The Human Eros: Eco-ontology and the Aesthetics of Existence

Introduction

{ 1 } The essays gathered here, spanning over two decades, represent my own attempts to explore what may be called an “aesthetics of human existence” in terms of an ecological, humanistic naturalism.1 They include extensions of my earlier interpretation of the philosophy of John Dewey as well as studies of the thought of Ralph Waldo Emerson and George Santayana. I have also tried to establish connections with Asian philosophy , especially Buddhism, and with Native American wisdom traditions. The overall trajectory of these writings is to contextualize the ideas of “pragmatism” and “naturalism,” as popularly understood, within a broader and deeper philosophy of experience. This, too, is a loaded term. “Experience,” in the Deweyan sense used here, is our shared cultural inhabitation of the world. Art and the aesthetic, instead of being pushed 1. I hope to make clear what these terms connote, but I caution that any word ending in “-ism,” while sounding intellectual, is usually an excuse for unreflective, vague generalizations that mislead critical reflection. introduction  introduction 2 to the periphery of philosophy, as is customary, are here seen as central. Insofar as there is now a revival of “pragmatism” under way, the position taken in these essays may provide something of a shock. Many of the new pragmatists are really converts from the analytic tradition that made epistemology Queen of Philosophy. These neopragmatists for the most part are still epistemologists but are now “pragmatic” epistemologists. That is, epistemology is still Queen; it’s just pragmatic now. The unsettling news from Dewey (following James) is that epistemology is not what philosophy is primarily about. In fact, Dewey called the tendency of philosophers to interpret everything in light of the problem of knowledge “the Philosophic Fallacy.”2 A good deal of what he wrote for his essays in Studies in Logical Theory in 1903 and from then on was an effort to contextualize questions of knowing within the larger world of lived experience . For James and Dewey, pragmatism was only part of a much larger, complex philosophy of experience. This is to say that the meaning of existence is not limited to, much less coextensive with, knowledge, not even knowledge that is “pragmatically” acquired. This is a lesson that still needs to be learned by many now flocking to what glibly passes as “pragmatism.” Furthermore, the vistas opened by this larger conception of philosophy are still relatively unexplored. Thus, the essays presented here can be thought of as explorations of a wilderness. When my book The Horizons of Feeling was published, there was just the barest beginning of a revival of interest in Dewey. The lonely struggle byseriousscholarslikeJohnJ.McDermott,H.S.Thayer,JamesGouinlock, and others to preserve and advance understanding of the richness of classical American thought had recently been given an unexpected boost from Richard Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979). Rorty undertook a critique of the whole project of analytic philosophy (which he had confidently once espoused), invoking not only the holy name of Wittgenstein, but the disregarded name of Dewey and the unmentionable name of Heidegger, viewed by many analytic philosophers as “not even a philosopher.” Rorty played fast and loose with what he knew of Dewey— he surmised much and missed a great deal, though that did not lessen the confidence with which he made his insouciant pronouncements. 2. See The Quest for Certainty (LW, 4:232–33) and Experience and Nature (LW, 1:28). Dewey also calls this the “Intellectualist Fallacy.” introduction 3 One result of Rorty’s bombshell was a growing reawakening of interest in Dewey beyond the scholars working in classical American philosophy. This was undertaken mostly by people sympathetic to Rorty’s deconstructive rebellion. Nevertheless, given the general indifference to the history of philosophy in the dominant Anglophone philosophical movement , it did not rapidly become evident—except to the scholars—that Rorty’s Dewey bore only a faint resemblance to the historical John Dewey. Rorty’s portrayal of Dewey was similar to a “portrait” by Matisse or Picasso, something done more for the sake of the artistic effects than fidelity to the original. Besides presenting Dewey as an utter relativist, Rorty’s Dewey was a deeply bifurcated person; there was a “good Dewey” who engaged in cultural criticism and a “bad Dewey” who frequently succumbed to the siren song of “Hegelian” metaphysics. In this view, Rorty was not alone, for the “two Deweys...