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  • Toward an Ethics of the Encounter:William James's Push Beyond Tolerance
  • Jeff Edmonds

Something in the world forces us to think. This something is an object not of recognition but of a fundamental encounter.

Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (1994)

The Deweyan call for democracy as a way of life is a call to bring together ethics and politics. There is the temptation to think of this vision of democracy as a single "way of life"—an ethos with well-defined values such that the democratic thinker, the democratic community, and the democratic citizen can be identified as living out this democratic way of life. However, it is important not to misconstrue the radical nature of Dewey's conception of democratic ethics.

The challenge of producing a philosophical account of a democratic ethics is not, as in a more traditional approach to ethics, to lay out an ideal against which life might be judged to be more or less democratic. For if democracy is a way of life involving specified values, attitudes, temperaments, and even states of body, this way of life must be one attuned to and in contact with a multiplicity of possible ways of life. In this sense, democracy as a way of life names precisely this problematic contact point [End Page 133] between a unifying and coordinated conception of democratic life and the encounters between and among the plural and internally variegated ways of life. It is out of these encounters that the demand for, the hope of, and perhaps even the faith in a conception of democratic ethics and politics arise.

Therefore, thinking the future of ethics democratically means making encounters with the actual and existing ways of life that make up and produce the social body. These various ways of life, this collection of fundamental habits, values, and structures, constitute the problematic field of ethics and, simultaneously, the problems and possibilities of politics. The future of pragmatic ethics demands entering into these problems and possibilities experimentally, experientially, and relentlessly.

In the reflections that follow, I hope to generate the conviction that the primary democratic virtue is not tolerance but a kind of courage to make what Deleuze calls encounters beyond recognition. I will do so by looking first at James's essay "On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings," arguing that James misconstrues the ethical implications of his own pluralism when he derives from it a passive ethics of tolerance. I argue that the more adequate response to our ineliminable blindnesses when it comes to our value judgments is instead an affirmation of the possibility of making encounters through the immediacy of shared feeling. I will use Michael Herr's account of the Vietnam War in Dispatches as an example of how these encounters might help us treat and reorganize the blindnesses that result from our ideas of each other.

Asymbolia as a Social Disorder

James's essay "On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings" ends with a call for an ethics of tolerance, articulated in terms of a demand and a prohibition: "[Our blindness] absolutely forbids us to be forward in pronouncing on the meaninglessness of forms of existence other than our own; and it commands us to tolerate, respect, and indulge in those whom we see harmlessly interested and happy in their own ways, however unintelligible they may be to us. Hands off" (1977, 144-45). There is a kind of relativist argument underlying this ethics that has been made often, and it runs something like this: the marks of meaning are feelings. Feelings are private, subjective, and inaccessible phenomena. Therefore the meaning and [End Page 134] value of life are not subject to public scrutiny. Hands off. Let other lives be. This is the line of argument that underwrites and authorizes a relationship between pluralism and an ethics of tolerance. Certainly awareness of our own provinciality, the shadows that this provinciality casts on other lives, and the interestedness and directedness of our own vision do seem to imply a duty of respect for the other. It makes some sense. Awareness of our limitations ought to make us cautious of presuming to regulate the entire field of experience, yes.

However, I...

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