The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism

3. The Coming-of-Age of American Pragmatism: John Dewey

3 The Coming,of,Age of American Pragmatism: John Dewey The endeavor to democratize the idea of God goes hand in hand with pragmatism, and both arise out of the spirit of "This, Here, and Soon." - }ohan Huizinga American pragmatism reaches its highest level of sophisticated articulation and engaged elaboration in the works and life of John Dewey. To put it crudely, if Emerson is the American Vico, and James and Peirce our John Stuart Mill and Immanuel Kant, then Dewey is the American Hegel and Marx! On the surface, these farfetched comparisons reveal the poverty of the American philosophical tradition, the paucity of intellectual worldhistorical figures in the American grain. But on a deeper level, these comparisons disclose a distinctive feature of American pragmatism: its diversity circumscribed by the Emersonian evasion of epistemology-centered philosophy and the Emersonian theodicy of the self and America. John Dewey is the greatest of the American pragmatists because he infuses an inherited Emersonian preoccupation with power, provocation, and personality-permeated by voluntaristic, amelioristic, and activistic themes-with the great discovery of nineteenth-century Europe: a mode of historical consciousness that highlights the conditioned and circumstantial character of human existence in terms ofchanging societies, cultures, and 69 70 The Coming-of-Age of American Pragmatism communities. Dewey is the first American pragmatist who revises Emersonian motifs of contingency and revisability in the light of modern historical consciousness.I For Emerson, history is a spatialized form of temporality awaiting occupation by a self that creates itself; hence, history is heroic autobiography. For James, history is an undifferentiated background against which heroic individuals fight and struggle. Similar to Emerson's, James's conception of the cosmos and nature celebrates plurality and mystery, yet in both of their views, history roughly amounts to temporal frontiers to be confronted and conquered by willful persons. For Peirce, history is an evolutionary process in need of human direction and communal guidance. He introduces a crucial social element that offsets the Emersonian and Jamesian individualisms. Yet this social element stresses the communal at the expense of the societal; that is, it takes seriously intermediate human associations and collectivities, but fails to consider the larger social structures , political systems, and economic institutions. The grand breakthrough of Dewey is not only that he considers these larger structures, systems, and institutions, but also that he puts them at the center of his pragmatic thought without surrendering his allegiance to Emersonian and Jamesian concerns with individuality and personality. Like Hegel, Dewey views modern historical consciousness-awareness of the radical contingency and variability of human societies, cultures, and communities-as the watershed event in contemporary thought. To cross this Rubicon is to enter a new intellectual terrain-to shun old philosophic forms of dualism, absolutism, and transcendentalism and to put forward new social theoretic understandings of knowledge, power, wealth, and culture. Just as Marx conceives the Aufhebung of philosophy to be a social theory of society and history and of revolution and emancipation, so Dewey holds pragmatism to be a historical theory of critical intelligence and scientific inquiry and of reform and amelioration. The privileged moral tropes in both Marx and Dewey are individuality , social freedom, and democracy. Yet Marx's vision and project are more ambitious than those of Dewey. This is so, in part, because as a more profound social theorist than Dewey, Marx sees and understands more clearly why and how early industrial capitalist conditions preclude individuality , social freedom, and democratic participation for the majority of the European and American populace. Furthermore, Marx theorizes from the vantage point of and in solidarity with the industrial working class of nineteenth-century Europe-an exploited, unfranchised, and downtrodden people-whereas Dewey writes from the vantage point of and in leadership over that rising professional fraction of the working class and managerial class that is in sympathy with and has some influence among an exploited yet franchised industrial working class in the United States. John Dewey 71 True to the American pragmatic grain, Dewey rejects the metaphysical residues in Marx: the Hegelian-inspired penchant toward totalizing history, universalizing collectivities, and simplifying emancipation. These residues tend to overlook the vast complexities of history, the sheer heterogeneity of collectivities, and the various complications of emancipation. Therefore, for Dewey, Marxist perspectives (given his rather frail yet still noteworthy grasp of them}2 tend toward premature totalities, and homogeneities that ignore uniqueness, difference, and diversity. Yet, like any...