John Dewey and Daoist Thought

Experiments in Intra-cultural Philosophy, Volume One

Jim Behuniak, Jim Behuniak, Jr.

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781438474502, 9781438474496
• eBook ISBN: 9781438474519
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Eastern Philosophy

Proposes an "intra-cultural philosophy" based on John Dewey's "cultural turn" and promotes Daoist thought as a resource that can help to reconstruct outmoded assumptions that continue to shape how we currently think.

In this timely and original work, Dewey's late-period "cultural turn" is recovered and "intra-cultural philosophy" proposed as its next logical step-a step beyond what is commonly known as comparative philosophy. The first of two volumes, John Dewey and Daoist Thought argues that early Chinese thought is poised to join forces with Dewey in meeting our most urgent cultural needs: namely, helping us to correct our outdated Greek-medieval assumptions, especially where these result in pre-Darwinian inferences about the world.

Relying on the latest research in both Chinese and American philosophies, Jim Behuniak establishes "specific philosophical relationships" between Dewey's ideas and early Daoist thought, suggesting how, together, they can assist us in getting our thinking "back in gear" with the world as it is currently known through the biological, physical, and cognitive sciences. Topics covered include the organization of organic form, teleology, cosmology, knowledge, the body, and technolog-thus engaging Dewey with themes generally associated with Daoist thought. Volume one works to establish "Chinese natural philosophy" as an empirical framework in which to consider cultural-level phenomena in volume two.

VOLUME ONE

Part I

1

John Dewey and Intra-cultural Philosophy

The world today is a very special world. Cultures and civilizations are coming into contact to a degree that has never before been possible. Humans have known for a long time that the earth was round. Now we are discovering that knowledge, as it circulates about the world, can also be thought of as being round.

—John Dewey, Guangdong Educational Association, July 1921

Philosophy East and West

The first two East-West Philosophers’ Conferences at the University of Hawai’i constitute an important chapter in the history of comparative philosophy. Wing-tsit Chan recalls the first meeting in 1939 as a “very small beginning,” one that served primarily as the impetus for F. S. C. Northrop’s thesis that East and West represented two contrasting styles of thought. As Chan remembers, “We saw the world as two halves, East and West.” Accordingly, in his subsequent 1946 work, The Meeting of East and West, Northrop “sharply contrasted the entire East, as using doctrines out of concepts by intuition, to the [entire] West, as constructing its doctrines out of concepts by postulation.”1 The purpose of the second meeting in 1949 was to study the possibility of achieving a “world philosophical synthesis” between East and West. This broader perspective would be cognizant of similarities as well as differences. Areas of agreement on issues in metaphysics, ethics, and social theory were duly noted at the conference.2 But since there could be no “orchestrated unity” composed of identical principles alone, differences were refined and preserved, these being important as the “basis of the synthesis.”3 Pursuant to the goal of achieving this world philosophical synthesis, Charles A. Moore founded the journal Philosophy East and West in 1951.

It is unlikely that John Dewey ever read The Meeting of East and West. Friends had advised him against it. “That Northrop book I mentioned the other day is not worth looking at,” Arthur Bentley told him.4 “Full of sweeping statements, more stimulating than reliable,” is what Albert Barnes had learned.5 Dewey saw reviews of the book, and suggested to Sing-nan Fen that a “critical account of [Northrop’s book] might be a good jumping off place for publication.”6 But it was Dewey who would contribute to East-West philosophy at this juncture. In 1950, he wrote a letter to Moore in which he had some “complimentary things” to say about the forthcoming journal.7 Moore wrote back, asking permission to include parts of Dewey’s letter in the “News and Notes” section of the first issue. Moore stated his preference, however, that Dewey write a fresh statement “expressing [his] conviction about the specific philosophical relationship between Oriental and Occidental philosophy or, perhaps, stating [his] ideas as to the best philosophical approach to a substantial synthesis of East and West.”8 In response, Dewey composed what would become the first article ever to appear in Philosophy East and West—a short piece entitled “On Philosophical Synthesis.”

Fittingly, the article was written in Hawai’i. Hoping to improve his declining health, Dewey sailed with his family for Honolulu just weeks after receiving Moore’s letter. When the SS President Wilson docked on January 17, 1951, a delegation from the University of Hawai’i came to receive them at the pier.9 Dewey’s “valuable article” would be written seaside on Waikīkī beach, under a canopy of palms in the breeze-swept cottages of the Halekulani resort.10 Though modest in length, the vision it relates is remarkable for its clarity, sophistication, and foresight. It is also noteworthy as a bold rejection of Northrop’s thesis that “East” and “West” are discrete and separable entities. In its entirety, this is what Dewey wrote:

I think that the most important function your journal can perform in bringing about the ultimate objective of a “substantial synthesis of East and West” is to help break down the notion that there is such a thing as a “West” and “East” that have to be synthesized. There are great and fundamental differences in the East just as there are in the West. The cultural matrix of China, Indonesia, Japan, India, and Asiatic Russia is not a single “block” affair. Nor is the cultural matrix of the West. The differences between Latin and French and Germanic cultures on the continent of Europe, and the differences between these and the culture of England on the one hand and the culture of the United States on the other (not to mention Canadian and Latin American difference), are extremely important for an understanding of the West. Some of the elements in Western cultures and Eastern cultures are so closely allied that the problem of “synthesizing” them does not exist when they are taken in isolation. But the point is that none of these elements—in the East or the West—is in isolation. They are all interwoven in a vast variety of ways in the historico-cultural process. The basic prerequisite for any fruitful development of inter-cultural relations—of which philosophy is simply one constituent part—is an understanding and appreciation of the complexities, differences, and ramifying interrelationships both within any given country and among the countries, East and West, whether taken separately or together.

What I have just said might at other times and under other circumstances be considered so obvious as to be platitudinous. But at the present time and in the present circumstances, I venture to think that it is far from being such. Under the pressure of political blocs that are now being formed East and West it is all too easy to think that there are cultural “blocks” of corresponding orientation. To adapt a phrase of William James, there are no “cultural block universes” and the hope of free men everywhere is to prevent any such “cultural block universes” from ever arising and fixing themselves upon all mankind or any portion of mankind. To the extent that your journal can keep the idea open and working that there are “specific philosophical relationships” to be explored in the West and in the East and between the West and the East you will, I think, be contributing most fruitfully and dynamically to the enlightenment and betterment of the human estate.11

The motive behind Dewey’s comments can be understood on different levels. On one level, they reflect his alarm at the emerging Cold War.12 On a deeper level, however, they reflect his current thinking on “the intimate connection of philosophical systems with culture,” a preoccupation that absorbed him during the final years of his life.13

This latter dimension is now better understood thanks to the recent recovery of the manuscript, Unmodern Philosophy and Modern Philosophy.14 This remarkable work, one that Dewey considered “the summation of his philosophical beliefs throughout the years,” was never finished and then reportedly lost in 1947.15 Dewey conceded before the manuscript went missing that he was not satisfied with its progress, and expressed frustration that the project “never would jell.” Significant drafts, however, have now been recovered from the Dewey archives, and despite their fragmentary nature, there are clear objectives driving the book.

The intent of the project was twofold. First, Dewey wanted to establish “culture” as the irreducible context in which everything human occurs. According to Phillip Deen, Dewey intended in this work to make culture “the most inclusive category within which various regions of human life interact.” Second, Dewey sought to trace the sociocultural history of Western philosophy and to contextualize its problems accordingly. “The purpose of this book,” Dewey writes, “is to discover the cultural source and context of problems and distinctions which have taken on technical philosophical meaning.”16 To this end, the work was divided into two parts. The first part was devoted to the analysis of Western intellectual history, especially the role that Greek-medieval assumptions played in the modern period. The second part was a critical treatment of certain dualisms that persisted as a result: “Things/Persons,” “Mind/Body,” “Theory/Practice,” “Material/Ideal,” and “Nature/Human.”

Had the manuscript been fully realized and published in 1947, it likely would have impacted the East-West Philosophers’ Conference in 1949. Dewey regarded the project as one with direct relevance to East-West philosophy. He had come to recognize that certain puzzles that occupied Western philosophy “played no particular role in [Chinese] systems.” This suggested to him that such problems had their sources in the “cultural history of the European world rather than in the factual subject matters” under consideration.17 He thus notes in his drafts that one of the wider ends served in Unmodern Philosophy would be the “realization that a problem that appears to be the same problem when it is stated in general terms … has, in fact, different contents and directions according to the cultural situation in which it is bred and nourished.” Such differences, he notes, are “of utmost import for the hardly as yet commenced comparative study of the course taken by philosophers in China and India in their contrast with the European tradition.”18

Such sensitivity to the cultural situation of world philosophies was not universally shared at the 1949 conference. The Sinologist Herrlee C. Creel, for instance, laments the treatment of Chinese philosophy at the Second East-West Philosophers’ Conference, where scholars “too seldom tried to analyze Chinese thinking on its own grounds and in its own terms.”19 As Moore relates, one of the noteworthy achievements of the 1949 conference was to establish that, “the philosophy of China must not be overlooked … nor must it be considered similar to or identical with the philosophy of India simply because both...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Prelude
• Acknowledgments
• Part I
• Part II
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index
• Back Cover