On Reading the New Scholarship on John Dewey

James M. Giarelli
Rutgers University

In an essay on the subject of his new book, John Wayne's America: The Politics of Celebrity, Garry Wills analyzes the distinguishing features of America's mythic history. Where

other cultures begin with a fixed and social hearth, a temple, a holy city, American life begins when that enclosure is escaped. One becomes American by going out. We are a people of departures, not arrivals....Our basic myth is that of the frontier. Our hero is the frontiersman. To become urban is to break the spirit of man."^[1]

This familiar Turnerian thesis is central to the project of American philosophy as well. In Michael A. Weinstein's account of the "classical" period of American philosophy at the turn of the twentieth century, the period of Peirce, Royce, James, Santayana, and Dewey, the organizing images are "wilderness" and "city." Drawing on Royce, Weinstein writes that the wilderness "was the mental space into which the philosopher withdrew in an act of separation from the moral conventions, the cognitive assumptions, and the practical certitudes of the "city,"...in contrast, "straightforward and readily definable as the everyday social life of human beings in their actual communities."^[2] For the classical American philosopher, "the journey into the wilderness was an attempt to doubt the certitudes of the city, not in order to break them down, but to discover and to think through a more rational basis for them and, therefore, to strengthen the bonds of community by giving them self-conscious justification."^[3] Classical American philosophy was essentially a moral quest, to show that the "God of the wilderness," the God of doubting, individual, separated self was at one with the "God of the city," the God of the connected, communal member.

Reading Dewey, we understand how torturous this quest was. In his only directly autobiographical account of his journey into philosophy, the essay "From Absolutism to Experimentalism," Dewey tells a story of movement within painful conflicts. For example, the conflicts between what he calls his native inclination toward the formal and the "accidents of personal experience that compelled me to take account of actual material."^[4] Dewey writes of how his choice of problems and a method of presentation in philosophy were consequences of the marks, what he calls stigmata, of this inner struggle. He writes further of how the divisions of the New England culture in which he was raised, of self from the world, soul from body, nature from God, were experienced as an "inward laceration" in response to which an "intense emotional craving," a "hunger," for unification arose. Dewey envies those who can tell their story straight-away in a unified pattern, but because of the "road I have been forced to travel," he remains entangled, unstable, chameleon-like, never settled. And finally, he connects his quest directly to the central categories of classical American philosophy. Hoping for unification, but not expecting it, Dewey writes that the chief task of philosophy is to "help get rid of the useless lumber that blocks our highways of thought, and strive to make straight and open the paths that lead to the future. Forty years spent wandering in the wilderness like that of the present is not a sad fate - unless one attempts to make himself believe that the wilderness is after all itself the promised land."^[5]

These are the struggles out of which Dewey's philosophy and educational theory emerge. The frontiersman encountering the city; the metropolitan encountering the wilderness. The public school movement arises from these same encounters. In Cremin's terms, the public school movement takes its shape in that transition from an agrarian to a metropolitan civilization, a complex shift marked notably by a transformation of knowledge itself from something that is learned in the doing to something that is stored and learned through symbols. Thus, while the school, the specialized domain of symbolic literacy, arises as the dominant institution in the metropolitan configuration of education, the sources of our public education, our common sense taken literally as the sense it takes to live in a commons, remain multiple and experiential. The Deweyan problem, "Can schools educate?" was met with an effort to theorize the common school as a "rustic city," a place where the formal could be learned through the occupations of living and where the curricular structures of doubt could become the resources of community, solidarity, and renewal.

Dewey's project was to understand how to become human - not by an appeal to an essence, not by an appeal to some correspondence or relation with something non-human, but by developing the reflective intelligences that enable us to tell masterful and moving stories of our participation in community. For Dewey, this is the only meaningful sense of literacy. When Dewey writes of reflection or reflective intelligence, he uses metaphors of creation, construction, or reconstruction of new identities and meanings as a consequence of symbolic interaction, rather than mirror metaphors of re-presentation, image-formation, or copying of that which exists antecedently. That is, for Dewey, the root meaning of reflection is not in lux, or light, but instead in lection, from legein or legere-to read. Reflective intelligence for Dewey is expressed in metaphors of reading and re-reading and more generally in metaphors of literacy. As such, the successor to philosophy, after epistemology, is educational inquiry.

One hundred years later we are entangled in another configurational shift. We are part of another round of leavings, of departures, of migrations and journeys from the level of the international marketplace to the level of the family and identity itself. Much of the talk about public school reform, understandably, focuses on institutions and thus misses the point. Home-schooling, common curricula, world-class standards, cultural literacy, all talk within the metropolitan configuration and the public school movement, but the basic categories are no longer there.

Where I live there are no cities, no wilderness, only longing expressed in the abstract signifiers of enclaves of nomads named Steward's Hamlet, Foxmoor Village, and so on. The idea of a public education here is vacuous. Indeed, the very idea of an education at all is deeply problematic. What is a symbol, a text, an author? The questions of educational theory are no longer where, or what, or how we learn, but when, and even that is stretched beyond the borders of practical response. Cyberculture, while part of the rhetorical superhighway of learning, is itself bound in metaphors of location, sites, and architecture. We "chat" in a "lobby," maybe move into a "public room" or "auditorium." We "visit" each other's "sites" and "home pages," a name that neatly combines and evokes familiar images of buildings and books, that is, schools. These are places, but only in the extreme abstraction of electronic impulses and silicon bubbles. Creations of a will and a click, they are, in the old terms, literally u-topias, no places at all.

This is why I think there is a new scholarship on Dewey and other thinkers, such as Nietzsche, whose thought emerged in the midst of another painful transformation, on the cusp of a wilderness journey. It seems to be our best, maybe only, option. Ordinary language analysis will not help us in this fix. Postmodernism is the intellectual's accommodation to the problem. Marxist politics is moribund. Some find solace and hope in religion. I heard a news story of a church day-care center which was closed because church officials thought that day-care centers promoted the kinds of life-styles which were breaking up marriages, families, and communities. Four single mothers who were members of the congregation were left with no one to care for their children while they tried to earn a living.

What will it mean to become a distinct member of a literate community in the new city and in the new wilderness? How can we organize such journeys, if at all? What do things mean? It is so easy to think within the conventional vocabulary of the city - more homework, canonical texts, computer literacy - so easy to enter the wilderness of doubt and succumb to its hermetic ecstasy.

But Dewey, lacerations, stigmata, and all, fighting his own predilection for premature system and the allure of the literary culture of the lost, insists upon life. No, better, upon living, the impulse of movement, of being underway to Being in Heidegger's terms, of the back and forth of doubt and communication. And he insists that they are of one piece and serve the same god. On the cusp, on the verge, on the borders, Dewey thinks not for us, but with us. His lifelong quest to dwell, write, think, and act within a systematic philosophy of incompleteness makes the problem of learning to become human the most urgent and beautiful call for our reflection and rereading.

---

[1] Garry Wills, "American Adam," New York Review of Books 44, no. 4 (6 March 1997): 30.

[2] Michael A. Weinstein, The Wilderness and the City: American Classical Philosophy as a Moral Quest (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1982), 5.

[3] Ibid.

[4] John Dewey, "From Absolutism to Experimentalism," in The Philosophy of John Dewey, ed. J.J. McDermott (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1973), 5.

[5] Ibid., 13.