The Grace and the Severity of the Ideal: John Dewey and the Transcendent
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The Grace and the Severity of the Ideal: John Dewey and the Transcendent
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Overview
Kestenbaum argues that to Dewey, the pragmatic struggle for ideal meaning occurs at the frontier of the visible and the invisible, the tangible and the intangible. Penetrating analyses of Dewey's early and later writings, as well as comparisons with the works of Hans-Georg Gadamer, Michael Oakeshott, and Wallace Stevens, shed new light on why Dewey regarded the human being's relationship to the ideal as "the most far-reaching question" of philosophy. For Dewey, the pragmatic struggle for the good life required a willingness "to surrender the actual experienced good for a possible ideal good." Dewey's pragmatism helps us to understand the place of the transcendent ideal in a world of action and practice.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226432151 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 10/01/2002 |
| Edition description: | 1 |
| Pages: | 261 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.30(h) x 0.90(d) |
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THE GRACE AND THE SEVERITY OF THE IDEAL
John Dewey and the Transcendent
By VICTOR KESTENBAUM
The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2002 The University of Chicago
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-43216-8
Chapter One
Under Ideal Conditions
* * *
The central aim of this work is to propose that at least one version of pragmatism, John Dewey's, has an important place for the ideal, intangible, and transcendent. I wish to discredit the view that pragmatism generally, and Dewey's in particular, is simply a philosophical apology for what Tocqueville called the American "taste for the tangible and the real." Dewey's pragmatism, I propose, is not a philosophical or cultural substitution of tangible goals for intangible ideals. His pragmatism is an attempt to respect the authority of the "tangible and the real" at the same time that it does justice to meanings which transcend the verified and the evident and which, in their most perfect expressions, are intimations of the ideal. Dewey's pragmatism does not simply, or only, "naturalize" ideals by bringing them "down to earth." His pragmatism is far more complicated than the instrumentalist and naturalistic interpretations which render ideals as "tools" to be used in the natural world. Ideals for Dewey are situated at the intersection of the tangible and the intangible, the natural and the transcendent. Ideals were the best evidence he had that in the realm of meaning, but not of fact, something simultaneously can be and not be.
My intent is not to argue that instrumentalist and naturalist interpretations of Dewey's pragmatism have no basis in his texts or in his own formulations of philosophical purpose. I do argue for the view that some of the most interesting and important aspects of Dewey's philosophy are those which are at best only obliquely related to his instrumentalism and naturalism. Sometimes at crucial points in an article or chapter, and other times in less telling moments, Dewey's pragmatism transgresses the expectations of a well-behaved instrumentalist-naturalist philosophy. The essays in this book give Dewey's transgressions a sustained and appreciative hearing.
Much of my argument depends upon the development of what I call the "primacy of meaning thesis" in Dewey, his contention that "meaning is wider in scope as well as more precious in value than is truth" This thesis is not unique to the early, middle, or late Dewey. It is there in "The Postulate of Immediate Empiricism," and it is there in Art as Experience. Meaning exceeds its verifying instances and is not to be equated with them. Further, meaning transcends-because experience transcends-the inquirable, the reflective, and the practical. We are, as Glenn Gray puts it, "attached to the world in a thousand ways." What is the proper place of ideal meanings in a world where meaning is "wider in scope as well as more precious in value than is truth"? In other words, when one speaks of the "pragmatic meaning" of an act, a value, or a fact, how do ideal meanings function in that pragmatic meaning? How are ideal meanings sustained, thought, and fulfilled in practical experience? In aesthetic experience? In poetic experience? In educational experience? In short, what is man's relationship to the transcendent and intangible meaning which may, on occasion, provide an intimation of the ideal?
This primacy of meaning thesis is distinguishable from Dewey's theory of prereflective, habitual meaning but ultimately each notion reinforces and deepens the other. In a previous work, I attempted to show, in the context of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of the habitual body, the centrality of habit in Art as Experience. I did not then see in what sense habits were the transcendentals of experience for Dewey, what that might mean for his entire philosophy, and what trouble it would cause him. The trouble derives from the fact that as Dewey asked more and more from the concept of habit, he was forced to accept more and more of the invisibilities of habitual meaning and the transcendental contribution it makes to experience. It certainly helps to avoid any hint of trouble if his middle and late periods can be regarded as continuous refinements of a naturalistic theory of habit, but it does not appear to me that the process happened quite that smoothly, if at all. For example, Human Nature and Conduct is Dewey's most concentrated and extended consideration of habit and comes closest to constituting what one might call his "theory of habit." Yet just three years later in Experience and Nature, habit plays a distinctly less prominent role. It is not that an equivalent concept has taken its place or that it has been abandoned. It is in the background, subdued.
Dewey did not, because he could not, sustain a wholly naturalistic interpretation of habit. He asked so much from the concept of habit in Human Nature and Conduct that his naturalism could not accommodate it all. In that work, habitual meaning is for the most part "trued up" to experience: to the social, to language, to context. But if meaning is "wider in scope as well as more precious in value than is truth," then meaning which has become funded in habit may find ranges of expression and fulfillment which transcend the requirements of truth or the need for inquiry. How does meaning unsteered by truth, but not indifferent to truth, function in deliberation? Neal Coughlan is correct to note that "much of what was new in Experience and Nature was there to ground human activity, so to speak, in the immediately felt qualities of things and in consummatory, as distinguished from instrumental, values." One of the most demanding and rewarding hermeneutic challenges in reading Dewey, however, is to understand how much of the human contribution to the instrumental and the consummatory is "offstage," in the background, under the surface, in habit.
Dewey often, but not always, grasped how radically the concept of habit unsettled what should be counted routine in experience and what was radiant. It begins to look as if habit is a strange ally for a pragmatist seeking to understand "ordinary experience." There is something ordinary about habit, but it had become increasingly evident to Dewey that there also is something extraordinary about habit. William James influenced Husserl significantly, but it was Dewey, not James, who saw that habit is not merely conservative but also is intentional: it creates and sustains meaning on a prereflective, preobjective level of experience. On this level, the solicitations of habit and world establish an accord which is both immanent and transcendent. My presence to the world, my opening to the world, is grounded in habitual meaning, which my reflective acts can only partially encompass or direct. Habit has been at work before I have predicated my ends-in-view; it is the source of what comes into view and is the limiting condition of what is viewable, that is, of what transcends my view. Pragmatic intelligence, grounded in transcendental habit, is situated in a transcendent world horizon. For such an intelligence, the ideal makes demands which are immanent and transcendent.
The essays in this book tend to be incompatible with, but not indifferent to, the standard view of Dewey's idealism. This view holds that having passed through his "idealist period" from 1882 to 1903, Dewey gradually but decisively turns away from idealism. The usual corollary to this view is that traces of Dewey's idealism can be found in his later philosophy and that indeed, in the case of the Psychology, in Herbert W. Schneider's words, it "foreshadows much of Dewey's later philosophy" "Foreshadows" does not adequately formulate the place of the Psychology and other early writings in Dewey's later development. My interpretation of Dewey proposes that there is good reason to believe that Dewey did not "break with" or reject idealism. He recast it. The difference is crucial, and not simply for gaining a better understanding of Dewey and American pragmatism. Dewey's understanding of the intangibility of ideal meanings focuses some of the most difficult, interesting, and enduring issues in the empirical and theoretical study of culture, politics, religion, and education. A careful study of the transcendent and the ideal in Dewey shows that the search for the good life cannot be conducted without a "taste for the tangible and the real." It also shows that significant progress in the pursuit of the good life, and a large element of its realization, requires what Dewey in Human Nature and Conduct calls "the need of a continuous unification of spirit and habit." This is not an unusual idea in Dewey's later, "mature" philosophy. It is merely one of the more vivid formulations of his desire to see how the spiritual and ideal are possible for the habit-grounded and habit-transcending human being. Viewed from this perspective, his early idealism does more than foreshadow his later pragmatism. It sets some of the philosophical requirements for an acceptable pragmatism, of what is involved in striving to see something under ideal conditions and acting in accord with such seeing. Even more fundamentally, his early idealism attends to the not seen, the invisible, the intimated, the undeclared. When he said in 1891 that "morality works by faith, not by sight," he set a path for his pragmatism which he could not steadily follow but one he would not abandon.
Dewey did not have a steady and clear vision of how such ideal, transcendent visibilities and invisibilities could be incorporated into a habit-based practical life. This may account for the range of interpretations we find concerning his idealism, interpretations arguing that he completely rejected idealism, essentially embraced it, or accepted and transformed some of it. I shall not attempt to provide a detailed account of this range of interpretations at this point but shall instead simply note a few of them.
Among his contemporaries, Edgar S. Brightman's view is fairly typical of what might be called the "repudiators," those who take Dewey to have rejected idealism and thereby to have lost his way. Brightman says that "John Dewey repudiates idealism and traditional religion but gives himself to the service of humanity and educational advance." Brightman then groups Dewey with those philosophers who "think that ideals are alien to the real world in which they arise." There are those, small in number, who note Dewey's affinity with idealism but simply wish to consider this a victory for idealism rather than an occasion to look deeper into Dewey. In this group, the remarks of R. F. Alfred Hoernle are interesting. In an article titled "The Revival of Idealism in the United States," he cites some passages from Experience and Nature and then says:
What Dewey here calls his own empirical method is, in spirit and principle, if not in the actual details of its execution, identical with the idealistic method, especially when one adds, from Dewey's Preface the references to "faith in experience when intelligently used as a means of disclosing the realities of nature," and to the character of human experience as "a growing progressive self-disclosure of nature itself." If in these utterances we substitute for "nature" simply "Reality," or even the "Absolute," they might have been written by any true-blue Idealist.
Hoernle's first premise is simple: the idealist way "is to take experience as 'ultimate,' i.e., as itself the context or whole within which all differences are found." His few quotations from Dewey are clearly meant to show that Dewey takes experience to be ultimate. The argument is, at best, elliptical. Nonetheless, there is at least a recognition that Dewey's pragmatism involves ultimates and that it may be a loftier thing than responses of organisms to their environments.
For some, Dewey's pragmatism is so lofty that it loses touch with material reality. Maurice Cornforth remarks that "Dewey's philosophy, which he parades as 'naturalism,' in opposition to idealism, is actually nothing but a subtle and disguised form of subjective idealism." With respect to Dewey's idealism, the distance from compliment to condemnation is indeed very short.
H. S. Thayer contends that "Dewey's use of much of the language of idealism was as unidealistic in intent and diverged as much from traditional idealism as his use of the word 'experience' departs from traditional empiricism." Thomas M. Alexander's account of Dewey's "idealist period" is exceptionally discerning, but he adopts the consensus view that "in 1903, Dewey officially broke with idealism and joined the new pragmatic movement with his Studies in Logical Theory." It is hard to judge the depth or length of this break, however, because Alexander notes various ways in which the idealism of Psychology is "retained" in Dewey's later philosophy, allowing one to find an "analogy" here (the role of rhythm), or "parallel" there (feelings as objective modes of revelation). Indeed, throughout much of his work, Alexander acknowledges that idealism leaves numerous traces, but these are, in his view, absorbed by and subordinated to experimentalism, empiricism, naturalism. Dewey's philosophy of experience puts idea and meaning in their proper instrumental, solve-a-problem place. In aesthetic experience, meaning is less labored and is more expressive of the possibilities of ordinary experience; in other words, it is consummatory. On Alexander's account, the line from the instrumental to the consummatory is continuous; there are no breaks. Ordinary experience may be transcended, but it is still, in his view, the "ground" of the intense moments of aesthetic experience because "they are its possibilities." The "ground," I think, presents more of a challenge for Dewey than Alexander's analysis allows or can allow. In aesthetic, moral, and religious experience, our confidence in, and reliance upon, the ordinary is disrupted by the drama of habits undergoing reconstruction, maybe reinvention, and perhaps even transcendence.
While Alexander's approach to Dewey's idealism aligns him pretty well with the "rejection" school of interpreters, there is more than a hint of what can be called "reconciliation" in his treatment of Dewey. This is the view that Dewey did not really reject idealism and that its presence in the later works is not a "leftover" or residue. On this view, it was Dewey's intention to reconcile ideals and experience. Russell B. Goodman presents this case in his chapter on Dewey in American Philosophy and the Romantic Tradition: Two main themes dominate Dewey's work: reconciliation and reconstruction. Under the former comes his interest in something akin to James's project of uniting empiricism and spiritualism: Dewey thinks of it as reconciling "ideals" and experience." Of particular interest to Goodman is "the sense in which Dewey remains an idealist and also the respects in which he, like James, incorporates a strong element of realism into his idealism." This is interesting, as is his claim that "although Dewey rejected 'traditional supernaturalism' because it placed ideals apart from human experience and control, he accepted the natural and humanized supernaturalism of the Romantics." Dewey's 1890 commencement address, "Poetry and Philosophy," occasions Goodman's remark that poetry for Dewey cannot be separate from life nor can it be separate from truth. It cannot be "transcendental." Goodman takes Dewey's belief in the "spiritual possibilities of the natural" to be an indication of his sympathy with the Romantics. In response to the sentiment summarized in Dewey's affirmation that poetry is "the genuine revelation of the ordinary day-by-day life of man," Goodman says: "Dewey here embraces the key Romantic idea of a spiritualized commonplace, achieved by or in poetry." Thus, the extraordinary is there in the ordinary: hidden, latent, unperceived, and, too often, unappreciated. There is no transcendence here, no "overweening Beyond and Away," as Dewey calls it in his 1903 essay on Emerson. According to Goodman, Dewey "shows ideal objects to be a part of nature, that is, how the secular and sacred (as well as many other oppositions) can be reconciled." Again, extraordinary possibilities are possibilities of ordinary experience. They are continuous with, resident in, the commonplace.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
PrefaceAcknowledgments
1. Under Ideal Conditions
2. The Pragmatic Struggle for the Good
3. "In the Midst of Effort"
4. Humanism and Vigilance
5. The Rationality of Conduct: Dewey and Oakeshott
6. The Undeclared Self
7. "Meaning on the Model of Truth": Dewey and Gadamer on Habit and Vorurteil
8. Faith and the Unseen
9. Dewey, Wallace Stevens, and the "Difficult Inch"
Notes
Index