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87 7 John Dewey and Pragmatism in Central Europe (the Case of the Former Czecho-Slovakia) Emil Višňovský, Slovak Academy of Sciences, Slovak Republic Introduction In this essay, I will attempt to map Dewey’s reception and influence in Central Europe, particularly in the countries of the former Czecho-Slovakia , the Czech and Slovak Republics.1 To demonstrate that this influence has not been very massive and why, I will provide a brief outline of the historical, cultural, and philosophical context. Generally, both our cultures, the Czech and the Slovak, are Slavic ones, but at least to some extent they are different from each other. While the Czechs may really be said to be “pragmatists” in their own right, though of a special type, the Slovaks are quite clearly rather antipragmatist. Thus in the first part, I will sketch the cultural background of this European region to give a sense of how and why pragmatism was resisted. In the second part, I will describe those early, clearest cases of the reception and influence of John Dewey and pragmatism in this territory, in particular in philosophy and education. In the third part, I will focus on the main cases of the ideological misinterpretation of Dewey and pragmatism in general since the 1950s. Finally, in the fourth part, I will briefly outline the current scene and the attitudes toward the contemporary revival of pragmatism and the extent of its penetration into our cultural and philosophic life. In Search of Our Central European Cultural Identity The attempts made to clarify European cultural identity in recent years have been both very intensive as well as extensive.2 However, the results of these efforts, which are, at least to my knowledge and from a philosophical point of view, quite unsatisfying, may be summarized as follows. 88 Emil Višňovský First, there was a deep crisis in European intellectual and cultural tradition during the whole twentieth century. While Nietzsche was the prophet of this crisis and foresaw the era of nihilism, it was Husserl who attempted to define it in his work The Crisis of European Sciences (1936). There were many others, such as members of the Frankfurt School, and later Heidegger with his writings on technology, who pointed out some substantial features of this crisis, such as instrumental rationality, Enlightenment humanism, and the science/technology alliance. The whole current movement of postmodernism may also be regarded as a vivid expression of this crisis of European cultural tradition.3 Second, one of the most interesting explanations of this crisis can be found in the works of the famous Czech philosopher Jan Patočka.4 According to him, the heart of the European tradition is Platonism, that is, “the care of a human soul,”5 and as we can see clearly in current conditions, this ideal or essence has been lost or abandoned, perhaps in favor of the “care of the body.” For Patočka, as late as 1945, we entered into the era dominated by science and technology, which he calls “the late European era.”6 So we have lost or abandoned something substantial in the sphere of our intellectual and spiritual culture, and there is little evidence or hope we can regain it. This line of thought has been pursued by some other contemporary Central European thinkers, many of them Patočka’s students, such as Václav Bělohradský, according to whom the European tradition will last as long as we make and preserve the Platonist distinction between picture and reality, which, however, seems to have disappeared.7 Thus, the Czech philosopher Otakar A. Funda concludes that Europe is dying because during its history it has destroyed its four main pillars: the religion of the old Israel, ancient Greek philosophy, Christianity, and modern secular humanism, and as a result, such ideals as responsibility, humanity, freedom, rationality, exactness, and tolerance have been fatally undermined. The sociocultural identity on which Europe was built has again been annihilated.8 In his work Procitne Evropa? [Will Europe Resuscitate?], German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk gives another interesting explanation of Europe’s damage to its own fate. According to Sloterdijk, the nature of Europe as a sociopolitical and cultural phenomenon consists in the power game it has been playing since its inception, and this game is simply the transitions of empire. Once it was the Roman Empire, which became the model for all other powerful European nations, such as Germany, France, England, Spain...

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