Democracy and Rhetoric: John Dewey on the Arts of Becoming

Conclusion

Conclusion The great lesson of Dewey’s mature philosophy is that the constitution of civilization is intrinsically an accomplishment of art—the intelligent and sympathetic process of doing and making that makes our shared world a richer place to inhabit. As he writes,“It is by creation of the intangibles of science and philosophy, and especially by those of the arts, that countries and communities have won immortality for themselves after material wealth has crumbled into dust.”1 Democracy, as a form of civilization, thus only exists insofar as it learns from and encourages the development of the arts, sciences, and philosophies that make existence something more than the instinctual struggle for survival. For Dewey “a democracy is more than a form of government ; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience.”2 What makes democracy different from other forms of associated living is that it places its faith in the ability for the arts of communication to draw from, direct, and give form to human experience without recourse to something “beyond” or “above” our existence. Democracy, in Dewey’s words, “is belief in the ability of human experience to generate the aims and methods by which further experience will grow in ordered richness.”3 Putting this belief to work requires more than simply the release from formal constraints to free expression. It requires a shared commitment to communication, to sharing experience, that has been the exception rather than the rule in human history. A radical democracy thus commits itself to the universal development of a radical rhetoric. This rhetoric draws from the resources of experimental logic for practical judgment while constituting new relationships between the self, society, and environment through the aesthetic form. In radical rhetoric, an audience thus progresses through the stages of aesthetic form—continuity, accumulation, tension, conservation, and anticipation—using the more intellectual and practical experiences of persuasion and argumentation to build up layers of energy that eventually find fulfillment and consummation in the aesthetic experience of eloquence. Radical rhetoric is thus not a discrete act that happens in a synchronic moment. Even in its performance, it is a development in time. Walker, for instance, demonstrates that “in a large and complex 188 Democracy and Rhetoric argument,” there is “a progression from enthymeme to enthymeme to enthymeme , building up an accumulated fund of value-laden, emotively significant ideas . . . that are variously brought to bear, forcefully and memorably, in the rhetor’s final enthymematic turns.”4 What Walker points out in what is already implicit in Dewey’s aesthetic theory; that logical form is a subset of aesthetic form, and that enthymemes work to build logical proofs only to find them wholly transformed through one’s final aesthetic turns. Dewey’s social and aesthetic theory leads us to the controversial conclusion that neither rhetoric nor democracy can afford to mock the Platonic goals of consummating truth, beauty, and goodness within a singular work of art. For all his metaphysical bluster, Plato established ideals that remain inspiring and necessary for social progress. Yet the achievement of these ideals can only be attained through a Sophistical understanding of art and a naturalistic ontology of becoming. Truth, beauty, and goodness are not metaphysical forms that look down upon the world as gods. They are experimental ends-in-view that we continually revise even as we strive after them.5 Rhetoric emerges at those points at which our struggle to ascend meets obstruction, when our habits are frustrated, our goals unclear, and our methods opaque. In that moment of crisis , our fate is decided on whether we turn this way or that, with each step moving us ever more distant from an alternative reality that might have been and toward a reality that is coming to be in time. The responsibility of rhetoric at these moments may be so great as to make us abandon our responsibility to the art and give ourselves up to forces beyond our control. Yet this is not the path to civilization, but to barbarism. The common faith of humanity may be ideal, but it is not idealistic. They are ideals of our own creation, made by us to further the enrichment of human experience. Dewey writes: The ideal ends to which we attach our faith are not shadowy and wavering. They assume concrete form in our understanding of our relations to one another and the values contained in these relations. We who now live are parts of a humanity that extends...