Texts:Rom-E-17b-BKNA

Buck Naked . . . And Not Abashed

Published with abbreviated documentation in Educational Theory, Volume 67, Number 5, October 2017, pp. 619-30.)

¶1

I thank my six commentators and regret that in the space at my avail I cannot reply to each with the fullness deserved. Instead, I address selected points to advance the basic intent of “Dewey in His Skivvies.”¹

¶2

Recall my main points. I start with the claim that educational theorists have inflated the reputation that John Dewey deserves beyond what the quality of his work can sustain. I develop that in several stages, suggesting first that the reconstruction of philosophy, education, and social life, making better use of scientific thinking as a guide, formed Dewey’s lifelong mission. That mission had a negative side, neutering the influence of past metaphysical thinking, and a positive side, reconstructing an impressively full spectrum of activities to inform conduct with instrumental attitudes, methods, and principles. I concentrate on Dewey’s weaknesses that have less to do with the positive part and more with the negative: his effort to declare prior philosophic thinking irrelevant to realizing the emerging agenda for thought and action in public life.

¶3

In four sections, I develop my critique of his effort to distance current thinking from metaphysical predecessors. The first biographically explains the formation of his ideas about reconstruction. The second criticizes his historical reasoning that purports to show the fundamental errors in the intellectual heritage. The third and fourth sketch in more detail how Dewey read and distanced himself from the work of Immanuel Kant and G. W. F. Hegel. I develop and use a concept of giving past thinkers a “fresh reading,” sympathetically engaging their work to test its present usefulness. Following these four parts, I conclude that by subjecting prior thinkers to prejudgments, Dewey ignored and discarded important concepts that might have made his positive agenda of reconstruction more effective. My critique aims to encourage current educational theorists to engage the conceptual resources of past thinkers more extensively than we are currently doing.

¶4

Commentators have said less about my present purpose for critiquing Dewey than I had hoped. We risk doing to our own work what Dewey did to his. A very large historical transition started several centuries ago and will keep on going for several more. In a kaleidoscope of concrete instantiations, it has been constraining thought and actions in ways we cannot clearly understand. We live and think in the midst of it and what each thinks and does must appear in two different ways: as a part of what is ceasing to happen and as part of what is starting to take place. I criticize Dewey for seeing his philosophical predecessors only as part of what was ceasing to happen while ignoring them as part of what was beginning to take place. That limited Dewey’s role in the larger historical movement. We have the challenge of viewing Dewey not retrospectively, but prospectively, as part of what now is taking place. To do so, we must jettison his negative agenda of reconstruction and without it reconstruct his place in the larger movement of thought that is going on. In it, much that Dewey rejected is playing an essential part. Through “Dewey in His Skivvies,” I try to initiate that reconstruction.

¶5

My responses, concentrating on these points, start with our tendency to inflate Dewey’s reputation. Enthusiastic, we overlook handling various sources with full critical care and make claims for Dewey beyond what his achieved work will bear. An example occurs early in Jim Garrison’s critique of my “just so” stories. In my section on Dewey and Kant, I discuss Dewey’s essay on “Kant and Philosophic Method” (EW 1, 34 – 47).² Garrison notes that I mention it and complains that I barely engage it, asserting “[i]t would require an article to do scholarly justice to this essay alone, which is likely part of Dewey’s lost dissertation.”³ Really?

¶6

Dewey’s paper looks impressive in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy. Its three footnotes appear at the bottom of the first and second pages. The first, which cites a brief quotation from Kant’s 1781 preface to the Critique of Pure Reason, reads “See Kant’s Werke, Rosenkranz’s ed., vol. ii, p. 7.” Then, displaying unusual depth of knowledge about Kant’s corpus, Dewey pointed to a passage from 1763 showing Kant’s disquiet with the concept of causation years before David Hume so disturbed Kant’s dogmatic slumber, citing it with casual knowingness: “see especially [Kant’s] essay on attempt to introduce the idea of negative quantity into philosophy, Werke, vol. i.” He followed quickly on the next page with a short quotation, cited “Ibid., p. 157.”⁴ Impressive — but the interpreter might wonder: not yet twenty-five years old, in the second year of his work for the PhD at Johns Hopkins, work for which he had not prepared deeply in advance, was Dewey really that versed in Kant’s Werke? That question leads to another: do graduate students ignore their mentor’s recent publications?

¶7

George S. Morris, who served as Dewey’s mentor at Johns Hopkins and at the University of Michigan until his death in 1889, had published Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason: A Critical Exposition in 1882.⁵ As Johnston speaks up for a lot of work, I should explain why I ignore the many rich examples clearly analyzed, which I admire for the perception of similarities yet cannot credit as examples of substantial influence.

¶8

Johnston has a fair complaint. I say little in my essay to contest examples of Dewey’s Hegelian-inspired thinking. For my taste, too much time lapses in the case of many such examples between the inspiration attributed to Dewey and its apparent manifestation in his work to make the cause and effect convincing. The chain of custody, so to speak, often includes many other influences and interpretive moves by Dewey himself, blurring whether we are looking at the Hegelian deposit or some complex compound of Hegel and subsequent inputs, internal and external. Owing to all this blurring — Dewey’s own thinking, his interaction with many colleagues, his experimental and laboratory work, the influence of many thinkers of diverse persuasions — one cannot infer backwards from later writings tinged with Hegel to a description of the permanent Hegelian deposit. We must figure that out from documents contemporary with the depositing. I do not doubt that an extraordinary effort has taken place in uncovering traces of the Hegelian deposit. But I think we need to do it with more critical care, paying close attention not to eventual manifestations of the Hegelian deposit, but to a thorough, judicious assay of what got deposited to begin with, when, how, and why.

¶9

As I read the sources, between 1882 and the death of George Morris in 1889, Dewey internalized a full neo-Hegelian view from the secondary literature and episodic reading in Hegel’s texts. Dewey used this general Hegelianism to give his first book, Psychology (EW 2), an overall Hegelian framework, which critics noted at the time, without his mentioning Hegel in the work. After Morris died and Dewey moved back to the University of Michigan in 1889, he started teaching advanced courses on Hegel’s Logik, some on Hegel’s aesthetics via Bernard Bosanquet, and some on The Philosophy of Spirit, working closely with Hegels Leben by Karl Rosenkranz and Hegel’s three volumes of the Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften.⁷ That intensive engagement with Hegel’s writings essentially ended in 1892, except possibly for some continuing work with Hegel on logic. Through that Hegelian deposit, Dewey internalized a very nineteenth-century view of Hegel without carefully engaging Phänomenologie des Geistes and some of Hegel’s most generative concepts.⁸

¶10

Whatever traces the deposit left did not prevent the mature Dewey from judging that Hegel stood with other retrograde metaphysical thinkers. For that, Dewey made explicit references, not ones to be inferred. Take, for example, this passage from the Quest for Certainty (1929):

The point important for our purpose is that in … Hegel there is expressed the animating spirit of modern idealism in dealing with the basic problem of all modern philosophies. They have sought by examination of the structure of the knowing function … to show that no matter what the detailed conclusions of the special sciences, the ideal authority of truth, goodness, and beauty are secure possessions of ultimate Being independently of experience and human action. (LW 4, 51 – 52)

If we are going to celebrate Dewey’s permanent Hegelian deposit, we should first make sure that it can strengthen our ability to cope with our world as we find it, looking ahead as it is starting to take place, not backwards at what is ceasing to happen.⁹

¶11

Let us quit Dewey and Hegel, at least for a while. Jennifer Welchman turns our attention from textual criticism to how four genres of historiography characterize histories of philosophy in her interesting commentary reconstructing Dewey’s his- toriography. Welchman bases her discussion on Richard Rorty’s essay from 1984 explaining how histories of philosophy fall within four genres: rational recon- structions, historical reconstructions, Geistesgeschichte, and doxography.¹⁰ Rorty judged the first three to be useful and hoped that a fifth possibility, intellectual history, would soon replace the vestiges of doxography.

¶12

D. C. Phillips gives us an exemplary illustration of what Rorty saw as rational reconstructions, which examine the arguments of our predecessors in the field “in the hope of treating those philosophers as contemporaries, as colleagues with whom they can exchange views.”11 Phillips pays a gratifying compliment and continues to supplement my concerns by turning his “attention to the general case that Dewey made for the need for reconstruction of philosophy,” giving an analysis of three formulations of it that Dewey gave in his 1948 introduction to the reissue of Reconstruction in Philosophy.12 He exemplifies those in Dewey’s 1920 Reconstruction, finding yet another general conception, obscurely voiced yet akin to what Thomas Kuhn suggested about paradigm shifts.13 Phillips’s closing paragraphs imply in a way perhaps similar to Welchman that I criticize Dewey for historical weaknesses that didn’t matter to him much. Perhaps, but Dewey no longer cares about our views of his weaknesses or strengths. My criticism aims at what we should do in light of how we read Dewey and others in our past.

¶13

If Phillips exemplifies the historiography of rational reconstruction, you might ask if someone illustrates doxography, and to that question, I would answer in politic fashion, “You might think that, but I couldn’t possibly comment.”¹⁴ Several, particularly Welchman’s commentary, concern historical reconstruction and Geistesgeschichte. By considering those genres, she criticizes my critique of Dewey usefully. My response will first give the gist of her critique, then reinterpret Rorty’s Geistesgeschichte, and use it to reiterate my basic critique of Dewey.

¶14

Welchman identifies both herself and myself as historical reconstructionists who want to understand past thinkers as they understood themselves in the context of their lives. On those grounds, she joins me in expressing “discontent with Dewey’s historiography.” That granted, Welchman calls attention to Rorty’s idea of Geistesgeschichte. To refresh our memories, I quote her able exposition of it, including her note that clearly shows Dewey to have written Geistesgeschichte:

The object of this genre of historical writing is “to justify the historian and his friends having the sort of philosophical concerns they have — in taking philosophy to be what they take it to be … to give plausibility to a certain image of philosophy.” In other words, this genre of historiography is directed to and routinely challenges history’s canonical understandings of what philosophy is about. This is why “the question of which problems are ‘the problems of philosophy,’ which questions are philosophical questions, are the questions to which geistesgeschichtlich histories are principally devoted.”¹⁵

¶15

For Rorty, Geistesgeschichte engages in canon formation. Welchman points out that by criticizing Dewey from a stance of historical reconstructionism, I make a category error, bringing to bear standards inappropriate to his controlling effort, namely to justify a new philosophical problematic on social scientific grounds, not historical ones. I can accept this criticism, as far as it goes, but I don’t think it goes quite far enough.

¶16

Rorty made a muddle equating Geistesgeschichte to canon formation. He had a keen sense for what literary intellectuals were thinking and the canon wars of the 1980s and 1990s were getting under way. He projected an anticipation of them into his understanding of Geistesgeschichte. A tell that something was amiss: Rorty found science not amenable to Geistesgeschichte as canon forma- tion, for whiggishly he saw science progressing from theory to theory without having to produce a canon.¹⁶ Yet he might have noted that Pierre Duhem and Joseph Needham, two of the truly great historians of science, clearly practiced Geistesgeschichte.¹⁷ What gives?

¶17

An important form of historical inquiry seeks to understand the processes of intellectual innovation that have driven change in philosophy and other forms of serious inquiry. Ecce Geistesgeschichte! Broadly speaking, Geistesgeschichte centers on two different, partially overlapping engines of intellectual change: innovation in methods employed in the processes of inquiry and developments in concept formation driving intellectual change. Geistesgeschichte concentrates on a spectrum of geistig, inspiriting powers defined at one pole by changing intellectual methods and at the other by the work of concept formation, with both methods and concepts and all between them set against developments in the material affordances and constraints affecting their use.¹⁸

¶18

Dewey wrote in the genre of Geistesgeschichte: he assessed the relative worth of speculative and scientific methods and strongly argued for expanding the place of scientific methods in philosophy, education, and the conduct of life. In book after book he deprecated the metaphysical methods of prior philosophy and showed how more intelligent, experimental, scientific methods could enhance our lifeworld. I do not argue against Dewey’s vision, but suggest that he espoused new, improved methods one-sidedly within Geistesgeschichte. Dewey did little to exploit past philosophical work for concept formation concerning matters important to his reconstructive efforts. Pace Naoko Saito, I do not contend, especially in the sections concerning Kant and Hegel, that Dewey incorrectly reconstructed their thinking. Rather, I show that with a different balance in his Geistesgeschichte, one in which his attention to method is more evenly balanced with a lively interest in how past philosophical work stimulates concept formation, Dewey might have expanded and strengthened his work.¹⁹

¶19

Thomas Fallace’s comments on my critique help to expand this point. Rather than contesting my criticisms, Fallace suggests giving Dewey fuller credit, first as a thinker in tune with his time, second for instances of his positive use of prior thinkers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Thomas Jefferson, and last for his positive and negative participation in the emergence of intellectual history as a well-defined field of inquiry.²⁰ These points strike me as sound, particularly his noting Dewey’s engagement with Rousseau in the first chapter of Schools of Tomorrow, “Education as Natural Development” (MW 8, 211 – 221). Dewey’s treatment of Rousseau there reflects his bias for method and lack of interest in concept formation.

¶20

Rousseau wrote Emile, as well as his other works, with a geistesgeschichtlich sense, attuned to the historical foibles of the current culture and imbued with a conviction that better methods and concepts could possibly overcome them. At the outward, behavioral level, these concerns informed his critique of child-rearing methods from excessive swaddling through forcing acquired skills and sophistications prematurely. In chapter 1 of Schools of Tomorrow, Dewey fully presented Rousseau’s ideas about reforming educational methods in accord with natural development.²¹ He presented Rousseau on method well, but had a weaker sensibility for Rousseau’s historically generative concepts. In chapter 6, which focuses on freedom and individuality, Dewey reintroduced Rousseau with a long quotation about the importance of perceiving discipline as “the heavy yoke that nature has imposed upon us.”²²Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, or Education, trans. Barbara Foxley (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1911), 55, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015047520807;view=1up;seq=71. Dewey quoted the passage to clarify the methods he preferred, although the passage and the surrounding paragraphs were one of many entry points into Rousseau’s effort to form concepts, such as amour de soi, amour propre, and negative education, with which to think about how persons form their inner sense of self and others. Characteristically not giving his source, Dewey did not even extend help to his curious readers who might have wondered why Rousseau said what he said about discipline in the quoted sentences.

¶21

With works like Emile, a reader must dig the concepts out through careful, sustained engagement — through the prolonged encounter that changes a person, which Walter Kaufmann memorably identified as the basis of humanistic educa- tion.²³ I do not think Dewey read Emile in a sustained way or presented it here or elsewhere to encourage others to engage in a deep, extended reading. Even with Hegel, as we’ve seen, documenting a prolonged engagement by Dewey with Hegel’s thought proves difficult. But enough has been said of that. How Kant, Hegel, and Dewey fit into the larger Geistesgeschichte remains at issue.

¶22

Johnston objects that I misunderstand Hegel by attending too much to the development of Geist and too little to positive reason, with the result that I overvalue Hegel’s Phänomenologie des Geistes (1807) and undervalue the Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften (1817, 1830), especially its volumes on Logik and Geist. In addition, he distrusts my explication of aufheben/Aufhebung and the way I make its action central in interpreting Geist, which I do buck naked, without cover of secondary literature.²⁴ Countering my account of Geist, Johnston adduces Hegel’s concept of logic, through which “the new shape of Spirit is the ‘positive result’ of the dialectical opposition made one through an intervention by speculative reason.” Johnston has given us a serious analysis that merits examination.²⁵

¶23

I respond by examining the role of speculative reason within Hegel’s logic, and in doing so, I am not abashed at leaving secondary sources aside and relying on Hegel’s text, specifically the one that Johnston uses in critiquing me. John- ston grants that my characterization of “Geist’s movement … accounts for the Begriffsbildung of the section on phenomenology in the Philosophy of Mind, but not the concept’s development in other areas of the system, for example, logic or anthropology.” Actually, I claim that the active role of Aufhebung that I explain operates centrally in all Hegel’s dialectical thinking, including in the example Johnston puts forward to counter my interpretation.

¶24

In countering my position, Johnston refers to ¶¶13– 17, Hegel’s paragraphs on “preliminary concepts” in “The Science of Logic” in the 1817 edition of his Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline.²⁶ These explain how logical operations have three moments: the determinant, the dialectical, and the speculative or positively rational, with the third moment being the source of the “positive result” on which Johnston puts great weight. In Hegel’s thinking, however, the second, dialectical moment marks the operations as dialectical and accounts for their dynamic movement. The translation Johnston uses states that “the dialectical moment is the self-suspension of such determinations [via the preceding, first moment] and their transition into an opposing form.”²⁷ This conveys a somewhat passive sense of the dialectical moment.

¶25

Here’s Hegel’s language in the original: “Das dialektische Moment ist das eigene Sich-Aufheben solcher Bestimmungen und ihr Uebergehen in ihre ent- gegengesetzte,” which we can translate literally as “The dialectical moment is the distinct self-upheaving of such determinations and their crossing over into their contraries.”²⁸ The active, substantive action of thinking arises here through the dialectical moment, through das Sich-Aufheben, “the self-upheaving.” Hegel concluded his description of this moment as follows: “the dialectic, therefore, constitutes the moving soul of further development, and is the principle whereby an immanent connection and necessity enter the contents of science; thus only within the dialectical lies the true, not external, elevation [Erhebung] beyond the finite.”²⁹ I agree with Johnston that Hegel’s logic works throughout his system, but his logic places an active Aufhebung as the moment of dialectic working every- where through the system. Positive reason in the third moment makes sense of the creative action wrought by the dialectical moment. But that creative action in the dialectical moment requires Geist to work hard to heave the given over and up.³⁰

¶26

It remains to decide what relative weight we should attach to Hegel’s Phänomenologie and to the Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften. Johnston follows Dewey and the predominant nineteenth-century interpretation valuing the philosophy, the Enzyklopädie, over the Phänomenologie. Over the past hundred years, numerous interpreters have devoted the weight of attention to the Phänomenologie. Despite its difficulty, it has had remarkable heuristic power within a historical context thoroughly different from the one in which Hegel wrote.

¶27

Educational theorists have two special reasons for weighting the Phänomenologie highly. First, it gives Hegel’s developmental account of Geist and its work in the world, which Hegel presented explicitly as the formative education of humanity, understood as a collectivity and as the person living in continuous interaction with other persons. Hegel wrote his famous “Preface” as an extended rationale of his system, comprising both the Phänomenologie and the gamut of philosophical sciences.³¹ In ¶¶1– 25, he dealt with the occasion for the complete system, and in ¶¶38– 72 he primarily treated philosophic method as it works throughout both phenomenology and philosophy. In ¶¶26– 37 he described the distinctive task of the Phenomenology, the long, complex book that imme- diately followed. Hegel asserted that the entire process presented through the Phenomenology took place as a process of Bildung, through formative education. Educators, among them Dewey, have paid it far too little attention.

¶28

A second reason for thinking the Phänomenologie central in considering Hegel and educational thought pertains to the prior discussion of Geistesgeschichte and to the two important challenges with which Naoko Saito ends her criticism of criticisms. I feel Saito’s initial sections mischaracterize my outlook, especially in suggesting that I superimpose “a Kantian conception of the individual onto [Dewey’s] completely different understanding of the self.” Here, Saito does not pick up on a quirk of my usage throughout the essay. I avoid talk of “individuals” and use it only in quotations.

¶29

Persons, not “individuals,” interest me, for strong geistesgeschichtlich rea- sons. The “individual” refers to an abstract entity, an intellectual construction in which a living person’s many entanglements with other persons, institutions, places, ideas — all the particulars of living — have been abstracted away. In con- trast, persons live historical lives, immersed in circumstances. The individual has no agency, no autonomy; it simply is what it is in an abstract description. In contrast, the person cannot escape her agency, her autonomy; she must act for better or for worse, constrained by pressing circumstances, suffering and enjoying all that which takes place in her life.³² Starting early in the nineteenth century with Johann Friedrich Herbart, education as the educative experience of persons has become overly psychologized and dehumanized through social-scientific abstrac- tion. Saito does us all a great service in pushing us to avoid dehumanization.

¶30

Of all six commentators, Saito sees most clearly that what we think about Dewey retrospectively pales relative to what we do prospectively with Dewey as an exemplar informing our efforts in our world, especially as we try to think through what educators can and should do to help people fashion their fulfillment in it. I’ll close with some reflections on Saito’s bracing challenges, in which she asks us to face up to the circumstances of our time. What can and should we do in light of our reading of Dewey to cope with the historic situation of our lives? Quoting Richard Bernstein, Saito asks, “to what extent can pragmatism transcend ‘American rootedness’ by ‘transcend[ing] the limitation of [its own] context’ in such a way as to present a third way beyond universality and particularity?”³³ Quoting Bernstein further, and through him, Hannah Arendt, she further asks, “How can pragmatism allow us ‘to think without banisters’ and at the same time not to succumb to a narcissistic despair?”³⁴

¶31

Saito identifies the first challenge as wanting to globally extend the horizon within which we think about our situation, and education in it. I join in that. But to do so, we should not begin rooting the best in pragmatism in a uniquely American context. Both C. S. Peirce and William James developed and worked in a nineteenth-century transatlantic culture, and I suspect that the American context did not particularly empower Peirce or James, but may have held them back a bit. Dewey grew up less a son of the transatlantic elite than Peirce or James, and Dewey accentuated his apparent Americanness by so clearly rejecting European predecessors, but as I’ve suggested, that also weakened the development of his thought. Pragmatism developed as an embedded part of a longer, larger movement of thought, one that grew out of Enlightenment thinking, gaining its distinctive impetus — thinking and acting without absolutes — from Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, and their peers. In this context, Arendt’s phrase “to think without banisters” merits some reflection.

¶32

Bernstein quoted the phrase in describing the creative project of pragmatism, but Arendt used it as a metaphor for a more comprehensive situation of having to think without absolutes. Those who started thinking without banisters started to do so quite some time ago. In the discussion in which Arendt introduced the metaphor, she suggested the cultural instabilities associated with it started in the seventeenth century.³⁵ By the time pragmatism got going, thinking without absolutes had become an established problem. Kant and Hegel played key early roles in shaping this effort to live without absolutes. Kant’s critical philosophy, confining our horizon to that of phenomenal awareness, effectively rendered absolutes moot. Hegel showed how the creative spirit initiates and organizes itself and its world in dialectical interaction with its phenomenal circumstances. Both had a lot of difficulty translating the clarity of their thinking into well articulated thought, but so do we all.³⁶

No banisters: we have no supports outside of us steadying or guaranteeing our exercise of judgment in our historical lives. Thinking without absolutes entails recognizing that thinking takes place in our lives — not in the abstract, but in our living — in our living in which we find ourselves constrained by meaningful circumstances, acting on our own with actual, irrevocable consequences. Garrison observes that “[o]n Dewey’s participant view, when we experience, we experience existence. What else could we experience?” I think that Dewey grasped that we experience not existence, but living, life, our lives: in our living, we create concepts like “existence” to help us manage our living. But the inertia of language is very great and no one talks about these things as clearly as we might. Dewey did not say it well. In living, we do not so much need histories of philosophy, or philosophies of history. Rather we need to think philosophically with full historical awareness.³⁷ Dewey grasped the value and importance of such thinking, but he blurred the historical awareness.

¶33

Dewey, like Kant and Hegel, saw the ineluctable need, relative to the world starting to take place, to think without absolutes, and he stands among the elect who have advanced the ability to do so. Dewey participated honorably in this effort to think without banisters and to find the words to express that in thought — but he spent a lot of unnecessary effort railing against the banisters and he skimped on his effort to translate his thinking into thought. But, and here’s the rub, Dewey did not perceive either Kant or Hegel as positive predecessors in his effort to think without absolutes and his mature writings deprecated the value of each. He saw them only relative to the world that was coming to an end. Of course, we can’t change Dewey’s mind. But we want to be able to do with Dewey what he was unable to do with his predecessors. Hence, we must ask, are we paying more attention to Dewey than he merits? And does that attention treat him too reverently as part of the world that is coming to an end? Asking these questions, I began, and reprising them, I end.