Greetings, MALA students: This is the site I use for my Intro to Philosophy (I call it "CoPhilosophy") classes. Feel free to ignore the rest of the site, beyond this post. But also feel free to check it out and discuss anything here that piques your interest. jpo
==- Is Elon Musk a good citizen? Dolly Parton?
- Have you read Hannah Arendt?
- What are "parents' rights" really about?
- Where does American democracy go from here?
- Do we need more women's perspectives in government?
- Richard Rorty's Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism 1... 2... 3... 4... 5... APA/slides
Posted March 12:
John Dewey
Hope you've all had a pleasant Spring Break, as we wait for the snow to melt...
My block (Mar 17, 24] is titled "Pragmatism and the Reconstruction of American Democracy." We'll read selections from John Dewey (Reconstruction in Philosophy, Democracy and Education) and Richard Rorty (Achieving Our Country, Philosophy and Social Hope, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism). I'll post the readings on my CoPhilosophy blogsite, along with questions for discussion. There, in the comments' space (alongside legacy comments from the September class) is where you'll post your short essays responding to at least two discussion questions each week, as well as any other pertinent thoughts you'd care to share.
You can respond to my discussion questions or come up with your own. Read and comment on anything by or about John Dewey you'd like, this week. I just want you to get a sense of his commitment to democracy as a way of life in which free citizens acknowledge their mutual dependency and shared interest in an ever-expanding "heritage of values"...
“The things in civilization we most prize are not of ourselves. They exist by 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.” John Dewey, A Common Faith
(NOTE: the CoPhilosophy site is also used by my Intro to Philosophy students. Most of the site content is directed at them... but of course you're free to look at, and comment on, any of it you wish.)
See you soon!
Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu
Happy convergence of themes in our #MTSU MALA fall interdisciplinary course ("Educating a good citizen") with SAAP's next on-ground conference ( “Citizenship, Education, & Democracy"). Two birds, one stone: "Pragmatism and the reconstruction of American democracy"
— Phil Oliver (@OSOPHER) May 12, 2021
MALA 6010, Fall 2021
| Class | 6:00 pm - 9:00 pm | R | BUSINESS AND AEROSPACE BLDG S309 | Aug 23, 2021 - Dec 09, 2021 | Seminar | Janet Kay McCormick (P) |
My block (Sep2, 9] will be titled "Pragmatism and the reconstruction of American democracy," and we'll read selections from (among others) John Dewey's Democracy and Education and Richard Rorty's Achieving Our Country]
BIO. Peripatetic. Dog person. Baseball fan. Author of "William James's 'Springs of Delight': The Return to Life")
block title-- Pragmatism and the reconstruction of American democracy
block description--A democracy is in serious jeopardy when a significant percentage of its citizenry is unwilling to accept the certified outcome of a presidential election. January 6, 2021 and its aftermath have indicated profound trouble for American democracy in our time. American philosophers like John Dewey and Richard Rorty say"achieving our country" and its democratic aspirations will require more open-minded "conversation" and perpetual "reconstruction." In this block we'll look at how democratic reconstruction may contribute an indispensable element of good citizenry.
course grade -- 75pts attendance/participation (including posted responses to discussion questions) week one, 75 pts attendance/participation week two
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Introductions... (this is how my Intro to Philosophy students and I introduced ourselves, perhaps you'd like to follow the same script with a verbal introduction Thursday and, if you wish, a written intro posted in the comments space: Who are you? Why are you here? What is your present understanding of Philosophy as either an academic discipline or an approach to life? Do you have a favorite philosopher (for our purposes maybe we should specify: philosopher of democracy/citizenship)? I'll explain what "CoPhilosophy" means to me, and how that shapes my classroom expectations, approach, etc.)
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Sep 2/Mar 17 - John Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy, Democracy and Education (* below)... just read the opening pages of each, and browse for a sense of what Dewey is about. Also, if you have a kindle or the kindle app, you might take a look at the samples from John Dewey and American Democracy by Robert Westbrook (or just look at the Google Books sample). Respond each week to at least two discussion questions, either those below or questions of your own or a classmate's, about Dewey and what his work implies about the meaning of good citizenship. You can post your short essays before or after class.
Discussion questions:
- In view of this quote from Dewey's The School and Society (1899), do you agree that good citizenship involves good parenting... and for those who are not parents themselves, as well as for parents, a proper parental regard for all children? What would this entail, besides being willing to pay taxes that support public education and other child-supportive policies? --"What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that must the community want for all of its children. Any other ideal for our schools is narrow and unlovely; acted upon, it destroys our democracy." The School and Society (1899)
- Does Dewey's statement (at the end of A Common Faith AND on his gravestone) about our "responsibility of conserving, transmitting, rectifyng, and expanding the heritage of values we have received" express a conception of good citizenship with which you agree? Does it imply a responsibility to future generations that you share? Why or why not?
“The things in civilization we most prize are not of ourselves. They exist by 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.”
- Democracy is "a belief in the ability of human experience to generate the aims and methods by which further experience shall grow in ordered richness." -Creative Democracy: The Task Before Us (1939). True? Believable? Aspirational?
- Are public schools still (were they ever, can they still be) an "assimilative force" for unity in American life, bringing people of different races, religions, and customs together?
- Every school, as he wrote in The School and Society, must become "an embryonic community life...we shall (then) have the deepest and best guarantee of a larger society which is worthy, lovely and harmonious." Is this utopian? Can you foresee a time when our legislators view public education in this light, and fund it accordingly?
- Dewey's favorite words: reconstruction, renewal, growth, intelligence... What do these concepts mean to you, in the context of American democracy and its future prospects?
- Does "experiential learning" or "learning by doing" work, in school and in life?
- Why do you think "progressive education" is so often mocked and caricatured by critics?
- Has your own education been "interdisciplinary" at any level? (How's the MALA program doing, on that score?) Is the present structure of higher education in this country conducive to interdisciplinary understanding?
- COMMENT: "...the institutional structure and the educational philosophy of higher education have remained the same for one hundred years, while faculties and student bodies have radically changed and technology has drastically transformed the way people produce and disseminate knowledge. At a time when competition to get into and succeed in college has never been more intense, universities are providing a less-useful education." -The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University by Louis Menand
- “The biggest undergraduate major by far in the United States is business. Twenty-two percent of all bachelor’s degrees are awarded in that field. Ten percent of all bachelor’s degrees are awarded in education.” -Louis Menand. What would Dewey say about that? What do you say?
- Do you agree (in the spirit of Dewey's statement that education is "life itself") that good citizens are lifelong learners?
“Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself. Education, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living.”―
Dewey's concept of education put a premium on meaningful activity in learning and participation in classroom democracy. Unlike earlier models of teaching, which relied on authoritarianism and rote learning, progressive education asserted that students must be invested in what they were learning. Dewey argued that curriculum should be relevant to students' lives. He saw learning by doing and development of practical life skills as crucial to children's education. Some critics assumed that, under Dewey's system, students would fail to acquire basic academic skills and knowledge. Others believed that classroom order and the teacher's authority would disappear.To Dewey, the central ethical imperative in education was democracy. Every school, as he wrote in The School and Society, must become "an embryonic community life, active with types of occupations that reflect the life of the larger society and permeated throughout with the spirit of art, history and science. When the school introduces and trains each child of society into membership within such a little community, saturating him with the spirit of service, and providing him with instruments of effective self-direction, we shall have the deepest and best guarantee of a larger society which is worthy, lovely and harmonious."pbs
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...In 1899, Dewey published the pamphlet that made him famous, The School and Society, and promulgated many key precepts of later education reforms. Dewey insisted that the old model of schooling—students sitting in rows, memorizing and reciting—was antiquated. Students should be active, not passive. They required compelling and relevant projects, not lectures. Students should become problem solvers. Interest, not fear, should be used to motivate them. They should cooperate, not compete... neh
― Reconstruction in Philosophy
- *“The intermingling in the school of youth of different races, differing religions, and unlike customs creates for all a new and broader environment. Common subject matter accustoms all to a unity of outlook upon a broader horizon than is visible to the members of any group while it is isolated. The assimilative force of the American public school is eloquent testimony to the efficacy of the common and balanced appeal.”
- “An intelligent home differs from an unintelligent one chiefly in that the habits of life and intercourse which prevail are chosen, or at least colored, by the thought of their bearing upon the development of children.”
- “The most notable distinction between living and inanimate beings is that the former maintain themselves by renewal.”
- “If a plague carried off the members of a society all at once, it is obvious that the group would be permanently done for. Yet the death of each of its constituent members is as certain as if an epidemic took them all at once. But the graded difference in age, the fact that some are born as some die, makes possible through transmission of ideas and practices the constant reweaving of the social fabric. Yet this renewal is not automatic. Unless pains are taken to see that genuine and thorough transmission takes place, the most civilized group will relapse into barbarism and then into savagery.”
- “Except in dealing with commonplaces and catch phrases one has to assimilate, imaginatively, something of another's experience in order to tell him intelligently of one's own experience.”
- “Knowledge is humanistic in quality not because it is about human products in the past, but because of what it does in liberating human intelligence and human sympathy. Any subject matter which accomplishes this result is humane, and any subject matter which does not accomplish it is not even educational.”
- “Nothing is more tragic than failure to discover one’s true business in life, or to find that one has drifted or been forced by circumstance into an uncongenial calling.”
- “Now in many cases—too many cases—the activity of the immature human being is simply played upon to secure habits which are useful. He is trained like an animal rather than educated like a human being.”
Democracy Through Education
John Dewey (1859–1952) was one of American pragmatism’s early founders, along with Charles Sanders Peirce and William James, and arguably the most prominent American intellectual for the first half of the twentieth century. Dewey’s educational theories and experiments had a global reach, his psychological theories had a sizable influence in that growing science, and his writings about democratic theory and practice deeply influenced debates in academic and practical quarters for decades. In addition, Dewey developed extensive and often systematic views in ethics, epistemology, logic, metaphysics, aesthetics, and philosophy of religion...
Dewey’s efforts to connect child, school, and society were motivated by more than just a desire for better pedagogical methods. Because character, rights, and duties are informed by and contribute to the social realm, schools were critical sites to learn and experiment with democracy. Democratic life consists not only in civic and economic conduct, but more crucially in habits of problem solving, compassionate imagination, creative expression, and civic self-governance. The full range of roles a child might assume in life is vast; once this is appreciated, it is incumbent upon society to make education its highest political and economic priority. During WWII, Dewey wrote,
There will be almost a revolution in school education when study and learning are treated not as acquisition of what others know but as development of capital to be invested in eager alertness in observing and judging the conditions under which one lives. Yet until this happens, we shall be ill-prepared to deal with a world whose outstanding trait is change. (“Between Two Worlds”, 1944, LW17: 463)
Democracy, on Dewey’s view, was much more comprehensive than a form of government.
“Democracy”, Dewey wrote, “is not an alternative to other principles of associated life [but] the idea of community life itself” (PP, LW2: 328). Individuals exist in communities; as their lives change, needs and conflicts emerge that require intelligent management; we must make sense out of new experiences.
Education "is that reconstruction or reorganization of experience which adds to the meaning of experience, and which increases ability to direct the course of subsequent experience." (DE, MW9: 82)
In other words, the engine of America’s political identify was creative experimentation; in order to fulfill their eventual roles as fully participating citizens, students needed education in the habits (imaginative, empirical) which made the experimental sciences so successful. Dewey called such attitudes and habits “intelligence”.[34]
Informing all the spheres just discussed—science, education, and democratic life—is Dewey’s naturalism which places hope not in what is immutable or ultimate (God, Nature, Reason, Ends) but in the human capacity to learn from life. In “Creative Democracy—The Task Before Us” (1939b) Dewey wrote,
Democracy is the faith that the process of experience is more important than any special result attained, so that special results achieved are of ultimate value only as they are used to enrich and order the ongoing process. Since the process of experience is capable of being educative, faith in democracy is all one with faith in experience and education. All ends and values that are cut off from the ongoing process become arrests, fixations. They strive to fixate what has been gained instead of using it to open the road and point the way to new and better experiences. (“Creative Democracy”, LW14: 229)
The success or failure of democracy rests on education. Education is most determinative of whether citizens develop the habits needed to investigate problematic beliefs and situations, to communicate openly, throughout. While every culture aims to convey values and beliefs to the coming generation, it is critical, Dewey thought, to distinguish between education which inculcates collaborative and creative hypothesizing and education which foments obeisance to parochialism and dogma. And philosophy must apply this same standard to itself. SEP
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Moral insights come from the demands of others, not from any individual’s isolated reflections. And insights come from all social quarters. Intelligent revision of norms therefore requires practices of moral inquiry that stress mutual responsiveness to others’ claims, and social inclusion of all members of society. Such practices are constitutive features of democracy, understood as a form of everyday life (not simply as a type of state constitution) (CD 224–230). This is the point at which Dewey’s political philosophy emerges from his ethics. Democracy, in Dewey’s view, is the means by which we practice intelligent moral inquiry together, seeking solutions to the problems we face together... Dewey regarded democracy as the social embodiment of experimental intelligence informed by sympathy and respect for the other members of society... (SEP)
Other Internet Resources
- Center for Dewey Studies, Southern Illinois University Carbondale
- John Dewey, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
- John Dewey, American Pragmatist, (pragmatism.org)
- John Dewey Society
- Links to Full-text Works by and about John Dewey, (dmoz open directory project)
Related Entries
Dewey, John | Dewey, John: aesthetics | Dewey, John: political philosophy | education, philosophy of | pragmatism
John Dewey (1859—1952) https://iep.utm.edu/dewey/ Explanation of Dewey And Dewey's Philosophy Of Education https://www.ipl.org/essay/Explain-Dew... Dewey’s philosophy on Experience and Education https://eiclsresearch.wordpress.com/t... osophy-on-experience-and-education/ John Dewey on Education: Impact & Theory https://study.com/academy/lesson/john... John Dewey’s Approach to Education https://www.thepositiveencourager.glo... Reformation of the Education System https://www.toolshero.com/change-mana... John Dewey’s View on Education http://www.yourarticlelibrary.com/edu... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KsRiU... John Dewey on Interaction https://www.ipl.org/essay/What-Is-Joh...
...Dewey appreciated our national pastime. "The sources of art in human experience will be learned by him who sees how the tense grace of the ball-player infects the onlooking crowd," he wrote in Art as Experience. Maria Popova, like E.J. Dionne discussing American democracy: 21 historic answers to 5 urgent questions, is also Dewey-eyed. The rest of that book's subtitle is Dewey's own phrase, "the task before us."
Democracy, wrote Dewey in Creative Democracy: The Task Before Us (1939), is "a belief in the ability of human experience to generate the aims and methods by which further experience shall grow in ordered richness." But ability should not be confused with probability. This attitude is indeed an aspirational article of faith, no less than it was on the eve of America's entry into the war against fascism abroad. Today the challenge is closer to home. The late Dewey devotee Richard Rorty was blunt: "Dewey's dreams of participatory democracy will never come true." Oh he of little faith. I still want to believe, and to affirm the possibility at least, that there are enough Amanda Gormans and Greta Thunbergs out there to wake their generation to the dream.When our girls were small I was, for a time, a public school activist. I started an online discussion group called Nashville PTO Talk, that got a bit of play in local media reporting. The tagline on all my posts was Dewey's statement in The School and Society (1899): "What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that must the community want for all of its children. Any other ideal for our schools is narrow and unlovely; acted upon, it destroys our democracy."
“The things in civilization we most prize are not of ourselves. They exist by 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.” John Dewey, A Common Faith (1934)
Democracy and Education
- Is it possible to indulge and express national pride and patriotism constructively, without becoming objectionably nationalistic?
- Can you be a good citizen and not call yourself a patriot?
- Do you think Richard Rorty got John Dewey right? Is his neo-pragmatism a legitimate continuation of Dewey's philosophy?
- In 1998 Richard Rorty wrote: [Working class & "badly educated" voters] "will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers — themselves desperately afraid of being downsized — are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else. At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for — someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots... One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past 40 years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. … All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet." Is that what happened?
- Do you share Rorty's hopes for a more global, cosmopolitan, democratic (etc.) America?
- Do you have a favorable, unfavorable, or indifferent attitude towards Platonism? Why do you think Rorty saw the repudiation of Platonism as connected to his social hopes?
- Are you a philosophical dualist with respect to reality or mind? Are they "nested" together, as Dewey said?
- Why do you think Rorty considers metaphysics and the appearance-reality distinction "unfortunate"?
- Is Rorty right to want to demote epistemology ("the quest for knowledge") as he indicates?
- Do you agree that our ability to trust and cooperate with others is our most praiseworthy capacity?
- Should we be trying to create a social democracy, even if we think the prospects of success are dim?
(More Discussion Questions coming soon... but feel free to post and respond to your own, in the comments space below. Post at least two short essays each week.)
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How have national pride and American patriotism come to seem an endorsement of atrocities--from slavery to the slaughter of Native Americans, from the rape of ancient forests to the Vietnam War? Achieving Our Country traces the sources of this debilitating mentality of shame in the Left, as well as the harm it does to its proponents and to the country. At the center of this history is the conflict between the Old Left and the New that arose during the Vietnam War era. Richard Rorty describes how the paradoxical victory of the antiwar movement, ushering in the Nixon years, encouraged a disillusioned generation of intellectuals to pursue High Theory at the expense of considering the place of ideas in our common life. In this turn to theory, Rorty sees a retreat from the secularism and pragmatism championed by Dewey and Whitman, and he decries the tendency of the heirs of the New Left to theorize about the United States from a distance instead of participating in the civic work of shaping our national future.
In the absence of a vibrant, active Left, the views of intellectuals on the American Right have come to dominate the public sphere. This galvanizing book, adapted from Rorty's Massey Lectures of 1997, takes the first step toward redressing the imbalance in American cultural life by rallying those on the Left to the civic engagement and inspiration needed for achieving our country.
- “What makes us moral beings is that...there are some acts we believe we ought to die rather than commit...But now suppose that one has in fact done one of the things one could not have imagined doing, and finds that one is still alive. At that point, one's choices are suicide, a life of bottomless self-disgust, and an attempt to live so as never to do such a thing again. Dewey recommends the third choice.”
- “But you cannot urge national political renewal on the basis of descriptions of fact. You have to describe the country in terms of what you passionately hope it will become, as well as in the terms of what you know it to be now. You have to be loyal to a dream country rather than to the one to which you wake up every morning. Unless such loyalty exists, the ideal has no chance of becoming actual.”
- “If we look to people who make no mistakes, who were always on the right side, who never apologized for tyrants or unjust wars, we shall have few heroes and heroines”
- “The pre-Sixties reformist Left, insofar as it concerned itself with oppressed minorities, did so by proclaiming that all of us –– black, white, and brown –– are Americans, and that we should respect one another as such.”
- “One reason the cultural Left will have a hard time transforming itself into a political Left is that, like the Sixties Left, it still dreams of being rescued by an angelic power called "the people". In this sense, "the people" is the name of a redemptive preternatural force, a force whose demonic counterpart is named "power" or "the system". The cultural Left inherited the slogan "Power to the people" from the Sixties Left, whose members rarely asked about how the transference of power was supposed to work. This question still got unasked.”
- “For James, disgust with American hypocrisy and self-deception was pointless unless accompanied by an effort to give America reason to be proud of itself in the future. The kind of proto-Heideggerian cultural pessimism which [Henry] Adams cultivated seemed, to James, decadent and cowardly.”
- “If the Left forms no such alliances, it will never have any effect on the laws of the United States. To form them will require the cultural Left to forget about Baudrillard's account of America as Disneyland--as a county of simulacra--and to start proposing changes in the laws of a real country, inhabited by real people who are enduring unnecessary suffering, much of which can be cured by governmental action. Nothing would do more to resurrect the American Left than agreement on a concrete political platform, a People's Charter, a list of specific reforms. The existence of such a list--endlessly reprinted and debated, equally familiar to professors and production workers, imprinted on the memory both of professional people and of those who clean the professionals' toilets--might revitalize leftist politics.”
- “The cultural Left has contributed to the formation of this politically useless unconscious not only by adopting “power” as the name of an invisible, ubiquitous, and malevolent presence, but by adopting ideals which nobody is yet able to imagine being actualized.
Among these ideals are participatory democracy and the end of capitalism. Power will pass to the people, the Sixties Left believed only when decisions are made by all those who may be affected by the results. This means, for example, that economic decisions will be made by stakeholders rather than by shareholders, and that entrepreneurship and markets will cease to play their present role. When they do, capitalism as we know it will have ended, and something new will have taken its place.
[…] Sixties leftists skipped lightly over all the questions which had been raised by the experience of non market economies in the so-called socialist countries. They seemed to be suggesting that once we were rid of both bureaucrats and entrepreneurs, “the people” would know how to handle competition from steel mills or textile factories in the developing world, price hikes on imported oil, and so on. But they never told us how “the people” would learn how to do this.
The cultural Left still skips over such questions. Doing so is a consequence of its preference for talking about “the system” rather than about specific social practices and specific changes in those practices. The rhetoric of this Left remains revolutionary rather than reformist and pragmatic. Its insouciant use of terms like “late capitalism” suggests that we can just wait for capitalism to collapse, rather than figuring out what, in the absence of markets, will set prices and regulate distribution. The voting public, the public which must be won over if the Left is to emerge from the academy into the public square, sensibly wants to be told the details. It wants to know how things are going to work after markets are put behind us. It wants to know how participatory democracy is supposed to function.
The cultural Left offers no answers to such demands for further information, but until it confronts them it will not be able to be a political Left. The public, sensibly, has no interest in getting rid of capitalism until it is offered details about the alternatives. Nor should it be interested in participatory democracy –– the liberation of the people from the power of technocrats –– until it is told how deliberative assemblies will acquire the same know-how which only the technocrats presently possess. […]
The cultural Left has a vision of an America in which the white patriarchs have stopped voting and have left all the voting to be done by members of previously victimized groups, people who have somehow come into possession of more foresight and imagination than the selfish suburbanites. These formerly oppressed and newly powerful people are expected to be as angelic as the straight white males were diabolical. If I shared this expectation, I too would want to live under this new dispensation. Since I see no reason to share it, I think that the left should get back into the business of piecemeal reform within the framework of a market economy. This was the business the American Left was in during the first two-thirds of the century.
Someday, perhaps, cumulative piecemeal reforms will be found to have brought about revolutionary change. Such reforms might someday produce a presently unimaginable non market economy, and much more widely distributed powers of decision making. […] But in the meantime, we should not let the abstractly described best be the enemy of the better. We should not let speculation about a totally changed system, and a totally different way of thinking about human life and affairs, replace step-by-step reform of the system we presently have.”
Rorty on Dewey...
Richard Rorty: Life, Pragmatism, and Conversational Philosophy
“let’s try something different” July 22, 2017 • By Santiago Zabala
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Richard Rorty’s Warning Against AuthoritarianismAfter Drumpf’s election, Rorty’s prophecy of social collapse went viral. His final book is perhaps the clearest account of his political thinking.
Of all the recently departed thinkers who might have helped us puzzle through the dismal political, intellectual, and socioeconomic prospects of the Drumpf era, perhaps none looms as large as Richard Rorty. Shortly after the 2016 election, the great pragmatist philosopher, who died in 2007, won fresh viral renown thanks to a widely quoted passage from his 1998 book Achieving Our Country, which appeared to prophesy the conditions of Donald Drumpf’s shocking ascension to the presidency.
Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism
by Richard Rorty, edited by Eduardo Mendieta
Harvard University Press. 272 pp. $27.95
Working-class Americans, he wrote, “will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or jobs from being exported.” Nor will suburban white-collar workers, struggling against their own brand of office-park precarity, “let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for somebody else.” So in short order, Rorty argued, “something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed them and start looking for a strongman to vote for—someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodern professors will no longer be calling the shots.”
Never mind that Drumpf actually won a majority of the white suburban electorate’s support as well; the general outlines of Rorty’s forecast helped explain the pseudopopulist, protectionist, and white nationalist takeover of the Republican Party—a realignment that has outlasted Drumpf’s term in office... (continues)
"American philosopher"
Who dares think a nation? What is the status of philosophy in a nation founded by philosophers? What are the risks of practicing philosophy in America? Does America have a "native" philosophy? Eight short films about philosophy in America and American philosophy by Phillip McReynolds.
"Philosophical ideas are confined to one percent of the population and they tend to be cosmopolites who are not easily identified with their country....Dewey's dreams of participatory democracy will never come true." Richard Rorty talks about John Dewey.
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America the philosophical
The title is no joke.
Carlin Romano delivered a recorded Lyceum lecture at MTSU in 2013, talking about his book which surveys the surprising depth and breadth of American thought (in and out of academia)...
By Jennifer Senior
Nov. 20, 2016
Three days after the presidential election, an astute law professor tweeted a picture of three paragraphs, very slightly condensed, from Richard Rorty’s “Achieving Our Country,” published in 1998. It was retweeted thousands of times, generating a run on the book — its ranking soared on Amazon and by day’s end it was no longer available. (Harvard University Press is reprinting the book for the first time since 2010, a spokeswoman for the publisher said.)
It’s worth rereading those tweeted paragraphs:
[M]embers of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers — themselves desperately afraid of being downsized — are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.Mr. Rorty, an American pragmatist philosopher, died in 2007. Were he still alive, he’d likely be deluged with phone calls from strangers, begging him to pick their stocks.
At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for — someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots. …
One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past 40 years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. … All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.
When “Achieving Our Country” came out, it received a mixed critical reception. Writing for this newspaper, the critic Christopher Lehmann-Haupt called the book “philosophically rigorous” but took umbrage at Mr. Rorty’s warnings about the country’s vulnerability to the charms of a strongman, calling this prophesy “a form of intellectual bullying.”
Donald J. Drumpf enthusiasts might dispute the word strongman. But the essence of Mr. Rorty’s argument holds up surprisingly well. Where others saw positive trends — say, a full-throated dawn chorus praising the nation’s diversity — Mr. Rorty saw dead canaries in a coal mine.
His basic contention is that the left once upon a time believed that our country, for all its flaws, was both perfectible and worth perfecting. Hope was part of its core philosophy. But during the 1960s, shame — over Vietnam, over the serial humiliation of African-Americans — transformed a good portion of the left, at least the academic left, into a disaffected gang of spectators, rather than agitators for change. A formalized despair became its philosophy. The system was beyond reform. The best one could do was focus on its victims.
The result was disastrous. The alliance between the unions and intellectuals, so vital to passing legislation in the Progressive Era, broke down. In universities, cultural and identity politics replaced the politics of change and economic justice. By 1997, when Mr. Rorty gave three lectures that make up the spine of “Achieving Our Country,” few of his academic colleagues, he insisted, were talking about reducing poverty at all.
“Nobody is setting up a program in unemployed studies, homeless studies, or trailer-park studies,” he wrote, “because the unemployed, the homeless, and the residents of trailer parks are not ‘other’ in the relevant sense.”
Does this overlooked category sound familiar?
Mr. Rorty did not deny that identity politics reduced the suffering of minorities. But it just so happened that at the very moment “socially accepted sadism” — good phrase, that — was diminishing, economic instability and inequality were increasing, thanks to globalization.
“This world economy will soon be owned by a cosmopolitan upper class which has no more sense of community with any workers anywhere than the great American capitalists of the year 1900.”
Again: Ring any bells?
This group included intellectuals, by the way, who, he wrote, are “ourselves quite well insulated, at least in the short run, from the effects of globalization.”
Which left the white working-class guy and gal up for grabs — open to right-wing populists, maybe even strongmen. In Mr. Rorty’s view, no one within academia was thinking creatively about how to relieve white working-class anxiety. This was a problem. “Outside the academy,” he wrote, “Americans still want to feel patriotic. They still want to feel part of a nation which can take control of its destiny and make itself a better place.”
Richard Rorty in 2004.
Sounds an awful lot like Make Donald Drumpf Again.
At the time, Mr. Rorty was staring at a slightly different political landscape. But it wasn’t that different, ultimately. Today’s just has more mature trees.
In “Achieving Our Country,” he wrote about the perils of the North American Free Trade Agreement; today, he’d probably have cautioned against the Trans-Pacific Partnership. In “Achieving Our Country,” Mr. Rorty railed against the “scurrilous demagogue” Pat Buchanan, who in 1991 talked about building a fence at the Mexican border; today Mr. Rorty would have railed against Mr. Drumpf and his proposed wall.
“Why could not the left,” he asked, “channel the mounting rage of the newly dispossessed?”
Is his analysis a bit oversimple? Yes. Even within universities, there have always been optimistic champions of America, those who ever-passionately believe in the moral arc bending toward justice and work ever-diligently on formulating concrete, actionable policies that would make the country more just.
By focusing only on his own environment, academia, Mr. Rorty’s arguments also seem strangely parochial. During the 1960s, the academic left may have started to turn its back on poverty, but actual politicians on the left were still thinking a great deal about it: Robert F. Kennedy was visiting poor white families in Appalachia; Lyndon B. Johnson was building the Great Society.
Right through the ’90s and into the 2000s, we had left-of-center politicians singing the praises of hope, rather than the hopelessness that Mr. Rorty decries. Bill Clinton explicitly campaigned as the “man from Hope,” and Barack Obama would later campaign on a platform of “hope” and “change.” In passing health care reform, Mr. Obama genuinely did something for the immiserated underclass, and both men, in their ways, rejected identity politics. (Remember Mr. Clinton dressing down Sister Souljah? Or Mr. Obama declaring on MTV that “brothers should pull up their pants”?)
But it wasn’t enough, obviously. “Under Presidents Carter and Clinton,” Mr. Rorty wrote, “the Democratic Party has survived by distancing itself from the unions and from any mention of redistribution.” Mr. Clinton was particularly guilty of this charge, passing Nafta, appointing Robert Rubin as his Treasury secretary and enthusiastically embracing financial deregulation. Mr. Obama pushed the Trans-Pacific Partnership. And he was one of those fancy elites.
Which brings us to Hillary Clinton. She may have had a plan to relieve the misery of the working class, but she didn’t speak about it much. (Bernie Sanders did. And lost.) She was in favor of the Partnership until she was against it. In a paid speech to a Brazilian bank, she spoke of a “hemispheric common market” for energy. And though her slogan was “Stronger Together,” her campaign was ultimately predicated on celebrating difference, in the hope that disparate voting blocs would come out and vote for her.
Here, Mr. Rorty’s most inflammatory words are most relevant, and also most uncomfortable: “The cultural Left has a vision of an America in which the white patriarchs have stopped voting and have left all the voting to be done by members of previously victimized groups.” Mrs. Clinton tried this strategy. It didn’t win her the Electoral College. “This Left wants to preserve otherness rather than ignore it,” he also wrote. That didn’t work either.
People are furiously arguing about what played a key role in this election — whether it was white working-class despair, a racist backlash or terror about the pace of cultural change. It seems reasonable to think that all three played a part.
What’s so striking about “Achieving Our Country” is that it blends these theories into a common argument: The left, both cultural and political, eventually abandoned economic justice in favor of identity politics, leaving too many people feeling freaked out or ignored.
“It is as if the American Left could not handle more than one initiative at a time,” Mr. Rorty wrote. “As if it either had to ignore stigma in order to concentrate on money, or vice versa.”
You may quarrel with his argument; you may say that he was projecting onto the larger world what was happening within his own cloistered, ivied walls. But Mr. Drumpf is now our president-elect. nyt
By Stephen MetcalfJanuary 10, 2017
How could the late philosopher Richard Rorty have celebrated the rise of identity politics in the university while also deriding the major trends in critical theory as illiberal and decadent?
In the days leading up to and following the Presidential election, a seemingly prophetic passage from the late philosopher Richard Rorty circulated virally on the Internet. The quote, which was subsequently written about in the Times and the Guardian and on Yahoo and the Web site for Cosmopolitan magazine, is from his book “Achieving Our Country,” published in 1998. It is worth quoting at length:
Members of labor unions, and unorganized and unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers—themselves desperately afraid of being downsized—are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.The chilling precision of these words resulted in renewed interest in Rorty, who died in 2007. Eighteen years after its release, “Achieving Our Country” sold out on Amazon, briefly cracking the site’s list of its hundred top-selling books. Harvard University Press decided to reprint it.
At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for—someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots. . . . Once the strongman takes office, no one can predict what will happen.
Rorty’s new fans may be surprised, opening their delivery, to discover a book that has almost nothing to do with the rise of a demagogic right and its cynical exploitation of the working class. It is, instead, a book about the left’s tragic loss of national pride. “National pride is to countries what self-respect is to individuals, a necessary condition for self-improvement,” Rorty writes in the book’s opening sentence, before describing in grim detail how the democratic optimism, however qualified, of Walt Whitman, John Dewey, and James Baldwin has been abandoned in favor of what he calls a “blasé” and “spectatorial” left.
Newcomers to Rorty and “Achieving Our Country” may be surprised on a second count as well. The Times piece about the new interest in the book summarized its argument like so: “In universities, cultural and identity politics replaced the politics of change and economic justice.” This is broadly accurate, but incomplete. Rorty, in “Achieving Our Country,” shows unqualified admiration for the expansion of academic syllabi to include nonwhite and non-male authors, and describes such efforts as one means of awakening students to the “humiliation which previous generations of Americans have inflicted on their fellow citizens.” He adds, without reservation, “Encouraging students to be what mocking neoconservatives call ‘politically correct’ has made our country a far better place.”
Rorty’s only issue with identity politics was that the left, having worked so hard to transfer stigmatic cruelty away from received categories like race and gender, had done too little to prevent that stigma from landing on class—and that the white working class, finding itself abandoned by both the free-market right and the identity left, would be all too eager to transfer that stigma back to minorities, immigrants, gays, and coastal élites. (Hence the viral prophecy.)
The principal object of Rorty’s derision was neither identity politics nor the rise of an ignoble free-market right but a peculiar form of decadence, which his larger intellectual project aimed to counter. I knew Rorty a little; he was a shy and gentle man, a red-diaper baby who grew up to be a bird-watcher and a savorer of Proust and Kant in their original languages. But his loathing of the academic left was neither shy nor gentle. The “Foucauldian” left, he writes in “Achieving Our Country,” “represents an unfortunate regression to the Marxist obsession with scientific rigor.” In the specific case of Foucault, this involved locating the “ubiquitous specter” known as “power” everywhere, and conceding that we are without agency in its presence. “To step into the intellectual world which some of these leftists inhabit is to move out of a world in which citizens of a democracy can join forces to resist sadism and selfishness into a Gothic world in which democratic politics has become a farce,” he writes.
How could Rorty have celebrated the rise of identity politics in the university while also deriding the major trends in critical theory as illiberal and decadent? And how did his exhortation for a renewed national pride connect with his earlier, more technical work on human mentality and the foundations of knowledge? Early in his career, Rorty had been preoccupied by the major questions of modern philosophy as they first arose in the seventeenth century, alongside the rise of experimental science. Is the human mind an object in the world, like all the other objects in the world? Is it, too, universally law-obedient to physics? And, if it is law-obedient, do we lack agency and, like other objects, inherent dignity?
Instead of solving these problems, Rorty thought we could ditch them, just as Descartes had ditched the problems of thirteenth-century scholasticism, and at a similarly low cost to the progress of human knowledge. The cheerfully non-philosophical way to ditch them was to ignore them, like most healthy people do. The slightly more philosophical method was to notice that people argued from, rather than to, their moral intuitions—an observation that may encourage us to accept that truth is at best a matter of consensus, not an observable fact of the world. The most philosophical way to abandon them was therapeutically: one could relive the philosophical past the same way an analysand relives her emotional past. By drawing, inch by agonizing inch, an unconscious pattern to the surface, one might discard it forever.
Around the same time Rorty completed his metaphysical therapy, and was reinventing himself as a general-interest writer, his peers in the English department were replacing the categories of mind and world with language and text. They were, in other words, reproducing the epistemological conundrums that had bedeviled modern philosophy since Descartes. Instead of ditching the old neurotic patterns, literary theory repeated them ad nauseum. Problems of knowledge became problems of interpretation. The glamour of its European intellectualism aside, this meant only that literary theory knocked back and forth between the assertion that nothing can be known—versions of this skepticism are found in Descartes, Hume, Berkeley, and Kant—and the assertion that skepticism can be vanquished when knowledge is reconstructed upon a new foundation.
Foucault rode this line perfectly. He said that all knowledge was inherently unstable, because it was historically contingent, and he built a new way of knowing around the master term “power.” The primal Foucauldian move is to locate abstract and universal rights, reason, and the notion of the human within concrete social practices, and show how they were coercive or hypocritical—or sadistic—from the start. The perfect symbol for liberal modernity is a prison, as governed by a panopticon, an instrument of universal surveillance. Point taken; but Rorty believed that, in addressing more or less all of humanity as his fellow-prisoners, Foucault was being decadent, and not simply because he was weakening the distinction between metaphorical and actual inmates. Foucault made seeing, or, really, seeing through, into a revolutionary activity, while implying that only an apocalyptic transformation in human thought might liberate us.
Foucault was a great philosopher. He worked tirelessly on behalf of prison reform for actual prisoners, and he was as canny as anyone about his own epistemological biases. Rorty and Foucault were, however, as temperamentally antithetical as two human beings can be. From intellectual habits that Rorty distrusted, Foucault moved on to a belief that Rorty detested. After exposing liberalism as a lie, Foucault then asserted that illiberalism was true to our nature. At times a fairly vulgar Nietzschean, he insisted that the substrate of our common reality, however we might suppress it, was cruelty. Shame is our hidden essence; the ugliest part of a thing is its truest part; being decent or kind or liberal is a sign of self-suppression or weakness; cynicism is knowledge. Here, the various tributaries of American nihilism flow into one another; a knowing passivity that regards cynicism as political courage leads to the rejection of liberal democracy on a juvenile dare. It was against just this sort of foolishness that Rorty wrote “Achieving Our Country.” NYr
Stephen Metcalf hosts Slate’s “Culture Gabfest” podcast and is currently at work on a book about the nineteen-eighties.
