Dewey, Paideia, and Turbulence

My paper is the outcome of a puzzlement concerning the absence of a word in Dewey and a refinement of a disagreement with Stanley Cavell. It also is motivated by my recognition (nearly thirty-five years after the publication of The Phenomenological Sense of John Dewey: Habit and Meaning)¹ of how much more remains to be said regarding habit, drama, and the dramatic in Dewey's pragmatism. Clarification of the convergence of these seemingly disparate elements requires a brief introduction to each of them. I will start with the disagreement with Stanley Cavell.

I.

The disagreement goes back a number of years, but it began to loom larger in my thinking while I was writing The Grace and the Severity of the Ideal: John Dewey and the Transcendent.² Still, it held my attention for only about four pages in that book. Wittgenstein's picture of thinking is, Cavell says, "one of moving from being lost to oneself to finding one's way, a circumstance of spiritual disorder." Cavell believes that for Dewey, thinking is "moving in action from a problematic situation to its solution, as by the removal of an obstacle, more or less difficult to recognize as such, by the least costly means."³ Cavell does not lack respect for this kind of thought, but its limitations are evident if the problem to be solved is "a circumstance of spiritual disorder." Indeed, to regard such a spiritual condition as principally a "problem" to be solved is almost by itself sufficient reason to distance Emerson and Wittgenstein from pragmatism, particularly Dewey's pragmatism.

There have been a number of criticisms of Cavell's interpretation of Dewey, and almost all of them spring from the same root, that is, Dewey's pragmatism can handle the Wittgensteinian and Emersonian pressure placed on it by Cavell.⁴ My disagreement with Cavell had a different focus. Why? Because I agreed with Cavell's characterization of America in the following passage, but not the difference he sees between Emerson and Dewey:

Both Dewey and Emerson are necessary for what each of them thinks of as democracy. To repress Emerson's difference is to deny that America is as transcendentalist as it is pragmatist, that it is in struggle with itself, at a level not articulated by what we understand as the political.⁵

Cavell simply took his place, in my mind, with all the others who could not find much of a connection between Dewey and transcendentalism. That "America is as transcendentalist as it is pragmatist" was, however, keenly interesting to me, but I took it to be tangential to my principal interest, that is, to give an appreciative hearing to certain pragmatic occasions of transcendence.

The view that "America is as transcendentalist as it is pragmatist" goes to the foundation of any view that Deweyan pragmatism has something important to offer America and American culture. If Cavell is right about America, or even partly right, then where does that leave Dewey? Where does that leave Dewey's understanding of America and American democracy as idea and ideal? The easy answer, but not for that reason unacceptable answer, is that Dewey should take care of the pragmatic America and that Emerson should take care of the transcendentalist America. In other words, split the difference, let the two halves live and let live, keep them out of each other's way. Allowing for the admirable simplicity of this answer, it still is unacceptable. I do not see why Dewey is good for only one half of American democracy, the pragmatist half. I believe a bolder stance is possible and warranted: I believe that Dewey was "in struggle" with himself in behalf of an American culture that was and is "as transcendentalist as it is pragmatist."

However, the focus of The Grace and the Severity of the Ideal was not on the meaning of Dewey's struggle with the relationship of the transcendental and the pragmatic for America. The focus was narrower and perhaps, deeper: what is the nature of that relationship in Dewey? One must be cautious in saying much in Dewey's name about...