab Spring, 70, 73, 80 aristocracy, 18 assimilation, 25, 37, 141, 146, 161, 219, 221 assimilation, process of, 19 authority, authorities, 45, 51, 60, 81, 85, 105, 120, 147–8, 171, 187, 189, 196, 205 authority, religious, 52 basic needs, 56, 64, 76, 209 benefit, mutual, 56, 67, 71, 196 Big Brother, 136 bigotry, nationalistic and religious, 209 Buddhist and Taoist thinkers, 56 business ethics, 75–6 capital(s), symbolic, 172, 221 capital, cultural, 171–2 capital, economic and cultural, 171–2 capital, social, 172 capitalism, 1, 69, 127, 143–7, 149–8, 170, 188, 194, 199, 219, 225 capitalism, heavy (forms of ), 146, 152–3 capitalism, light (forms of ), 146–7, 152–3, 155, 157, 213 capitalism, nineteenth-century bourgeois, 30 Cartesian project, 29–30 Cartesian quest, 102 cataclysms, natural, 73 certainty, quest for, 7, 33, 44, 91, 102, 111, 117, 131, 167, 216

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Subject Index

Christian Church, 57 civil liberties, 72, 78, 188 civil society, 2, 6, 56, 60–1, 67, 155, 157, 195, 217 civilization(s), 62–4, 66, 67, 75–6, 135, 147, 148–9 civilizations, clash of, 67, 83, 170, 192 class(es), 15, 90, 121, 133, 142, 157, 166–7, 172, 181, 183, 187, 201, 203–4, 210 collaboration(s), 1, 3, 63–4, 72, 94 collectivism, 35 colonial(ism), 63, 73, 76–7, 109, 203, 209 color, 20, 63, 72, 150 commitments, ideological, 44 commitments, religious or political, 52 commonality, commonalities, 100, 123, 155, 171, 180, 183, 195 communal, 95, 220 communication, 2, 8, 15, 50–1, 67, 72, 75, 119–21, 126, 134, 139, 150, 152, 166, 169, 183, 187–8, 192, 197–8, 205–7, 210–11, 214 communitarism, 156–7 communities, democratic, 121, 123, 157, 165, 167, 175, 177, 184 communities, religious, 149 community, a more inclusive, 47, 49–50 community, American, 19 community, local, 16, 66, 80, 179, 219 community, virtual, 217 compartmentalization, 133, 153, 174 competences, communicative, 214 complexity, social, 8, 165 concentration camp, 136 conditioned, 48, 62 conflict(s), 20, 43, 45, 71, 86, 89, 94, 125, 128, 133, 135, 158, 170, 183, 205, 221 conflicts, ethnic, 202 Consciousness of Self, 13 consequentialism, 104 conservative(s), 6, 48, 61, 68–9, 78, 82 Constitution, 69, 124

construction(s), 18, 77, 101, 103, 108, 111–13, 117–18, 120–1, 124–5, 127, 131, 133, 137, 144, 146, 157, 165–7, 176, 179, 188, 199, 206–8 construction(s), transcendental, 100, 102, 111–12, 115, 117, 120 constructions, contingent social, 124 constructivism, 8, 121, 130, 137, 162–3, 193, 199, 203, 208, 214, 220 constructivism, interactive, 7, 99, 123, 125–6, 127, 129, 137, 139, 146, 151, 156, 160–3, 190, 193, 196, 205–8, 214, 220, 224, 226 constructivism, Köln (interactive), 101, 112, 123, 125, 215, 219, 222 consumerism, 146, 148 context, contextual situation, 2, 7–8, 11, 15, 25–9, 31–3, 35, 37–44, 51, 69, 94, 96, 112–14, 117, 123,131–2, 135, 148–9, 157, 167, 169–70, 175–6, 178, 183, 189, 197–9, 202–3, 206, 213–16, 225–6 contextualism, 5, 26–8, 36, 44, 47, 130, 161, 198–9, 206 contingency, contingent, 2, 49, 83, 109, 113, 124–5, 132, 134, 140–1, 167, 180, 182, 184, 193, 198, 212, 219 contract, social, 87 conversations, cross-difference, 1, 3–4, 8 cooperation, 18, 73, 112, 126, 128 cosmopolitan ideal(s), 6, 18, 61, 80 cosmopolitan pluralism, 64, 73, 82 cosmopolitan, pragmatist, 6, 55, 64, 77 cosmopolitanism, 1, 3, 5, 55–63, 65, 67, 69, 71–3, 75, 77, 79–81, 83, 222–7 crisis, financial, 153, 157–8 critical theory, 2–3, 53, 141, 184, 199, 204, 219 critical-pragmatic approach, 7 criticism, 15, 31, 41, 96, 107, 113, 125, 139, 141–2, 151, 157, 165, 179, 184, 197, 199–200, 213, 220 cross-difference conversations, 1, 3–4, 8 Crusades, the, 57

10.1057/9781137010605 - Pragmatism and Diversity, Edited by Judith M. Green, Stefan Neubert and Kersten Reich

Subject Index cultivating, 55, 59, 61–2, 64, 67, 217 cultural contexts, 5, 43, 129, 137, 169, 198, 210, 226 cultural diversity, diversities, 18, 34, 71, 81, 134, 204 cultural pluralism, 36, 62–3, 82 cultural sciences, 139, 177 cultural studies, 139, 170 cultural tradition, 17 culture-immersed individuals, 3 Cynics, 56, 58–9, 62, 65 Darwinism, 212–13 de/re/constructing, 124 debate, universalist-contextualist, 43–4, 49 Declaration of Independence, 58, 81 deconstruction, 1, 112, 141, 146, 151, 193, 206–8 deities, transcendent, 44 deliberation, deliberative, 6, 52, 72, 88–92, 95, 189,191–2, 194, 213, 216, 219 democracy, 2–8, 15–18, 21–3, 26, 35–6, 39, 42, 45–7, 49, 51–3, 64–6, 70, 72–3, 80–83, 85–99, 101, 117, 120–4, 126–8, 134, 136, 137, 141–3, 145, 149–51, 153–57, 159–63, 165–9, 171, 173–9, 181–2, 184–195, 197, 199–200, 202–11, 213–25 democrat, Deweyan, 88 democratic, 1–8, 11, 15, 18, 20, 43, 45–7, 49–53, 55–6, 60–5, 70–3, 78, 80–2, 85–93, 95–7, 99–101, 116–18, 120–5, 128, 134, 136–7, 143–5, 149–51, 153–60, 165–71, 173–97, 199–201, 203–5, 207–11, 213–19, 221–3, 225, 227 deontology, 104 deregulation, 142 descent, African, 19 destruction, mass 67–8 determined, culturally, 109

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development(s), social, 127–8, 135, 144, 156, 169, 221 Deweyan democracy, 7, 88, 90, 99 Deweyan terms, 33, 154 difference(s), 1, 3–5, 7–8, 15, 36–7, 45, 49, 53, 56–9, 61, 62, 64–5, 67, 71–3, 77, 80, 83, 91, 93, 94, 99–100, 103, 109–10, 113, 117–18, 121–6, 130, 134, 139, 146, 155–8, 162, 165, 172–3, 177, 181, 183–4, 195, 202–4, 209, 215, 219–20, 222–23, 225, 227 disabilities studies, 204 disciplinary, 168–9 discourse, existential, 32 discourse, psychological, 32 discourse, religious, 32 discourse, sociopolitical, 32 discrimination, 2 distribution, 67, 75, 116, 174 diverse, 1–6, 8, 12, 14–20, 28, 43, 56, 63–4, 66–7, 73, 80–1, 86, 88, 93, 132–45, 149, 165–6, 168, 173, 178, 181, 200–1, 203–5, 209–10, 214, 219, 225–7 diversity, 1–4, 6–8, 11–21, 23, 25–6, 34–40, 55, 59, 62, 64, 71, 80–2, 123, 126, 134, 140, 158, 162, 165–7, 174, 180–1, 183–5, 195–210, 215–27 diversity, social, 16 divide, religious-cultural, 69 division, social, 5, 43, 45 doctrine, timeless and unchanging, 8 dogma, religious, 223 domination, 1, 74, 165, 168–70 dualism(s), 101, 107, 114–15, 168, 175, 212, 220 dualism, quasi-theistic, 107 dualisms, metaphysical, 65 economic, 1, 3, 19–20, 58, 60, 63, 65, 67–7, 79, 83, 90, 140–1, 143, 148–52, 154, 157–8, 160, 171–3, 179, 181, 196, 201, 209–10, 212, 214, 221, 224–5

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Subject Index

education, educational, educative, 1, 4–6, 8, 15–16, 22, 35, 42, 51–2, 55, 61, 64, 67, 69, 72–3, 75–80, 82, 89–91, 120, 126–7, 134, 137, 139, 143, 145–7, 150, 156, 159–61, 163, 165–7, 171–2, 174–6, 181–3, 186–9, 191–3, 196–7, 200–1, 203–10, 213, 217–18, 221, 223–4 emancipation, 124, 127, 141–6, 149, 156, 179–80, 185, 212 empire(s), 58–9, 72, 79, 200 empiricism, 33, 47 empowerment, social, 179 environmental, environments, 75, 77, 116, 122, 146, 196 environments, sociocultural, 210 epistemic habits, 6, 87–8 epistemology, 30, 37, 86, 98 equality, 15, 21, 47–8, 51–2, 58, 95, 124, 143, 175, 181, 184, 189–90, 204 equity, 175, 181, 183, 186, 189, 192, 204, 221 ethnocentric, 176 ethnocentrism, 196, 226 evolution, 21, 23, 65–6, 75–6, 82, 213 evolution, Darwinian, 212 exclusion, 131, 157, 185, 204 existence, 12–13, 15, 29, 101–2, 109–10, 114, 116, 119–20, 122, 132, 144, 158, 166, 198, 212, 216, 220 existentially, 30, 32, 66 experience(s), 1–5, 7–8, 12–13, 16–17, 19, 21–2, 25, 27–30, 32–6, 38–42, 44, 51–2, 54, 57, 61–2, 64–8, 71–2, 74, 77, 82, 89–92, 94, 97, 99, 105, 110, 113–14, 118–21, 125, 131–4, 136, 140, 145, 150–3, 155, 159, 166–7, 175, 178–80, 187, 189–91, 194, 196–200, 202–6, 208, 210, 212–3, 217, 220–1, 223, 225 experimental practice, 5, 43

experimentalism, 5, 43, 45–9, 52–3, 187, 198, 210, 215 experimentalism, democratic, 175 experimentalist psychology, 46 experts, 7, 93, 128, 154, 157, 172, 207, 210–12 face-to-face interactions, 2 faith in democracy, experience and education, 51 faith, moral and social, 51 fallibilism, 206 feminism, 1, 42, 82, 204 feudalism, agrarian, 149 flexibility, 73, 147, 154 fluidity, 59, 134 forces, social, 150 Fordist, Fordist factory, 136, 146–8, 153, 156 fragmentation, 133, 153 freedom, 15, 18, 21, 47, 54, 62, 72, 82, 97, 100, 123, 127, 135, 141, 143, 145, 147, 149, 151, 154–6, 174, 182–3, 185, 187–8, 208, 213, 226 freedom, democratic, 179 functionalism, 46, 202 fundamentalism, 202 gender studies, 204 gender, 13, 19, 80, 95, 170, 201, 203–4, 219 generation(s), 4, 11, 13, 15, 18, 20, 62, 79–80, 97, 159, 192, 216 genocide, 202 global, 2–3, 5–6, 55, 58–61, 63–4, 66–74, 76, 78–80, 145, 152, 154, 157–8, 167, 170, 181, 183–4, 195–7, 199–201, 205, 209–10, 225 globalization, 1, 59, 67–8, 70–1, 74, 76, 146, 161, 170, 199, 201, 209 goals of freedom and equality, 47 God, 44, 46, 102, 105, 107–8, 111, 117, 125, 212 Good, the, 103–5, 111

10.1057/9781137010605 - Pragmatism and Diversity, Edited by Judith M. Green, Stefan Neubert and Kersten Reich

Subject Index government(s), 6, 51, 53, 56, 64, 66–7, 69–70, 72, 75, 80, 82, 90, 97, 121, 145, 157, 176, 180, 187, 189, 195, 211, 217, 219, 225 Great Community, 158 Greek Cynics, 56 Greek tragedy, 33 growth, 2–3, 15, 36, 39, 42, 53, 62, 69, 81, 89, 100, 122, 146, 157–9, 166–7, 174, 182, 184–6, 201, 203, 217, 223 Gulag, 136 habit(s), 1, 3, 6, 38, 56, 64–5, 70, 72–5, 79, 80 , 87–8, 92, 100, 121, 138, 140, 166–7, 173, 186, 190, 195, 198, 200–2, 219, 223 habitus, 172–3, 186, 189, 211 hegemonic, hegemony, 45, 53, 168–71, 186, 192, 203, 208, 220–1 hierarchically, 109 hierarchy, racial, 69 historical context historical solution, 7, 33, 135, 199 historicism, 101 historico-cultural context, 43 history, American, 19 holocaust, 99, 109, 136, 145, 161 homogenization, 4 homosexual, 62 hospitality, cross-difference, 61 Human Affairs, 127–30, 134–5, 137, 140–1, 145, 148, 155–6, 160, 204, 211 human betterment, 15 human condition, 33, 44, 46, 196 human history, 34, 128 human life-experience, 2 human nature, 31, 66, 72, 82, 90, 133, 176 human right(s), 56–61, 67, 70, 78, 82, 152, 177, 199–200, 204 humanism, 155

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humanity, 3, 28, 35, 47, 55–60, 63, 66, 74, 79–80, 224 humility, 27, 36, 38, 206 hybrid people, 63 hybridity, 59 ideal, transcendent, 100 idealism, 113, 175 ideals of American fundamental law, 19 ideals of equality and freedom, 21 identification, 17, 149, 157, 169 identity, personal-cultural-national, 68 identity, identities, national, 83, 200, 214 identity, identities, personal, 56, 62, 70, 74, 112, 115 ideology, 52, 68 imagination(s), 57, 121, 133, 146, 151, 154–55, 158, 162, 183, 185, 215 imaginative reconstruction, 3 immigrant groups, immigrant(s), 17–20, 71, 200–1, 204 imperial, imperial nations, imperialism, 57, 74, 79, 101, 121 inclusion, inclusive society, 2–4, 6, 8, 39, 47, 49–50, 60–1, 66, 69, 80, 89, 92, 124, 128, 131, 201, 204 individual, individuality, individualism, individualization, 1, 3, 5–6, 11, 13–17, 20, 35–7, 46, 49–51, 56–8, 64–7, 71–4, 77–9, 82, 86–7, 90, 92–5, 100–3, 106–8, 110, 112–13, 115–23, 125, 127, 134–6, 139, 141–3, 145–9, 151–56, 159, 167, 173–4, 180, 182–8, 197, 202–8, 210–11, 217, 220, 222–3, 225 industry, 144, 149, 153, 182, 188 inhuman, 33 injustice, 57, 71–2, 74, 76, 199, 209 inquiry, 3–4, 6–7, 11, 28–9, 39–41, 45, 48–9, 52, 63–5, 67, 71, 73, 86, 88, 91–2, 95, 127–30, 132–3, 161, 187, 194, 197–9, 210, 213, 219–20

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Subject Index

insecurity, 34, 55, 71, 77, 150, 152, 157, 160, 218 institution(s), 1–3, 6, 13, 15, 18–21, 29, 44–5, 48, 53, 56, 61, 64–7, 72, 87–8, 90, 121–4, 129, 133–4, 144–5, 150, 155, 158, 168–9, 171–2, 174, 177, 182–6, 195–6, 200, 204, 208, 210, 214, 216–17 institutions, social, 6, 18, 87–8, 124 instrumentalism, 97, 178, 189, 191, 218 intellectual analysis, 39 intellectualism, 101–2, 110, 114 intelligence, 65–8, 77, 91–2, 128, 151,173, 188, 197, 210–11, 213 intelligence, social, 66–7, 83, 90–1, 94, 128, 154, 171, 173, 210–11, 217, 223 intentional communities, 6, 66 interaction(s), 2, 11, 15, 37, 51, 65–6, 100, 108, 112, 115–16, 122, 124, 149, 166–68, 179–80, 182, 196, 198, 206–8 interactive constructivism, 7, 99, 101, 112, 123, 125–6, 127, 129, 137, 139, 146, 151, 156, 160–3, 190, 193, 196, 205–8, 214–15, 219–20, 222, 224, 226 intercultural, 66, 74, 77 interdependence, 15, 71, 149 interdisciplinary, 63, 216 international, internationalism, 16, 53, 55, 60–2, 64, 70–1, 74, 77–9, 195, 214, 223 interpretation(s), 13, 16, 27, 30–1, 35, 82, 96–7, 130, 133, 136, 161, 168–9, 176, 179, 188, 192, 197–9, 204–5, 207, 221 interrelation(s), 129, 181 irony, 83, 137, 143, 163, 180, 193, 218 judges, ideal, 14 justice, 18, 25, 45, 53, 55, 57, 61, 68, 70–4, 76–7, 79, 82–3, 120, 136, 151, 156, 167, 174–5, 177–8, 180, 183, 190, 193, 198, 212, 222

Kafkaesque, 4, 25, 30, 35, 38–40 knowledge, 8, 37–9, 50–1, 72–5, 85, 88, 92, 96, 98, 103–5, 114–15, 120, 129–30, 160, 166–7, 169, 172, 175, 191–2, 197–8, 207, 210–13, 223 labor, 75–6, 79, 127, 146–7, 152–4, 156 language game(s), 47, 49, 155, 178–9, 181–2, 184, 186, 190 language, 19, 26, 37, 41, 60, 65, 100, 105, 113, 118–20, 137, 139–40, 178, 191, 194, 198, 216, 219 law, international, 60–1 laws, local, national and transnational, 56 learners, 174, 206–8, 213 learning, 35, 65, 73, 75, 144, 146–7, 160, 174, 196, 206–7, 213, 219, 223 liberal, liberalism, 6, 34, 45, 51–2, 62, 85, 87–8, 97–9, 122, 135, 149, 155, 167, 170, 173, 175, 179–81, 185, 187, 189–90, 192–4, 213, 216 liberation movements, 95 liberty, liberties, 48, 51–2, 58, 63, 72, 78, 143, 145–6, 156, 179–80, 184–6, 188 life-worlds, 1 linguistic turn, 179 linguistically, 29, 105, 118 living, life, associated, 36, 51–3, 121, 182 loyality, loyalities, 1, 16–17, 55–9, 62–3, 71, 82, 112, 148–9, 182, 188, 209 majority, majorities, 61, 68, 71, 86, 93, 157, 160, 176–7 manipulation, 53, 175 Marxism, 152, 183 Marxism, deconstruction of, 141 mass media, 75 materialism, 113

10.1057/9781137010605 - Pragmatism and Diversity, Edited by Judith M. Green, Stefan Neubert and Kersten Reich

Subject Index meliorism, meliorist, melioristic 13, 136, 144, 150, 156, 158, 201, 218, 221 melting pot, 17–18, 22, 25, 36–7, 220, 222 meta-narrative(s), 142, 155, 176 metaphysic(s), metaphysical, 11, 13, 56, 58, 60, 63, 65, 80–1, 101, 106–8, 113, 121, 125, 167, 176–7, 212 Metaphysical Club, 11 Middle East, 45, 64, 80 military power, 3 minority, minorities, 19–20, 53, 93, 170, 204 mobility, 147–8, 153, 158 modern culture, 133–5, 139 modern life, 128, 132, 134, 136 modernity, 2, 7–8, 73–4, 127–31, 133–42, 145–6, 148, 150, 152–3, 155–6, 161–2, 177, 179–80, 190–2, 212, 216, 221, 225 modernization, 74, 138, 140 moral absolute, 36 moral(s), morality, 12, 17, 42, 51, 55–6, 58–61, 70, 90–1, 97, 102, 113, 122–5, 129, 161–2, 182, 199, 201, 212–13, 225 movements, social 6, 66, 170 movements, transnational, 80 multicultural America, 20–1 multicultural democracy, 4 multicultural, 134, 200, 209 multiculturalism, 145 multiple perspectives, 4, 20–1 myths, 53 nation(s), 16, 56, 59, 61–4, 66–71, 73–81, 87, 124, 166, 173, 200, 209, 222–3 nationalism, 55, 61, 64, 69–70, 156, 167, 196 nation-state, 16, 60, 95, 157 Native American(s), 81, 93, 124, 223 natural sciences, 54, 178 natural world, 47, 100, 109, 112

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239

naturalism, 53–4, 91, 101, 109, 178 nature, 4, 12–13, 21–2, 25, 27–31, 34–5, 37–41, 43, 45–6, 56–7, 61, 65–6, 72, 74, 81, 82, 87, 90–1, 102, 109, 114, 120, 132–3, 144, 150, 158–9, 176, 193, 202, 208, 216 neo-conservatism, 214 neoliberalism, neoliberal, 79, 153–4, 157–8 neo-pragmatism, 204 networks, social, 174 9/11, 5, 67–8, 70 noncitizens, 81 noncognitive, 39, 109, 114 noncontextualist, 35 nongovernment organization, 6 nonviolent, 70 norms, cosmopolitan, 59–61, 64, 71–2 objectivity, 26, 47, 50, 132, 161, 193 obligations, moral, 56 observation(s), 29–30, 53, 60, 91–2, 109, 124, 128–30, 132, 137–9, 152, 159, 168, 188, 197–8, 204, 210–11, 226 observer(s), 26, 112, 114, 123–4, 129–30, 137, 146, 163, 176, 186, 190, 193, 206, 208, 215, 226 observer, decontextualized, 112, 114 opportunity, opportunities, 2, 52, 68, 73, 75–6, 78, 80, 95, 113, 131, 136, 139, 143, 146–7, 150, 152, 154, 156, 183, 185–7, 195–6, 200–5, 208–10, 215, 217, 219, 221–2, 224 order, quest for, 7, 131–2 order, Westphalian international, 71 organisms, 116 orientation, sexual, 95, 201 Other, an infinite, 107, 110, 118, 202 other, generalized, 119–20 otherness, 7, 99–101, 103, 107, 109, 113, 122, 124–5, 208

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Subject Index

Panopticon, 136, 169 participant(s), 3, 6,8, 52–3, 95, 104, 108, 112, 114, 123–4, 137, 146, 161, 163, 186, 190, 193, 206, 208, 214–15, 217, 219, 226 participation, 2, 8, 18, 65, 86–7, 95, 113–14, 119, 124–5, 128–30, 132, 137, 139, 144, 154–5, 159, 165, 171, 174–6, 179, 181–3, 185–9, 204, 207, 210, 217–18, 221, 226 participatory democracy, 64, 85, 95, 176, 219, 222 patriotism, 156 peace, peaceful, 21, 57–8, 62, 64–5, 67–9, 71–3, 76, 79–80, 82–3, 94, 100, 174, 201, 209, 227 pedagogically, pedagogy, 80, 105, 126, 163, 189, 193 perspective, experimentalist, 49–50 perspectives, multiple, 4, 20–1 philosopher-citizens, 59 Philosophes, French, 49 philosophical method(s), 8, 59, 101–2, 110, 195 Philosophical system(s), 27, 92 philosophical tradition(s), 1, 3, 13, 29, 101, 227 philosophy of democracy, 2, 85–6, 95, 97, 189 philosophy, 2–3, 7, 15, 18, 21–3, 26–8, 33, 36, 40–1, 43–4, 60, 81–3, 85–6, 90–1, 97, 101, 103–5, 109, 113–14, 126–30, 139, 141, 158, 162, 174, 178–9, 190, 192–4, 197–9, 202, 206, 211–13, 215, 220 philosophy, Husserlian, 102 philosophy, social and political, 43 pluralism, (traditional) metaphysical, 13, 63, 106 pluralism, agonistic, 5, 43–50, 53 pluralism, pluralist, 6–7, 12–13, 15, 18, 21–3, 28, 36, 45–6, 62–5, 73, 82, 86–7, 89, 91, 93–4, 96, 98–9, 101, 106, 113, 116, 126, 134, 162,

180–1, 184–5, 197, 202, 206, 216, 225 pluralistic society, 13, 93, 125 policies, free market, 158 policies, public, 65, 195, 200–1 policies, social welfare, 158 political norms, 5, 43–4, 47–50 political order, 53, 90 political power, 87, 149 political, the, 45–8, 193 politics, electoral, 96 politics, neoliberal, 79 postcolonial(ism), 1, 62, 200, 204 postcolonial, postcolonialism, 1, 62, 200, 204 post-Marxist, 151 postmodern, postmodernism, postmodernity, 1, 8, 97, 127, 129–30, 134–40, 145–7, 151, 154, 156, 161–2, 165, 169, 174, 178, 180, 184, 187, 190–2, 204, 207, 211–13, 216, 221 post-Rorty reconstruction of pragmatism, 3 poverty, 74, 155, 157, 219 power, 3, 8, 14–15, 34, 57, 60–61, 63, 65, 69, 74, 79–80, 87, 93, 95, 98, 105, 123, 125, 132, 145, 149, 158–9, 165, 168–73, 181, 186, 190–1, 194, 201, 204, 205, 207–9, 211, 213, 215, 220, 221, 223 practice(s), 5–8, 11, 43–44, 47–49, 56, 63–6, 72, 74, 85–8, 90–3, 95–6, 101, 118, 129, 133–4, 167–8, 171, 173–9, 182–4, 186, 191, 195, 200, 203–5, 209–10, 213–14, 216–17, 220–1, 224, 226 pragmatic inquiry, 7 Pragmatic Social Thought, 191 pragmatic turn, (the), 62, 81, 175 pragmatism, 1–4, 6, 8, 12–13, 20–1, 23, 41–2, 53, 81–2, 86, 92, 99, 126, 130, 142, 156, 162–3, 165, 175–9, 181, 187, 189–94, 196–7, 199, 200, 203–5, 208–9, 213–16, 220–1, 224–5

10.1057/9781137010605 - Pragmatism and Diversity, Edited by Judith M. Green, Stefan Neubert and Kersten Reich

Subject Index pragmatism, Deweyan/Dewey’s, 2, 4, 6, 41, 53, 85,125, 127, 129–31, 140, 143, 155–6, 195, 199, 204, 207, 213, 222 pragmatist cosmopolitanism, 5, 55, 59, 61–2, 65, 67, 72, 79, 81, 227 pragmatistic church, 12 pragmatists, 3, 6, 8, 11–12, 62–3, 65, 85, 130, 145, 179, 205–6, 214–15, 217–18, 223, 225–7 precarious, 2, 132, 134, 140, 145, 154, 157, 178, 198, 205, 221 prejudice(s), 20, 129, 226 prejudice, racial, 20 principle, Heisenberg, 115, 125 principles, cosmic universal, 80 privatization, 142 problems, social 17 process, educational, 52, 64, 73 production, 75, 92, 105, 131, 140, 142, 148, 150, 153–4, 160, 171–2, 191 progress, 2, 26, 30, 32–3, 36, 39, 64, 123, 132, 135–6, 140, 142, 144–5, 148, 156, 160, 181, 186, 193, 202, 215, 218, 221–2 projects, transformative, 65 property, 58, 79, 171–2, 210 psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic, 46 public education, 52, 75 public(s), 2, 3, 7–8, 19, 21–2, 27, 35–6, 41–2, 44–8, 52, 65, 68–9, 75, 82, 85–6, 93–4, 128, 137, 143–5, 149–50, 156–9, 162, 173–6, 180–1, 183, 185–7, 190–1, 195–6, 200–1, 210–11, 217–19 Pullman strike, 47 pursuit of happiness, 58 quietism, 64 racial, 13, 20, 63, 68–9, 87, 222 rationalism, 50, 86 rationality, 49, 66, 76–7, 83, 132, 212, 215 real, 15, 29, 31, 39, 70, 85, 90, 96, 111, 113, 153, 170, 181, 192, 196, 205, 216

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241

reality, 12, 17–20, 37–9, 42, 58, 78, 87, 110, 111, 129, 130–1, 137, 141, 143, 150–1, 166, 174, 176–7, 188, 198, 200, 206–8, 211, 220–1 reasonable pluralism, 6, 86–87, 91, 93 reconstruction, 2–3, 6–8, 13, 33, 45, 47, 60, 90–1, 112, 124–5, 127–30, 136–7, 143, 146, 154, 156, 158–9, 166, 176, 179, 181, 194–5, 197, 199, 206–8, 222 reconstruction, philosophical, 128–9 reductionism, 129 regulations, government, 75 relation(s), ethical, 103–4, 109, 112 relations, absolvable, 107, 109, 115 relations, ontological, 103 relations, social, 60, 120–1, 123, 134, 139, 171, 173, 182, 186 relativism, 82, 177–8, 191, 193, 224 religious institutions and associations, 45 religious power, 3 representation, symbolic, 207 resistance, 169 resources, natural, 75, 199 responsibility, social, 14, 180 Revolution, American, 58 Revolution, French, 58 revolution, revolutionary, 2, 34, 58, 60–1, 81, 124, 128, 144, 160, 192, 213, 220 revolution, the scientific, industrial, and political, 128 risks of democracy and diversity, 195 roles, familial, social, economic, civic and religious, 73 roles, social, 13, 211 routine(s), 134, 136, 147, 168–9, 171, 174, 177, 182–4, 186, 204 Royal Society, 50 sameness, 7, 99–101, 103–6, 108–12, 117, 120, 123–5, 206, 215, 225 scholarship, 161 school system, 143, 172–3, 189

10.1057/9781137010605 - Pragmatism and Diversity, Edited by Judith M. Green, Stefan Neubert and Kersten Reich

242

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Subject Index

school, 11, 15, 19, 21, 56, 73, 75, 93, 95, 99, 171, 174, 182, 189 sciences, social, 11, 40, 48, 52–3, 129, 137, 172, 178 scientific method, 33 Scientism, 54 security, 54, 70, 74, 78, 103, 109, 111, 135, 147, 150–1, 157–8, 160, 218 segregation, class, 167 segregation, racial, 87 self, 4, 13–21, 23, 27–8, 38–9, 46, 56, 68, 76, 79, 93–4, 97, 102, 104–6, 108, 110, 115–20, 122, 126, 137, 141, 144–6, 152, 157, 169, 171, 174, 176, 180, 184, 190, 192–3, 206, 208–9, 211–13, 218, 226 self-concept, 100 self-consciousness, 118–20, 206 self-evaluation, 14 self-reflection, ironical, 180 semiotic, 111 sensibilities, Kantian and Hegelian, 59 sex(ual), 34, 80, 82, 90, 95 sexist, 196 sexuality, 188, 191–2 skepticism, 179, 190 skin color, 20 slave(s), slavery 19, 57, 69, 80, 87, 108, 117, 121, 124, 224 social hope(s), 144, 146, 155–6, 193 social reform, 16–17 socialism, 142, 150, 155, 194 socialization, 101, 115, 208, 210, 218 societies, pluralistic-democratic, 46 societies, postmodern, 147, 204, 211–12 societies, Western, 173, 176 society, American, 17–18, 20, 78, 213 society, knowledge, 8 society, risk, 178 sociology, postmodern, 127, 129–130 socio-politically, 30 solidarity, 2, 49–51, 68, 83, 123, 141, 155, 174, 180, 182–6, 190, 192–3, 221 spectator(s), 112, 129, 161

state(s), 16, 18–19, 22–3, 25, 32, 35, 41, 46, 48, 51, 53–4, 60–1, 67, 74, 77–8, 81–2, 87, 93, 95, 97, 110, 118, 124, 126, 129, 135, 138, 144, 157, 158, 160, 162–3, 170, 172, 182, 187–8, 190–4, 200, 202, 204, 213, 218, 222–4 status, economic, 90 Stoics, 56–9, 62, 65 struggles, democratic, 168, 183 subjectivism, subjectivity, 26, 101–2, 104, 106, 180 symbolic, symbolically, 29, 45, 70, 172–3, 181, 191, 194, 198, 206–7, 221 system, holistic, 106 system, political, 79, 88, 90 Taliban, 67 Tea Party, 69–70, 82 technocratic, 175 technological developments, 1, 150 technology, technologies, 1, 58, 65, 75, 95, 144, 151, 153, 169, 178, 188, 190, 193, 203, 209, 215 technosciences, 47, 49, 52–3 terrorism, 1, 67, 74 theocracy, 46 theology, 48, 176 Third World nations and cultures, 78 tolerance, 41, 73, 122, 179–80, 184–85, 222–4 totalitarian(s), totalitarianism, 33, 88, 99, 141, 188, 206 totality, 101, 104, 106–8, 110–11, 113, 123, 126 totalization, 100, 107, 120, 225 tradition, post-Parmenidean Western, 117 tradition, Western monistic metaphysical, 106 tragedy, tragedies, 30, 33–5, 39, 41, 109 tragic, 4, 8, 25–6, 30, 33, 35–6, 38–41, 218

10.1057/9781137010605 - Pragmatism and Diversity, Edited by Judith M. Green, Stefan Neubert and Kersten Reich

Subject Index transaction(s), transactionally, 2, 28, 38, 75, 97, 109, 116–20, 122, 126, 146, 150, 153, 161 transcendent(al), 44, 100, 102–4, 106, 108, 111–12, 115, 117–18, 120–1, 175, 203 Transforming Experience, 89, 97, 140, 191 transhistorical conversation, 3 transnational, 18, 56, 60, 62, 66, 77, 80, 157–8 truth(s), 4, 6, 21–2, 31, 43, 47–9, 54, 65, 67, 74, 79, 83, 87, 91, 106, 111, 174, 189–90, 193, 197, 207, 213, 216, 223 uncertain, uncertainty, uncertainties, 29, 64, 115, 128, 132, 134, 140, 162, 176, 206 uneducated, 142, 181 United Nations, 59–61, 78 unity, American, 16 universal, universalism, universalization, 1, 5–6, 15, 26–8, 35, 40, 43–4, 47–50, 56–8, 64–6, 68, 74, 80, 97, 111, 113, 117, 125, 132, 141, 151, 155, 161, 167, 175–6, 187, 206, 214, 217, 224–5 universalism debate, 5

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243

universe, 12, 26, 60, 104, 109, 110–13, 123, 132, 197 universe, pluralist(ic), 82, 100, 110, 112–13, 117, 123, 126, 206–7 universe, post-metaphysical, 60 university, universities, 9, 19, 21–3, 40–2, 47, 53–4, 58, 75, 77, 80–3, 85, 96–8, 125–6, 161–3, 189–94, 202, 204 utopian, 171, 173, 186, 190 vague, 27, 38, 51, 197, 220 viability, 133, 137, 175–6, 178, 199 violence, 19, 45–7, 53, 70, 74, 76–7, 100–1, 108, 112, 122, 125, 131, 168, 208 vision, social, 88 War(s), World, 17, 63–4, 69, 99, 214, 219 War, Civil, 124 War, European, 19 War, Gulf, 214 War, Iraq, 68 warranted assertibility, 48, 179, 183, 199 wealth, 72, 74, 76, 143, 150–2, 171 West, 67, 71, 79, 170, 192, 200, 226 work and labor, 127, 152, 156

10.1057/9781137010605 - Pragmatism and Diversity, Edited by Judith M. Green, Stefan Neubert and Kersten Reich