Dewey and Cosmopolitanism

Many people rightly consider John Dewey a distinctively American thinker. He was born into a time-honored New England culture. He was educated in American schools. He lived and worked virtually his entire life in the United States. He had a lifelong respect for American traditions in poetry, literature, philosophy, and more. He was active in political and cultural movements, ranging from the protection of free speech to the right of teachers to unionize. For over a century his educational philosophy has influenced educators across the fifty states. He has had a wide-ranging impact on several streams of American thought, among them pragmatism. If Ralph Waldo Emerson had written after rather than before Dewey, he might have called Dewey “A Representative Man,” embodying much that is original and hopeful about the American prospect.¹

There is at least one other Dewey, however, fused with his familiar American avatar. This Dewey expressed in his writing a deep and abiding interest in the world writ large. This Dewey enunciated ideas and points of view as a philosopher in and of the world: as if the provenance of his thought had no national or otherwise predetermined boundaries, and as if the meanings in his thought were not preshaped by wherever his desk and typewriter happened to be. This Dewey was cosmopolitan. In what follows I will sketch some aspects of this claim. After providing a brief account of cosmopolitanism, I will focus upon Dewey’s philosophy of education where many of his cosmopolitan impulses come most generatively alive.

A Cosmopolitan Orientation

A cosmopolitan outlook embodies more than open-mindedness as conventionally understood. Rather it fuses reflective openness to the world with reflective loyalty to local roots, traditions, and practices. Cosmopolitanism presumes individual and cultural distinctiveness. It would vanish in a homogenized world. “Reflective” openness to the world connotes awareness, mindfulness, and responsiveness. It echoes what Dewey describes as a “readiness to learn” from life.² It is not “emptymindedness,”³ as if the person or community must throw out a welcome mat to any influence from the world. Rather, a cosmopolitan orientation embodies a considered receptivity toward and appreciation of the unfathomable variability that marks the human world.

Reflective loyalty toward the local mirrors the fact that a cosmopolitan orientation necessitates a sense of home. A person may feel at home in a culture, town, region, and language while also retaining reflective openness to new perspectives and ideas. But a person may feel equally or more rooted in a practice or vocation: for example, in a transcultural, transnational, and transpersonal community of scholars, doctors, poets, teachers, entrepreneurs, sailors, and so forth. Put another way, a cosmopolitan-minded person is always “leaving home” in the bubbled, closed, or walled-in sense of that term. The person recognizes, if not in so many words, the illusion of isolation. It is no more conceivable to shield oneself from the incessant influence of the world than it is to stop the sunrise or turn of the tide. What human beings can do is respond to that influence in more rather than less efficacious ways: those which allow them to sustain individual and cultural continuity through the vicissitudes of ongoing change.

A cosmopolitan-minded person does not reject home out of hand—with home understood, once more, as referring either to a geographical location or to a vocational one. To be sure, such “homes” themselves sometimes reject people. Consider the countless individuals and communities who have been exiled from or otherwise oppressed in their natal locales. The record of suffering ranges from Jews in Germany persecuted for their cosmopolitanism, to alleged enemies of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia condemned for their openness to alternative views, to the individual painter, poet, or scholar shunned by a community as not “loyal” enough to current standards and practices. Historically, cosmopolitanism has constituted a psychic, spiritual, and material refuge for many persons exiled by local community. And yet, it has served this function precisely by generating alternative senses of home, without which the orientation cannot be sustained (cosmopolitanism is not a synonym with open-mindedness nor with rootlessness). These remarks attest...