Is Thoreau More Cosmopolitan Than Dewey?

I. Dewey's American Philosophy and Cosmopolitanism Today

In 1921 John Dewey published an article on "mutual national understanding" based upon his real experience of encountering foreign cultures in Japan and China ("Creative Democracy" 228). The article echoes his democratic spirit of learning from difference beyond national and cultural boundaries. The vitality of his American philosophy and its potency in a global context are still evident today. Some of the recent research on Dewey is plain enough evidence of this (Hickman; Hansen). Neither fixed within national ground nor appealing to any universalist cause in the process of continuing growth, Dewey encourages us to become cosmopolitan, going beyond cultural differences and national boundaries. By inheriting what Dewey has left us, this paper critically re-examines the viability of Dewey's philosophy today in the context of a debate on cosmopolitanism and global citizenship in American philosophy. It tests his claim that understanding different cultures should be a pre-condition for our becoming cosmopolitan. To take up this task, I want to confront Dewey with another voice of American philosophy—that of Henry David Thoreau as revived by Stanley Cavell. Thoreau tends to be absent both in Dewey's writings themselves and in those of Deweyan scholars. What does this absence imply? What does the silenced voice of Thoreau suggest when one looks at Dewey's line of argument regarding cosmopolitanism? In searching for answers to these questions, this paper explores what lies behind this absence. I shall re-read Thoreau's Walden, via Cavell's ordinary language philosophy, as offering an alternative mode of becoming cosmopolitan—beyond the dichotomous framework of cosmopolitanism in words and cosmopolitanism in action. It will show us how our endeavor to become cosmopolitan requires the reconsideration of the respective meanings of our terms in "understanding" "different" "cultures." I shall conclude that Thoreau and Cavell in their idea of philosophy as translation help us respond to the question of the untranslatable, a question that Dewey leaves unanswered; and that, to the extent that Thoreau presents us with an alternative vision of becoming cosmopolitan from within, he can be seen to be more cosmopolitan than Dewey.

II. Dewey on Mutual National Understanding and Cosmopolitanism

Dewey's Cross-Cultural Experience in Asia

Dewey says that "democracy must begin at home" (Public and Its Problems 368), but he also says that "[Territorial states and political boundaries] will not be barriers which impoverish experience by cutting man off from his fellows" (Public and Its Problems 370). He implies that we can transcend the boundaries. Yet for this possibility to be realized, we need education: we need the kind of education in which we mutually learn from differences with the democratic spirit of friendship ("Creative Democracy" 228) and open-mindedness (Democracy and Education 183). Dewey is a global citizen, as Hickman says and, as Hansen says, "a cosmopolitan philosopher" (Hansen 116).

Dewey experimented with his cosmopolitan philosophy in his experience of foreign travel. One of his most challenging experiences was his visit to Japan. It was on February 9, 1919, that he set foot in Japan. Being faithful to his idea of mutual learning from difference, Dewey suggests that understanding the inner spirit of people in different cultures—that is, of those who live in a universe that is different from the one with which we are familiar—cannot merely be a matter of neutral, objective comparison or of the assimilation of difference into unity based on an ethnocentric framework. Instead, he emphasized the importance of an understanding that reached "the inner spirit and real life of a people" ("Some Factors" 267). By confronting and surmounting differences in ways of thinking, value systems, and habits of mind in other countries, Dewey proposed that such contact with another nation become "a real means of education, a means of insight and understanding" ("Some Factors" 263). We might call this a humanist and cosmopolitan aspect of Dewey's pragmatism.

In his actual experience, however, Dewey encountered a radical difference in the undemocratic culture of Japan at that time—radical to such an extent that his humanitarian-democratic position was incommunicable. In...