The American Evasion of Philosophy

The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism by Cornel West has been on my list for a little while.

This book was frequently cited in Reason to Believe. Since the pragmatic point of view seems instrumental to the evolution of heroes in the American consciousness, and I will have to deal with many issues regarding race or ethnicity in the photographic representations of heroes, I suspect detailed notes on West’s take on Emerson will be helpful. Not to mention other figures like John Dewey, who clearly shaped the flavor of didactic practice in America.

It is an interdisciplinary study which encompasses Emerson, Dewey, Du Bois, Trilling, Quine, Rorty, Hook, Mills, and a few others. I’ve failed in my mission to finish it within a week, so I’ve had to reposition the entry.

I find the writing style incredibly lucid and not bombastic or propagandistic. West seems very sensitive to the complexity of Emerson’s position, and the nature of the shifts in perspective over time.

The introduction is polemic, as one might expect. But it’s a polemic I largely agree with. The first chapter deals with Emerson, with glancing references to Karl Marx and Andrew Jackson. Chapter two deals with Charles Sanders Peirce and William James. Chapter three goes into great depth regarding John Dewey (finally finished!).

Introduction

West takes note of a “small scale intellectual renascence” occurring under the broad banner of pragmatism. The issues underlying this include:

First, there is a widespread disenchantment with the traditional image of philosophy as a transcendent mode of inquiry, a tribunal of reason which grounds claims about Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. . . .

Second, the disenchantment with transcendental conceptions of philosophy has lead to a preoccupation with the relation of knowledge and power, cognition and control, discourse and politics. . . .

Third, this focus on powers has returned humanistic studies to the primal stuff of human history, that is, structured and circumscribed human agency in all its various manifestations (3-4).

This trend toward a human focus is seen as a distinctly American rejection of epistemology-centered philosophy which has a deep historical tradition. The embrace of the pragmatic approach reveals an “unashamedly moral emphasis” with a concurrent “unequivocally ameliorative impulse.” It is a rejection of cynicism, and decentered ideologies:

In this world-weary period of pervasive cynicisms, nihilisms, terrorisms, and possible extermination there is a longing for norms and values that can make a difference, a yearning for principled resistance and struggle that can change our desperate plight. (4)

Obviously, though, West is not an Emersonian cheerleader for the “American Way.” The book promises to reveal the true nature of American pragmatism:

American pragmatism emerges with profound insights and myopic blindnesses, enabling strengths and debilitating weaknesses, all resulting from distinctive figures of American civilization: its revolutionary beginnings combined with a slave-based economy; its elastic liberal rule of law combined with an entrenched business dominated status quo; its hybrid culture in combination with a collective self definition as homogeneously Anglo-American; its obsession with mobility, contingency, and pecuniary liquidity combined with a deep moralistic impulse; and its impatience with theories or philosophies alongside ingenious technological innovation, political strategies of compromise, and personal devices for comfort and convenience. (5)

What a great sentence. West’s project is to revive the liberal tradition as an effective teaching tool, for both its failings and its strengths as a means of promoting change. The book has an unabashed political motive. It’s method is that of social history, and the goal is to offer an alternative to European philosophical traditions that, though they have much to teach, clearly provide a poor fit with the American psyche. Philosophy in America is ultimately tested by its utility, and West’s argument is that the strands of American pragmatism provide signposts toward developing an effective approach to our culture.

The book stems from a reaction to American intellectual culture which I share to a certain extent:

I am disturbed by the transformation of highly intelligent liberals into tendentious neoconservatives owing to crude ethnic identity-based allegiances and vulgar neonationalist sentiments. I am disappointed with the professional incorporation of former New Left activists who now often thrive on a self-serving careerism while espousing rhetorics of oppositional politics of little seriousness and integrity. More important, I am depressed about the concrete nihilism in working-class and underclass American communities— the pervasive drug addiction, suicides, alcoholism, male violence against women, white violence against black, white, yellow, and brown people, and black criminality against others, especially other black people. (7-8)

I remember a question from a black student, after we finished discussing a speech by Martin Luther King. He asked: “What heroes are left for black people today?” I mentioned West, and Henry Louis Gates, for lack of any better answer. With the big shake-up in his career last year, and the controversy over Gates’s implication of Africans as complicit in the slave trade, it becomes harder and harder to spot the a heroic type. Everyone is caught up in controversy. Now that I begin to see just how “American” West’s point of view is, I can understand a little better. Americans always reject their own philosophies.

*It freaked me out after reading West’s book (from 1989) that I read this bit from Slate:

How the anything-goes drug-and-sex party that the cultural left threw in the ’60s segued into an Amish wake featuring stern readings from the joyless work of Barbara Ehrenreich, the scoldings of Todd Gitlin, and the catechisms of Richard Goldstein is anybody’s guess. Would Emma Goldman dance with these folks? Or would she make a beeline for the house on the right, which looks like a brothel in comparison to the one on the left? I await the Powers sequel.

Chapter 1: The Emersonian Prehistory of American Pragmatism

West opens by comparing and contrasting the views of Karl Marx and Emerson. West echoes the critique I’ve often heard in the English department about Emerson’s failings, and celebrates the rhetorical nature of Emerson’s praxis:

Emerson lacks the patience and persistence to be a great poet. He does not have the deep sense of alienation and marginality to be a profound prophet. And he does not possess the talent for logical precision and sustained argumentation to be a great philosopher. Yet Emerson is more than a mediocre man of letters or a meteoric man of lectures. Rather he is a cultural critic who devised and deployed a vast array of rhetorical strategies to exert intellectual and moral leadership over a significant segment of the educated classes of his day. (10)

The key sentence which follows, sums up what most American cultural critics today strive for: “The rhetorical strategies, principally aimed at explaining America to itself, weave novel notions of power, provocation, and personality into a potent and emerging American ideology of voluntaristic invulnerability and utopian possibility” (10). This places his agenda as distinctly parallel to Marx, who also focused on “the scope of human powers and contingency of human societies” (10). Where they differ is in Marx’s projection of social transformation through class conflict, vs. Emerson’s prescription for producing social transformation through the individual empowerment of the creative impulse. The enemy, for Emerson, was stagnation. This view places his firmly at the center of American society.

According to West, the contemporary fringe of revolutionary socialist thinkers would thrill Marx, while he might be appalled by the center. On the other hand, Emerson’s views fit comfortably within the center of American culture. The reason for this rests on a complex matrix of attitudes, delineated first through an exploration of Emerson’s views on power and tradition. West explores a variety of different readings of Emerson’s view of history.

Most scholars read into Emerson’s flight from history and conflicts with authority a lack of historical consciousness. West considers this to be a parochial misreading, because Emerson was did not ignore history, but rather highlighted the difference between American history. Emerson’s language is a language of crisis. Adopting Coleridgean terms, West describes Emerson as:

an organic intellectual primarily preoccupied with the crisis of a moribund religious tradition, a nascent industrial order, and, most important, a postcolonial and imperialist nation unsure of itself and unsettled about its future. (11)

The distinction which sets Emerson at the center of the formation of the national identity is the conception of “the individual as America,” with a mythic notion of self at its core (13). To consolidate the nation, individuals must be empowered as worthy of the birth of a new nation. Reading Emerson’s journals from 1841-43, I have encountered the crushing critique of America, as it existed in Emerson’s day which West explores. Emerson saw the nation in crisis, and his rhetoric reflects deep concerns over the stilted nature of the American intellectual.

Emerson railed against limitation in any form (echoing William Blake), and unabashedly proposed the “invulnerability and unassailability” of the American way, all the while proposing a trenchant critique of it. The core values, in West’s reading of Emerson, are “contingency, change, and challenge” (15). West calls Emerson’s cheerleading for the American way the creation of the “American religion,” which extols “human power, vision, newness, and conquest” (17). However, to concentrate on these values alone without heeding the critique which Emerson provides each step along the way is to miss his point. Built into this notion of power, is the power of the individual conscience to rebel against moral transgression. Emerson, like Carlyle, had a deep distrust of the masses.

Emerson’s privileging of vision promotes “separateness over and above solidarity, detachment against association, and individual intuition against collective action” (18). But to read it simplistically is, according to West, to ignore the way in which vision is mediated— something that Emerson was well aware of. What we see with is a part of what we see through. The individual vision is but one horizon among many. West sees in Emerson’s view of history as symptomatic of “a deep desire to conceive of time, history, and authority as commensurate with an parallel to the vast open spaces of untouched woods, virgin lands, and haunting wilderness” (19). However, the catch in privileging the individual over the social is that social conscience becomes “virtually impotent and politically ineffective” (20). West proposes that this caused a deep guilt over his ineffectiveness over important issues, such as the Indian removal and abolition. Part of this is perhaps only a matter of temperament, and part of it is due to Emerson’s attraction to bourgeois respectability, despite his pronouncements to the contrary (24).

Another fundamental component to Emerson’s strategy was that of provocation. By embracing energy (again, like Blake), Emerson was both in league with and against the market forces of capitalism. Unlike Carlyle, Emerson did not pine for a golden age. His embrace of modernity meant that he employed the tropes of the market economy, often turning them against certain aspects of his culture (26). In distinct counterpoint to his rugged individualism, the Emersonian self was capitalist:

The Emersonian self— much like the protean, mobile, performative self promoted by market forces— literally feeds off of other people. It survives by means of ensuring and securing its own excitement and titillation. Nature itself becomes but a catalyst to the self’s energies, a “means of arousing his inner activity.” (27)

Thus there is an abstract individual self, which is balanced with a concrete practical self which must find nourishment from society. Due to the stratified nature of American culture, the question of personality and race must be dealt with to justify the economic relations. West characterizes Emerson as a “mild racist,” because he was firmly attached to the dominance of the white race as a natural progression of history. However, his involvement with the abolitionist movement, and with the fight for Native American rights, tempers his attitude, which was common among the liberals of his day. “All men are created equal” is a fine phrase, which forces us to define just what a “man” is. The definition, for Emerson, was not simple. He shared Carlyle’s lust for “great men,” and though he spoke up for democratic ideals publicly, his journals are fraught with conflict over the relative position of different “types” of men.

The prevailing view of race during Emerson’s time was a “scale of being” view. There was an assumed hierarchy of humanity, and the lower tiers (Africans and Native Americans) were assumed to be inferior. Genius, as a quality, was thought to be absent from these lower races. Around 1844, Emerson’s view shifted to a more evolutionary perspective, but the vestigial traces of the hierarchy remain. Emerson made personality central to his discourse, and differences in personality were still explained by race. West asserts: “As a trope in his discourse, race signifies the circumstantial, the conditioned, the fateful— that which limits the will of individuals, even exceptional ones” (31). For Emerson, race was a concept that was useful in explaining both natural history and personality.

Thus, as a limit on developing the capacities and potentialities of individual personalities and will, race was central. Great men come from great races, and thus the Norman or Anglo-Saxon imperialists stem from “animal vigor” or “an excess of virility” present in those races (34). Emerson was concerned with the ascending and descending races, and not entirely secure regarding the continuing dominance of the Anglo-Saxon race. The “cycle of fate” currently favored Western society, but its survival was far from certain. But given the promise of this new America, it seemed pointless to speculate about the potential for decline.

Power for Emerson was intermingled with notions of tradition, provocation arising from both the individual conscience and the marketplace, and personality, contingent upon circumstances including race. To say that he believed all men were created equal would be an incredible distortion. Some men, clearly, were more equal than others. West’s collation of Emerson’s primary principles is astute:

Emerson viewed knowledge not as a set of representations to be justified, grounded, or privileged, but rather as instrumental effects of human will as it is guided by human interests.

. . . Emerson prefered the language of tentative strategies, contingent functions, enabling tactics, and useful devices— mindful of the profound Wittgensteinian insight that these descriptions apply to language itself.

. . . Emerson evades modern philosophy not because it is wrong, unjustified, or uninteresting, but rather because it is antiquated, anachronistic, and outdated relative to his own chosen tasks. (36)

West places Emerson’s rhetoric alongside Andrew Jackson to draw some striking parallels:

Jackson offered them nitty-gritty activism, concrete benefits, and political involvement; Emerson, contemplative reflection, personal integrity, and individual conscience. Yet both share common rhetorics of power, expansion, and limitlessness. (39)

[Emerson] deployed a set of rhetorical strategies that attempt to both legitimize and criticize America, and situates the project within the refined and reformist elements of the middle class— the emerging and evolving class envision as the historical agent of the American religion” (41).

The concept of the “middle class” as an agent of change pervades most twentieth century historiography and rhetoric (my observation, not West’s). However, it seems clear to me that the majority who attempt to appeal to this class, are not of it. They always position themselves higher in a hierarchal view of history.

*What seems absent from West’s consideration of Emerson is the dynamic tension between morality and science, an opposition he embraces in the next chapter, but does not apply directly to Emerson.

Chapter 2: The Historic Emergence of American Pragmatism

West’s primary thesis is that the logical result of the justification of Emerson’s theodicy within “the professional perimeters of academic philosophy” is American Pragmatism. The project was driven by an interest in demystifying science, and for a few, in modernizing religion. Both aims were “shot through with moral purpose” (42). The two figures considered are Charles Sanders Peirce and Willam James.

Peirce on Scientific Method, Community, and Christian Love

West remarks that Peirce is enigmatic not only because his corpus is huge and broad, but also because his viewpoints are often underdeveloped. He is best in the areas of semiotics, mathematical logic, rational technique, and scientific method (43). The three main tenets of Peirce’s pragmatism are listed as:

1. The most reasonable method of arriving at belief is scientific method

2. Scientific method is a self-correcting social and communal process.

3. Scientific method is linked to the ultimate good, i.e., “evolutionary love.”

To justify these tenets, Peirce had to find a replacement set of values for the “modern Cartesian search and quest” (44). The fundamental errors of Cartesian scientific philosophy, in Peirce’s perception, are outlined by West as:

1. Philosophy must begin with universal doubt.

2. The ultimate test for certainty is in individual consciousness.

3. Cartesians revert to deus ex machina to explain self and world.

4. The Cartesian point of view overlooks the relation of ideas to ideas. (44)

The revision of Cartesian ideas in Peirce results in this alternative:

1. There is no power of introspection: all knowledge comes from external facts.

2. There is no power of intuition: all cognition follows logically from previous cognition.

3. There is no thinking without signs

4. There is no concept of the absolutely incognizable. (45)

West sees this as a reaction against epistemic philosophy which ignores the relation of self to nature, and communal relations among selves, and the radical contingency and revisability of these relations (45). It is also a reaction against the excesses of “rugged individualism,” as manifest in the late nineteenth century. Just as Emerson used the rhetoric of the marketplace, Peirce uses the rhetoric of the natural sciences to combat the excesses of his day arguing for individuality in community.

While on the surface this seems deeply at odds with Emersonian individuality, it is not— due to Peirce’s careful limitation of scientific method. He limits it by insisting that it is purely contingent and can only reach provisional conclusions (46). The deep ambiguity of Peirce’s philosophy rests in its continued reliance on dogma as an inextricable part of “vital” moral and political action (47). There is a distinct duality to the insistence on change, revision, and newness all the while relying on custom, habit, and traditional ethics.

Peirce’s rejection of the “vulgar professionalism” of his day rests on a base of a dual faith in scientific method and Christian faith. He railed against young men who came to Harvard to “receive a fine education and may thus be able to earn handsome incomes, and have a canvas-back and a bottle of Clos de Vouegeot for dinner . . .” (49). Christian faith was inextricably linked to a notion of evolutionary optimism about collectives, not individuals (50). Tied to the belief that knowledge was external, Peirce was in search of a method to maintain that belief at least contingently. West characterizes Peirce’s pragmatism as being “Kantianism without things-in-themselves” (51).

Ultimately, humans must accept the best available theories regarding reality; convergence of opinion is the surest method. This represents a “leap of faith” into science, which can only be contingent upon its fit with human consciousness (52). A quote from Peirce utilized in the book shows an interesting choice of modifier for the word community: “an indefinite community” (53).

It may seems strange that I should put forward three sentiments; namely interest in an indefinite community, recognition of this interest being made supreme, and hope in the unlimited continuance of intellectual activity, as indispensable requirements of logic. Yet, when we consider that logic depends on a mere struggle to escape doubt, which, as it terminates in action, must begin in emotion, and that, furthermore, the only cause of out planting ourselves on reason is that other methods of escaping doubt fail on account of the social impulse, why should we wonder to find social sentiment presupposed by reasoning? As for the other two sentiments which I find necessary, they are so only as supports and accessories of that. It interests me to notice that these three sentiments seem to be pretty much the same as that famous trio of Charity, Faith, and Hope, which in the estimation of St. Paul, are the finest and greatest of spiritual gifts. Neither Old nor New Testament is a textbook in the logic of science, but the latter is certainly the highest existing authority in regard to the disposition of the heart which a man ought to have. (53)

I find this quote incredibly moving. The acceptance of emotion as a necessity to provoke action is an interesting stroke for a man of the “scientific method.” However, I see the Cartesian principle of the necessity of doubt in there as well, although Peirce rejects it.

James on Individuality, Reconciliation, and Heroic Energies

William James, in West’s terms, “actually out-Emersons Emerson” (54). Unlike Peirce, James wishes to move the focus out of the community and back to the individual person. Common to all three however, is a sense of ethical purpose. West compares James to Huckleberry Finn, where “experience is like a river— a set of actions and reactions connected with ethical purpose.” Unlike Emerson, James is not detached and contemplative but rather a “restless patrician of the street.” According to West, “If Emerson signifies Man Thinking, and Peirce, Man Inquiring, then James discloses Man Willing” (55).

West calls Principles of Psychology of 1890 “a profound work” and cites Paul Conklin’s observation that “if psychology lost its soul with Kant, it lost its mind with James— without falling into the trap of a vulgar behaviorism” (55-6). For James, pragmatism was not a new philosophy but a method for clear thinking. James “affirms a pungent Emersonian individualism” while at the same time recommending the conciliation with past authority before attempting to assert a new one (57). Pragmatism should be a “mediating principle” between the extremes of radical individualism and structured communal authority. The tacit assumption of Jamesean pragmatism is that the mediation between two extremes must be better than either alternative taken alone.

James’ pragmatism did not rely on the mysticism of Emerson, but rather was dependent on a “precondition for volunteerism— a host upon which heroism is parasitic” (58). Like Carlyle, and Emerson, there is a deep mistrust of the common man in James. West notes that the most vehement defense of heroism in James is to be found in “The Powers of Man,” an essay published in 1910. West notes that:

James promotes a moral heroism, martial in form, that gets at the hearts and souls of people, rather than political heroism, militarist in content, that stakes out land and colonizes people.

. . .Patriotic pride and ambition in their military form are, after all, only specifications of more universal and enduring competitive passion. They are its first form, but that is no reason for supposing them to be its last form . . .

James uses the dominant imperialistic militaristic language of his time but turns it back against American imperialism and militarism. (58-9)

The pattern of West’s argument seems consistent thus far. Emerson subverted the market rhetoric, Peirce the expansionist rhetoric, and James the imperialist rhetoric. In each case, the object of study is a provocateur. He points out the strange conflict between James’s middle of the road, compromising philosophy with the revolutionary rhetoric. He returns to the subject of personality, central to Emerson, in his appraisal:

For James, the moral development of human personalities is related to but far from determined by social circumstances. Like Emerson, he is prohibited by his individualism from taking seriously fundamental social change, instead, he opts for a gradualism supported by moral critique. . . “every one should paddle their own canoe, especially on the high seas” (60)

His position in the upper class as an educator is tied to heroic notions:

. . .The best claim we can make for higher education is . . . it should enable us to know a good man when we see him . . . As a class, we college graduates should look to it that ours has spreading power. (61-62)

As was the case with Emerson’s concern with abolition, James’s anti-imperialism is tied deeply with what reflection it cast upon “his own social class and white fellow citizens” (63). However, in James we find a critique of the missionary impulse to “civilize and uplift inferior peoples and races” (63). James’s view of truth, according to West, sought to “unite the novel with the familiar with a minimum of friction” (64). New knowledge must build on the old. This contrasts deeply with Emerson’s world view of creating a new history. James’s view of truth is deeply rhetorical:

For James, Truth is not a value-free notion independent of human interests, needs, or wants, but a value-laden one shot through with specific interests, needs, or wants. (65)

While philosophically radical, West sees James as culturally conservative (66). The “plain speaking” tradition finds a philosophical underpinning in James where the pragmatic values stress “the distinctively concrete, particular, and effective” and denigrate the “abstract, general and vague” (67). James temporalizes knowledge, tying it deeply to human satisfaction and success. For West, James embodies the tensions of pragmatism in its early stages— “a professional who scorned professionalism”— and “a mediator fascinated with the extreme” (68).

Chapter 3: The Coming of Age of American Pragmatism: John Dewey

West opens this chapter with an assertive panegyric:

To put it crudely, if Emerson is the American Vico, and James and Peirce our John Stuart Mill and Immanuel Kant, then Dewey is the American Hegel and Marx! On the surface, these farfetched comparisons reveal the poverty of the American philosophical tradition, the paucity of intellectual world-historical figures in the American grain. But on a deeper level, these comparisons disclose a distinctive feature of American pragmatism: its diversity circumscribed by the Emersonian evasion of epistemology-centered philosophy and the Emersonian theodicy of the self and America. (69)

West proposes that Dewey combined the “Emersonian preoccupation with power, provocation, and personality— permeated by volunteristic, amelioristic, and activistic themes” with a new nineteenth century perception of historical consciousness which embraces its “circumstantial” character (69). West describes the Emersonian view of history as “spatial.” It was a product of the expansionist time, where a country was ripe to be populated by heroic selves. For Emerson, history was “heroic autobiography” (70).

James, on the other hand sees history as an “undifferentiated backdrop against which heroic individuals fight and struggle” (70). The historic consciousness of Peirce is described as “an evolutionary process in need of human direction and communal guidance” (70). This seems very much identical to the view of Thomas Henry Huxley to me, though West does not draw the parallel. However, he does credit Peirce with introducing the social element to offset Emersonian individuality.

The breakthrough of Dewey is that he considers systems and institutions central to pragmatic thought without surrendering individuality and personality. West clearly considers Dewey on the same level as Marx:

To cross this Rubicon is to enter a new intellectual terrain— to shun old philosophic forms of dualism, absolutism, and transcendentalism and to put forward new social theoretic understandings of knowledge, power, wealth, and culture. . . .Dewey holds pragmatism to be a historical theory of critical intelligence and scientific inquiry and of reform and amelioration. (70)

Dewey’s position is vastly different, partly because of his point of view within the system rather than outside it. West proposes that in keeping with the pragmatic tradition, he rejects the “metaphysical residue” in Marx and the “totalizing history” of Hegel (71). The move away from evolutionary views of history, or theological ones, into an embrace of historical contingency is what makes West believe that Dewey is “the sifting funnel through which much of the best but little of the worst of American culture flow” (71).

According to West, Dewey refined the definition of the American pragmatist “to be a social critic, literary critic, or a poet— in short, a participant in the social criticism and cultural creation” (71). Philosophy is reconstructed as “a mode of intellectual activity,” demystified and embracing the idea of “critical intelligence” (72). West deals with Dewey’s essay on Emerson [on my list of things to retrieve from the library next week] at great length. West sees the essay not only as homage to a “spiritual father” but as a careful justification for placing poetry and philosophical reflection at the center of social activity, not as an escape from society (73). Both poetry and philosophy, for Dewey represent the height of human intelligence.

There is a key distinction in Dewey’s vocabulary: Dewey prefers “the word intelligence to reason because of the long anti-empirical tradition of the latter word” (74). This also acts to recombine emotion and intellect; clearly, as in the work of James, emotion plays a large role in the empirical functioning of society. Dewey’s essay also attempts to establish the anti-methodical Emerson as “the philosopher of democracy” (75). West claims the Emerson fails the criterion for a “true democrat” due to his mild racism, insisting instead that it is Dewey himself who is better qualified for that title. To that end, I suspect, he continues on with a biographical sketch of Dewey.

Dewey entered the University of Vermont and graduated in a class of 18 with a “mediocre record and limited exposure to new intellectual developments” (77). However, he was exposed to T.H. Huxley, Auguste Comte, and Herbert Spencer. Dewey enrolled in the first American secular graduate school, John Hopkins in Baltimore, in 1882. Peirce was a visiting lecturer, but Dewey was not attracted to his mode of thought. Instead, he embraced the teaching of neo-Hegelian George Sylvester Morris and G. Stanley Hall, who gained the first U.S. doctorate in psychology under William James. He wrote a dissertation, now lost, on Kant’s psychology, and was invited by Morris to teach at the University of Michigan. He left in 1888 to teach at the University of Minnesota, but returned when Morris died.

Dewey shifted from psychology to ethics, partly under the influence of T.H. Green, and partly because of his new wife, Alice Chipman. Alice encouraged Dewey’s social activism, and reinforced his belief that “religious attitude was indigenous in natural experience and that theology and ecclesiastical institutions had benumbed rather than promoted it” (78-9). West notes the shift at this time to a more urban society as perhaps a motive for Dewey’s focus on radical journalism as a means of change. Along with Franklin Ford, they began Thought News to “sell critical intelligence” to the people (80-1). According to West, the practical quality of reflective intelligence was the product they were trying to sell.

However, it was not monastic scholarship they promoted, but an active engagement with the world and its affairs. Ford went over the top though, by proclaiming sentiments which forced a divisive split. Though Dewey probably didn’t disagree, he distanced himself from Ford’s promotion of:

“a new idea in journalism and education” that would “by applying the historical method to the reporting of everyday life,” bridge “the chasm between education and real life, between theory and practice” (82)

This provoked one local critic to lampoon Dewey as the new Benjamin Franklin, and call Thought News the kite which would “bring philosophy down to life and like the lightning turn the wheels of society” (82). Dewey recanted, and the publication of Thought News ceased. West acts as an apologist for Dewey’s early surrender, claiming that he merely chose to work the “middle-class channels” (84).He moved to Chicago, and opened the Dewey School in 1896. West claims that though it is easy to confuse Dewey’s “functionalistic” approach to education with a “functional,” vocational approach, his ideas were much closer to the Emersonian idea of creating citizens.

The school came to an end after a series of mergers, and the firing of his wife in 1904. Dewey immediately quit the University of Chicago, moving on to Columbia University, accepting a chair in Philosophy. If Dewey excelled in Chicago, according to West, he truly became a giant in New York. The timing of this move means that he would have been firmly entrenched there when Rexford Tugwell and Roy Stryker did their time at Columbia, too. According to West:

Dewey’s mature formulations of pragmatism were certainly encouraged by the entree of America on the international stage of history. This entree required not only “the end of American innocence,” i.e., an end to America’s naive optimism and uncritical penchant for romantic simplicity, or a “revolt against formalism,” i.e., an engagement with the dynamic reality in functional and contextual manner. (85)

This forced a redefinition of philosophy: “philosophy is neither a form of knowledge nor a means to acquire knowledge,” it is instead “a mode of cultural critical action that focus on the ways and means by which human beings have, do, and can overcome obstacles” (86). Their are distinctly spiritual overtones to Dewey’s pronouncement that “philosophy is a form of desire, of effort at action— a love, namely of wisdom” and that “whatever it is, it is not a mode of science or knowledge” (86). This is an evasion of epistemology in a distinctly Emersonian vein.

Dewey’s redefinition of philosophy as a means of action comes as a part of a total redefinition of knowledge. “Dewey’s aim is to evade the epistemological problematic of modern philosophy and thereby emancipate philosophy from its arid scholasticism and cultural conservatism” (87-8). According to West, this entails redefining experience. Most Western conceptions involve “a spectator theory of knowledge” and an “invidiously real reality” (88). West claims that Dewey wishes to show how impoverished these ideas are, which privilege the notion that philosophy somehow “knows reality” better than any other discipline. West outlines Dewey’s conception of the “five paradigmatic notions of experience” according to modern philosophy:

1. Experience is knowledge

2. Experience is psychic, and “shot through with subjectivity”

3. Experience is past directed, based in memory

4. Experience is antithetical to thought

In opposition to this, Dewey offers three definitions of experience:

1. Experience is a process of undergoing— of passion and suffering

2. Experience is simultaneous doings and sufferings— nothing eliminates risk

3. Experience creates obstacles— and obstacles create future progress

This demotes experience as an epistemic mode. West calls it the equivalence of a regicide, demoting epistemology, and like Peirce, rejecting the subjectivist turn of Descartes. West says that for Dewey, “the modern philosophic obsession with epistemic skepticism presupposes a subjectivist starting point” (89). While Dewey champions doubt as the motor which provokes change, he sidesteps modern skepticism. And dethroning the worth of memory in experience leads Dewey to quip “What should experience be but the future implicated in the present!” (90). The implications of this shift in thinking are spelled out in “The Development of American Pragmatism” (1922):

Pragmatism, thus, presents itself as an extension of historical empiricism, but with this fundamental difference, that it does not insist upon antecedent phenomena but on consequent phenomena; not upon the precedents but on the possibility of action. And this change in point of view is almost revolutionary in its consequences. An empiricism which is content with repeating facts already past has no place for possibility or for liberty. . . .

Imaginative recovery of the bygone is indispensible to successful invasion of the future, but its status is that of an instrument . . . the movement of the agent-patient to meet the future is partial and passionate; yet detached and impartial study of the past is the only alternative to luck in assuring success to passion. (91)

The role of the past, for Emerson, was future use. Hence, the rupture he proclaimed in the opening of Nature was a rejection not of history, but of a specific European history (my conjecture, not West’s). Dewey has a fourth principle of experience, as described by West: it is not particular, which is to say disconnected from fluidity or plurality (91). This opposes the subjectivist view, because it posits that experience is connected and continuous with society. These connections, according to Dewey, are not alien to experience, or supplemented by nonempirical sources (as in Kant). Connection permeates experience. West describes Emerson’s conception of history as “a refusal to tell European lies-against-time” thereby “locating America (the self) at the beginning of time” (92).

Dewey refuses to develop a theory of reality. According to West, Dewey is “accused of going from the more plausible claim that there is no ‘Reality in general’ to the more objectionable claim that no general theory of reality is possible” (94). West claims that these accusations are partially correct, because Dewey is ambiguous on this point. According to West, Peirce was essentially traditional in his philosophic view, Emerson evaded philosophy through poetry, and James saw philosophy not as social, but as a tool for healing rifts in the self. West takes up Rorty’s critique of Dewey’s metaphysics, and calls it essentially correct (96). However, West sides with Dewey’s project claiming that “the criticism of culture can take many forms, including a redescription of nature and experience” (96). According to West, Dewey’s metaphilosophy accentuates the role of critical intelligence in human experience” (97).

West isolates these key points regarding critical intelligence:

• Critical intelligence is available to all peoples

• Critical intelligence deploys scientific method— but does not constitute the real

According to West, though Dewey is thought of as a scientific thinker, “he actually only held that science provides one kind of description (or one set of descriptions) of the world among other kinds of equally acceptable descriptions, eg., those of art” (98). There are a variety of types of knowledge, with critical intelligence “that defers to no authority other than the enrichment of human experience and the alleviation of the human plight” (99). All knowledge exists only as “ingredients” for human action. West cites Bertrand Russell’s attack that “Truth is not an important concept for Dr. Dewey’s logic” (99). Philosophers argue that “truth is not reducible to warranted assertability” (100). West argues that this only assuages the conscience that there is no payoff— no work connected with truth. “In short, there is no significant difference between the nature of truth and the test of truth, but the two are never identical” (100).

The goal of Dewey, according to West was to resolve social conflict through wide consensus, and his approach was gradualist (102). West describes him as a sort of left-wing Jeffersonian, “an egalitarian more radical than liberalism and more individualistic than Marxism” (103). Dewey was in search of a culture of democracy, fueled by the experimental method. “Dewey’s ideal is neither the mythic medieval society of Morris nor the mythic Greek polis of Marx but rather a future Emersonian culture” (104). He argued for the use of experimental methods in the affairs of society, because “the ragged individualism and smothering conformity of American culture are out of step with the advances of science and technology” (105). The disparity is restated quite eloquently by West:

American culture is highly underdeveloped— anti-intellectual, escapist, repressive, hedonistic, intolerant, xenophobic— while the American economy is impressively developed, though the wealth is maldistributed. (105).

Dewey emphasizes community and communication as the means of change, though West notes that Dewey’s project “never really got off the ground” (107). Ultimately, West blames Dewey’s poor understanding of Marxism, his emphasis on conventional cultural agents, i.e. the rising middle class for his impotence. It seems apparent to me that the functionality of West’s argument rests on maximum impact— a criteria that all the figures thus far fail. I’m not so sure that there are any heroes in that regard to be found.