Ecological Existentialism in a Deweyan Vein:
Finitude, Heroism, and Prophecy
A number of thinkers find fault with what they see as Dewey’s blindness to the
existential realities of existence. Hilary Putnam claims that Dewey's vision falls short "when we
try to apply it to individual existential choices,"1 William Caspary concurs, saying, “Dewey
neglects the tragic dimension in which characters are caught up in the anguish and dire
consequences of irresolvable conflict.”2 Kenneth Stikkers questions whether Dewey adequately
understands that "Existence is not merely precarious...it is disastrous; life does not merely teeter
on the edge of a cliff; rather, from the beginning, it hurls headlong onto the rocks."3 And
William Barrett argues against Dewey’s inclusion as an existentialist thinker, despite Dewey’s
recognition of the “‘negative’ and destructive side of philosophy” and presentation of the “image
of man as an earth-bound and time-bound creature” because, for Barrett, Dewey never calls
intelligence or the scientific method into question and “never goes past this [biological and
social] context into that deepest center of the human person where fear and trembling start.”4
Sidney Hook, however, believes that Dewey’s work can be the basis for “existentialism without
tears.”5 This paper will examine what resources are available within Dewey’s thought for
addressing the irreconcilable, the tragic, and the disastrous and will argue that an ecological
understanding of the individual must have the means for taking up these concerns, even if
Dewey’s own thought too often falls short.
1
Hilary Putnam, Renewing Philosophy, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 190.
William Caspary, Dewey on Democracy (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2000), 129. (DOUBLE CHECK PAGE***)
3
Stikkers, 65.
4
William Barrett, Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy (New York: Double-Day/Anchor, 1958), 1920.
5
Sidney Hook, “The Quest for Certainty—Existentialism without Tears,” in Pragmatism and the Tragic Sense of
Life (New York: Basic Books, 1974), 44-60.
22
1
Quite often, people dismiss Dewey as naive and overly optimistic. For instance, Stanley
Cavell claims that for Dewey, "the relation between science and philosophy is unproblematic"
and that the Deweyan (from an Emersonian perspective) is "apt to seem an enlightened child,
toying with the means of destruction, stinting the means of instruction, of provoking the self to
work."6 He claims that Dewey fits Tocqueville's characterization of the American, with his
"lively faith in the perfectibility of man," and his assessment of "society as a body in a state of
improvement, humanity as a changing scene, in which nothing is, or ought to be, permanent."7
Although this assessment is a caricature at best, Dewey himself notes in "Creative Democracy:
The Task before Us" that he has "been accused more than once and from opposed quarters of an
undue, a utopian faith in the possibilities of intelligence and in education as a correlate of
intelligence" (LW 14:227). But despite his faith in human possibilities, Dewey is no utopian.
Scott Russell Sanders' assessment of himself fits equally as well for Dewey:
So I write always in the face of grief. I write about hope because I wrestle
with despair. I describe glimpses of paradise as a measure of what we
might aspire to and of the direction we might go. To write about the
natural order that sustains us is not to ignore the human condition, but to
insist on our most fundamental needs—for light and earth and water and
air, for companions, for beauty, meaning, grace.8
Dewey, like Sanders, holds up a vision of the possible so that we can better see the actual in its
light.
6
Stanley Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 15-16.
7
Cavell, Conditions, 15, quoting Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Henry Reeves (New York,
Vintage, 1945).
8
Scott Russell Sanders, The Country of Language (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 1999), 38.
2
However, in Renewing Philosophy, Putnam argues that Dewey’s moral philosophy falls
short when applied to “individual existential choices,” especially when “[i]ndividuality is at
stake.”9 For Putnam, Dewey’s reliance upon scientific method and “intelligently guided
experimentation” does not help, primarily because in making such a choice, the individual is
attempting to authentically be what the individual already is or at least become what the
individual will be.10 In questions of irreconcilable options, such as Sartre’s Pierre, who must
choose between joining the French Resistance or staying home with his ailing mother, critical
inquiry and the scientific method seem to be irrelevant.
However, Putnam focuses too much on Dewey’s advocacy of experimentation and
inquiry, and he overlooks the importance these and other elements of Dewey’s thought can have
in making these types of decisions. Dewey does not have a specific answer for what Pierre
should do with his life, because the particular individual must take up his/her life as a process of
self-creation within a range of viable possibilities. For Dewey, such is the nature of moral
inquiry:
Moral theory can (i) generalize the types of moral conflicts which arise, thus
enabling a perplexed and doubtful individual to clarify his own particular problem
by placing it in a larger context; it can (ii) state the leading ways in which such
problems have been intellectually dealt with by those who have thought upon
such matters; it can (iii) render personal reflection more systematic and
enlightened, suggesting alternatives that might otherwise be overlooked, and
stimulating greater consistency in judgment. But it does not offer a table of
commandments in a catechism in which answers are as definite as are the
9
Hilary Putnam, “A Reconsideration of Deweyan Democracy” in Renewing Philosophy, (Cambridge: Harvard UP,
1994), 190-191.
10
Ibid.
3
questions which are asked. It can render personal choice more intelligent, but it
cannot take the place of personal decision, which must be made in every case of
moral perplexity….the attempt to set up ready-made conclusions contradicts the
very nature of reflective morality. (LW 7:166).
Only a system that attempts to undermine the individual’s freedom of self-determination will
specify the individual’s “proper” life path. Such a system runs the risk of promoting an ethical
monoculture, something antithetical to the freedoms valued by Putnam. Dewey understands the
precariousness of nature and realizes that individuals must pick their way through the options
before them. His philosophy provides tools, critical inquiry and experimentation among them, to
better enable this navigation. It is certainly distressing that none of us can be everything we want
to be. Each of us faces moments of decision regarding self-creation which require leaps of faith.
In order to live authentically, the individual must finally make that leap alone.11 Anything else
means living life second-hand. However, Dewey’s philosophy does not leave the individual
without methods of assessing options. But those methods are not replacements for the leap.
Melvin Rogers, in responding to Putnam’s complaint, says:
But the fact that Dewey does not spend a great deal of time on tragic conflicts, I
think, does not point to an unwillingness to acknowledge them or inattentiveness
to the pluralism conflicts imply….[H]e understands these moments to be a feature
of our social and political world, rather than its exclusive feature….Recall
[Dewey’s] earlier remark: ‘Sometimes a juncture is so critical that a person…feels
that his future his very being, is at stake.’ But he continues on a Jamesian note,
remarking that these cases are important for theoretical reflection because ‘some
11
This is meant in a functional sense, of course. The Deweyan individual is a creature of society, even while in
isolation. See his discussion of Robinson Crusoe in “Individuality in Education,” MW 15:178-179.
4
degree of what is conspicuous in these momentous cases is found in every
voluntary decision.12
Dewey’s understanding of the individual is such that every decision provides a means by which
the individual takes up the process of self-development. Certainly the momentous decisions
shape individuals, but the smaller, seemingly inconsequential acts do so as well. For instance,
how often do people reach middle age to be startled by the appearance of health problems that
have been slowly building throughout the course of their lives?
So Rogers believes that Dewey does recognize the importance of individual existential
choices, and that he extends the importance beyond momentous decisions to include those
seemingly less important choices as well. But does his philosophy offer anything for the
individual actually in the position of having to choose? For Putnam is correct: there are
decisions that cannot be tested using the experimental method. Some decisions are irrevocable
and must be made on the fly, while others must be made without the tools necessary for proper
experimentation. And this is where Dewey’s focus on community and communication, as well
as his idea of dramatic rehearsal become important.
For Dewey does not believe that we make our irrevocable decisions in a vacuum. We
make our decisions within a community, even as we struggle against living life second-hand by
simply following social dictates. When we push for our own development, we do so in
communication with those around us, including those who will push us to push ourselves. The
moment of the existential leap, even if done alone, cannot be separated from the communicative
events that inform it. Through communication, the individual can better unpack his or her
values, desires, ambitions, and fears—all of which aid in making irrevocable decisions.
12
Melvin Rogers, The Undiscovered Dewey: Religion, Morality, and the Ethos of Democracy, (New York:
Columbia UP, 2009), 188.
5
Dramatic rehearsal also provides a means of better approaching such decisions. It occurs
when an individual uses imagination to explore “various competing possible lines of
action….Thought runs ahead and foresees outcomes, and thereby avoids having to await the
instruction of actual failure and disaster. An act overtly tried out is irrevocable, its consequences
cannot be blotted out. An act tried out in imagination is not final or fatal. It is retrievable” (MW
14:132-133). Dramatic rehearsal allows us to project ourselves forward in our imagination in
order to understand more clearly how we will embody and carry forward a particular action,
whether “momentous” or ordinary.
When the individual is understood as separate or alienated from nature and society, such
a process seems fairly straightforward. But how does understanding the individual as ecological
affect this process of making momentous as well as ordinary decisions? For one thing, we must
look more closely at Stikkers’ critique. For Stikkers, Dewey’s philosophy “fails to address the
endurance of suffering and thereby inadequately concerns the meaning of suffering.”13 But when
we understand the individual as ecological—as inseparable from the biological and social
communities of which we are a part—we are forced to recognize and address these very
concerns, even if Dewey himself may not have sufficiently done so in his own works.
Recognition of our embedment within biological and social contexts (all of which are shot
through with suffering, danger, and irreconcilable choices) calls forth this existential fear. The
child negotiating gang-land encounters and the biologist examining the current cascade of
extinctions both recognize their embedment within a precarious and even disastrous context, and
they must address the resultant existential fear and trembling. An ecological model that
emphasizes our biological and social context, far from buffering us, instead emphasizes our
condition as beings which exist within a precarious, disastrous, and all-too-often tragic milieu.
13
Stikkers, 72.
6
And Dewey’s presentation of the individual can be seen in just such an ecological way.
Humans are embedded within a biological and cultural context, and because of this
embedment—if we are to act with the critical intelligence Dewey continually calls for—we must
examine our choices not only as they relate immediately to ourselves and those nearest to us, but
also as they send ripples throughout the web of relations that form our existence. When we do
this, we are forced to confront the extent and the “endurance of suffering.” Critical inquiry, far
from allowing escape from the suffering, highlights its endurance and the precariousness not
only of ourselves but of entire systems in which we exist.
THE PRECARIOUS, TRAGIC, AND BANAL IN DEWEY’S WORKS:
Although much of Dewey’s work calls for faith in the possibilities of human existence,
he does not ignore the precarious, the banal, and the tragic. We see this in Experience and
Nature, when Dewey claims:
Man finds himself living in an aleatory world; his existence involves, to put it
baldly, a gamble. The world is a scene of risk; it is uncertain, unstable, uncannily
unstable. Its dangers are irregular, inconstant, not to be counted upon as to their
times and seasons….Plague, famine, failure of crops, disease, death, defeat in
battle, are always just around the corner, and so are abundance, strength, victory,
festival, and song. Luck is proverbially both good and bad in its distributions.
The sacred and the accursed are potentialities of the same situation; and there is
no category of things which has not embodied the sacred and accursed: persons,
words, places, times, directions in space, stones, winds, animals, stars. (LW 1:43)
7
For Dewey, there are possibilities for both disaster and triumph, and while hard work and critical
intelligence may influence the outcome, there are features of existence which cannot be
controlled. We live in a tychistic universe, in which our best laid plans all too often go awry.
According to Dewey, individuals continually move through “phases in which the
organism falls out of step with the march of surrounding things and then recovers unison with
it—either through effort of by some happy chance” (LW 10:19). Growth occurs when these
processes lead to a deeper enrichment. However, “If the gap between organism and environment
is too wide, the creature dies. If its activity is not enhanced by the temporary alienation, it
merely subsists” (LW 10:19-20). In this passage, Dewey does not address what occurs if the
organism closes the gap only to find itself in a diminished or less secure position; however, in
The Public and Its Problems, he speaks of the “weakening of vigor and…sapping of energy that
emanate from the absence of constructive opportunity” (LW 5:80). As McDermott rightly
claims, passages such as these call into question Dewey’s supposed optimism, for growth is by
no means guaranteed: “A closer look, however, reveals that alienation and death present
themselves in the course of events, and the line between the temporary alienation necessary for
the enhancement of life and the gap of permanent alienation which spells death, physical or
spiritual, is a thin one.”14
Dewey’s “The Lost Individual” captures just such alienation in his description of the fear,
anxiety, and desperation so often felt by American workers: “individuals are confused and
bewildered,” they “vibrate between a past that is intellectually too empty to give stability and a
present that is too diversely crowded and chaotic to afford balance or direction to ideas and
emotion” (LW 5:66, 67). They face insecurity that “cuts deeper and extends more widely than
bare unemployment. Fear of loss of work, dread of the oncoming of old age, create anxiety and
14
John McDermott, [2 volume Dewey collection], xxix.
8
eat into self-respect in a way that impairs personal dignity. Where fears abound, courageous and
robust individuality is undermined.” In place of confidence, we find “unrest, impatience,
irritation and hurry” (LW 5:68). For Dewey, social conditions have produced a pathological
state: “Feverish love of anything as long as it is a change which is distracting, impatience,
unsettlement, nervous discontentment, and desire for excitement, are not native to human nature”
(LW 5:68). But they are the conditions under which most Americans now live.
Besides nervous anxiety there is a sense of colorlessness, banality, or what Dewey calls
the anesthetic. Dewey speaks of the “colorless conformity” which is the mark of one type
negative morals: “Its commonest form is the protective coloration of a neutral respectability, an
insipidity of character. For one man who thanks God that he is not as other men there are a
thousand to offer thanks that they are as other men, sufficiently as others are to escape
attention….Conventional morality is a drab morality, in which the only fatal thing is to be
conspicuous” (MW 14:6). But this colorlessness quite often extends into every aspect of an
individual’s existence. Experience becomes anesthetic when “[t]hings happen, but they are
neither definitely included nor decisively excluded; we drift. We yield according to external
pressure, or evade and compromise” (LW 10:46). Unfortunately, the anesthetic becomes the
norm, as most of life becomes either a “loose succession that does not begin at any particular
place and that ends—in the sense of ceasing—at no particular place” or “arrest, constriction,
proceeding from parts having only a mechanical connection with the other” (LW 10:47). Just as
Dewey’s The Public and Its Problems captures the anxiety and bewilderment caused by
alienation, so Art as Experience presents the anesthetic aspect of contemporary existence,
appearing in “the humdrum; slackness of loose ends; submission to convention in practice and
procedure[, r]igid abstinence, coerced submission, tightness on one side and dissipation,
9
incoherence and aimless indulgence on the other” (LW 10:47). For Dewey, most of experience
has become anesthetic, and because such a condition has become the norm (LW 10:47), our
cultural habits or character is likewise anesthetic.
Aaron Smuts, in “Anesthetic Experience,” takes up this concern: “Dewey diagnoses a
rarely recognized experiential ailment—what might be called the anesthetic malady. This illness
generally results when experience is deprived of meaning due to the poverty of the predominant
forms of activity available in one’s environment.”15 Although rarely recognized, the malady is
certainly not rare, and the typical solutions address symptoms, not the underlying conditions.
True solution would require radical reconstruction not only of the particular individual’s
circumstances but a transformation of the broader environment—all the elements which
undermine aesthetic possibility. For Smuts, “The diagnosis and alteration of those activities,
situations, and structures that prevent experience from being an experience is a crucial task for
philosophers concerned with identifying the optimum conditions for human flourishing.”16
Dewey’s writings, both academic and popular, fit this description and reflect his recognition of
the banal or anesthetic qualities of existence.
In addition to the precarious and the banal, Dewey also acknowledges the tragic as a
central feature of human existence. In the original opening chapter to Experience and Nature,
Dewey speaks of “moving fatally to tragic destiny” (LW 1:368) and the “fatal implication in the
remote” (LW 1:369). Dewey, so opposed to supernatural explanations, frames tragedy and
destiny in naturalistic terms and sees them as of our own making, for individuals as well as for
communities. Each generation bequeaths a set of social and biological circumstances to the next,
and that generation must take up those conditions in its attempt to flourish. In the process, we
15
16
Aaron Smuts, “Anesthetic Experience,” Philosophy and Literature 29, no.1 (April 2005): 97.
Ibid.
10
create a sort of destiny for ourselves as these choices produce habits that form the basis of most
of our behavior. Critical inquiry, communication, and dramatic rehearsal all aid us in this
process, yet they are usually applied poorly, if at all. Destruction of rainforests, the biological
and social consequences of factory farming, and the economic consequences of long-term U.S.
banking practices all serve as examples of the fatal implication in the remote and of our moving
fatally to tragic destiny. Our earlier choices have set up organic chains of events which have
created the circumstances of today. As each set of practices has become more habitual and
entrenched, they have become increasingly difficult to change. This is the only sense in which
destiny has any meaning within a Deweyan scheme. Certainly there are opportunities for
change, and “human desire and choice count for something” (MW 14:9); however, change must
contend with the inertia within all systems.
When we are forced to recognize the extent of the suffering and dangers surrounding us,
it is all too easy for us to fall into despair, especially in light of our finitude. No matter what we
do to mitigate the negative circumstances surrounding us, we continually find that it is too little
and too late. Too often, people fall into either anxiety or depression in response to the
precarious, the banal, and the tragic. Dewey’s philosophy, while acknowledging the existential
realities we face, attempts to provide a way of responding to these circumstances in the hope of
finding a means of amelioration and growth.
WHAT ARE WE TO DO? DEWEY, THE HERO, AND THE PROPHET:
While Dewey recognizes and understands the existential realities of suffering,
destruction, and meaninglessness, he also knows that humans are not passive but actively take up
elements of the world. Given the reality of suffering and death, as well as the lack of anything
absolute to ground meaning, what are humans to do? For even if we ultimately are doomed to
11
failure, humans at least have the ability to carve out a personal meaning within their lived
experience. Dewey’s instrumentalism, when paired with his aesthetic and religious views,
provides a means of responding to suffering, not with the idea that we can escape the precarious
nature of existence, but so we can better control those elements that can be controlled, better face
those elements that cannot, and create meaning along the way.17
And this means taking up the project of living, regardless of the dangers or the banalities,
for it is the process of living that allows us to deepen our experience and to truly live:
Dewey urges us to live our lives on the qui vive, always alert to our surroundings
as if with animal sensibility. The most perilous threat to human life is
secondhandedness, living out the bequest of our parents, siblings, relatives,
teachers, and other dispensers of already programmed possibilities. We should be
wary of the inherited, however noble its intention, for it is the quality of our own
experience which is decisive. Failure, deeply undergone, often enriches, whereas
success achieved mechanically through the paths set out by others often blunts
sensibility. We are not dropped into the world as a thing among things. We are
live creatures who eat experience.18
But creatures who eat experience must struggle to overcome the lure of secondhand existence, as
well as endemic despair and the banality. Dewey’s philosophy offers an alternative, and to the
extent that it demands a struggle above and beyond mere existence and often in opposition to the
easy answers offered by social habituation, it can be seen as “call to the heroic life,” as Murray
G. Murphey has noted (MW 14:xix).
17
A non-theistic version of Reinhold Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer might be appropriate: “God, give us grace to accept
with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things which should be changed, and the
wisdom to distinguish the one from the other” (Bartlett’s 16th ed., p. 684).
18
John McDermott, The Culture of Experience: Philosophical Essays in the American Grain (New York: New
York University Press, 1976), 140.
12
The Deweyan Hero
In the introduction to Human Nature and Conduct, Murray G. Murphey claims that for
Dewey, “moral choice is an effective agent in the world, and it is this fact which gives meaning
and zest to life. Indeed, this is Dewey’s call to the heroic life, and for the possibility of genuine
social reform” (MW 14:xix). The life dedicated to “genuine social reform” stands as an example
of the heroic life because it is one that requires the individual to struggle toward an ideal despite
opposition. Further, in taking up the heroic life, the would-be hero forsakes alternatives that do
not require the degree of struggle and sacrifices that are part and parcel of the heroic life.
Finally, the individual takes up the cause without assurance of success. Failure is a live option
for the hero, and when the cause is genuine social reform, a partial victory is almost always the
best possible outcome. In A Common Faith, Dewey claims that “Any activity pursued in behalf
of an ideal end against obstacles and in spite of threats of personal loss because of conviction of
its general and enduring value is religious in quality.”19 Properly employed, it is also heroic.
But what would the heroic life look like for Dewey? Certainly it will be different from
the way heroism appears in the times long past, yet there is a certain continuity at play.
According to Will Durant, "To the Greek the best life is the fullest one, rich in health, strength,
beauty, passion, means, adventure, and thought. Virtue is arête, manly—literally and originally,
martial—excellence (Ares, Mars); precisely what the Romans called vir-tus, manliness."20
Michael Grant concurs, saying:
The hero must use his superior qualities at all times to excel and win applause, for
that is the reward and demonstration of his manhood. He makes honour his
paramount code, and glory the driving force and aim of his existence. Birth,
19
John Dewey, A Common Faith, in John Dewey: The Later Works, vol. 9, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale, IL:
Southern Illinois University Press, 1986), 18.
20
Will Durant. The History of Civilization: 2, Life of Greece (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1939), 298.
13
wealth and prowess confirm the hero's title; his ideals are courage, endurance,
strength and beauty. Enthusiastically confident in what he achieves and
possesses, he relies upon his own ability to make the fullest use of his powers.21
Further, the hero falls between humanity and the gods, for "there is something about him
which brings him not too far from heaven....human nature, far though it is from divinity, can yet
come within reach of it...."22 The hero is able to "[shake] off primitive superstitions and taboos
by showing that man can do amazing things by his own effort and by his own nature, indeed that
he can almost rise above his own nature into strengths scarcely known or understood."23 Perhaps
because of this, "an atmosphere of tragedy surrounds the Hero."24 As Grant says, "There is
pathos in his struggle against his fellows and against fate; he fulfills himself in death, the last and
most searching ordeal, the true test of worth."25
But the heroic form was no static structure. Just as Achilles must remember himself and
fulfill the destiny he has chosen—for his choice is to secure a long life at the cost of renown or to
live a brief, heroic life—so too must Odysseus remember himself and tear himself from the
secret pleasures of Calypso’s arms so that he might find his way back home in order to fulfill his
duties as husband, father, and king. Plato reworks the heroic ideal with Socrates as his model,
the best of men and the truest exemplar of arête. Just as the Odyssey recasts the hero as
presented in the Iliad, and as Plato transforms it with Socrates as the heroic exemplar, so too
must the hero be reconstructed for Deweyan uses.
21
Michael Grant. Myths of the Greeks and Romans (New York: Mentor Book by New American Library, 1968), 45.
Ibid.
23
Ibid., 46.
24
Ibid., 48.
25
Ibid.
22
14
Although he doesn’t use the term “hero,” Tom Alexander, in discussing spirituality in
Dewey’s works, provides a hint as to why there is need for a heroic approach to existence and
what that might look like. Alexander contrasts Dewey’s approach to world as an orientation
toward possibility as such rather than an orientation toward actuality, or toward the secure and
fixed. For Alexander:
The former alternative requires a courageous and complex orientation of the self
to existence, one that includes a surrender to the comforting notion that the ends
of our aspirations and actions that give meaning to our lives are not guaranteed
either in their existence or even in their meaning, much less that they are
ultimately within our control. Spirituality in this mode requires that we undertake
a degree of existential risk and accept the immanent possibility of tragedy, for
even with the best of intentions, the final meaning of our actions may betray us.
This requires a courageous orientation of spirit to existence, but it must be a
resoluteness combined with humility, compassion and a certain ‘tragic
wisdom’…[or] natural piety.26
The Deweyan hero in many ways will fit the Socratic exemplar as developed by Plato.
There will be a focus on the wise life, with a particular emphasis upon self-cultivation (which
also includes community cultivation). The Deweyan hero will be one who critiques the status
quo, and will do so by means of communication, which will also be a key element to cultivation.
Because the sense of the heroic develops in response to the existential realities faced by
individuals, there must be an emphasis upon everyday courage and everyday inspiration. During
the struggle to craft something better or to struggle toward ideals, the Deweyan hero will no
26
Thomas Alexander, “Imagination and Spirituality in John Dewey’s Philosophy and Life” (p. 12 of the 08-19-10
draft).
15
doubt often feel weak against the forces that work to undermine growth and thus will be able to
identify with Keats’ “sick Eagle looking at the sky,”27 capable of imagining the ideal but
incapable of finding the path or the strength to achieve it. But like Keats, the Deweyan hero
“accepts life and experience in all its uncertainty, mystery, doubt, and half-knowledge and turns
that experience upon itself to deepen and intensify its own qualities…” (LW 10: 41). This is the
insight that breathes through all of Dewey’s writings and all his activities: educational, religious,
political, and aesthetic, and it allows the Deweyan hero to face the realities of our precarious
world but still find the strength needed for the struggle to create something better.
In the process, it is easy to lose ourselves in the humdrum of daily existence, but Dewey’s
“call to the heroic life” is one of remembrance of the interconnections which form us,
recognition of the dangers surrounding us, and a courageous taking up of our lives in light of the
possibilities of existence, despite our individual finitude and the impossibility of complete
achievement. Courage must be tempered by humility and tragic wisdom to avoid the hubris
which brings low those who forget themselves, who forget that they are finite and fallible, caught
in a web of relations shot through with danger, sorrow, and loss.
The Deweyan Prophet
Closely tied to the hero is the prophet, and there is certainly a prophetic quality to
Dewey’s work. The word Hebrew word for “prophet” is navi, and designates someone who is
called by and speaks for God.28 According to Harris and Platzner, prophets “should be seen not
as mere observers of or commentators on current events but as divinely appointed intermediaries
27
John Keats “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles” in The Complete Poems of John Keats (New York: Modern Library,
1994), 228.
28
Stephen L. Harris and Robert L. Platzner, The Old Testament: An Introduction to the Hebrew Bible (Boston:
McGraw Hill, 2002), 215.
16
and even as active participants in an unfolding drama of judgment and redemption.”29 They note
that the “primary task of an Israelite prophet was to be a truth-teller by declaring the word and
the will of YHWH to his contemporaries, and the principle ‘truth’ that the prophets were
summoned to proclaim was the true nature of the covenant relationship.”30 Although stripped of
the explicitly Judea-Christian language, Dewey’s writings serve a similar purpose. Those who
would take up Dewey’s heroic call must have prophetic eyes as well as a prophetic voice if they
are to dedicate their lives to genuine social reform. They must be able to imagine a better future,
be willing to act as spokesmen on behalf of that vision, and take on the often heroic task of
working to make that vision a reality.
The name most often associated with prophetic pragmatism is Cornel West. For West,
pragmatism’s focus is the examination of cultural norms for the purpose of social transformation
and amelioration:
[P]ragmatism’s primary aim is to discern, delineate, and defend particular norms through
highlighting desirable possibilities present in the practices of a specific community or
society. The goal of reflection is amelioration, and its chief consequence is the
transformation of existing realities. This process is guided by moral convictions and
social norms, and the transformation is shaped by the interpretation and description of the
prevailing communal practices.”31
But West thinks that pragmatism “is in need of an explicit political mode of cultural criticism
that refines and revises Emerson’s concerns with power, provocation and personality in light of
Dewey’s stress on historical consciousness and Du Bois’s focus on the plight of the wretched of
29
Ibid.
Ibid., 220.
31
Cornel West, Prophesy Deliverance! An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity, Anniversary Edition
(Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002), 21.
30
17
the earth.”32 In particular, West’s prophetic pragmatism “understands pragmatism as a political
form of cultural criticism and locates politics in the everyday experiences of ordinary people,”
but “[u]nlike Dewey, prophetic pragmatism promotes a more direct encounter with the Marxist
tradition of social analysis.”33 According to Jeffrey Ayala Milligan:
Cornel West’s prophetic pragmatism [addresses] several shortcomings found in other
forms of pragmatism. By embracing a progressive Marxism it overcomes deficiencies in
pragmatism’s analysis of political and economic forces. Prophetic pragmatism is also
more sensitive to issues of race and, supposedly, better appreciates that a deep sense of
evil and tragedy must infuse the meaning of democracy. West’s version of prophetic
pragmatism is Christological and believes that human beings are created in the image of
God. Above all, the prophetic pragmatist is obligated to struggle toward values that
transcend history because there are ideals that are, in a sense, ‘unattainable by historically
defined individual human beings.’ Finally, prophetic pragmatist teaching places ethics,
rather than knowledge, at the center of educational practice.34
While acknowledging the value of both West’s and Milligan’s prophetic pragmatism, Jim
Garrison argues that Deweyan pragmatism can be prophetic and do so without turning to the
supernatural.35 Further, Dewey (and thus the Deweyan prophetic pragmatist) is able to believe in
the possibility of progress and amelioration without becoming a “naïve progressivist.” To
Garrison’s mind, “One does not need to think things are getting better to do their best, or that
there is some cosmic guarantee for success. Such is the attitude of the meliorist in contrast to the
32
Cornel West, “On Prophetic Pragmatism” in The Cornel West Reader (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 1999),
150.
33
Ibid., 151.
34
Jim Garrison, “The Crossroads of Poetry and Prophecy,” Philosophy of Education 1997
http://www.ed.uiuc.edu/PES-Yearbook /97docs/garrison.html 9/27/2010.
35
For a detailed critique of Garrison’s position see Dwayne Tunstall’s “Cornel West, John Dewey, and the
Tragicomic Undercurrents of Deweyan Creative Democracy.”
18
optimist.” But it is Garrison’s connection of the poetic, the creative, and the prophetic—all
within a strictly naturalistic frame—that distinguishes his version of prophetic pragmatism. For
Garrison, “humanity is a participant in an unfinished pluralistic universe and…human beings are
created creators poetically continuing the creation,” poetically in the “sense of poiesis, or calling
into existence.” In fleshing out his views, Garrison claims that “[p]rophets are poets because they
perceive beyond the limits of the actual into the possibility of unifying ideals that could heal our
wounds,” and that our world is poorer because “[w]e live in destitute times wherein the gospel of
greed and financial profit, not prophecy, answers our existential questions.”36
John McDermott, in addition to drawing attention to Dewey’s “secular liturgy” also
describes Dewey’s critique of America in the 1930s as “a jeremiad worthy of his Puritan
forebears” (LW 11:xxi). The phrase is apt and certainly captures the prophetic quality of
Dewey’s writings: “As a people we are more eager than sturdy; more hasty in action than ready
to reflect on what should be done; prone to snatch at nostrums and quack remedies in both
physical and social ailments. The spirit of speculation has fallen in with the spirit of waste;
together they have fostered reckless disregard of life itself and have encouraged recourse to
crime” (LW 11:xxi, 232). However, Dewey does more than attack American failings, for he
uses his critique as a call to do better by making democracy a way of life rather than simply a
form of government. Dewey’s prophetic vision consists of seeing the actual in light of the
possible, blinded not by fear, despair, or greed. It means recognizing the existential realities
surrounding and penetrating us, and resolving to call others’ attentions to those realities in order
to make them see.
COMMUNITY AND THE TRANSMISSION OF MEANING
36
Garrison
19
Prophetic vision and heroic action take place within a specific setting, and the community
becomes not only the locus of action but also a reservoir of meaning and funded experience, to
use Dewey’s phrase. Individuals are born within social and biological networks, both of which
exhibit qualities that can add to or detract from the individual’s possibilities for growth. A
particular individual—even an extraordinary one—can achieve only a partial victory in his or her
attempt to expand value and create a more just society. But in taking up the possibilities
surrounding them, individuals are able to reshape their environments for good or ill, thereby
leaving legacies that hopefully make their communities more sustaining than they were. We see
Dewey’s hope, despite the dangers, banality, and tragic implications of existence in his closing
of A Common Faith:
We who now live are parts of a humanity that extends into the remote past, a
humanity that has interacted with nature. The things in civilization we most prize
are not of ourselves. They exist by the grace of the doings and sufferings of the
continuous human community in which we are a link. Ours is the responsibility
of conserving, transmitting, rectifying and expanding the heritage of values we
have received that those who come after us may receive it more solid and secure,
more widely accessible and more generously shared than we have received it.
(LW 9:57-58)
This is not a call to subsume one’s identity into the group, nor is it an attempt to deny the
existential realities we face. Dewey understands that achievements crumble, civilizations fall,
and that time gnaws away at everything we hold dear. Regardless, culture provides an
opportunity for us to transmit our achievements, so that others may take them up, renew them,
and perhaps transform them along the way.
20
DEWEYAN ECOLOGICAL EXISTENTIALISM
When most people think of existentialism, they usually turn to thinkers in a particular
tradition beginning with Kierkegaard. However, Lewis Gordon questions this approach, saying:
The body of literature that constitutes European existentialism is but one
continent’s response to a set of problems that date from the moment human
beings faced problems of anguish and despair….Existential philosophy addresses
problems of freedom, anguish, dread, responsibility, embodied agency, society,
and liberation; it addresses these problems through a focus on the human
condition.37
When William Barrett dismisses the possibility of American existentialism, saying that the
“philosopher cannot seriously put to himself questions that his civilization has not lived,”38 he
ignores exactly what America had lived through by the time of Dewey’s writings.39 Granted that
Dewey himself did not speak often enough, or specifically enough, about existential concerns,
what would Deweyan existentialism look like? It seems that it must include at least the
following:
First, it requires a belief that there is no ready-made, absolute truth, no ultimate guide to
tell us what we are and how we should live. We exist in a world in which humans must
create/carve out meaning, even when born into a “meaning full” culture. This is due to
temporality and the precarious nature of existence. Our “stored meanings” are continually
stretched and strained as times change and we find ourselves in novel situations. When we live
37
Lewis R. Gordon, Existentia Africana: Understanding Africana Existentialist Thought (New York: Routledge,
2000), 6-7.
38
Barrett, 20.
39
The horrors of the Civil War, both World Wars, as well as those of slavery and Jim Crow, of the massacres of
Native Americans, and of the displacements during the Great Depression serve as a few examples of what America
has lived.
21
“secondhand,” in a sense, we attempt to live out of time, or at least in denial of the temporality of
everything, including our most favored cultural artifacts.
Second, there needs to be a recognition that much of human malaise comes from just
such an attempt to live life secondhand, whether by our following cultural ideals in an
unthinking, lock-step fashion (such as is required by various types of fundamentalism) or by
living life vicariously through fiction, sports, or even the lives of our loved ones, or by
subsuming ourselves in a career that deadens our creativity and initiative. If individuals are to be
actively engaged, they cannot rely upon ready-made answers. Even if their process of
engagement results in recreating the wheel, “the value of a discovery in the mental life of an
individual is the contribution it makes to a creatively active mind; it does not depend upon no
one’s ever having thought of the same idea before” (LW 5:128). We must continually strive for
authentic existence.
Third, even when we are in irreconcilable, tragic, and disastrous circumstances, we must
attempt to make sense of our particular circumstances. Too often we fall back upon ready-made
answers and thus fail at the one distinctive, positive human contribution: our ability to create
meaning. It is in actively taking up ourselves within this precarious and tragic milieu that we
begin to live authentic lives, rather than allowing ourselves to be uncritically swept along by the
cultural forces around us.
Fourth, angst is an appropriate response to recognizing our existential status, as is the
feeling of absurdity. However, in a Deweyan scheme, these should be phases of experience
rather than conditions in which we remain. In doing so, one shifts from a determination that life
has no meaning or a sense of "the ridiculous character of that habit, the absence of any profound
22
reason for living, the insane charatcter of that daily agitation, and the uselessness of suffering"40
to a recogntion that "even within the limits of nihilism, it is possible to find the means to proceed
beyond nihilism."41
A fifth element is an acknowledgment that effects spill beyond the immediate situation,
and we never return exactly to our previous state. Our legacies—large and small, for good or
ill—may become lost in the buzz of existence, but individual existence transforms the relative
whole of which it is a part. We ignore this fact at our own risk. Things wear down, wear out,
stretch beyond their breaking point, and lose their spring. Systems have limits to the damage
they can absorb and still remain capable of maintaining their viability. As individuals, we find
ourselves within just such systems, and our viability is intimately connected with that of these
systems. Critical intelligence demands that we take up our lived situation, but that very process
drives home exactly how precarious our situation has become. Deweyan existentialism calls us
to harness the resulting fear and trembling in order to live and to hopefully salvage that which
can be saved.
Sixth is the need to recognize that we exist within a community of co-sufferers and cocreators, not only with other humans but also everything within the biotic community, including
the soil, plants, animals, mountains, streams, oceans, and weather patterns. Humans have a
capacity these others lack, namely, critical intelligence. Unfortunately, we rarely cultivate this
distinctive capacity and thus rarely take up our lived situation as proficiently as we otherwise
could.
Seventh, since everything within the ecosystem is intertwined, the precariousness of any
component affects the relative stability of the rest. Because of this, our understanding of
40
41
Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays. (New York: Vintage-Random House, 1955) 4.
Ibid., Preface
23
individual actions must take into account the ways in which consequences are taken up within
the larger biotic community. For instance, mercury levels in fish have risen not only in areas
closest to large human populations but throughout the world’s waters. Our precariousness is
such that possible demise might originate not only a world away, but in a form all but invisible.
Finally, it recognizes that despite our best efforts, we continually make mistakes and at
any moment we may fail in a catastrophic way. Growth requires a continual movement from the
stable to the precarious to the stable once again. According to McDermott, for Dewey:
[A]lienation and death present themselves in the course of events, and the line
between the temporary alienation necessary to the enhancement of life and the
gap of permanent alienation which spells death, physical or spiritual is a thin one.
The blame for crossing it is placed not on nature, nor on civilization, nor on a
deus ex machine, but on ourselves. In John Dewey’s philosophy, the task of
overcoming personal and social alienation and reconstituting the processes of
living within the flow of time is one which is laced with chance, happy and
otherwise, but the responsibility is ours and ours alone.42
While Dewey might have been too much of a meliorist to count as a true existentialist,
too hopeful of humanity’s capacity to become better, his philosophy is shot through with
existentialist themes. If we are to take seriously an ecological understanding of the individual—
in light of our current state of mass extinctions, environmental destruction, global warming, and
willful ignorance about all of the above—we must also take up these themes and temper our
hope with the realization that all our struggles for a brighter tomorrow may very well be in vain,
and that the most we can ever hope for is a partial victory. But if we look closely at Dewey,
underneath his faith in the common sense of the average citizen and his belief in science as the
42
McDermott, Culture, 142-143.
24
most secure means of progress, we find the recognition that despite (or perhaps because of) our
intelligence and our ideals we still too often fall into mass suicide. As McDermott says, “The
thought of John Dewey does not answer the question, Why Bother? in any peremptory or
stentorian way. The question, however, pervades his life and work.”43
Understanding the individual as ecological strips away the various fictions we use to
insulate us from the precarious nature of existence. When we recognize our ties to others—other
humans, communities, life forms, ecosystems, even those non-living components of our
environment—we are reminded of the various ways our actions intertwine and how tenuous our
existence truly is. It is too easy for us to respond to our existential fears by grasping various
monocultures to provide us with ready-made answers. Christianity, Islam, Capitalism,
Marxism—all have fundamentalist contingents offering to provide a neat framework for selfunderstanding and a community of the like-minded. Although there is something tempting here,
Dewey is correct: ready-made answers blunt our sensibility. If we are to grow and make
meaning, we must acknowledge our existential status, harness our fear and trembling, and take
up the project of self-cultivation, all the while knowing that, to quote McDermott, “The first,
foremost, and permanent ontological fact of our human existence is that we are born to live but
sure to die.”44 Dewey understands this and offers his philosophy as a means of taking up the
project of living in the hope of “conserving, transmitting, rectifying and expanding the heritage
of values we have received” (LW 9:57) but with the realization that “when all is said and done,
the fundamentally hazardous character of the world is not seriously modified, much less
43
44
p. 282
“Why Bother,” 274
25
eliminated.”45 But for Dewey, it is this very fact which renders human meaning-making
meaningful.
45
Experience and Nature, LW 1:45
26