Perfectionism and the Love of Humanity: Democracy as a Way of Life after Dewey, Thoreau, and Cavell
Rent from DeepDyveI. Introduction: Starting to Think with Dewey on How to Achieve Democracy as a Way of Life
A man who has not been seen in the daily relations of life may inspire admiration, emulation, servile subjection, fanatical partnership, hero worship; but not love and understanding, save as they radiate from the attachments of a near-by union. Democracy must begin at home, and its home is the neighborly community.
(Dewey 1984a, 368)
This is from Dewey's The Public and its Problems (1927), a book that is known to be his call for recreating the democratic public. Dewey claims that democracy must start "at home"—home as a cultivating ground of love for the intimate, the familiar, and the native, including the neighborly community and the nation—and be expanded onto a global scale. Deweyan democracy and education, however, today face new challenges in the contemporary global world: how to resist the unifying and assimilating force of Americanization; how to resist militant and exclusive forms of patriotism; how to rebuild our relationship with our homeland and with what is familiar to us, including our relationship to ourselves; how to cultivate a critical language among citizens in the face of the nihilistic tendencies of private and public life. These challenging questions sometimes defeat our hope for extending love on a global scale.
In response to these questions, I would like to explore the possibilities of Dewey's idea of democracy and education in dialogue with Thoreau and Cavell. Thoreau is typically known to be an individualist, and Cavell sometimes is criticized for being apolitical or subjective. Against this view, I shall argue that Cavell helps us re-see a hidden dimension in Thoreau's views on democracy as a way of life and provides us with clues to how we can extend love for humanity. Cavell and Thoreau, as critical interlocutors who confront Dewey with the limits and [End Page 93] possibilities of his language and of the internal structure of his philosophy, can reinforce a distinctively American philosophy in the contemporary world.
In the following, I first examine Dewey's idea of expanding circles of democracy. In order to be adequate to the Deweyan task of democracy in the contemporary world, however, I argue that there is a need to critically reconsider Dewey's language and thought. In response to this task, I propose to invite Thoreau and Cavell into a dialogue on democracy as a way of life. Their idea of the "politics of interpretation" is crucially relevant to the task of expanding the circles of democracy. I conclude that Thoreau and Cavell point us to an assiduous process of perfecting love to humanity, and hence, complement Dewey's task of democracy as a way of life.
II. Expanding Circles of Democracy as a Way of Life
Dewey's idea of democracy beginning at home represents and is supported by his faith in democracy—democracy as a way of life as distinguished from democracy as an institution and set of procedures. He claims that if "citizens" were merely faithful in "performing political duties," this would not be sufficient to create democracy in its fullest sense. "Democracy," he says, is a "personal, an individual, way of life" (1988, 226). Such life includes face-to-face communication with others based upon freedom, equality, and, most important, friendship. It is the process of mutual learning from difference and, hence, is inseparable from education: "the expression of difference is not only a right of the other persons but is a means of enriching one's own life-experience" (228). Democracy is ever to be achieved, and it should "point the way to new and better experiences," and hence, it is creative (229).
When Dewey says that democracy must begin at home, he implies that the immediate...
