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Epilogue. Pragmatism and the Decline of Dewey The Spanish philosopher George Santayana had enshrined one of the enduring images into American philosophical history in the same year that Mexico ’s revolutionary armies had mobilized against Porfirio Dı́az in 1911.1 Speaking before the Philosophical Union at the University of California, Berkeley, he argued that California, like the eastern United States, was a new society. Yet amid its newness, it had somehow managed to create a tradition of philosophical investigation of its own. Some of that tradition had emerged from the Calvinist traditions that had come from Europe to America through the Puritans, whose strict doctrines of life had become the foundational system of American thought. Calvinism in America was ‘‘an old wine in new bottles,’’ the transplantation of European philosophy to a new continent. But America had been unexpected. Its materialism had created an aggressive spirit of achievement that had left behind the ascetic philosophy of the Calvinists, necessitating a new philosophy to replace the old wine that had been forgotten in the wake of continental expansion. What America now needed was a philosophy that could reconcile the old systems of the fathers with the experience of change that was hurtling the new nation forward into the twentieth century. A new wine that many would call America’s only original contribution to philosophy, pragmatism, was being formulated at that very moment, ironically. It was fitting for that reason that Santayana was speaking at Berkeley , since it was there in 1898 that William James had become the first person to use the term ‘‘pragmatism’’ for the philosophical system that he, Charles Peirce, and John Dewey were then developing.2 Twenty-four years later, in 1935, José Vasconcelos surveyed the state of philosophy and education in postrevolutionary Mexico and found that his Pragmatism and the Decline of Dewey 287 countrymen had grown drunk on the new wine that James and Dewey had expanded across North America.3 ‘‘Once we have emerged from the drunken stupor of this bad wine, let us return to the fruitful wine of our own tradition. In that manner, we will resuscitate Odysseus from the dead, in order to oppose him to the simplistic formulations of the Robinson Crusoes that surround us.’’4 For Vasconcelos, Homer’s Odysseus represented the good wine of philosophy to which Mexico had to return, and Robinson the bad wine that had poisoned the postrevolutionary republic as the new Mexican state had risen from the ashes of war. ‘‘Robinsonism, empiricism, the philosophy of the travelogue, it is necessary for us to complement these other philosophies with the theory of final ends, with the metaphysics of happy disinterest, and with the supremacy of the absolute.’’ Nothing better captured the disagreement between pragmatism and idealism than the contrast that Vasconcelos here set up in the signifiers of Robinson and Odysseus. To Dewey’s criticism that ends had to reside in social consensus, Vasconcelos counterposed the superhuman of the absolute. To Dewey’s experience and experimentalism as the method for consensual truth, Vasconcelos counterposed the closed universe of the ultimate end. To Robinson Crusoe’s rudimentary adaptations to the island of Juan Fernández that Vasconcelos believed pragmatism represented, Vasconcelos counterposed the sublime seafaring and noble resourcefulness of Odysseus. Dewey had become a shaping influence on Mexico’s public schools between the time of Santayana’s speech and the time of Vasconcelos’s attack. There were thousands of new schoolhouses between 1920 and 1950 where previously there had been none, and in them labored teachers who had received their instruction from the Deweyites Moisés Sáenz and Rafael Ramı́rez. ‘‘It is in so much vogue today throughout Latin America and its colonial antecedents,’’ Vasconcelos had written of Dewey in Mexico and Latin America before excoriating pragmatism for its undue influence over the minds of the young students of the nation.5 ‘‘The importation of the Deweyan system among our countrymen is an aberrant case, with graver consequences than the opium and alcohol trades which other colonized people had been subjected to,’’ Vasconcelos had also written.6 Scholars in the United States would similarly note the deep imprint that Dewey had left on the Mexican schools, especially after World War II. Ralph Beals noted Dewey’s influence in a 1957 piece, and within four years so too would the eminent historian of Mexico, Ramón Eduardo Ruiz.7 [18.117.188.64] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 02:38...

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