John Dewey's Ethics: Democracy as Experience

10. The Intelligent, Aesthetic, and Democratic Way of Life

∞∏∑ t e n The Intelligent, Aesthetic, and Democratic Way of Life Dewey did not have a theory about the good life, a notion antithetical to the pluralistic and contextualist thrust of his moral philosophy. Nevertheless , his ethics is unintelligible apart from some normative commitments and hypotheses about the conditions and instrumentalities for a better moral life. Dewey wanted us to give each moral situation the attention and care that it deserves and to assume a positive trust in the possibilities and instrumentalities available in a situation. The moral life that he envisioned is one that relies on experience for direction, illumination, and motivation . He was not, however, always explicit about his ideal. I will be occupied , in the remainder of this book, with articulating in a coherent way this normative vision. This chapter begins with the most general description of the kind of moral life that Dewey thought was worthwhile in light of his preoccupation with the quality of present experience. Then, in the last two chapters, I consider the kind of self and community that, according to Dewey, are constitutive of such a life. The broadest possible characterization of Dewey’s ideal is that he advocates living a moral life that is intelligent, aesthetic, and democratic. These three adjectives characterize mutually dependent aspects of a single t h e i d e a l m o r a l l i f e ∞∏∏ moral vision, and they collectively describe a moral life that promises to be the most meaningful and fruitful general form of engagement in experience. To say that a moral life has a dimension of intelligence is to say that one who lives the moral life can educate herself (i.e., learn) and transform morally problematic situations through her own moral resources. What Dewey called ‘‘experimental intelligence’’ involves those habits of inquiry by means of which hypotheses are tested and by means of which working connections are found between old habits, customs, institutions, beliefs, and new conditions. With respect to moral life, intelligence refers to a way of reaching moral judgments and appropriating a moral tradition. Dewey contrasts intelligence with the practice of guiding our lives by authority, custom, coercive force, imitation, caprice, or drift. To live a reflective moral life is not to live in accordance with reason but to have ‘‘the power of using past experience to shape and transform future experience. It is constructive and creative’’ (MW 11:346). The aesthetic dimension of moral life refers to its qualitative aspect and to the inherently meaningful forms of engagement exercised within it. Moral reconstruction is undertaken in an aesthetic manner. Dewey contrasts the aesthetic with the mechanical, the fragmentary, the non-integrated , and all other non-meaningful forms of engagement. To engage a situation intelligently is to engage it aesthetically. It is in this way that ‘‘moral life is protected from falling into formalism and rigid repetition. It is rendered flexible, vital, growing’’ (MW 12:180). The democratic aspect of moral life means that living the moral life involves a certain way of interacting with others, a certain kind of communication and community. Dewey understands democracy as a form of moral association in which a certain way of life is instituted in the relations and interactions of its citizens. ‘‘It is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience’’ (MW 9:93). His notion of democracy is an outgrowth of his ideas about moral experience, and the democratic way of life involves the intelligent and the aesthetic community. Although an important part of my task is to show how the ideal moral life is supported by and consistent with Dewey’s philosophical commitments (e.g., his faith in experience) it would be wrong to suppose that this ideal logically follows from them. To do this would be to neglect context (i.e., commit the philosophical fallacy) and assume a view of ideals that is foreign to Dewey’s philosophical outlook. Inquiry about how to live takes place in the context of a felt discontent with present ways of living. Let’s briefly consider the problematic context that generated and gives meaning to Dewey’s ideal. t h e i n t e l l i g e n t , a e s t h e t i c , a n d d e m o c r a t i c w a y o f l i f...