Reconstructing dewey: The philosophy of critical pragmatism

Polity

Volumn 38, Issue 4, 2006, Pages 519-542

  Kadlec, Alison ^a  

^a Public Agenda   (United States)

Author keywords

Critical theory; Dewey; Pragmatism

Indexed keywords

EID: 33749321415     PISSN: 00323497     EISSN: 17441684     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1057/palgrave.polity.2300067     Document Type: Review

References (71)

1. Alain Locke, "Values and Imperatives," in The Philosophy of Alain Locke, ed. Leonard Harris (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1935).
2. It is certainly because of Jürgen Habermas's attraction to American pragmatism, particularly that of Charles Sanders Peirce and George Herbert Mead, that interest in the relationship between the two traditions has emerged in recent years. See Mitchell Aboulafia, Myra Bookman, and Katherine Kemp, ed., Habermas and Pragmatism (London: Routledge Press, 2002).
3. Although Dewey himself never used the phrase "critical pragmatism," chap. 10 of Experience and Nature (LW1: 295-326) is dedicated to delineating the relationship between "existence, value, and criticism." In this chapter, Dewey argues that criticism begins as reflective analysis, which in turn forms the basis of philosophy. The argument is rich and complex and, though Experience and Nature is not the subject of my effort here, deep engagement with this work, along with The Quest for Certainty (LW4) would be required for any comprehensive treatment of the critical dimensions of Dewey's pragmatism. The actual phrase "critical pragmatism" appears at least as early as 1935 in Alain Locke's pragmatic theory of valuation. In the context of Locke's work, the idea of a critical pragmatism was supposed to undergird the development of cultural pluralism. Although Locke's work has received scant attention, it should be noted that much of his work in the context of the Harlem Renaissance was grounded in his reading of Dewey, and his having studied with James. See Johnny Washington, Alain Locke and Philosophy: A Quest for Cultural Pluralism (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986).
4. More recently, however, the idea of a critical pragmatism as well as a pragmatist critical theory has begun to receive new attention. See Dmitir Shalin, "Critical Theory and the Pragmatist Challenge," American Journal of Sociology 98 (September 1992);
5. Steven K. White, The Cambridge Companion to Habermas (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995);
6. James Farr, "John Dewey and American Political Science," American Journal of Political Science 43 (April 1999);
7. and "Engels, Dewey, and Marxism in America," in Engels After Marx, ed. Manfred Steger and Terrell Carver (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999).
8. All references to Dewey, with the exception of Democracy and Education are to the collected works, published in three sets. The Collected Works of John Dewey, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967-1972). The Early Works, 1882-1889 (EW 5 volumes); The Middle Works, 1899-1824 (MW 15 volumes); The Later Works, 1925-1953 (LW 17 volumes).
9. White, Cambridge Companion, 314.
10. White, Cambridge Companion, 314.
11. It is generally accepted that with the 1979 publication of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Rorty single-handedly revived interest in Dewey by arguing that along with Heidegger and Wittgenstein, Dewey "is one of the three most important philosophers of the twentieth century," in Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), 5.
12. For a related discussion, see Chaps. 3 and 4 of Hans Joas, Pragmatism and Social Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 79-125.
13. It is important to make clear from the outset that "experience" connotes a very specific, although rather complicated, constellation of ideas. Although he explored many different kinds of experience (e.g. aesthetic experience, cognitive experience, and religious experience), there are red threads that run throughout his multifarious use of the term. Most simply, "experience" in Dewey's lexicon means two specific things. First, in contrast to the traditional conception of experience as a matter of individual consciousness, Dewey's notion of experience is intersubjective, communicative, and social. As Dewey says, "Experience is no slipping along in a path fixed by inner consciousness. Private consciousness is an incidental outcome of experience of a vital objective sort; it is not its source." Second, experience is a matter of "enduring" and "undergoing" the consequences of our actions, and is therefore best understood as an ongoing process. Taken together, these ideas form the basis of a powerful resource for critical reflection and social transformation. In Dewey's social philosophy, lived experience is a tool for meaningful democratic struggle to the extent that it consists of a critical and forward-thinking perception of the private and shared consequences of our actions. See Dewey's "The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy," MW10.
14. Raymond Geuss, The Idea of a Critical Theory: Habermas and the Frankfurt School (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 1-2.
15. Although Reconstruction in Philosophy is a relatively short book, Dewey essentially surveys the history of Western philosophy from the Ancients to the Enlightenment. These broad strokes are helpful in creating a macrocosmic picture of his general approach to pragmatism in philosophical terms. All references to Reconstruction in Philosophy are found in Middle Works (MW12).
16. Horkheimer's attack is grounded in his creative reading of Dewey's 1917 reflections in "A Recovery in Philosophy? the short essay which prefigures the themes developed in Reconstruction in Philosophy (MW10).
17. For an excellent discussion of Horkheimer's conflating of positivism and pragmatism, see Hans Joas, "An Underestimated Alternative: America and the Limits of Critical Theory? in Pragmatism and Social Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 79-93.
18. In addition to Reconstruction in Philosophy, Dewey's most sustained discussions of classical philosophy are located in The Quest for Certainty (LW4) and the shorter "The 'Socratic Dialogues' of Plato" (LW2).
19. I place these words in quotes because they are complex ideas that Dewey characteristically defines against the grain of ordinary usage.
20. It should be noted that my focus here on lived experience and reconstructed individualism, while sufficiently robust for my purposes, only captures two aspects of a far more comprehensive, complex, and expansive system that comprises Dewey's philosophical worldview. For a more complete understanding of this larger framework, one must engage a number of works Dewey produced in the 1920s, including, in addition to Reconstruction in Philosophy, both Experience and Nature (LW1) and The Quest for Certainty (LW4).
21. Although there is not a great deal of literature on this subject, Hans Joas's article on the relationship between German thought and American pragmatism in Pragmatism and Social Theory has cleared the ground for my approach. Although my focus here is quite distinct from Joas's, there are two notable commonalities: First, like Joas's, my discussion is aimed at illuminating the persistently overlooked theoretical common ground shared by critical theory and pragmatism. More specifically, both Joas and I discuss the particular impact of Horkheimer's rejection of pragmatism in The Eclipse of Reason. Although we take different approaches, and therefore cover quite distinct terrain, Joas's contributions form an important backdrop for the specific trajectory I trace here. See Hans Joas, "American Pragmatism and German Thought: A History of Misunderstandings," in his Pragmatism and Social Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 94-121.
22. In addition to Gramsci, Lukacs and Korsch were the most notable figures who shared in the revival of German idealism at this time. Although Korsch and Lukacs made significant contributions in the struggles against determinist and positivist interpretations of historical materialism, it was Gramsci's "philosophy of praxis" that most fully embodied the aims of this first phase of critical Marxism. For discussions of the theoretical and political problems plaguing both Lukacs's and Korsch's careers as critical Marxists, see Martin Jay's classic Dialectical Imagination: A History of the frankfurt School (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973)
23. and Andrew Arato, "Political Sociology and the Critique of Politics," in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, ed. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (New York: Urizen Books, 1978).
24. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, trans. Quinton Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971), 321.
25. This is perhaps the area in which Gramsci's misunderstanding of pragmatism is at its most acute, because his understanding of common sense is deeply akin to pragmatic treatments of the idea of "habit." For example, Gramsci's understanding of common sense as a "collective noun" is not unlike William James understanding of "habit" as the "enormous fly-wheel of society!' Both ideas denote those thought patterns that allow for the continual reproduction of existing values and institutions in the absence of critical reflection. As a consequence, Gramsci's contrasting concept of "good sense" is very similar to Dewey's reconstructed understanding of "habits" as the flexible patterns of thought and action generated according to the sorts of critical ruminations that work to continually undo "common sense" in the Gramscian sense of the word. For James's discussion of habit, see the chapter entitled "Habit" in The Principles of Psychology, The Works of William James, 19 volumes (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975-1988), 1890.
26. For Gramsci's discussion of common sense, see Prison Notebooks, 325-35.
27. It should be noted that this criticism of pragmatism is alive and well today See Christopher Lasch, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and its Critics, (New York: Norton, 1991);
28. and John Patrick Diggins, The Promise of Pragmatism (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1994).
29. The distinction Gramsci makes between the Factory Council Movement and the struggle of labor unions best captures his disdain for pragmatism. According to Gramsci, labor unions cannot effect real social change because they treat the worker as a mere wage earner. In contrast, Factory Councils treat workers as members of a productive community, and are therefore able to cultivate a proper relationship between organic and traditional intellectuals in the factory itself. Whereas labor unions can only marginally improve existing conditions in the factory, the Council Movement is about to reconstruct the factory as the nucleus of the future proletarian state. For Gramsci, pragmatists can only form labor unions, while the philosophy of praxis is aimed at fomenting the more properly revolutionary Council Movements.
30. There are no references to Dewey or Peirce in The Prison Notebooks, and so it is unclear whether or not Gramsci read either.
31. Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, 372.
32. Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, 373.
33. Both positivism and pragmatism, according to Gramsci, are blindly infat uated with anything immediately given, thus they are natural allies.
34. It is not clear whether or not Gramsci read Dewey, but Horkheimer certainly did. For similar attacks on pragmatism, see Marcuse's Reason and Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1941)
35. and One Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964).
36. Martin Jay, Dialectical Imagination, 297.
37. Richard Bernstein, "Pragmatism, Pluralism, and the Healing of Wounds," reprinted in Pragmatism: A Reader, ed. and intro. Louis Menand (New York: Vintage, 1997), 391.
38. Max Horkheimer, The Eclipse of Reason (New York: Continuum Press, 1947), 5.
39. Horkheimer, Eclipse, 48, 71.
40. Horkheimer, Eclipse, 50.
41. Horkheimer, Eclipse, 85.
42. It is interesting to note that Reconstruction in Philosophy was the text that first attracted the young Marxist, Sidney Hook, to pragmatism. Hook described Reconstruction in Philosophy as "a brilliant application of the principles of historical materialism," and argued that Dewey, although he did not consider himself a Marxist, "tried to show in detail how social stratification and class struggles got expressed in the metaphysical dualisms of the time. . . ." See Out of Step: An Unquiet Life in the Twentieth Century (New York: Harper & Row, 1987), 81.
43. See "Ethics and Physical Science" (EW1), and "Reconstruction" (EW4).
44. This effort to deploy historical investigation in exposing obstacles to democracy began quite early in Dewey's career and culminated in The Quest for Certainty (LW4).
45. Westbrook, John Dewey, 348.
46. The Quest for Certainty (LW4: 20). Dewey's appreciation of classical Greek philosophy owed a great deal to the early influence of G.S. Morris and the later influence of F.J.E. Woodbridge. In addition to The Quest for Certainty and Reconstruction and Philosophy, see Dewey's "The 'Socratic Dialogues' of Plato" (LW2: 124-40). For an excellent discussion of Dewey's complex ambivalence toward Aristotle and Plato, and his subsequent appraisal of classical philosophy at the start of the 1920s, see Westbrook, John Dewey, 347-61.
47. Dewey, Reconstruction, 91-92.
48. Although I take up Dewey's notion of "experience" in more detail in subsequent sections, it is important to clarify here that Dewey's vibrant and transformatory view of experience stands in stark contrast to the Ancient Greek view of experience as the ordinary and unreflective realm in which we privately absorb the given stimulus of everyday life. Likewise, as an intersubjective, communicative, and social medium that is grounded in the back-and-forth movement between reflection and forward-thinking perception of consequences, Dewey's view is radically different from the positivist notion of experience as mere sense-perception.
49. Alan Ryan, John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism (New York: WW Norton and Company, 1995), 98. While any simplistic notion of "class struggle" would be regarded by Dewey as coming dangerously close to generating yet another noxious dualism ("oppressor'Voppressed"), it is nonetheless true that he was deeply concerned with the ways in which failure to grasp the democratic possibilities of experience plays a part in the discursive construction of iniquities. The most explicit and concrete expression of this concern is found in Dewey's discussions of education, and in his particular struggle against a dual system of vocational education that gained momentum during the first decades of the twentieth century In this context, Dewey occasionally deployed the language of class struggle to distinguish his social democratic view of education from the prevailing view of education. See "Education from a Social Perspective" (MW7: 113-27). Also see Chap. 19 of Democracy and Education (MW9) for Dewey's explicit discussion of the relationship between class oppression in Ancient Greece and the inherited labor/leisure dualism undergirding the call for a dual system of vocational education.
50. Dewey Reconstruction, 91-93.
51. I borrow the phrase "mobilization of bias" from Steven Lukes here to underscore the extent to which Dewey's analysis is grounded in his attention to power relations. While my discussion of the Ancient Greeks' use of power to buttress the status quo is aimed at exposing power relations, I do not mean to imply any vulgar or simplistic or dualistic notion of "class struggle." See Power: A Radical View (London: Macmillan Press, 1974).
52. "Education From a Social Perspective" (MW7: 127).
53. See Experience and Nature for Dewey's discussion of the primacy of experience in the development of knowledge (LWl:27-28).
54. "The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy" (MW10: 8-9).
55. For an especially good discussion of the failures of positivism, see Chap. 10 of The Quest for Certainty (LW4).
56. The influence of Darwin's work on Dewey was profound, and it has been either misunderstood or merely overlooked. As Louis Menand notes, the world that Darwin described was one governed by contingency, process, random chance, and openness, and it was out of this world that Dewey himself grew and developed as a philosopher of "continued investigation, experiment, hermeneutic openness, provisional conclusions, and social progress." See Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2001), 121;
57. and Jay Martin, The Education of John Dewey (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 253.
58. It must also be noted that Dewey went to great lengths to distinguish his holistic and progressive evolutionary perspective from those of vulgar social Darwinists such as Herbert Spencer. For excellent treatments of the conceptual and moral poverty of Spencer's conception of "survival of the fittest", see Dewey's "Ethics and Physical Science" (EW1) and "Evolution and Ethics" (EW5).
59. "The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy" (MW4: 3).
60. This is akin to Foucault's understanding of truth. As Paul Rabinow notes in his comparison of Chomsky and Foucault, the latter is less interested in identifying the truth than in exploring what functions are performed by truth claims. This shift from "what" to "how" is very much like the shift that Dewey sees initiated by Darwin. See The Foucault Reader (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 12.
61. Dewey Reconstruction, 133-34.
62. Dewey, Reconstruction, 150.
63. See "The Inclusive Philosophical Idea" (LW3) for a great discussion of Dewey's view of "the social" as a linchpin for any effective critical philosophy For Dewey "the social" is a construct deployed to capture the intersubjective and communicative dimensions of philosophy as a critical enterprise, and, as such, it should not be confused with Arendt's use of the term. See Hanna Fenichel Pitkin's Attack of the Blob: Hannah Arendt's Concept of the Social (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). 53.
64. Dewey, Reconstruction, 150.
65. Dewey Reconstruction, 186.
66. Although it is only in the later Liberalism and Social Action (LW11) that Dewey focuses explicitly on the extent to which entrenched economic interests directly benefit from a perpetuation of this fraudulent conception of the individual as an isolated, acquisitive entity, Individualism Old and New (LW5) does represent the first step in that direction.
67. Dewey, Individualism Old and New, (LW5:59, 85). Dewey's concern with the "subordination of creative individuality" places him in the company of other thinkers, most notably J.S. Mill and Alexis de Tocqueville who have been, each in his own way, preoccupied with the tendency in modern society toward regimentation of thought and opinion. For Mill, this "despotism of custom is everywhere the standing hindrance to human advancement," and for Tocqueville, the power of public opinion in America is such that it "brings immense weight to bear on every individual. It surrounds, directs, and oppresses him." J.S. Mill, On Liberty (London: Everyman's Press, 1972), 138;
68. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. J.P Mayer, trans. George Lawrence (New York: Harper and Row), 643.
69. Dewey Individualism, 103.
70. Dewey Reconstruction, 190, 197.
71. Dewey, Reconstruction, 93.