Pragmatism as Post-postmodernism: Lessons from John Dewey (review)

This collection of previous published essays, revised from their origins in work spanning the past twenty years, is a welcome gift from Larry Hickman, eminent Dewey scholar and Director of the Center for Dewey Studies at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. An ambassador from Deweyan pragmatism to the world, Hickman makes friendly introductions for Dewey, getting him into new conversations and using him for ameliorating philosophical and real-world problems. In these essays Hickman is primarily instructing non-pragmatists in those aspects of Dewey’s work relevant to diverse topics and figures across the intellectual landscape. As a display of courage to transport and translate Dewey into such wide-ranging comparison, discussion, and debate, this book of Hickman’s is unrivalled. Fellow Dewey scholars will find Hickman’s forays stimulating and suggestive for their own adventures, while those new to Dewey will be impressed by the helpfulness of Dewey’s broad insights.

Hickman’s Dewey is the ultimate tool, a do-it-all Swiss army knife ready for any job at hand. From issues in knowledge, science, and technology to concerns across applied ethics, religion, and social and political philosophy, Hickman’s Dewey is well-prepared for application to each experimental test. Yet Hickman never stretches Dewey too far or too thin. The selected arenas of contest are all on favorable ground fairly central to Deweyan philosophy. Only the best of Dewey is on display here, carefully selected from his vast corpus to most useful effect. There is little occasion to offer the sort of detailed exegesis of key passages that might expose crucial flaws or serious oversights. Rarely is Hickman tempted to hint at any inadequacies in Dewey’s views, or to credit a rival philosopher with superior judgment. While Hickman does subject Dewey to criticism in other writings, this book consists only of Dewey translated at his objective best. But perhaps that’s the right way to properly introduce Dewey to non-pragmatists when creating and advancing communal inquiry is at stake. There is no sign here that Hickman has the least sympathy with that isolated cottage industry of disgruntled “interpreters” determined to prove their own contemporary relevance by tossing Dewey into history’s trash dump of narrow-minded intellectuals, bourgeoisie elitists, values-free secularists, nihilistic atheists, insensitive racists and misogynists, and imperial apologists. Only time will tell which kind of conversation turns out to be a dead-end in this emerging age of global communication.

Most of Hickman’s chapters are studies in contrasts. The book’s title suggests a greater preoccupation with postmodernism than the contents manage to deliver, but this observation is hardly a detraction. Dewey’s contrasts against various postmodernisms are developed in several chapters. Hickman’s first chapter, “Classical Pragmatism: Waiting at the End of the Road,” agrees with Richard Rorty’s observation in 1982 that Dewey had long ago arrived at the juster conclusions towards which some analytic and continental philosophers have been reaching. Hickman cannot agree with Rorty’s additional implications that Dewey’s own thought traveled down much the same roads as the others, but only sped ahead faster, or that Dewey’s final conclusions coincide with the others’, but only expressed in a superficially different form. On Hickman’s reading, Dewey is entirely “post-postmodern,” since Dewey did reach some postmodernist conclusions (e.g. rejecting foundationalisms, metaphysical realisms, cultural hegemonies, grand narratives) only to travel even further to a positively coherent system of thought. Rorty and his postmodernist friends reveled in the romantic wild fields opened by radicalized relativisms of all kinds; Dewey, alas, was no radical. Dewey’s naturalistic metaphysics, his biological theory of inquiry, his cultural historicism, his democratic progressivism—intertwined strands of stability explain why we really were never in an “anything goes” or “all is permitted” situation.

The second chapter, “Pragmatism, Postmodernism, and Global Citizenship,” pursues further this developing theme that postmodernism is quite capable (like analytic philosophy?) of tearing matters apart, but ill-equipped to stitch anything back...