John Dewey, Confucius, and Global Philosophy

Notes

❁ Notes Foreword 1. “New Confucianism: A Native Response to Western Philosophy,” in Chinese Political Culture, edited by Hua Shiping (Armok, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2001). 2. See John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), pp. 147–49. 3. In a manuscript on the history of American philosophy that David Hall was working on before his death he is intent on interpreting Jonathan Edwards as one of the principal architects of the American sensibility. In rehearsing aspects of Edwards’s philosophical reflections, Hall begins by claiming that Edwards circumvents the modern problematic of subjectivity and self-consciousness in any of its familiar modes by proposing a model of individuality that is not predicated upon either knowing, acting, or making as subject centered. In fact, the dissolution of the subject is a function of the development in Edwards of a process vision of the world as an alternative to substance modes of thinking. Further, this process philosophy is informed by a dispositional ontology that understands natural and supernatural processes in terms of inclinations or habits of response that are to be normatively understood as inclinations toward or responses to beauty. For Edwards, the communication of beauty is the defining feature of both the divine and human realms. And for Hall, the desubjectification of the individual by appeal to a processive, dispositional ontology, and the movement of beauty and the aesthetic sensibility from the margins to the center qualify Edwards to serve as an original American thinker. 4. John Dewey, The Middle Works of John Dewey, 1899–1924. Edited by Jo Ann Boydston. 15 vols. Carbondale, Southern Illinois University Press, 1976–1983. 10:45. 113 5. John Dewey, Religious Faith and Democratic Humanism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991). Preface 1. See Roger Ames and Henry Rosemont, The Analects of Confucius (New York: Ballantine, 1999), p. 314, where the issue of method is decided in favor of using the method of taking “the key twenty-plus terms in the Chinese lexicon of philosophical import, provide initial glosses, and thereafter merely transliterate them.” This groundbreaking translation ought to be considered the canonical text for generations to come. Hereafter cited as Analects. 2. Even though it is central to Dewey’s philosophy I do not deal with democracy. That task has already been done by David Hall and Roger Ames. See their Democracy of the Dead (Chicago: Open Court, 1999) for a comparative study of the place of democracy in the thought of Confucius and Dewey. Chapter 1 1. See Steven Rockefeller, John Dewey, Religious Faith and Democratic Humanism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991). Rockefeller’s work is the best source for tying together the biographical moments that give rise to important aspects of Dewey’s philosophy. 2. John Dewey, “The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy,” in The Essential Dewey, vol. 1 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), p. 49. Henceforth cited as ED. 3. John Dewey, “Qualitative Thought,” in ED, vol. I, p. 205. Where Dewey uses the term, “qualitative” (and all its cognates) I substitute “value” since it seems more suitable for contemporary discussions. 4. John Dewey, “The Need for a Recovery in Philosophy,” in ED, vol. I, p. 49. 5. John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Capricorn, 1958), p. 169. 6. See the last chapter of Experience and Nature, “Existence, Value and Criticism ,” for Dewey’s classic discussion of the public role of philosophy as a cultural force. 7. This is the title of the justly famous first chapter of Dewey’s masterpiece, Art as Experience. 8. See my two volumes, Nature: An Environmental Cosmology (1997) and City: An Urban Cosmology (1999), both published by State University of New York Press, for a thorough discussion of this way of thinking. 9. See David Hall and Roger Ames, Thinking Through Confucius (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987), pp. 298–304, for a compre114 Notes to Chapter 1 hensive presentation of this important dimension of Chinese thought. Alternative interpretations of the Confucian tradition are to be found in Robert Neville, Boston Confucianism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001); Chung-ying Cheng, New Dimensions of Confucian and Neo-Confucian Philosophy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991); Tu Wei- Ming, Confucian Thought: Selfhood as Creative Transformation (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985); and Herbert Fingarette, Confucius: The Secular as Sacred (New York: Harper Torchbooks , 1972). A valuable collection of essays...