Pragmatism as Post-Postmodernism

Lessons from John Dewey

Larry A. Hickman

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780823283071
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Pragmatism in Philosophy

Larry A. Hickman presents John Dewey as very much at home in the busy mix of contemporary philosophy—as a thinker whose work now, more than fifty years after his death, still furnishes fresh insights into cutting-edge philosophical debates. Hickman argues that it is precisely the rich, pluralistic mix of contemporary philosophical discourse, with its competing research programs in French-inspired postmodernism, phenomenology, Critical Theory, Heidegger studies, analytic philosophy, and neopragmatism—all busily engaging, challenging, and informing one another—that invites renewed examination of Dewey's central ideas.Hickman offers a Dewey who both anticipated some of the central insights of French-inspired postmodernism and, if he were alive today, would certainly be one of its most committed critics, a Dewey who foresaw some of the most trenchant problems associated with fostering global citizenship, and a Dewey whose core ideas are often at odds with those of some of his most ardent neopragmatist interpreters.In the trio of essays that launch this book, Dewey is an observer and critic of some of the central features of French-inspired postmodernism and its American cousin, neopragmatism. In the next four, Dewey enters into dialogue with contemporary critics of technology, including Jürgen Habermas, Andrew Feenberg, and Albert Borgmann. The next two essays establish Dewey as an environmental philosopher of the first rank—a worthy conversation partner for Holmes Ralston, III, Baird Callicott, Bryan G. Norton, and Aldo Leopold. The concluding essays provide novel interpretations of Dewey's views of religious belief, the psychology of habit, philosophical anthropology, and what he termed "the epistemology industry."Pragmatism as Post-Postmodernism: Lessons from John Dewey is available from the publisher on an open-access basis.

PART ONE

POSTMODERNISM

ONE

CLASSICAL PRAGMATISM

Waiting at the End of the Road

I take as my point of departure the now famous remark by Richard Rorty, that when certain of the postmodernists reach the end of the road they are traveling they will find Dewey there waiting for them.1 The precise text I have in mind is from the introduction to The Consequences of Pragmatism. It goes like this: “On my view, James and Dewey were not only waiting at the end of the dialectical road which analytic philosophy traveled, but are waiting at the end of the road which, for example, Foucault and Deleuze are currently traveling.”2

I freely admit that when Rorty wrote this sentence he probably had something different in mind than what I will suggest here. That much is clear from his remarks on Foucault and Dewey several hundred pages later. He tells us there that the burden of his argument “is that we should see Dewey as having already gone the route Foucault is traveling, and as having arrived at the point Foucault is still trying to reach—the point at which we can make philosophical and historical (‘genealogical’) reflection useful to those, in Foucault’s phrase, ‘whose fight is located in the fine meshes of the webs of power.’”3 Rorty fleshes this point out in an admirable manner when he writes that although Foucault’s philosophy of language and his analysis of power relations seem new, Dewey anticipated both. Even further, he suggests that Foucault’s “structures of power” are not much different from what Dewey described as “structures of culture.”

Just taken as they stand, however, these remarks only allow us to conclude that Dewey is on the same road and has reached the same point that the others have traveled. In what sense is he, as Rorty put it, “waiting at the end of the road”? Rorty thinks that this is a matter of Dewey’s superior vocabulary, which “allows room for unjustifiable hope, and an ungroundable but vital sense of human solidarity.”4

In what follows I want to indicate some of the ways in which Dewey’s version of Pragmatism can be viewed as having advanced beyond the positions held by some of the authors commonly identified as postmodernists. In other words, I will suggest that Dewey’s Pragmatism can and should be viewed as a form of post-postmodernism. Of course I do not intend to argue that there is any sort of linear progress in philosophy, or that Dewey has somehow leapfrogged postmodernism. There are in fact several important senses in which Dewey is a postmodern thinker. Kwame Anthony Appiah and James Livingston, among others, have called attention to elements of postmodernism in Dewey’s thought, and Livingston has even identified some of those elements as already well formed during the first decades of the twentieth century.5 What I intend to do instead is identify some of the problems postmodernism leaves unresolved, and then indicate how I think Dewey had already dealt with them early in the twentieth century. It is in this sense that I am terming his variety of Pragmatism post-postmodernism. To put matters another way, it is postmodernism without some of its problems. To put this in some sort of perspective, however, it would probably be good to say something about how I understand the term postmodernism.6

What precisely is postmodern about postmodernism? Precision is difficult here, since the term is notoriously slippery. Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth, who has written an admirable book on the subject,7 has even gone as far as to suggest that the word may not function so much as a term of reference as a way to “hold open a space for that which exceeds expression.”8 Postmodernism does refer to specific ideas, although they must be stated negatively. It is fair to say that postmodernism rejects some of the key assumptions, methods, and conclusions of the period from Descartes to Hegel and beyond. In doing so, of course, it also rejects many of the assumptions, methods, and conclusions of the philosophical tradition going all the way back to Plato and Aristotle. In Appiah’s book, this involves the rejection of foundationalism and other forms of epistemological exclusivism, the rejection of metaphysical realism and other forms of ontological exclusivism, and the celebration of such figures as Nietzsche and Dewey.9

Ermarth has provided us with what is probably one of the best summary statements of the movement, if indeed that is what we wish to call it. She suggests that postmodernism can be recognized by two key assumptions. “First, the assumption that there is no common denominator—in ‘nature’ or ‘God’ or ‘the future’—that guarantees either the One-ness of the world or the possibility of neutral or objective thought. Second, the assumption that all human systems operate like language, being self-reflexive rather than referential systems—systems of differential function which are powerful but finite, and which construct and maintain meaning and value.”10

I find it extremely helpful that she is keen to differentiate postmodernism from its near relative, deconstruction. The latter, she argues, often gets caught up in its own circularity because of its preoccupation with what a text is not, rather than what it is. On the other hand, postmodernism is characterized by its positive efforts to construct meaning in the absence of transcendent value and to find ways of acting in the absence of absolute truth. Despite the fact that some may find this view controversial, I hope that I will be allowed to stipulate it and move on.11

While Ermarth provides a tight characterization of what the varieties of postmodernism have in common, Appiah offers a similarly precise characterization of how they differ by discipline. In technical philosophy, as I have already indicated, Appiah thinks that postmodernism involves the rejection of epistemological and ontological exclusivism and the celebration of such figures as Nietzsche and Dewey. In architecture, postmodernism rejects the exclusivism of function (the styles of Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe) in favor of playfulness and pastiche. Postmodernist architects would include the great Antonio Gaudí of Catalonia, as well as the less accomplished but equally playful designers of taco restaurants in the American Southwest that resemble giant sombreros. And then of course there is the incomparable postmodernist architecture of Las Vegas. A third type of postmodernism is encountered in literature, where, Appiah tells us, it is a reaction against the high seriousness of authors such as Marcel Proust, T. S. Eliot, and Virginia Woolf. This, I suppose, implies a turn toward the self-reflexive playfulness of authors such as James Joyce and Donald Barthelme. In addition, given the preoccupation of some French and American philosophers with the permutations of the trope, perhaps their work should be considered literary, rather than philosophical, postmodernism. Rorty, a neopragmatist trained in philosophy, was most recently a professor of comparative literature. Appiah finds a fourth type of postmodernism exhibited in political theory. In this case it rejects “scientific” Marxism and other monolithic enterprises and turns instead to a celebration of pluralism and perspectivism. The evolution of the Frankfurt School, to take one important example, supports Appiah’s characterization of political postmodernism. First-generation Critical Theorists, such as Adorno, regarded technoscience as reified ideology, operating apart from and opposed to the activities of the lifeworld. Second-generation Critical Theorists, such as Habermas, focused on social problems of constitutionality and consensus-making. And their third-generation heirs, such as Feenberg and Axel Honneth, by regarding technoscience as embedded in society, thus concentrate on problems of globalization, pluralism, and multiculturalism. (See chapters 4 and 5.)

What all of this boils down to for Appiah is space: postmodernism is, in his view, “a new way of understanding the multiplication of distinctions that flows from the need to clear oneself a space; the need that drives the underlying dynamic of cultural modernity.” “Modernism,” he writes, “saw the economization of the world as the triumph of reason; postmodernism rejects that claim, allowing in the realm of theory the same multiplication of distinctions we see in the cultures it seeks to understand.”12 For Appiah, a close observer of modernism in the form of colonialism, postmodernism is culturally liberating. In fact, in various manifestations, postmodernism puts the individual front and center. As a system of communication, postmodernism is more or less the celebration of individual and group differences under an overarching communications superstructure that eventually replaces many of the functions of the nation-state, as Marshall McLuhan13 described in great detail during the 1960s. In its commercial, and even in its educational, manifestations, it may well turn out to be what some entrepreneurs are now calling “mass customization”—the mass production of objects tailored to individual wants and needs.

At this point it seems appropriate to recall one of the best known statements of postmodernism: the well known remark by Lyotard. In his words, a crucial feature of “the postmodern condition” is the end of “the grand narrative.” What does this mean? Even more to the point of the title of this chapter, what does it mean in terms of how we should understand Dewey’s work? Does he avoid some of the problems that continue to plague postmodernism?

If the end of the grand narrative means recognition of the futility of attempts to build metaphysical systems such as those constructed by Hegel and Marx, systems that attempt to encompass everything, then Dewey was already a card-carrying postmodernist more than a century ago. In a letter to James Rowland Angell, dated May 10, 1893, for example, he wrote, “Metaphysics has had its day, and if the truths which Hegel saw cannot be stated as direct, practical truths, they are not true.”14 An indication of Dewey’s disdain for systematic metaphysics, metaphysics-as-usual, can be found even in familiar remarks addressed to his wife, Alice. In 1891, two years before his “metaphysics has had its day” remark to Angell, Dewey wrote to Alice that he had been approached by a speculator at the Chicago Board of Trade, a certain Mr. Van Ostrand, who had been working on a philosophical “scheme.” Van Ostrand had offered Dewey $100 to serve as a kind of philosophical consultant. (This was, by the way, no mean sum. We know that just eighteen months earlier Dewey’s annual salary was $2,200.) “For the first time on record,” he told Alice, “in our experience at least, metaphysics made the connexion with the objective world—… if there are many men like him in Chicago, I’ll resign & go out there & hang up a sign ‘Dr. Dewey, Metaphysical healer.’”15

In short, if Lyotard’s remark about master narratives means that metaphysics-as-system-that-accounts-for-everything16 is defunct, then Dewey was a postmodernist almost a century before Lyotard’s famous dictum was published in 1979.

There is a second possible interpretation of Lyotard’s remark. The end of the master narrative might be taken to mean that metaphysics in any form is impossible because it claims too much as a privileged position, that the varieties of human experience are at their most fundamental levels ungrounded and incommensurable. On this reading, the best that we can do is cope with that fact by constructing whatever solidarity we can in our roles as “ironists,” in Rorty’s term, that is, people who know that their brave front and best efforts may be futile. As Rorty puts it, “Liberals have come to expect philosophy to do a certain job—namely, answering questions like ‘Why not be cruel?’ and ‘Why be kind?’—and they feel that any philosophy which refuses this assignment must be heartless. But that expectation is a result of a metaphysical upbringing. If we could get rid of the expectation, liberals would not ask ironist philosophy to do a job which it cannot do, and which it defines itself as unable to do.”17

So this second possibility seems to reflect Rorty’s version of the postmodernist distaste for metaphysics. If we accept this alternative, then Dewey was not a postmodernist, but held in fact a position that is much richer and goes well beyond that feckless view of matters. In other words, Dewey was a post-postmodernist.

Of course there is an irony that Rorty may not have fully appreciated. The positivism he dislikes and the postmodernism he apparently likes, share an interesting trait: they both hold the position that philosophy is incapable of addressing ethical issues such as the ones that Rorty raised in the passage just quoted. In the case of positivism it is because such issues are consigned to the jam-packed realm of everything that is noncognitive. In the case of Rortian postmodernism, it is because there is no adequate common denominator for human experience.) Bruno Latour is among the few thinkers who have noted this remarkable situation. In a 1993 interview, for example, he charged “much of postmodernism” with being scientistic: “They are not indignant at the ahuman dimension of technology—again they leave indignation to the moderns—no, they like it. They relish its completely naked, sleek, ahuman aspect. In other words, they accept the disenchantment argument, but they just take it as a positive feature instead of a negative one.”18

How did Dewey go beyond postmodernism in this context? How did he resolve some of its core difficulties? Put simply, he argued that there is a commonality of human experience that can ultimately trump the compartmentalizing, hyperrelativistic tendencies latent in most forms of postmodernism. This view, which is a part of his evolutionary naturalism, is grounded in the empirical observations and experimental work of anthropologists and evolutionary biologists. For human beings inquiry is an essential component of communication, which can construct pluralistic links across otherwise isolated cultures and disciplines. Another important common feature humans share, Dewey contends, is our ability to do the type of cognitive, reconstructive work with respect to our environing conditions, including our social conditions, that allows us to think in terms of those common features.

This general cultural point is sharpened and called upon to do a prodigious amount of philosophical work in Dewey’s famous remark about the role of philosophy as “liaison officer.” In Experience and Nature he writes, “Thus philosophy as a critical organ becomes in effect a messenger, a liaison officer, making reciprocally intelligible voices speaking provincial tongues, and thereby enlarging as well as rectifying the meanings with which they are charged” (LW 1.306). This metaphor, by the way, has distinct advantages over some of its alternatives. It is more positive than getting flies out of fly bottles, it is more active than philosophy as platzhalter, and it is less imperious than philosophy as platzfinder. The first of these alternative metaphors, of course, we owe to Wittgenstein. The latter two we owe to Habermas, who accepts the first and rejects the second.

Dewey is thus a postmodernist in the sense that he rejects the notion that there is some foundation of certainty on which we can stand. He made that much clear early on, and put the matter to rest in his important little book The Quest for Certainty. But he is post-postmodernist in the sense that he reconstructed and put to work what the postmodernists had simply dismissed: a set of organic functions or activities that are natural to human beings as a group, that reveal their common evolution, and that can be employed as a part of the process of testing and securing...