Dewey, Eros and Education

Lb X I 7 v. II v.a-^ Dewey, Eros and Education i Jim Garrison We are attracted by our heart's desires. In love we passionately desire to possess the good, or at least what we perceive to be the good. But what we seek soon comes to possess us in thought, feeling, and action. It becomes who we are, the content of our character. In this paper I want to talk about education and Eros. I want to talk about Eros as a creative poetic force that makes new meanings and makes us who we are. I desire to reopen a conversation about what it means to educate for wisdom, that is, to teach the passions to desire the good. The field of education would be better off if it would turn to a more robust philosophy of everyday life that emphasizes the emotions, the imagination, and disciplined moral action. Such an education is largely creative and aesthetic. It is precisely the kind of education that Dewey's philosophy of Eros seems to make possible. We will begin with philosophy or the love of wisdom. Dewey understood wisdom as follows: By wisdom we mean not systematic and proved knowledge of fact and truth, but a conviction about moral values, a sense for the better kind of life to be led. Wisdom is a moral term, and like every moral term refers not to the constitution of things already in existence, not even if that constitution be magnified into eternity and absoluteness. As a moral term it refers to a choice about something to be done, a preference for living this sort of life rather than that. It refers not to accomplished reality but to a desired future which our desires, when translated into articulate conviction, may help bring into existence.' Wisdom desires the best, has the aesthetic power to imagine the possible in the actual situation, and has the discipline to achieve it in action. Such wisdom lies beyond knowledge of actual facts. In expressing his own view of the meaning of philosophy , Dewey decried Plato's ideal of wisdom as knowledge of the eternal, the transcendental, or "the Good." He proposed an alternative to any affirmation of philosophy as epistemologically foundational and transcendentally metaphysical. The alternative was, . . . to deny that philosophy is in any sense whatever a form of knowledge. It is to say that we should return to the original and etymological sense of the word, and recognize that philosophy is a form of desire, of effort at action — a love, namely, of wisdom; but with the thorough proviso, not attached to the Platonic use of the word, that wisdom, whatever it is, is not a mode of science or knowledge... it is an intellectualized wish, an aspiration subjected to rational discriminations and tests, a social hope reduced to a working program of action, a prophecy of the future, but one disciplined by serious thought and knowledge.^ Philosophy, the love of wisdom, lies far beyond knowledge and the quest for certainty. Wisdom is what is possessed by prophets and prophetic teachers that allows them to create new social values. Chapter 2 of Dewey's Art as Experience is titled "The Live Creature and 'Ethereal Things'."3 Exploring this title carefully will help explain the core of Dewey' s thinking about the relations between Eros, action, and rationality. It will also help clarify his thinking in ways that will greatly surprise those who read Dewey as scientistic. Thomas Alexander believes that we should approach Dewey through his aesthetics . Dewey believed all human beings desired to live life with the greatest sense of meaning and value. Alexander calls this passionate desire for life, meaning, and value "the Human Eros."4 A passionate desire to live and satisfy need is something we share with every living creature. Unique to the Human Eros is the passionate need and creative desire for what Dewey called "Ethereal things." Before taking up Dewey's notion of "Ethereal Things," and the pragmatic view of creation it contains, I would like to dismiss the accusation that Dewey's pragmatism is scientistic. This dismissal helps warrant Alexander's suggestion that Dewey is best approached through his...