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  • McDermott's Salvation:Turning and Returning
  • Roger Ward

Nothing is easier than self-deceit. For what each man wishes he also believes to be true.

—Demosthenes, Third Olynthiac

The pragmatic and gospel adage that you can judge a tree by its fruits is especially apt for John J. McDermott. The fruits of extraordinary and prolific scholarship are second only to his extraordinary and prolific teaching. Mc-Dermott's place in American philosophy, and his making American philosophy his place, gathers vitality from the texts of James, Dewey, and Royce he has opened through the mantra of experience that reflects the existentialists, urban living, problems of education, and radical aesthetic sensibility. McDermott just sees the world and philosophy from a unique angle, an American angle, an angle we can only approximate looking over his shoulder. As James Campbell points out, what McDermott includes in his anthologies of James, Dewey, and Royce is as interesting as what he chooses to exclude (See Campbell and Hart 34). Over the course of a long career, McDermott exhibits a striking control of both his texts and the texts he responds to, even though he claims that he does not attend carefully to his own corpus. Constructing his philosophy in this way makes it possible for commentators and readers to gather a sense of the significant themes of his work without worrying that it has been tooled or packaged for distribution.

Reading thus, I find that McDermott writes and worries about salvation frequently and with passion. But the salvation he has in view is not, is not the salvation of "ultimate explanation" or a deus ex machina that comes to clean up after the party. He says, "No salvation is promised. Salving becomes both the task and, one hopes, the actuality of our journey. Admitting to ourselves that the nectar is in the journey and only there may not yield the best of all possible worlds. Nonetheless, such a way of life is better, far better than living a secondhand life"(Campbell and Hart 245). Salvation, for McDermott, is the result of one's work, one's vision, and one's turning. He employs the [End Page 63] Hebraic notion of shuv, or turning, that is translated "conversion" in the New Testament. His conversion to American philosophers came at the urging of his teacher Robert C. Pollock, who shifted his dissertation topic from Scheler to James. The transformation of his philosophy under the radical vision of James required a conversion, and philosophical conversion is another theme discovered in McDermott. Transformation by virtue of powerful experience reflects the "permanent deposit" in his thought from Jonathan Edwards and the Puritan congregational life oriented toward reflective growth and collective responsibility (See Campbell and Hart 32).

In this essay, I engage McDermott on the theme of salvation, the turning of a philosophical conversion, and the possibilities that this turning is a returning. "Returning" raises the question of the presence of formative but veiled religious commitments as opposed to the sufficiency of a primordial sense of human experience that breaks open all reflective structures in a flurry of Heraclitean flux. This latter is McDermott's ground. He patiently and passionately seeks the crucial ability to maintain reflective stability in such a flux through a conception of death faced not as the end, as in the end of obsolescence, but as the end in a rhythm. For McDermott, the ultimately negative prospect of human failure is obsolescence, a separation of one from others affected by social structures but ultimately determined by the person's own action. Personal action is the only irremediable source against obsolescence. It is my contention that McDermott flirts with religious turning, fears the obsolescence possible in a Heraclitean flux, and strives to stand himself in a stable middle position that is, as he says, "without hope but not despairing" (McDermott 227). The strong medicine of nondespairing hopelessness seems to be a kind of shock therapy for people with religious sensibilities (and I think Christian religion is particularly in McDermott's sights). McDermott's evaluation is similar to Karl Jaspers', who notes that religion has lost its power of creative expression in the actual present (See Jaspers 151...

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