John Dewey, Confucius, and Global Philosophy

Foreword

❁ Foreword Roger T. Ames As Joseph Grange insists throughout this present essay, in pursuing cultural understanding and accommodation between American and Chinese cultural sensibilities, there is quite simply no intelligent alternative to dialogue. And a dialogue to be meaningful requires a shared ground—an appreciation of continuities and differences revealed through an exploration of an overlapping cultural vocabulary. Grange draws upon his sustained and substantial reading of the original reflections of John Dewey and of Confucius to bring into focus several seminal ideas from each of these two traditions that provide us with a resonance between them, and that can serve us as the terms of art necessary for undertaking such a Sino-American dialogue. To set the context for Grange’s proposed cultural conversation, we might begin by asking the synoptic question: what, after all, do we mean by “Confucianism” and “Deweyan pragmatism?” It is only in coming to terms with this question that we are able to make the important connection between Grange’s impassioned plea for a better world, and the vision for addressing such a task provided in the works of Confucius and Dewey. Elsewhere I have argued for a narrative rather than an analytical understanding of Confucianism.1 In short, framing the question as “What is Confucianism?” in analytical terms tends to essentialize Confucianism as a specific ideology—a technical philosophy—that can be stipulated with varying degrees of detail and accuracy. What is a question that is perhaps more successfully directed at attempts at systematic philosophy where through analysis one can seek to abstract the ix formal, cognitive structure in the language of principles, theories, and concepts. However, in evaluating the content and worth of a fundamentally aesthetic tradition that takes as its basic premise the uniqueness of each and every situation, and in which the goal of ritualized living is to redirect attention back to the level of concrete feeling, the what question is at best a first step. Beyond the what question, we need to ask more importantly after method: how has Confucianism functioned historically within the specific conditions of an evolving Chinese culture to try to make the most of its circumstances? However we might choose to characterize Confucianism, it is more than any particular set of precepts or potted ideology identified post hoc within different phases or epochs of China’s cultural narrative . Confucianism is not as much an isolatable doctrine or a commitment to a certain belief structure as it is the continuing narrative of a community of people—the center of an ongoing way or dao of thinking and living. Approaching the story of Confucianism as a continuing cultural narrative presents us with a rolling, continuous, and always contingent tradition out of which emerges its own values and its own logic. A narrative understanding of Confucianism is made available to us by drawing relevant correlations among specific historical figures and events. Confucianism is importantly biographical and genealogical —the stories of formative models. And in reflecting on the lives of Chinese philosophes—a survey of often passionate, sometimes courageous intellectuals who as heirs to the tradition of the “scholar-official” (shi) advance their own programs of human values and social order— we become immediately aware that any account of the existential, practical, and resolutely historical nature of this tradition makes it more (and certainly less) than what would be defined as “philosophers” doing philosophy within the contemporary Western context. If we take Dewey on his own terms, the same distinction between narrative and analysis—method and ideology—might be directed at the question, “What is Deweyan pragmatism?” Robert Westbrook recounts how the early critics of pragmatism attacked it condescendingly as a “would-be philosophical system” with distinctively American characteristics, and how Dewey responded by readily allowing the relationship between philosophical ideas and the cultural sensibilities within which they are embedded.2 The American sensibility is not to be found in an assessment of notions such as “fundamental principles,” “system of values,” “ruling theories,” or “core beliefs.” The term “senx Foreword sibility” is best understood dispositionally as a nuanced manner of anticipating, responding to, and shaping the world about us. Sensibilities are complexes of habits that both create and are created by habitats and that promote specific, personal manners of in-habiting a world. Cultural sensibilities are not easily expressed through the analysis of social, economic, or even political institutions. Such sensibilities reside in the prominent feelings, ideas...