Reconstructing Individualism by Albrecht James;

Author:Albrecht, James;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Monograph
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Published: 2012-02-29T16:00:00+00:00

Four

Character and Community

Dewey’s Model of Moral Selfhood

Regarded as an idea, democracy is not an alternative to other principles of associated life. It is the idea of community life itself.

—John Dewey

Even if Emerson has no system, none the less he is the prophet and herald of any system which democracy may henceforth construct and hold by, and…when democracy has articulated itself, it will have no difficulty in finding itself already proposed in Emerson.

—John Dewey

The writings of John Dewey occupy a pivotal position in the genealogy of pragmatic individualism charted in this study.1 Spanning the era from the Civil War to the Cold War (1859–1952), Dewey’s life is remarkable for the sheer scope of social changes he witnessed and participated in, and the breadth of these changes is reflected in his prodigious range and output as a philosopher. When Democracy and Education was published in 1916, Dewey, at age fifty-seven, had already achieved a notable career as a philosopher of pragmatism and a pioneer of progressive educational reform.2 In the subsequent decades, well into his eighties, Dewey’s productivity was staggering, as he wrote a series of major works constituting his mature philosophy—ranging from the social psychology of Human Nature and Conduct (1922) and the naturalistic metaphysics of Experience and Nature (1925) to the aesthetics of Art as Experience (1934) and political reflections such as The Public and Its Problems (1927), Liberalism and Social Action (1937), and Freedom and Culture (1939). In these works of his later phase one can see Dewey deploying and adapting pragmatism, a philosophy that emerged in the final decades of the nineteenth century, to meet the demands of a twentieth-century world beset by the Great Depression, two world wars, and the threat of totalitarianism—that is to say, a world that in the scope and complexity of its dangers is more recognizably akin to our own present than to the context in which Peirce and James wrote. In this broad sense, Dewey remains indispensable to any attempt to gauge pragmatism’s continuing relevance.

More specifically, Dewey is also crucial for understanding how pragmatism allows—and indeed requires—us to reconceive individualism. Of all the writers considered in the current study, Dewey articulates the most comprehensive critique of classic liberal individualism, as well as the most systematic argument as to why a reconstructed individualism is not merely compatible with, but essential to, a democratic ideal of community. Since any claim for the moral viability of individualism must justify its consonance with the common good, the scope and clarity of Dewey’s arguments are important enough in their own right. His arguments gain added significance, however, when considered in relation to their Emersonian roots, for Dewey illustrates how a genealogy of American ethics that begins with Emerson—that poster-child for the alleged excesses of self-reliant individualism—can result in a rationale for community. The twin epigraphs above encapsulate the matter: if, as Dewey claims, the democratic ideal is the ideal of community, and if any form that democracy might take will find itself prefigured in Emerson, the inference is that Dewey sees in Emerson a democratic vision that supports and requires community.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.