Recovering Overlooked Pragmatists in Communication: Extending the Living Conversation about Pragmatism and Rhetoric

Recovering OverlookedPragmatists inCommunicationExtending the Living Conversationabout Pragmatism and Rhetoric

Edited byRobert Danisch

Recovering Overlooked Pragmatists in Communication

Robert Danisch Editor

Recovering Overlooked Pragmatists

in CommunicationExtending the Living Conversation about

Pragmatism and Rhetoric

EditorRobert DanischDepartment of Communication ArtsUniversity of WaterlooWaterloo, ON, Canada

ISBN 978-3-030-14342-8 ISBN 978-3-030-14343-5 (eBook)https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14343-5

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019932942

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed.The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14343-5

v

Acknowledgements

This book is dedicated to all of those scholars involved in the creative rereading of our various intellectual histories. I am deeply indebted to the scholars who have contributed essays to this volume for their abil-ity to think beyond the regular canon of pragmatist philosophers. I have benefitted from many conversations with those that are in this book and many who are not. Those conversations are vital to the on-going task of using pragmatism to make our world a little better. I’m very grateful to the University of Waterloo for supporting my work, and for the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for generous sup-port. Institutions like these are some of the greatest achievements of our collective democratic efforts, and I am lucky to be a member of them. I think it is fair to say the relationship between pragmatism and rhetoric is now a central preoccupation for our field. That is the achievement of a range of scholars over the last twenty or so years writing terrific books, participating in panels and conferences, and thinking seriously about what we might make of the pragmatist tradition going forward. This book is mostly dedicated to all of the people that have been part of that conversation for at least the last twenty years, from the senior statesmen like Steve Mailloux to my younger colleagues with essays in this book.

A special thanks to Scott Stroud for pushing me to develop this project when I might just have let it slip. And a special thanks to Pete Simonson for teaching that seminar on pragmatism so many years ago. And my deep-est appreciation is saved for Eliot and Julien, who continue to extend every conversation that I’m a part of in the most amazing and productive ways.

vii

contents

1 On the Uses and On-going Relevance of Pragmatism for Communication Studies 1Robert Danisch

2 Richard McKeon in the Pragmatist Tradition 23Peter Simonson

3 Hu Shi’s Search for the “Chinese Sophist” and “Spirit of Courageous Doubt” 53Rya Butterfield

4 Echoes of Pragmatism in India: Bhimrao Ambedkar and Reconstructive Rhetoric 79Scott R. Stroud

5 The Art of Adjustment: Ralph Ellison’s Pragmatist Critique of Irving Howe 105Jansen B. Werner

6 Living Pragmatism: Alice Dewey’s Open-Minded Approach to Experiential Education and Cross-Cultural Immersion 129Karen Shea and Krysten Manke

viii CONTENTS

7 The Accidental Pragmatist: Jonathan Haidt’s Moral Psychology as Pragmatic Popular Science 157Jeremy Smyczek

8 Jane Addams’ Rhetorical Ear: Teaching, Learning, and Listening in the Settlement House Model 177Amy E. Dayton

9 Emergent Publics, Public Emergencies: The Importance of John Dewey in Jane Bennett’s Nonhuman Politics of Vital Materialism 197Daniel P. Richards

Index 223

ix

notes on contributors

Rya Butterfield is Assistant Professor of Speech in the Department of Mass Communication at Nicholls State University, USA. She is the recent past president of the Association for Chinese Communication Studies and a member of the Third Council Committee of the Chinese Rhetoric Society of the World. Her Ph.D., is in Rhetoric with a minor in Political Theory from Louisiana State University, USA.

Robert Danisch is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Waterloo, Canada. He is author of Pragmatism, Democracy, and the Necessity of Rhetoric and Building a Social Democracy: The Promise of Rhetorical Pragmatism.

Amy E. Dayton is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Writing Center at The University of Alabama, USA. She is editor of Assessing the Teaching of Writing, and has published essays in Rhetoric Review, Community Literacy Journal, and College English.

Krysten Manke is currently a doctoral candidate for a degree in Rhetoric and Composition at the University of Rhode Island, USA. Her dissertation provides an archival investigation of the Dewey Laboratory School as a site of rhetorical education. Her research interests include the pedagogical intersections of feminism, pragmatism, and rhetorical citizenship.

Daniel P. Richards is Assistant Professor of English at Old Dominion University, USA, where he teaches undergraduate and graduate courses

x NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

in rhetoric, technical communication, writing pedagogy, and American pragmatism. His research specializes in professional and technical com-munication, particularly in the context of risk and disaster, and his work has appeared in Technical Communication Quarterly, Intercom, Communication Design Quarterly, and Composition Forum, as well as in several edited collections. His own co-edited collection, Posthuman Praxis in Technical Communication (2018), has been published in the Routledge Studies in Technical Communication, Rhetoric, and Culture series.

Karen Shea is Professor of English at Johnson & Wales University, USA. She has taught postsecondary English and English as a Second Language for thirty years, both at home and abroad. Her most recent research focuses on comparative rhetoric, open-mindedness, pragmatism, and John Dewey’s personal correspondence from Asia.

Peter Simonson is Professor and Chair of the Department of Communication at the University of Colorado Boulder, USA. He con-ducts research on rhetorical practice across different media, the intellec-tual history of communication in the United States, and the international history of media and communication studies. He is author of Refiguring Mass Communication: A History, lead editor of The International History of Communication Study and The Handbook of Communication History, and producer of two documentary films on the history of media research.

Jeremy Smyczek is Assistant Professor of English at St. Bonaventure University, USA, where he teaches courses in composition, professional writing, and rhetorical theory. His research investigates current uses of American pragmatism in rhetoric and communication studies and its potential as a tool to supplement existing approaches in the academic communities studying scientific argument and advocacy.

Scott R. Stroud is Associate Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, USA. His work lies at the intersection of rhetoric and philosophy. He is author of John Dewey and the Artful Life and Kant and the Promise of Rhetoric.

Jansen B. Werner is an independent scholar. His research explores questions related to rhetoric, belonging, and civic life. He is currently developing a book project that examines how Ralph Ellison employed contradiction as a dynamic civic resource.

1

CHAPTER 1

On the Uses and On-going Relevance of Pragmatism for Communication Studies

Robert Danisch

Pragmatism has a complicated intellectual history with multiple defini-tions, a plurality of advocates and detractors, and a variety of disparate figures all claiming some allegiance to its worldview (Menand 2002; Diggins 1994; Bacon 2012; Stuhr 1999; Misak 2015). This book’s aim is not to settle any of the controversy surrounding pragmatism or to reduce the multiplicity or plurality of definitions and forms of it. That kind of multiplicity demonstrates the advantages and vitality of the prag-matist tradition. This book aims to cultivate a greater degree of variety and complexity within the pragmatist tradition by interpreting and relat-ing a series of figures that we might not ordinarily think of as pragma-tists. In order to expand the range of characters and commitments that characterize the pragmatist tradition, I will argue, in this chapter, that we consider the difference between philosophical pragmatism and rhetori-cal pragmatism. This distinction will help us track the influence of early pragmatists on the disparate figures assessed in the forthcoming chap-ters of this book. This distinction, in other words, will help orient our

© The Author(s) 2019 R. Danisch (ed.), Recovering Overlooked Pragmatists in Communication, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14343-5_1

R. Danisch (*) Department of Communication Arts, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canadae-mail: [email protected]

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14343-5_1

http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1007/978-3-030-14343-5_1&domain=pdf

2 R. DANISCH

understanding of why some key intellectual figures in the history of the twentieth century have been overlooked as important pragmatists, and what the cash value of reading those figures back into the pragmatist tra-dition might be.

Philosophical pragmatism, as I call it, refers to the professional, aca-demic concern with tracking the intellectual and theoretical implications of positions that foreground social interaction, pluralism, and contin-gency as basic facts of human experience. William James spent consid-erable time in both Pragmatism and The Meaning of Truth explicating an epistemology that issues from a commitment to contingency, plural-ity, and social interaction. Contemporary neo-pragmatists like Donald Davidson and Robert Brandom develop philosophical pragmatisms that go further and explicate a theory of language that issues from the same set of commitments. Professional philosophers like Davidson and Brandom pursue their work even though first-generation pragmatism rejected much of the tradition of philosophy that extended from Plato to Descartes. In other words, many pragmatist figures remain devoted to the task of providing answers to traditional questions in the academic discipline of philosophy despite the deep critiques of the philosophical tradition authored by James and Dewey. But what about those figures that might work outside of, or at the margins of, professional academic philosophy? Rhetorical pragmatism, as I call it, takes the philosophical insights of James, Dewey, and other pragmatist philosophers and uses them as a theoretical resource and justification for seeking, developing, and deploying methods and practices for improving our democratic culture. These methods and practices are, more often than not, mat-ters of communicative practice. William James’s commitment to public lecturing and his investment in creating an intellectual community with his audiences were signs of the connection between pragmatism and rhetoric/communication (Stob). To put it more succinctly: rhetorical pragmatism turns questions of epistemology or metaphysics into ques-tions about the effects of our communicative practices.

In my view, philosophical pragmatism (from its beginning in the works of John Dewey and William James) has entailed a commitment to communication and rhetorical practice. One can see this commitment even in the most professionalized versions of contemporary philosophical pragmatism like Richard Rorty’s account of the contingency of language and Robert Brandom’s social practice account of meaning. If we take the entailment to communication and rhetorical practice seriously, then

1 ON THE USES AND ON-GOING RELEVANCE OF PRAGMATISM … 3

one way to advance the pragmatist project is to turn philosophical ques-tions about truth, morality, logic, or aesthetics into rhetorical questions about the best practices for citizenship, leadership, inquiry, deliberation, public argument, and community building. In other words, one of the intellectual projects that first-generation pragmatism has left for us is the development and use of methods of communicative practice fit for the advancement of contemporary democracy. The variety of chapters in this book all show different kinds of practices or methods that could real-ize such an end and different figures that sought ways of improving their socio-political circumstances through leveraging pragmatist intellectual commitments to different ends. In other words, the essays in this book argue that what remains after philosophical pragmatism has furnished all of the answers that it can to the full range of philosophical problems is rhetorical pragmatism’s commitment to pursuing communication prac-tices that will build a form of democratic life capable of generating good decisions about pressing public issues and promoting freedom.

Taken as a whole, this book offers an alternative intellectual history of American pragmatism, one that reclaims a series of intellectual figures whose work can push neo-pragmatism beyond its philosophical limi-tations. From Jane Addams and Jane Bennett to Hu Shi and Bhimrao Ambedkar, this intellectual history asserts that a variety of forms of prag-matism developed throughout the twentieth century both inside the United States and outside, and that these forms of pragmatism were all deeply concerned with rhetoric and communication in their orientations. Taken as a whole, therefore, the essays in this book argue that one of the major entailments of the invention of American pragmatism at the beginning of the twentieth century is that rhetoric and communication are important intellectual objects of study, as well as important means of improving democratic life. Pragmatism entails a commitment to rheto-ric and communication practices. This is the argument that philosophical pragmatism either continues to fail to realize or continues to misun-derstand. This book can hopefully stretch our imagination beyond the limits of philosophical pragmatism in order to find useful ways toward important intellectual insights and practical methods for improving our own circumstances. In this Chapter, I will also argue that a rhetori-cal pragmatism will be more faithful to the project of John Dewey and William James’s work, will offer insight into the ways in which commu-nication operates in contemporary democratic cultures, will recommend practices, methods and modes of action for improving contemporary

4 R. DANISCH

democratic cultures, and will subordinate philosophy to rhetoric by reim-agining appropriate ways for pragmatist scholarship and social research to advance. In order to explicate this argument and to continue the conversation about the relationship between pragmatism, rhetoric, and communication, I want to clarify the distinction between philosophical pragmatism and rhetorical pragmatism, to consider this distinction in the light of the disciplinary politics of higher education, and then return to the original pragmatists for insight into what is at stake in this distinction.

PhilosoPhicAl Versus rhetoricAl PrAgmAtism

Another book about pragmatism may be one book too many, and it might be the case that too much has already been said about the mean-ing of pragmatism. One could read a fairly large number of books that begin with an account of the tradition of pragmatism and its core philo-sophical arguments. This book does seek to add to that long list of other books making such claims. But my purpose in this opening essay is not to refute or dismiss this scholarship, much of which is excellent. From Robert Westbrook and John Patrick Diggins (intellectual historians) to Cheryl Misak and Robert Talisse (philosophers), work about pragmatism has offered detailed arguments concerning the relationships and distinc-tions between various pragmatist figures. All of this work has helped to fully articulate pragmatist-style answers to many philosophical questions, thus extending and developing the tradition of pragmatism in impor-tant ways. This book, taken as a whole, offers yet another kind of intel-lectual history. But instead of trying to define pragmatism or dwelling extensively on reconstructing a pragmatist tradition and extending phil-osophical analyses, these essays will show the diverse range of influences that pragmatism has had. To begin to explain why pragmatism has been able to have the diverse range of influences outlined within this book, I want to make clear two different kinds of questions that I think prag-matism makes central. The first set of questions concerns the traditional considerations of professional, academic philosophy, and the second set of questions concerns how best to improve our lived experience. In my view, examples of the first set of questions are indicative of work in phil-osophical pragmatism, and examples of the second set of questions are indicative of work in rhetorical pragmatism. I also think that the first set of questions are mostly a matter of epistemology and that the second set


of questions are mostly a matter of communication. The essays in this book reveal the cash value and promise of work in rhetorical pragmatism, and thus attempt to extend the conversation beyond the limits of work in philosophical pragmatism.

What are questions that concern traditional considerations in philos-ophy? Primarily I mean questions that seek an explanation of the way the world is and an account of why the world is that way, along with a verifiable description of what we know about the world and how we know those things. William James (1907 [1995]) asks, for example, what is truth? It is not the content of this kind of question that interests me, but the form of it. Robert Talisse (2008), to use another example, begins his book by asking a series of questions about the existence and defin-ing characteristics of a pragmatist tradition. These questions have the same form as James’s question about truth. The goal of a philosophical question is to get at the unchanging, universalizable truth of the world and our place in it. Pragmatism does offer some insights that could help reach such an end. One of the unique features of pragmatism is the kind of answers that figures like John Dewey and William James have offered to philosophical questions. The questions themselves, however, are not new in terms of form or content. William James goes so far as to call pragmatism a method of doing philosophy, by which he means it is a set of intellectual practices to use when asking and answering philosophical questions designed to get at universalizable truths. He shows, to name just one example, how pragmatism can answer questions about the one and the many in Pragmatism. What gives the tradition of philosophical pragmatism a center of gravity are the kinds of considerations that get foregrounded in the answering of such questions.

That center of gravity is marked by what Robert Westbrook has called a “workmanlike” position on the nature of knowledge, meaning, and truth (1). A “workmanlike” epistemology rejects realism and ideal-ism and rejects the search for foundations upon which to base our truth claims. In the place of a search for foundational knowledge that is uni-versalizable, pragmatism is committed to the process of inquiry. That process of inquiry leads to an evolutionary and ecological account of knowledge. From this perspective, truth is not the property of a proposi-tion but an outcome of a process. This is a rejection of Rene Descartes’s philosophy (which is understood to be one of the hallmarks of the devel-opment of professional, academic philosophy), along with any attempt to assert a strong distinction between a knowing subject and an object

6 R. DANISCH

for our knowledge. My intention here is not to offer a careful read-ing of either pragmatist or realist epistemology or the debates between those two perspectives. My aim is simply to note that, from a pragma-tist perspective, human interests and actions (taken individually and col-lectively) become the measure of truth. If we follow this initial insight, several other intellectual positions become important to philosophical pragmatism. For John Dewey, and other pragmatists that have followed, “experience” is the preferred description for how we interact with our surroundings because it highlights the constitutive exchange between people and environments and helps us think about how we are trans-formed by our interactions with our surroundings and how we trans-form those same surroundings by our actions. In addition, pragmatism is committed to a kind of philosophical and political pluralism. Such a perspective suggests that final determinations regarding human affairs are not possible given the multiplicity of ways we can and do experience the world. This also entails that the world, and our place in it, is character-ized by contingency and uncertainty. Communities are then left with the task of negotiating and managing the plurality, contingency, and uncer-tainty that we experience in the world. For philosophical pragmatism, we are socially encumbered and relational beings. Therefore, the individu-al’s relationship to community becomes a central consideration. How communities influence individuals and how individuals maintain and express themselves through communities are key questions for pragma-tism. These questions about the individual’s relationship to community ultimately lead to considerations about the importance of democracy as the preferred way of managing community relationships. Dewey (1927 [1946]) perhaps most succinctly and eloquently ties the epistemological insights of pragmatism to a concern for community by suggesting that “knowledge is a function of communication and association,” by which he means it is a function of community life (158).

Philosophical pragmatism takes a version of these intellectual commit-ments as a starting point and then develops sophisticated accounts of the world and our place in it that amount to univeralizable truths in keep-ing with the traditions of academic, professional philosophy. In my view, Robert Brandom has authored the best contemporary articulation of a well-developed philosophical pragmatism. Brandom’s (1998) social prac-tice account of language issues from the epistemology that John Dewey and William James first began to articulate, along with the commitments to uncertainty, contingency, pluralism, and community that issue from


that epistemology. He articulates and advances an impressive philosophy, but it is one that is constrained in an important way—it is unrelated to the project of living in a democratic culture. John Dewey and William James also articulated and advanced impressive philosophies from the same intellectual commitments. But they were also seriously committed to the task of designing and implementing methods for improving their social and political circumstances. Dewey, for example, worked closely with Jane Addams at Hull House because he wanted to figure out how to aid and improve his local community. Early versions of pragmatism faced the dual task of developing a full and sophisticated philosophy out of the importance assigned to contingency, plurality, uncertainty, com-munity and a rejection of realist epistemology, along with the tasks of building and improving the American democratic experiment. John Dewey, William James, Jane Addams, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Alain Locke and others all thought that the answers they formed to philosoph-ical questions also happened to entail a commitment to the development of American democracy because of the nature of those answers. Robert Brandom, Richard Rorty, John Stuhr, and many other neo- pragmatists have dropped what I would call the rhetorical project of improving democratic culture and instead focused exclusively on the philosophi-cal puzzles that emerge when one sees the world like Dewey, James and others saw it. When philosophical pragmatism is severed from the dem-ocratic project, then something profound is lost from the tradition of pragmatism.

The intellectual commitments outlined above returned John Dewey, again and again, to questions about, and concerns with, communication. If truth is contingent, uncertain, plural, and the outcome of a process of inquiry, and if we are all creatures of associated living, then commu-nication is the principal means of living within our circumstances. Put another way, communication is the means by which we come to hold things to be true and to have things in common. I have argued elsewhere that philosophical pragmatism commits us to a concern with communica-tion (Danisch 2015). Communication practices become the pivot point, from my perspective, that justifies the move from philosophical pragma-tism to rhetorical pragmatism. My aim is not to deny what has always appeared true: that pragmatism has long been committed to offering a philosophical explanation of the work and our place in it. I do aim, how-ever, to remind us (and hopefully each of the essays in this volume will remind us all of this argument) that pragmatism was also committed to

8 R. DANISCH

changing the world and producing melioristic consequences. Rhetorical pragmatism extends beyond the emphasis on descriptive epistemologi-cal accounts of the world and focuses attention on consequential prac-tices for changing the world. When saying that communication is a pivot point between philosophical pragmatism and rhetorical pragmatism, I mean that it serves as both an essential component of any adequate phil-osophical account of our plural, contingent and uncertain circumstances and it serves as the fundamental means of engaging with the world in consequential and melioristic ways. Part of the method of doing philoso-phy that William James outlined asks that we evaluate the consequences of offering a particular account of the world. This is because pragma-tism, as a philosophy of interaction, is committed to the belief that the world changes because of human activity. Once that kind of philosophi-cal account is in place, I think we have an obligation to begin to rework and revise our habits and practices of interaction in order to produce the kinds of effects that we think are beneficial. That project signals the move from what I’m calling philosophical pragmatism to rhetorical pragma-tism. John Dewey, operating as a professional philosopher, described a world in which social interaction governed by communication was essen-tial for a coherent epistemology, aesthetics, and ethics. He then went so far as to make prescriptive recommendations for how we might improve our habits and practices for the betterment of American democratic cul-ture. We ought to read this as the way in which his philosophical pragma-tism pushed him toward a rhetorical pragmatism.

Unfortunately, the first pragmatists did not make a full turn to rhetor-ical pragmatism and never fully thought through how to improve com-munication practices for transforming our democratic culture. Toward the end of his career, John Dewey wrote the introduction to a textbook for a relatively new class at universities called “Discussion” (Keith 2007). This was precisely the kind of class that could serve the rhetorical project of improving citizenship through communication skills. William James reflected, throughout his career, on the role and complexity of pub-lic speaking as an integral and essential intellectual practice, but he never developed a full-blown rhetorical pragmatism capable of recommend-ing forms of public speaking that could best influence American democ-racy. Instead, first-generation pragmatists spent more time working out the philosophical implications of the intellectual commitments described above. This is not a failure; it is merely a limitation. But if contempo-rary versions of pragmatism are also unable to work out a full rhetorical


pragmatism and, instead, focus almost exclusively on developing philo-sophical accounts of the world then we diminish the legacy of pragmatism. The essays in this book are, in my view, examples of the kind of intellectual work made possible when we pivot away from philosophical pragmatism and toward rhetorical pragmatism, or when we pivot away from think-ing in the terms of academic, professional philosophy and toward how we might improve our socio-political circumstances. Pragmatism, I think, demands that we ask: what are the consequences of limiting ourselves to questions of epistemology that are central to the professional discipline of philosophy? In my view, the main consequence is that pragmatism, both new and old, can give excellent and sophisticated intellectual accounts of the world but cannot provide sophisticated intellectual resources for improving our democratic culture. One of the reasons that we may have overlooked the figures in this book is that they might not fit into the tradi-tion of philosophical pragmatism, and might instead offer us insights more aligned with rhetorical pragmatism. In addition, the main consequence of pursuing philosophical questions is the advancement and development of the professional academic discipline of philosophy, and professional philos-ophy has developed in the U.S. in the last fifty years by offering pragmatist answers to basic philosophical questions. But another consequence of the development of professional philosophy is less attention paid to the prac-tical socio-political projects of the moment; professional academic life is separated from the tasks of democratic life. America’s greatest intellectual contribution to the world of ideas has not been used to improve American democracy. It is time, in my view, for the constraints of philosophy to be removed so that pragmatism can fully engage in the project of building an improved democratic culture. This is the consequence of making a rhetor-ical turn and putting rhetorical considerations before philosophical ones. One achievement of extending the conversation between pragmatism, rhetoric, and communication might just be better resources for improving our democratic culture. In other words, the importance of extending the conversation between pragmatism, rhetoric, and communication is that we might imagine better ways of engaging with and transforming our demo-cratic culture (and not just better ways of answering traditional questions in philosophy). Each of the essays in this book provides some insight into how that might be possible.

Before proceeding any further I want to clarify what I mean by rhet-oric. The study and practice of rhetoric developed in Greek antiquity as a way of influencing political affairs (Schiappa 1999; Habinek 2004).

10 R. DANISCH

The Greek sophists argued that uncertainty and ambiguity characterized human affairs, and that multiple, idiosyncratic perspectives derived from human experiences created contingent circumstances subject to change (Schiappa 2003). Rhetoric was formed in response to such situations. The artful use of language was capable of generating some degree of order out of otherwise uncertain or chaotic circumstances. In political affairs, this meant that rhetorical practice was the central way of guiding deliberation, articulating individual opinions, and holding communities together (all important political projects). The more eloquent uses of language were able to distinguish one piece of discourse from another, and eloquence began to drive community decision-making because of its ability to persuade audiences. Rhetoric, therefore, was both a technê and a dynamis (Farrell 1995, 62–67). On the one hand, rhetoric was a body of rules derived from experience that may be known or applied through the exercise of reason in order to produce eloquent and effec-tive discourse. And, on the other hand, rhetoric was a powerful capacity for doing, or for making and constructing the world through language. Greek rhetoricians developed handbooks of rhetorical practice to make recommendations for how best to deploy this powerful art. These ancient origins of rhetoric foregrounded a set of questions different from traditional questions of philosophy, and created a set of intellectual com-mitments that remain with us today. These commitments prioritize a consideration of the effects of language and symbol systems over ques-tions about what words or symbols represent. They also recommend that we pay more attention to how we communicate and less attention to what we know. Rhetorical theorists and practitioners ask the following set of questions: What effects will my speech acts have? How can I use symbols to create order and meaning in different circumstances? What argumentative choices will be most persuasive? How do I use language to become a political leader and influence the course of decision-making? How can I bring and hold a community together through symbols and speech acts? How does the eloquent use of language aid the process of public deliberation?

The ancient Greeks had their own set of answers to these questions, but those answers are not my concern here. My argument is that prag-matism puts this same set of questions before us as well, and that dif-ferent contexts demand different sets of answers. Rhetorical pragmatism will not, and cannot, look exactly like ancient Greek rhetorical theory and practice (the essays in this book make that clear). Although it will


develop out of a similar set of intellectual commitments, it will lead us to offer different versions of rhetoric as a technê and dynamis. It will, however, prioritize questions about communication practices over ques-tions about epistemology. If we follow rhetorical pragmatism and not philosophical pragmatism, and begin to attend to questions about com-munication practices and how symbols and words enact relationships, generate consensus and make meanings, then we are in a better position to change, transform or improve our democratic culture. At stake in the distinction between philosophical pragmatism and rhetorical pragmatism is whether I want to simply give an epistemological account of the world or whether I want to change the world. Change is an outcome of rhe-torical practice not philosophical reflection. The philosophical account of the world provided by pragmatism entails a commitment to the rhetori-cal project because it tells us that social interaction in communities gov-erned by conditions of uncertainty, contingency, and plurality determines what we know and what things mean. In such circumstances, rhetorical practice is necessary within the process of social interaction. And it is also the best available method for guiding those interactions to better out-comes. The distinction I’ve drawn here is part of an old and enduring debate between rhetoric and philosophy. I want to briefly describe how that long debate offers contextual justification for the distinction I’ve just drawn, and how that debate might condition our understanding of the value of returning to the overlooked pragmatists in this book.

communicAtion studies And PhilosoPhy in liberAl Arts educAtion

Bruce Kimball (1995) argued that the distinction I am drawing between a philosophical and a rhetorical orientation to the world has guided two competing visions of liberal education since the ancient Greek debates between Socrates and the sophists. Kimball has not been the only person to recognize this tension. Much has been written about the 2500 year-old contest between philosophy and rhetoric, and the meaning and implications of that contest (Ijselling 1976; Hauser 2008). In some ways, I am arguing that the philosophical debates inspired by pragmatism return us, in new variation, to the ancient Greek debates between philos-ophy and rhetoric. Surprisingly, many proponents of philosophical prag-matism, including John Dewey, William James, Richard Rorty, Robert Brandom and others, are unaware of the richness and complexity of the

12 R. DANISCH

rhetorical tradition. Dewey and James certainly did not see themselves as part of the larger contest between philosophy and rhetoric. In my view, however, I think that useful and important insights about prag-matism are made possible by reading pragmatists into this larger, longer debate. And, in some sense, the authors of the essays in this book also read a broader group of pragmatist figures into the intellectual tradi-tion of rhetoric and communication studies to help offer fresh insights about the cash value of pragmatism. A careful look at the origins and development of Communication Studies as an academic discipline in the twentieth century can show how a set of pragmatist commitments helped to breathe life into an American version of the rhetorical tradition.

In Orators and Philosophers, Kimball describes the ways in which Isocrates, Cicero, Quintilian and other ancient rhetoricians were critical of the theoretical and abstract pursuit of truth promoted by Socrates and Plato. On the other hand, and from a philosophical perspective, Socrates and Plato criticized advocates of rhetoric for their ambivalence or apa-thy toward truth and “their hand-to-mouth pragmatism” (xvii). Today’s modern research university, according to perspectives informed by these earlier debates, represents a triumph of the philosophers over the ora-tors. Kimball reminds us, however, that the rhetorical perspective made important and valuable contributions to both our broader intellectual history and the pedagogical mission of higher education. The orators, for example, claimed that communicating knowledge was crucial to learn-ing and that a community of learners would need to make judgments about what to do and how to act in uncertain circumstances. Isocrates, Cicero and Quintilian all taught their students the language arts in order to produce wise, public citizens capable of eloquent and persuasive com-munication and good decision-making. Beyond commitments to com-munication and community, the classical rhetorical tradition believed persuasion was integral to the cultivation of moral character and vir-tue, and this belief led to the formation of the first version of the lib-eral arts tradition with the goal of training good citizens to lead society. Rhetorical education, from this perspective, produced an active citizen, who was a virtuous, universally competent, and capable orator with the ability to address any topic and assume any position of leadership in the state. One main difference between this classical version of the rhetori-cal tradition and the pragmatist commitments outlined above is the role of oratory (or, put more simply, the kind of communicative competence being taught). Classical Athens and Republican Rome required oratory


as a principle communication skill for leaders. Pragmatism’s commitment to democratic culture requires a more varied set of communicative com-petencies for leadership (as the essays in this book show). Those compe-tencies include oratory but extend to other practices like listening, and small group deliberation, as was made clear by Dewey in his introduction to a “Discussion” textbook. Regardless, a rhetorical education empha-sizes communication, community and virtuous leadership and teaches us to consider consequences and to pursue change in public ways. These are hallmarks of both the classical approach to rhetorical education and the pragmatist approach to education more generally.

Edward Schiappa (1995) has argued that Isocrates was the earliest proponent of both pragmatism and rhetorical education. In Isocrates’ work, we find a careful articulation of the pragmatist intellectual com-mitments articulated by James and Dewey as well as a philosophy of edu-cation deeply committed to rhetoric’s ability to transform socio-political circumstances. I think it is worth noting that Isocrates’ school in Athens was incredibly successful, attracted many students, and produced alumni who became political leaders in the ancient Greek world. The students in Isocrates’ school were taught using a form of experiential learning, whereby practice was privileged over speculation and discussion (which were the preferred modes of education at Plato’s Academy). Students delivered practice speeches on pressing moral, political or social issues. The goal was to help the students develop a sense of practical wisdom (Poulakos). Through active practice and experience using rhetoric stu-dents were put into position to make good decisions (as measured by whether decisions benefitted the community as a whole) in difficult cir-cumstances. What is most clear from examples of the kind of education students received from Isocrates is that the kind of epistemology taught in the academic discipline of philosophy was simply not taught. This was because he considered the quest for universalizable accounts of the world irrelevant for the development of the skill of good decision-making and community leadership. Unfortunately, Isocrates is mostly ignored or forgotten as an educational theorist, even as we hear buzzwords about experiential learning and flipped classrooms. John Dewey is often cred-ited as the first advocate of experiential learning and for coming up with the idea that students ought to use and hone practical judgment while engaging with real-life problems. But this is also exactly what Isocrates taught his students as a form of rhetorical education. Isocrates is an example of what might happen when rhetoric is privileged over

14 R. DANISCH

philosophy. Moreover, his work also shows the importance of such privi-leging for building an effective democracy.

Unlike Isocrates’ school, the primary function of the modern research university is to produce new knowledge. Science and Engineering pro-grams tend to be the privileged producers of new knowledge in higher education (and are often described in the most attractive terms to poten-tial students) while communication skills are thought of as “soft skills,” capable of helping with the transmission of new knowledge produced by scientists and engineers. Unfortunately, the humanities and social sciences have followed the commitment to knowledge production pro-moted by the sciences and engineering. Within such a model of higher education, research is the privileged activity of academics in all fields, and philosophy occupies a privileged place in the hierarchy of humani-ties disciplines because of its ability to offer epistemological accounts of all of this new knowledge. These may be some fairly broad statements, but I think it is fair to argue that the modern research university is more committed to knowledge-making than to cultivating wisdom or prac-tical judgment in students. The mission statements of almost all North American universities suggest a civic purpose but rarely does the curricu-lum deliver on that promise. The professionalization of higher education has coincided with this greater attention on knowledge and research, and has, in some ways, cut the university off from the civic responsibilities of leadership within our democratic culture. The “ivory tower” as an apt descriptor of the modern university nicely summarizes and shows the gap between the practical judgment required to lead a community and the abstract, systematic search for knowledge characteristic of systems of education that stretch back to Plato’s Academy. My argument here is that a central component of both the pragmatist tradition and the rhe-torical tradition is a commitment to fostering practical judgment and not just transferring bodies of knowledge.

William Keith (2007) recounts the origins of Speech Communication programs in the twentieth century, and in so doing shows that the tradi-tion of rhetorical education has persisted alongside the successes of sci-ence and engineering programs. Speech Communication Departments (which later became Communication Departments) grew out of English Studies at the beginning of the twentieth century. The split between English and Communication was mostly a result of a dissatisfaction with teaching rhetoric as just a matter of composition and taste. From Keith’s perspective, the central question that Speech Communication programs


faced was: “How do we teach democracy (91)?” If teachers of rhetoric focused too much on taste or composition, then they could not answer this question in any robust way. Instead, early communication scholars relied on John Dewey’s work, with its emphasis on deliberative decision- making in problematic situations, as a way of teaching democracy. Keith calls “discussion pedagogy” the mode of teaching that stressed the importance of deliberative interaction and that developed in the middle of the twentieth century as a kind of pragmatist rhetorical education for democratic culture. “Discussion pedagogy” does not give any final, com-prehensive account of rhetorical education for democratic culture, nor is it the only kind of rhetorical education that is entailed by pragmatism. But it is one of the forgotten moments from the twentieth century when philosophical pragmatism began to pivot toward rhetorical pragmatism by placing experiential learning and communicative practices over and above the pursuit of universalizable knowledge.

My aim here is not to end the longstanding debate between philos-ophy and rhetoric or to use a sustained critique of the modern research university’s search for abstract knowledge to promote rhetorical educa-tion (although I think we ought to engage in such a critique whenever we can). I wanted to describe these larger and longer debates in order to position pragmatism, especially the versions of pragmatism found within this book. My argument, and I believe the essays that follow sup-port this argument, is that pragmatism shares more with the kind of rhetorical education advanced by Kimball’s “orators” and Keith’s “dis-cussion pedagogy” than it does with the emphasis on universalizable and abstract knowledge advanced by Kimball’s “philosophers” or contem-porary Philosophy departments. A commitment to rhetorical education becomes one of the key ways to pivot from philosophical pragmatism to rhetorical pragmatism. Once we are equipped with the philosophi-cal worldview provided by pragmatism, we ought to be committed to cultivating rhetorical practices in order to help improve our demo-cratic culture. I see, especially in examples like Bimrao Ambedkar, Jane Addams, and Alice Dewey, just this kind of commitment. If one remains constrained by philosophical pragmatism’s intellectual orientation to the world, then one cannot articulate, develop and advance a form of rhetorical education. Pragmatism, time and again in its commitment to transforming our world, returns us to these old and enduring debates between philosophy and rhetoric, and, in so doing, recommends that we privilege rhetoric over philosophy. If philosophical pragmatism loses

16 R. DANISCH

sight of this, then the epistemology, ethics, aesthetics or philosophy of language that emerge from pragmatism cannot effect change or improve our socio-political circumstances.

For thousands of years, a rhetorical education has taught through experiential learning and promoted the mastery of specific communi-cation skills for the purposes of citizenship and leadership. This was done with support from the kinds of complex theoretical accounts of the world given to us by figures like Aristotle, Isocrates, the sophists, Cicero and others. These complex theoretical accounts of the world share much with pragmatism. Therefore, extending the conversation about pragmatism requires us to explore the intersection between com-munication, rhetoric, and pragmatism in order to more fully flesh out the ways in which we might engage in, and transform, the world. Speech Communication programs throughout North America have been the contemporary realization of the ancient commitment to rhetorical edu-cation within our own university systems. The chapters of this book will hopefully show how we might leverage the exciting intellectual work by a series of overlooked figures in order to advance such a conversation. This work will show the advantages to be gained for both pragmatism and the discipline of Communication Studies by focusing on such a series of fig-ures and moving beyond the limitations of philosophical pragmatism. To focus on method, practice, interaction, contingency, plurality, and expe-rience is to occupy a rhetorical worldview from which one can change one’s socio-political circumstances and help build an effective democratic culture. To realize the pragmatist project is to make the turn from phi-losophy to rhetoric in the broadest possible sense.

the on-going releVAnce of first-generAtion PrAgmAtism

Before engaging with the diverse set of figures in this book, I think we ought to first assess the continued and broad-ranging relevance of first-generation pragmatism. In my view, the earliest versions pragmatism gave us two important insights: First, Dewey, James, and others gave us a series of interesting answers to philosophical questions that foreground the role of social interaction, plurality, contingency, community, and practical action. Second, they also gave us an argument for building and improving a democratic culture. These two insights and commitments are related and they recommend the development of both philosophical


pragmatism and rhetorical pragmatism. We have, unfortunately, spent too much time fleshing out philosophical pragmatism instead of rhetori-cal pragmatism. But we cannot build or improve our democratic culture without articulating and promoting a form of rhetorical pragmatism. Rhetorical pragmatism makes direct, practical engagement with dem-ocratic culture possible and holds the potential to change our socio- political circumstances in ways that the earliest versions of pragmatism had desired. Remaining faithful to the tradition of pragmatism requires that we engage this task just as substantively as we have engaged the philosophical task throughout the twentieth century. If democracy is a way of life (like John Dewey argued), then we don’t only need an expla-nation of life in it. We also need a way to live it, which is another way of saying that we need a set of the rhetorical practices that we could use to live it well.

Another way of making sense of these two main insights of first- generation pragmatism is to make a distinction between orthodox prag-matists and secular pragmatists. Secular pragmatists are not wedded to philosophical questions and puzzles (or work within the confines of aca-demic, professional philosophy) but instead seek to find ways of using philosophical insight in the service of building democratic cultures. Orthodox pragmatists articulate and explain pragmatism within the confines of traditional Philosophy Departments by seeking universaliza-ble claims consistent with the intellectual orientation to the world first articulated by James and Dewey. Orthodox pragmatists also minimize or ignore questions about democracy by treating such questions with high degrees of abstraction (if they treat them at all). I believe John Dewey, William James, Jane Addams, Alice Dewey, Richard McKeon, Bhimrao Ambedkar, Hu Shi, Ralph Ellison, Jonathan Haidt, and Jane Bennett are all secular pragmatists because they are not content to ask and answer questions within the confines of professional philosophy (although they may do that kind of work at times, it does not define their careers). I understand Richard Rorty, Cornel West, Robert Brandom, W.V. Quine, Donald Davidson, Cheryl Misak, and Robert Talisse to be orthodox pragmatists because professional philosophy constrains, limits, and deter-mines the kinds of intellectual work in which each engages. Orthodox pragmatism is blind to the rhetorical tradition and unable to imagine or develop practical ways of improving democratic culture. James and Dewey, at varying points and in various contexts, inhabited both ortho-dox philosophical positions and secular pragmatist positions that allowed

18 R. DANISCH

them to see beyond the limits of professional philosophy; this is part of what gives them an on-going and important utility in asking and answer-ing pressing intellectual questions. The advantage of secular pragmatists is that they put democratic culture ahead of professional philosophy, while orthodox pragmatists remain content to put professional philoso-phy ahead of democratic culture. I think one of the main implications of the earliest versions of pragmatism is the argument that we ought to be more secular and less orthodox in our intellectual work. I believe that this book takes up the secular task in ways that philosophical pragma-tism cannot, and one of the reasons the figures in this book are often overlooked as pragmatists is the secular nature of their work. If we don’t practice a kind of secular pragmatism then the main developments of this tradition remain confined to professional philosophy. In the tradition of secular pragmatists, I hope this book will make promiscuous use of the legacy of first-generation pragmatism in order to better understand the function of communication and rhetoric in building a democratic culture.

In The Public and Its Problems, Dewey argues that: “knowledge is communication” (176). This is part of the kind of epistemology artic-ulated by philosophical pragmatism, but it is also a fairly puzzling and ambiguous statement. I want to unpack some of the implications of this statement beyond the entailments for arguments inside the professional philosophical debates around epistemology. Thinking through this state-ment as a rhetorical pragmatist will help to demonstrate what I think is the on-going usefulness of pragmatism as an intellectual tradition. For Dewey, communication is a social activity. In Democracy and Education he claims that: “Men live in community by virtue of the things which they have in common; and communication is the way in which they come to possess things in common” (4). In Art as Experience he devel-ops this position further: “Communication is the process of creating participation, of making common what has been isolated and singu-lar” (244). This means that communication involves the coordination of social action, the sharing of experiences, and broad participation. Dewey’s understanding of knowledge has a deeply social dimension: “knowledge is a function of association and communication; it depends upon tradition, upon tools and methods socially transmitted, developed and sanctioned” (1927 [1946], 158). Both communication and knowl-edge bring people into association, and when people are brought into association, the meaning of the world they share is made. The fact that


this happens is a matter for philosophy to explain, but how it happens is a matter for rhetorical practice. From my perspective, the how gives us the most exciting insight into our potential as human agents and our ability to develop what Dewey calls “the great community.” For the kind of social cooperation that Dewey describes to happen, persuasion must take place as well. Dewey seems keenly aware of this at the end of The Public and Its Problems: “The essential need … is the improvement of the methods and conditions of debate, discussion, and persuasion. That is the problem of the public. We have asserted that this improvement depends essentially upon freeing and perfecting the processes of inquiry and the dissemination of their conclusions” (208). Methods of persua-sion, what all of the authors of the essays in this book might call rhe-torical practices, allow for the participation of the public in the process of democratic deliberation. According to my reading, this is another way of saying that we need to improve our rhetorical practices—an argument that would have seemed very sensible in democratic Athens or Republican Rome when rhetorical approaches to education flour-ished. But Dewey does not tell us how we might do this. The essays in this book open up a conversation about how we might answer these questions.

I do think that Dewey understood the role that language played in answering how questions. To use one example, he claimed that the meanings were made in a community by using “channels formed by instrumentalities of which, in the end, language, the vehicle of thought as well as of communication is the most important” (1927 [1946], 210). In How We Think, he goes further to elaborate on the use of lan-guage for persuasion and also illustrates how the persuasive function of language is essential to education: “The primary motive for language is to influence (through the expression of desire, emotion, and thought) the activity of others; its secondary use is to enter into more intimate social relations with them” (179). This makes the problem of education a problem of directing “pupils’ oral and written speech, used primarily for practical and social ends, so that gradually it shall become a conscious tool of conveying knowledge and assisting thought [emphasis in original]” (179). This is a basic description of a rhetorical education, and for that reason it remains one of my favorite quotes from Dewey’s corpus. Herein lies the justification for pivoting from philosophical to rhetorical pragmatism. The argument in this quote is also supported by Dewey’s insight that language is a mode of action and not a reflection of the world:

20 R. DANISCH

Language is always a form of action and in its instrumental use is always a means of concerted action for an end, while at the same time it finds in itself all the goods of its possible consequences. For there is no mode of action as fulfilling and as rewarding as is concerted consensus of action … Language is specifically a mode of interaction of at least two beings, a speaker and a hearer; it presupposes an organized group to which these creatures belong, and from whom they have acquired their habits of speech. It is therefore a relationship, not a particularity. (1925 [1958], 185)

The main implication of Dewey’s position is that objective meanings become tacit rules for communication only through habitual interaction between speakers and hearers over a long period of time. This argument clearly resonates with Richard Rorty’s later linguistic pragmatism. But words can also be used in new, creative ways, to bring speaker and hearer into new and meaningful relationships. When we understand language as a special kind of action, or at the least as an interaction between two people, it becomes clear that the practice of rhetoric can and does regu-late meanings and relationships. This is precisely why language and com-munication are critical concerns for democratic culture. This insight will be very central to the essays and pragmatists covered in this book. The deeper question remains how we might build relationships and regulate meanings using rhetoric and what kinds of meanings and relationships are best suited for improving democratic culture.

For Dewey, we all must use our intelligence in order to direct the affairs of the state while at the same time realizing that we are all bound to one another in a community. The success of the community depends on “perfecting the means and ways of communication of meanings so that genuinely shared interest in the consequences of interdependent activities may inform desire and effort and thereby direct action” (1927 [1946], 174). Our first task, then, is to discover the methods of commu-nication that would permit individuals the opportunity to participate in decision-making and to understand the interconnectedness of the com-munity to which they belong. Throughout The Pubic and Its Problems, Dewey suggests a rhetoric of communion, and this kind of communion requires technology, aesthetics, and inquiry: “The highest and most dif-ficult kind of inquiry and a subtle, delicate, vivid, and responsive art of communication must take possession of the physical machinery of trans-mission and circulation and breathe life into it … Democracy will come into its own, for democracy is a name for a life of free and enriching


communion … It [democracy] will have its consummation when free social inquiry is indissolubly wedded to the art of full and moving com-munication” (1927 [1946], 184). In other words, when a full and mov-ing art of rhetoric is functioning, then the great community will finally be realized. This is not a very specific or complex answer to the how questions, but it is a start. One of the hopes of a book like this is that we might be able to start to build a more sophisticated understanding of what this kind of Dewey-inspired commitment to communication and rhetoric might look like. The implicit argument of this book is that we have lots of intellectual resources for developing such a sophisticated understanding if we pivot away from the traditional canon of philosoph-ical pragmatists and toward the great variety of other pragmatist figures that we often overlook.

I’ve quoted Dewey here because I think his statements about com-munication are both exciting and exasperating. On the one hand, he seems committed to the kind of rhetorical turn that I am advocating. More importantly, he seems aware of the importance of that rhetorical turn for the improvement of American democratic culture. On the other hand, these recommendations are not very robust. Dewey does not offer us the kind of systematic or sophisticated rhetorical pedagogy articu-lated by figures like Isocrates or Aristotle. Dewey writing as an orthodox pragmatist no doubt constrained Dewey as a budding secular pragmatist. His insights in these quotations do not match the depth and rigor of his insights into the issues more germane to philosophical pragmatism. My hope is that these essays will add depth and insight into the questions posed by rhetorical pragmatism to make up for some of the frustration entailed by these quotes. My argument is that one of the primary legacies of first-generation pragmatism is that philosophy returns us to the cen-trality of rhetoric and communication. So our responsibility is to extend and develop the conversation about the connections between pragma-tism, rhetoric, and communication.

references

Bacon, Michael. 2012. Pragmatism: An Introduction. Boston: Polity Press.Brandom, Robert. 1998. Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing and

Discursive Commitment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Danisch, Robert. 2015. Building a Social Democracy: The Promise of Rhetorical

Pragmatism. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

22 R. DANISCH

Dewey, John. 1916 [1944]. Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education. New York: The Free Press.

Dewey, John. 1925 [1958]. Experience and Nature. New York: Dover.Dewey, John. 1927 [1946]. The Public and Its Problems. New York:

Philosophical Library, Inc.Diggins, John Patrick. 1994. The Promise of Pragmatism: Modernism and the

Crisis of Knowledge and Authority. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Farrell, Thomas. 1995. Norms of Rhetorical Culture. New Haven: Yale University

Press.Habinek, Thomas. 2004. Ancient Rhetoric and Oratory. Hoboken, NJ:

Wiley-Blackwell.Hauser, Gerard, ed. 2008. Philosophy and Rhetoric in Dialogue: Redrawing Their

Intellectual Landscape. State College, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press.Ijselling, J. C. 1976. Rhetoric and Philosophy in Conflict: A Historical Survey.

New York: Springer.James, William. 1907 [1995]. Pragmatism. New York: Dover.Keith, William. 2007. Democracy as Discussion: Civic Education and the

American Forum Movement. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.Kimball, Bruce. 1995. Orators and Philosophers: A History of the Idea of Liberal

Education. Mt. Vernon, IL: College Board.Menand, Louis. 2002. The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America. New

York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux.Misak, Cheryl. 2015. The American Pragmatists. Oxford, UK: Oxford University

Press.Schiappa, Edward. 1995. “Isocrates’ Philosophia and Contemporary

Pragmatism.” In Rhetoric, Sophistry, Pragmatism, edited by Steven Mailloux, 33–60. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Schiappa, Edward. 1999. The Beginnings of Rhetorical Theory in Classical Greece. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Schiappa, Edward. 2003. Protagoras and Logos: A Study in Greek Philosophy and Rhetoric. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press.

Stuhr, John, ed. 1999. Pragmatism and Classical American Philosophy: Essential Readings and Interpretive Essays. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Talisse, Robert. 2008. Pragmatism: A Guide for the Perplexed. New York: Bloomsbury Academic.

Westbrook, Robert. 2005. Democratic Hope: Pragmatism and the Politics of Truth. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

23

CHAPTER 2

Richard McKeon in the Pragmatist Tradition

Peter Simonson

Let’s consider four topics together: Richard McKeon, pragmatism, rhetoric, and communication. The grouping is rare but shouldn’t be. Considering them together is an act of discovery and invention that sheds new light on each topic individually and the interrelations among them. Such an inquiry can (1) reveal important but previously unseen dimensions of the history of pragmatism and its entanglements with theories of rhetoric and communication; (2) shed particular light on the under-analyzed middle period between the era of classic pragmatism (1870s–1930s) and its revival since the 1970s; and (3) help bring a generative but little-read figure into contemporary conversations. McKeon is important as the first and arguably most important figure in the pragmatist tradition whose philosophy made extensive use of both rhetoric and communication as terms and concepts. He was one of the major intellectual figures who turned to rhetoric in the first half of the twentieth century and was a significant if neglected commu-nication theorist. His work is ripe for reengagement today.

Though scholars of pragmatism have sometimes noted that McKeon was John Dewey’s student and Richard Rorty’s teacher, his “place in pragmatism’s history…has yet to be sufficiently explored” (Koopman 2013, n.p.).


P. Simonson (*) University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO, USAe-mail: [email protected]

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14343-5_2


24 P. SIMONSON

There are several reasons for this neglect. One is the relative inattention to the generation of pragmatist-infused thought between the 1940s and 1970s, McKeon’s prime years. Even among those invested in reclaim-ing that era, it’s rare to mention McKeon.1 Part of this is due to an unu-sual and difficult prose style that wards off casual readers. Adding to the problem is McKeon’s vast corpus of more than 150 essays and a handful of books, with no single definitive statement to read and teach. His prose in turn reflects a unique philosophical style that doesn’t easily fit the usual categories of thought (see Garver 1984). Because he edited two critical volumes of Aristotle’s writings and consistently drew upon Aristotle, he’s often been misidentified as an “Aristotelian.”2 Douglas Mitchell insightfully calls McKeon’s philosophy “Pragmatism in a new key” (2016, 243), a truth partially cashed out in handful of illuminating studies (Depew 2000, 2010; Buchanan 2000; Garver 2000; Gross 2008; Danisch 2015; Baranowski 2016). Yet, as I’ll elaborate below, McKeon’s was a complex articulation of pragmatism. As such, it has largely fallen outside the ken of the con-temporary pragmatists who charted histories and usable pasts. As David Depew (2010), Richard Buchanan, and most extensively Robert Danisch have begun to show, McKeon’s was a pragmatist-inflected rhetorical philos-ophy animated by a view of culture and intellectual life as communicative phenomena. Based on my reading of the full corpus of McKeon’s extensive writings on rhetoric and communication, I’ll sketch the history and con-temporary significance of his brand of forgotten pragmatism.

Little writing on McKeon provides a historical account of the devel-opment of his work, which I believe has contributed to misunder-standings and neglect.3 I try to remedy that lack by telling a mostly

1 Many philosophers try to reclaim mid-century pragmatism, but none makes even passing mention of McKeon. The key book-length exception comes from a rhetorician, Danisch (2015).

2 Although McKeon was strongly influenced by Aristotle, he repeatedly claimed that he was “no Aristotelian,” but “viewed himself primarily as an American philosopher, in the tradition of the pragmatists. His devotion to pluralism was thoroughgoing. Politically, he was a World Federalist” (Editors’ Preface to McKeon 1986, 577; see also Buchanan 2000, 141, 153–158).

3 For good overall introductions to McKeon’s work, see the Introductions by Ruttenberg and by Zahava McKeon in the University of Chicago Press collections of his essays (McKeon 1990, 2005). The only book-length monograph is the important study by Plochmann (1990). Buchanan and Garver (2000) has number of penetrating essays,

2 RICHARD MCKEON IN THE PRAGMATIST TRADITION 25

chronological tale across five sections of this essay. In the first, I provide a brief introduction to McKeon’s life and work for readers unfamiliar with him. Second, I turn to the questions of what it means to be part of the pragmatist tradition and how McKeon fits into it. I adopt a rhetorical framework for addressing those questions. Focusing on his writings from the 1920s to the 1940s (a period when discovered and began reinvent-ing rhetoric), I show how he mediated elements of Deweyan pragmatism and its central topoi of analysis. In the third section, I sketch McKeon’s postwar embrace of the concepts of communication and culture—the first a central Deweyan topos, the second partially submerged. Next, I show how mid-century pragmatism took form in McKeon’s historical seman-tics and metaphilosophy, before turning to his mature communication and rhetorical theories of the 1960s and ’70s, when the new key of his pragmatism came into a different pitch. I conclude with thoughts on McKeon’s relevance today.

who wAs richArd mckeon?Richard McKeon (1900–1985) was at once an intellectual cosmopolitan engaged with the global political currents of his era, an academic philoso-pher comfortably at home in a discipline that became fully professionalized in his lifetime, and an intimidatingly erudite interdisciplinary thinker and educator whose style set him off from the dominant schools of his day. His biography has not been written, but we can piece elements together from a handful of semi-autobiographical essays and sketches by students and colleagues.4 Born outside New York City in Union Hill, New Jersey, McKeon attended Columbia University, where he would earn three degrees. Initially, he was on preprofessional tracks for law and then for engineering, but after a brief stint in the Naval Reserve dur-ing World War I, he turned to philosophy, which he said offered similar

4 The main autobiographical sources are McKeon (1952 [1987], 1953 [1990], 1970 [1990], 1975, 1982).

including several touching upon McKeon’s rhetorical thought. For helpful discussions of his writings on rhetoric, see Backman (in McKeon 1987, vii–xxxii), Depew (2010), Goodnight (2014), Hauser and Cushman (1973), and Wess (2015).

26 P. SIMONSON

attention to “problems…of relating theory and practice in sciences, social and natural” (1975, 103). He met Kenneth Burke in 1917 when both were students at Columbia and riding the ferry in from New Jersey (Selzer 1996, 41). Burke would soon drop out of school, but he and McKeon would remain lifelong conversation partners. “We argued at that time [as undergraduates]; we’ve been arguing ever since,” McKeon recounted in a public dialogue with Burke in 1970. “And gradually, in the period in between then and now, the rest of the world has caught up with us and is beginning to talk about rhetoric and poetic” (McKeon and Burke 1970, 2).5

McKeon’s early intellectual influences helped establish the contours of his mid-century pragmatism. As an undergraduate, he absorbed les-sons from intellectual history courses taught by James Harvey Robinson, whose pragmatist-inspired “new history” took “the relevant and the use-ful” as standards for writing history (Robinson 1912, 15). Robinson’s classes also left McKeon with a sense of how accumulated knowledge “uncovered new characterizations of past ages” (McKeon 1982, 3). McKeon took his B.A. and M.A. degrees in 1920. His Master’s thesis on modern views of art and literature concluded with the flourish, “Not art for art’s sake should be the cry, but art for life’s sake”—a sentiment that the 1920s Burke also shared (quoted in Plochmann 1990, 36). McKeon entered Columbia’s doctoral program in philosophy, where he studied with Frederick Woodbridge and John Dewey, as I’ll discuss below. His work with Woodbridge on the seventeenth century led to a dissertation on Spinoza. He completed it after spending three years (1922–1925) at the University of Paris—studying medieval philosophy with the Thomist Étienne Gilson, Plato and Aristotle with Léon Robin, and Spinoza with Léon Brunschvig. From Paris and Columbia, McKeon learned “to use the historical development of concepts as part of the analysis of current problems in their interrelations” and “to trace basic patterns and unity of philosophic thought through the diversity of philosophic systems and expressions” (McKeon 1953 [1990], 12). He received his Ph.D. in 1928, the same year that his book on Spinoza was published, and would teach in Dewey and Woodbridge’s Department of Philosophy at Columbia until 1934.

5 For discussions of McKeon and Burke together, see Baranowski (2016) and Wess (2008, 2015).


Coming out of these experiences, McKeon was a scholar who com-bined deep knowledge of the history of philosophy with sophisticated engagement with problems in contemporary philosophy and culture. From his Master’s thesis forward, literature and poetics were steady top-ics, and he played a significant role in developing the so-called “Chicago School” of criticism (see McKeon 1982). His expertise traversed ancient, medieval, and modern thought and literature, linked the history of con-cepts to current issues, and was fundamentally informed by a pluralism that both recognized the wide variety of philosophical expression and held out the belief that truth was both real and ultimately one. Study in Paris provided firsthand experience in different cultural traditions of interpretation of the same texts, a lesson he had learned in a different way through reading commentaries on Aristotle and other philosophers across the centuries. McKeon’s absorption of multiple schools of thought added to his unique intellectual style.

Beyond his scholarship, McKeon’s career is typically discussed in relation to two other families of practice—one tied to his position as a dean and educator at Chicago, the other to his work with the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). He spent most of his career at the University of Chicago, which had brought him from Columbia as an external examiner for their great books program from 1931 to 1933, a visiting professor of history in 1934, and then permanently as a professor of Greek (1935) and phi-losophy (1937). Under President Robert Maynard Hutchins, Chicago was reorganizing its curriculum to promote an interdisciplinary general education and the organization of faculty into “committees” that cut across departments. The 36-year-old Hutchins appointed the 35-year-old McKeon Dean of the Division of Humanities in 1935, a position he would hold until 1947, exerting considerable influence over both graduate and undergraduate education during that time (Levine 2006; McKeon 1953 [1990]). Among much else, McKeon helped create a degree-granting interdisciplinary graduate committee on Language and Communication in the 1940s, one of the first educational programs to use the term “communication.” Hutchins and his ally Mortimer Adler were neo-Thomistic and Aristotelian critics of John Dewey and pragma-tism who supported the educational pursuit of timeless truths. McKeon’s position was more complex, historicist, and pragmatist. As he would write in a kind of culminating essay to his period as dean, “The problems which arise in education in any age and relative to any subject matter or

28 P. SIMONSON

pursuit are determined in part by the problems of the times and in part by the knowledge available” (1949 [2005], 235).6

McKeon’s deanship ended as he was becoming deeply involved with UNESCO, the cultural and scientific arm of the newly formed United Nations. During the war, he had directed the Army Specialized Training Program’s Area and Language Studies unit at the University of Chicago. Beyond its geopolitical functions, the project accelerated an educational trend toward investigating “the interrelations of cultures and the broad-ening of interest beyond the limits of the traditions of Western European and American culture” (McKeon 1953 [1990], 25). This experience provided an entry point into McKeon’s participation in UNESCO, which he conceived as “the first attempt to create a public institution in which ideas are the acknowledged instruments for the achievement of such political purposes as ‘the intellectual and moral solidarity of man-kind’” (1948, 574). UNESCO was also a politically crucial example of “knowledge embodied in organization and required for common action” and issuing in material “structures of relations,” not merely applications of some theory (1952, 298, 299). He served as a member of the US delegation to the first three General Conferences (Paris 1946, Mexico City 1947, Beirut 1948) and American Counselor for UNESCO in the U.S. Embassy in Paris (1947). From those positions, he would go on to take a major role in committees that investigated the place of philos-ophy and the humanities in UNESCO and the philosophic basis for the UN’s historic International Declaration of Human Rights (see Doxtader 2010).

The Human Rights Committee opened an important line of inquiry into key political and philosophical concepts. It reflected McKeon’s plu-ralistic, historically inflected pragmatism and served as a bridge to the metaphilosophical semantics projects he would develop over the next

6 As an educator, McKeon left his mark on, among others, the philosopher Richard Rorty, philosopher-novelist Robert Persig (whose figure of the professor in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was inspired by McKeon), writer-filmmaker Susan Sontag, wide-ranging intellectual Paul Goodman, poet-literary critic Elder Olson, sociologist Donald Levine, anthropologist Paul Rabinow, University of Chicago editor Douglas Mitchell, and a group of rhetoricians and rhetorically attuned philosophers and critics that included Wayne Booth, Eugene Garver, Richard Buchanan, Thomas Farrell, Thomas Conley, Walter Watson, and indirectly David Depew—a list whose near absence of women should remind us of the gendered conditions of intellectual production of McKeon’s career and the lines of (often ambivalent) male relations that ran through it.


two decades. The concept of human rights—and related ideas like liberty and democracy—had disparate meanings and ambiguities across history and cultures. The philosophic problem at hand, however, was “not to achieve doctrinal consensus but rather to achieve agreement concerning rights, and also action in the realization and defense of rights, which may be justified on highly diverse doctrinal grounds” (UNESCO 1947, 4–5). This sensibility informed subsequent UNESCO-sponsored inquiries into the varied cultural meanings and histories of key concepts of the modern political world (including freedom, democracy, right, dialectic, state, force, society, institution, justice, common good, and class). The unrealized hope was to produce a 150-entry International Dictionary of Fundamental Terms of Philosophy and Political Thought. Several cross-cultural inves-tigations did however come to fruition.7 McKeon saw them not as exer-cises in history or philosophy but rather investigations of what those concepts “significantly and operatively mean to people who seek free-dom, rights, and justice” (1965, 158–159). They were efforts to exca-vate “a plurality of meanings which had been, and might again be made, an effective force in action and in formation of policy” (1975, 110). Across his UNESCO work, we can hear elements of a liberal democratic pragmatism attuned to ideas as embedded in cultures, institutions, and practices; and a rhetorical sensibility attendant to the significance of lan-guage in use.

mckeon And the PrAgmAtist trAdition

I’ve laid some biographical groundwork, but in what sense was McKeon really a pragmatist? The question moves us to issues of definition and historiography. Some years back, I argued that pragmatism can be approached as a doctrine or a tradition (Simonson 2001). Let me expand that claim here. Pluralizing the concept of doctrine, we can view prag-matism as variably: (a) a philosophical school of thought, (b) a body of principles, (c) an intellectual problematic, (d) a cluster of habits or meth-ods of inquiry, or (e) a set of deployable rhetorical topoi and arguments. Pluralizing the concept of tradition, we can approach pragmatism as:

7 Most notably in the 1948 UNESCO-edited symposium Human Rights: Comments and Interpretations and the 1951 McKeon-edited Democracy in a World of Tensions. The con-cepts of responsibility, justice, and society were treated in issues of the Revue Internationale de Philosophie Volumes 39 (1957), 41 (1957) and 55 (1961) respectively.

30 P. SIMONSON

(a) a historically embedded array of texts, topoi, and ideas—an intellectual tradition partly constituted by arguments about its very meaning; (b) a lineage of embodied characters linked through networks of face-to-face and mediated communication—a social tradition partly constituted by arguments about affiliations and belonging; or (c) as a historically terri-torializing and de-territorializing assemblage of texts, discourses, objects, people, interactions, performances, relationships, and social and institu-tional practices—a socio-material tradition constituted through agencies dispersed across different actants. These various approaches to pragma-tism as doctrine or historically embedded tradition are analytically dis-tinct but practically overlapping.

I’ll take up a rhetorically inflected approach to pragmatism as both an intellectual and social tradition manifesting itself through discourse, embodied characters, and habits of thought and practice. In the process, I will draw out the persistence and remediation of pragmatist topoi and thematics over time. This approach allows us to parse out pragmatist dimensions of McKeon’s philosophy while acknowledging that he some-times distanced himself from pragmatism as a doctrine or philosophical school of thought. Any attempt to situate him within the tradition must acknowledge statements like these: “many, if not most, American philoso-phers would agree that pragmatism ceased to be one of the active schools of American philosophy some fifteen or twenty years ago” (1950a, 346); and “I have never felt attracted to the pragmatic principles or dia-lectical methods, preferring to treat theoretic and practical questions sep-arately rather than to assimilate theory to practice or practice to theory” (1952 [1987], 204).

McKeon studied with Dewey in the wake of Dewey’s important 1919–1921 trip to Japan and China. Dewey’s lectures fed Reconstruction in Philosophy (1920) and likely influenced at least one of the two courses that McKeon took from him in 1921–1922, Types of Philosophic Thought (the other was Types of Logical Theory). As McKeon later remembered, the two courses “set forth the basis of [Dewey’s] philos-ophy” more fully than it has appeared in the many books that he was to write in succeeding decades.

In those courses he dwelled on the term which was to become so impor-tant in the development of his logic and his political and social philosophy, and explained his hesitations in choosing it. By ‘experience,’ he meant, not a psychological stage nor an epistemological category, but rather the


context and diversified circumstances in which problems arise and ideas are developed. If he were to seek a single synonym for what he meant by ‘experience,’ he said, he would use the term ‘culture.’ He set himself the task of exploring in nonhistorical but systematic fashion the contacts, shifts, alternations, and equivalences of the problems which had been pre-sented to philosophers by experience in their times and of the means which they had devised to treat them. The solutions, like the problems, found their criteria in the economic, social, and intellectual circumstances in which they were developed. (McKeon 1952 [1987], 200–201)

McKeon’s recollection provides evidence of the lasting impression left by Dewey’s struggle toward culture through experience, his emphasis on problems, and an attention to circumstances that McKeon found “nonhis-torical.” All would manifest themselves in McKeon’s own philosophy.

Beyond what he absorbed from Dewey, it’s worth noting McKeon’s debt to Frederick Woodbridge, an all-but-forgotten figure today some-times cited for his 1929 declaration that pragmatism “is now a memory more than a force” (541). McKeon would write that “the crossing of…influence [of Dewey and Woodbridge] was a greater educational force than the teacher of either alone could have been,” with both feeding McKeon’s fundamental concern with “the problem of the one and the many” (1952 [1987], 200). Woodbridge (1912) argued that philosophy arises from history, which “is pluralistic and implies a pluralistic philos-ophy” (4). It may well have been under the influence of Woodbridge’s interest in ancient philosophical naturalism that McKeon experienced “the occasion which seems to me to have influenced my work in phi-losophy more than any other”: a 1921 reading of Cicero and Plato alongside one another that led him to the recognition that truth, though one, has no single expression (1952 [1987], 204). Though not at the time an admirer of Cicero (that would change), McKeon became convinced “that his importance as transmitter of Greek culture to the modern world was underrated and…the similarity of our own philosophic tendencies to his was overlooked” (ibid.).8 Though their influence came together on McKeon, Woodbridge and Dewey also represented two poles in a debate between self-described realists and self-described pragmatists whose battles were particularly

8 The sense of truth being one but given many expressions would also be a lesson the Thomist Etienne Gilson would underscore to McKeon in Paris.

32 P. SIMONSON

pitched at Columbia (Depew 2000). Through Woodbridge, McKeon came to identify with the realist position that “ideas are not inventions constructed by the mind, but discoveries forced upon us by compelling realities whose natures are basically intelligible” (1952 [1987], 200). In this and other ways, McKeon reminds us of pragmatism’s heterogeneity bred through many intellectual cross-fertilizations.

To map McKeon’s pragmatist inheritance, I’ll draw out four of Dewey’s key topoi and McKeon’s subsequent use of them: history, expe-rience, problems, and communication. Dewey’s evolutionary naturalism, along with the early Hegelian influence he never quite escaped, meant that he understood philosophy within a broadly historical frame. This came through particularly clearly in the 1920s, when he “worked up an extended historical explanation…of the origins and persistence” of what he called the “‘bad metaphysics’ that plagued Western philosophy.” This was the project of Reconstruction in Philosophy, which argued that “philosophy originated not out of intellectual material, but out of social and emotional material,” so the history of philosophy was “a chapter in the development of civilization and culture” (Dewey 1920 [1957], 25). Part of Dewey’s task was to show how earlier philosophical doctrines arose from circumstances, experiences, and cultures inconsistent with modern liberal democracies. This disconnect prompted a need for recon-structing philosophical ideas as well as social practices, which for Dewey were intricately interwoven.

Like philosophies, problems also arose from historically specific con-stellations of experience. As Alan Ryan has observed, “problem” was perhaps Dewey’s central intellectual concept, serving as the engine that stirred individuals and societies into motion and making “[p]roblem solving…the condition of organic life” (1995, 28). This topos is the cen-terpiece of Dewey’s most cited book in communication studies, The Public and Its Problems (1927), where it plays a dual role—pointing to both the socially perceived problems that call publics into existence and the difficulty of activating publics in complex, modern societies where problems fall outside the experiences of particular persons and groups. That book, following Experience and Nature (1925), also signaled Dewey’s full turn toward communication as “an architectonic concept” (Depew 2000, 33). Understood as “the establishment of cooperation in an activity in which there are partners, and in which the activity of each is modified and regulated by partnership,” communication for Dewey drew upon language as “a form of action,” “a mode of interaction,” and


“the tool of tools” through which meanings and communities develop (Dewey 1925 [1958], 179, 184, 185, 186).

Though a number of contemporary writers have praised Dewey’s conception of philosophy as embedded in history, his use of history was broad-brushed and reductive in comparison to McKeon, who no doubt recognized his teacher’s limits as a historian of philosophy.9 Woodbridge and McKeon’s Parisian mentors were all better historians than Dewey, and they provided models toward the kind of scholarly erudition McKeon would early achieve in his knowledge of ancient, medieval, and seventeenth-century thinkers. Indeed, one can read McKeon’s earliest publications as offering implicit critiques of the simplistic historical nar-rative of Reconstruction in Philosophy, which features a linear narrative of a singular “ancient tradition” dominated by Platonic and Aristotelian metaphysics, given Christian supernatural form through the medieval period, and only beginning to shake its authoritative metaphysical fixi-ties with Francis Bacon, “great forerunner of the spirit of the modern age” and “the prophet of a pragmatic conception of knowledge” (Dewey 1920 [1957], 51, 28, 38). Dewey in turn cast Aristotle as measuring “the worth of knowledge…[by] the degree to which it is purely contem-plative” (110), a position McKeon would reject in emphasizing multiple forms of knowing in Aristotle tied to praxis, poeisis, and technê.

From the beginning, McKeon took the topos of history as a method of discovery that opened to plural traditions, to recurrent philosophical sensibilities and guiding principles, and to ancient precursors to mod-ern ways of thought. In “The Empiricist and Experimentalist Temper in the Middle Ages,” written for a 1929 festschrift to Dewey, McKeon offered “a prolegomenon to the study of mediaeval science” that compli-cated the meaning of empirical attitudes and implicitly rejected Dewey’s story of Bacon and scientific modernity. “The instances which have been taken to indicate an absence of interest in the things of nature during the early period of Christianity can be balanced and rectified by examining

9 While still Dewey’s colleague at Columbia, McKeon (1933) obliquely critiqued his for-mer teacher’s approach to the history of thought. Comparing Dewey’s treatment of medi-eval philosophy to Hegel’s, McKeon observed, “Philosophers…are untrustworthy guides to the historic lineaments and thoughts of the ages and the men whom, for the purposes of…philosophy, they attempt to describe or controvert” (433). He concluded that “[t]he impractical, supernatural, medieval thinker of recent construction is explained less by the social and economic organizations…of his times, than by the philosophic convictions of our own times” (436).

34 P. SIMONSON

what the contemporary observer did see when he looked about him,” he wrote (1929, 220). Observation and facts are dependent upon “the system of thought to which they are proper,” so that facts of one time period are not facts of another; in the Middle Ages the things of the world were observed and explained through analogical interpretation, with “the marks of truth…scattered throughout nature and literature” (219, 221).

In abbreviated form, McKeon was pointing toward paradigms of knowing and advancing pragmatism by arguing that all thinking occurs through particular conceptual frames (Depew 2000, 32f.). As he wrote four years later, again in unstated dialogue with pragmatism, “what con-stitutes the practical has not been a fixed concept,” an insight he later developed by parsing out four different philosophical accounts of the practical, charting its “rhetorical transformation” through Isocrates and Cicero with asides to John Stuart Mill and William James (1944, 242). McKeon’s conceptual pluralism in turn fed a more complex kind of his-toricism than Dewey’s. Like Dewey, he saw philosophy as a reflection of its cultural moment. Unlike Dewey, he maintained a distance between theory and practice, and philosophy was both tied to its moment and part of a transhistorical conversation whose fundamental terms took dif-ferent meanings over time.

Building out from his knowledge of ancient and medieval thought, and perhaps drawing upon conversations he was having with Burke, McKeon began writing about rhetoric while living in New York in the early 1930s.10 He brought his conceptual pluralism to bear on a grand interpretive framework for the history of Western thought based on the arts of the trivium. “Medieval philosophers learned from the ancients…that philosophic attitudes are determined by the distinctions laid in the study of grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic,” he wrote (1933, 433–434). Two years later, that kernel of insight had grown into a fuller-blown schema he characterized as the “first stage of [an] inquiry into the nature of history, or of verbal expression in general” (1935, 49, 108). Rejecting

10 Wess (2015) dates McKeon’s turn to rhetoric to mid-century, but my reading of his corpus shows rhetoric to be a topic of interest from the 1920s forward, albeit one that accelerates in the 1950s and ’60s.


positivist notions of history as the scientific collection of facts, McKeon cast “history as disguised philosophy” built upon competing concep-tual frameworks with their own terms, principles, and problematics. He traced lines of medieval thought as they moved into the Renaissance and showed how the arts of grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric each had their philosophical proponents and ways of understanding words and things. Each of the arts offered distinct perspectives and methods, which resulted in fundamentally different approaches to problems of knowledge and action and different characterizations of the other two arts. Each of the three arts took different forms over time, but they each had central tendencies: (1) the way of grammar aims to understand texts and prop-ositions about the state of nature, things, and cosmos; (2) the way of dialectic aims to determine the ultimate truth of logical propositions, competing theories, and possible meanings; and (3) the way of rhetoric operates by grounding itself in how humans actually think “to arrive at a richer suggestiveness in thought, a greater utility in action and a closer approximation to the nature of things as they are” (1935, 112).

In short, by the early 1930s McKeon was working up an archi-tectonic scheme for interpreting both intellectual orientations and grander historical epochs in terms of the three fundamental arts of dis-course. His account of rhetoric was initially less developed, but his rich “Rhetoric in the Middle Ages” elaborated the history and demonstrated that rhetoric had no singular essence but plural traditions and fluidly circulating doctrines and devices. Written in an era when he was teach-ing courses in rhetoric and pursuing his educational reforms as dean, the essay provides a broadside against histories of rhetoric “as a sim-ple verbal discipline” and marked by “the monotonous enumeration of doctrines” (1987, 121). In their stead, he offered a wide-ranging philosophical history that traced competing traditions of rhetoric var-iably understood as a part of rational philosophy subordinate to logic, as an instrument of theology dominating the other arts, and as a cen-tral investment for those committed to practical actions and words. In his telling, rhetoric was also the source of doctrines that would migrate to other sciences (e.g., the study of the passions) and of devices that would be applied to many subjects (e.g., the commonplaces). In short, McKeon cast rhetoric as a central but variegated component of the cul-tural and intellectual history of the West, laying groundwork for making it philosophically central again.

36 P. SIMONSON

A turn to CommuniCation And Culture

As McKeon was publishing on the intellectual history of rhetoric in the 1940s (see also 1941, xxix–xxxii; 1987; 1950b), two other key terms entered his vocabulary with increasing frequency: communication and culture. The former was of course a key topos for Dewey, while the latter was the term Dewey perhaps felt that he should have adopted instead of experience. It would be a mistake to attribute McKeon’s use of them to Dewey and draw a simple historical line of influence from clas-sic to mid-century and perhaps on to more recent pragmatist thought. McKeon’s turns to communication and culture were more proximally driven by the broader intellectual environment of the late 1940s, by his participation in UNESCO, and by the internal evolution of his own thought and educational practice. The story warrants more than the lim-ited space I have for it here, but I’ll point to several pieces. The concept- term communication gained increasing salience in the United States in the 1940s, and careful reading shows this to be the case in McKeon’s own writings of that decade. Institutionally, the University of Chicago had created a new interdisciplinary Committee on Communications and Public Opinion by 1942, with McKeon a member and his Survey of Rhetorics (Philosophy 348) among the listed courses (University of Chicago 1942). More broadly, as one observer of the era wrote, remark-ing on the increasing tendency “to think more of processes and less of things,…every thoughtful student of human behavior today, no matter what he calls his field, is likely to find that something which he will have to call ‘communication’ obtrudes itself in the complex” (Bryson 1948, 1–2). McKeon concurred, writing a few years later, “Future histori-ans who record what is being said and done today will find it difficult to avoid giving a prominent place to our preoccupation with ‘commu-nication’” (1957 [1990], 89). UNESCO would contribute to and help internationalize that discourse, featuring communication in its 1945 con-stitution and subsequent mission.

Between about 1944 and 1957, McKeon developed an overarching view of communication that at once extended Deweyan thematics, his-toricized them within the present age, and situated them within a met-aphilosophical semantic scheme partly indebted to rhetoric. Across that work, communication meant several things for McKeon. For one, to use the Burkean vocabulary, it was a historically specific terministic screen—a word that selects, reflects, and deflects socially experienced reality.


The word “does not signify a problem newly discovered in our times, but a fashion of thinking and a method of analyzing which we apply in the statement of all fundamental problems,” McKeon wrote (1957 [1990], 89). Adopting that fashion, McKeon retroactively characterized elements of Aristotle’s philosophy of language and Cicero’s rhetorical theory in terms of “communication” (McKeon 1947, 1950b). In Deweyan natu-ralism, communication was a universal human activity. McKeon agreed, but also recognized it as a historically specific way of seeing the world that marked certain epochs, including the twentieth century.

By his summative “Communication, Truth, and Society” (1957 [1990]), communication had become an architectonic concept in McKeon’s pragmatist pluralism. He self-consciously embraced the intel-lectual fashion of an age where “all problems can be stated as problems of communication” (90). In different ways, this was also true in the Roman Republic and Renaissance, an insight he would return to in the long historical view he adopted for communication across cultures. In the current era, the “invention of instruments of communication and massive extension of their use” had both given new intellectual sali-ence to the concept of communication and created societies that “have themselves become systems of communication” (92). Speaking into that moment, McKeon conceived philosophy, political practice, and policy as forms of communication that also generated problems of communi-cation (see also 1947, 1950c). At the same time, in a departure from Deweyan pragmatism, McKeon made a harder separation between the realms of theory/philosophy and policy/practice. While he cast both as fundamentally communicative, McKeon argued that the problems raised by theory required the reconciliation of differences among the principles of experts, while those raised by practice could be addressed through a common commitment to find a workable solution (1947, 80–83). One can hear echoes of Peirce in his view of theory and of Dewey in his view of practice.

By the 1950s, McKeon was also embracing the concept of culture and linking it to communication. After his studies at the University of Paris in the 1920s, he had come to see philosophical systems as “functions of culture” (1953 [1990], 13), but before 1945 the term made only spo-radic appearance in his writings. About that time, he begins referenc-ing anthropologists like Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckholn, but it is only after his immersion in UNESCO that culture becomes part of his central vocabulary. During this period, a major source of his intellectual

38 P. SIMONSON

insights arose “from conferring, particularly…[through] UNESCO, with people of backgrounds, presuppositions, and cultures different than my own” (1952 [1987], 202). These insights fed his accounts of philosophy, communication, and culture as intertwined and pluralistic activities. The philosophies of the world were for him “expressions of the cultures in which they were developed as well as demonstrations of the truths they express” (1953, 204). This was a bifocal view that recognized both the cultural pluralism of anthropology and the regulative ideal of philosoph-ical dialogue across difference as a way to recognize shared truth and generate “symbols of concord and agreement” that could provide a basis for peace and coordinated action (1990). He saw cultural patterns them-selves as “structures of communication” with entwined social, political, and expressive-humanistic dimensions that could all three come together in the constitution of Deweyan publics (1950c, 244, 250). Within and across cultures, communication was then a historically salient concept for understanding the world, a social process that establishes relations among people, and an art whose skillful deployment could promote the discovery of shared truths, the diverse expression of common values, and the creation of ethical communities (1990).

semAntics And metAPhilosoPhy

Paralleling his turns to communication and culture, McKeon developed two metaphilosophical schemas to facilitate understanding and dialogue across competing philosophies and the social practices they informed: historical semantics and philosophical semantics. He situated these twin programs within the contexts of the current era, when the “dominant intellectual tendencies…turn discussion of basic questions to consid-erations of action or of language” (1952 [1990], 161). Again he drew parallels with the Renaissance and the Roman Republic, whose philo-sophical loyalties were captured by Cicero’s dictum “words and deeds.” McKeon’s metaphilosophy leveraged “current fashion in order to analyze the causes of difficulties and disputes” and provide “a means of commu-nication” across philosophical difference (ibid., 162, 181). On the one hand, historical semantics investigated key terms across different phi-losophies and the ways that persistent human problems took different forms among them—a project that overlapped with his UNESCO work. McKeon envisioned it as a framework for analyzing how the meanings of “important words carry over from the systems of philosophers” into


the broader discourses of politics, poetry, and ordinary speech across his-tory and cultures (163), though his own studies focused mostly on phil-osophical thought. Philosophical semantics in turn investigated the formal principles and rules for determining truth within particular philosophies (McKeon 1952 [1990], 163, 179). This project reflected McKeon’s view that the primary purpose of philosophy is the discovery and demonstra-tion of truth; but he recognized that “‘truth’ is differently conceived according to the principles of different philosophies,” and philosophi-cal methods are constructed to form and justify doctrines derived from those competing principles (1956 [1990], 122). Philosophical semantics was a metaphilosophical framework for advancing what Walter Watson calls McKeon’s “agonistic pluralism that develops tensions and opposi-tions in order to test positions by their consequences” (1994, 23). In different ways, both historical and philosophical semantics advanced the pragmatist project, and both were informed by rhetorical and commu-nicative sensibilities.11

While the project in philosophical semantics grew into an elaborate system that, in my view, is mostly of interest to harder-core McKeonites, historical semantics is accessible, useful, and relevant to the purposes of my essay. Robert Wess calls it “the best place to begin a study of McKeon” (2015, 56). I’ll speak into two of its dimensions. The first per-tains to what Wess calls McKeon’s “quartet” of commonplaces: things, thoughts, actions, words. Playing different roles, these commonplaces recur across McKeon’s work (see Watson 2000, 16, 234). To my point here, they provide a means for characterizing the dominant philosophical positions of cultures and historical eras as well as the grounding princi-ples for particular theories and disciplines. When things are fundamen-tal, realities independent of human thought, language, and purpose are foundational. This is the way of metaphysics, objectivist science, and—in our own day—new materialisms. When thoughts are fundamental, struc-tures of the mind and knowing are foundational. This is the way of epis-temology and Idealism. When actions are fundamental, human purposes, practices, and actually experienced realities are foundational. This is the way of politics, Ciceronian civic republicanism, Deweyan pragmatism, and certain forms of Marxism. When words or signs are fundamental,

11 For a good account of McKeon’s historical semantics, see Harvanek (1956). For his philosophical semantics, see Zahava McKeon (1990, xvii–xxv; 1998, 5–15), Plochmann (1990, Chapter 4), Watson (1994), and Depew (2000, 38–44).

40 P. SIMONSON

language is foundational. This is the way of sophistry, rhetoric, the lin-guistic turn, and forms of constructivism. In McKeon’s grander narra-tive, history cycles between ages of things, of thoughts, and of actions/words—the last of which tend to run together, as they did in the twen-tieth century (see e.g., 1952 [1990], 160–170). Like its predecessors, the current age had “abandoned the quest for certainty and the search for reality except as they are involved in problems of symbols, signs, and actions, and in so far as they are determined by the structure, limits, and efficacy of communication” (McKeon 1957 [1990], 90).

Layered beneath the quartet of fundamental principles for his his-torical semantics is a second fourfold scheme, of philosophical meth-ods: dialectical, logistical, problematic, and operational. Each prioritizes and conceives things, thoughts, actions, and words differently. These differences in term shape the meanings that each of the four methods ascribe to the fundamental terms of philosophies and cultures. McKeon illustrated these differences in studies of three pairs of terms: free-dom and history, philosophy and action, and dialogue and controversy (1952 [1990], 1952, 1956 [1990]). His mid-century metaphilosophi-cal pragmatism shows through most clearly in his study of philosophy and action, or theory and practice. (1) Dialectical methods collapse the opposition between theory and practice and reconcile contraries of both thought and action into larger dynamic wholes. They cast all genuine sciences and arts as practical in the sense that they are determined by the history of a society and find their criteria by their effects on human con-ditions. (2) Logistic methods in turn construct formal systems of sciences on the model of mathematics and build complex wholes out of simple parts. They cast practice as separate from and in need of guidance by those sciences, which apply their special knowledge to the separate realm of practical affairs in the manner of engineering. (3) Problematic meth-ods (also called methods of inquiry) devote themselves to resolving prob-lems, seen as the task of theory and practice alike. They apply different forms of scientific method to different realms (e.g., the natural and prac-tical sciences), with problems of practice requiring modes of discussion, judgment, and agreement arising out of the felt needs of people. (4) Operational (also called rhetorical) methods collapse theory into practice, cast them equally as the products of experience, and test both through concrete action and discernible results. “When inquiry is considered in terms of the operations by which it is conducted, the differences between the laws of logic and of scientific methodology, on the one hand, and the


practices of rhetoric and of adjustment to circumstances, on the other, disappear,” McKeon wrote (1952, 87). While methods of inquiry gain their bearings from problems and the particular methodologies they require, operational methods are centrally based on language and main-tain skepticism about the ability to know a world beyond words.

McKeon’s historical semantics provides a useful analytic for mapping the pragmatist tradition and his place in it. As Talisse (2013) observes, “pragmatism always has had a metaphilosophical bent”—a higher-order conception of what philosophy is, what it can do, and how one does it (427; see also Aiken and Talisse 2017). Different branches of pragma-tism differ in the kind of metaphilosophy they practice. One branch prac-tices it “as a means for continuing inquiry among opposing views”; the other “as a way to dismiss opposition and ‘get over’ problems” (Talisse 2013, 430). Talisse and Aiken see Peirce as exemplar of the first tradi-tion, Dewey (and Rorty) of the second. McKeon belongs to the Peircean branch, in no small part because both men viewed philosophical inquiry as communication.

The distinction between problematic and operational methods in turn points to a different charting of the pragmatist family tree. As McKeon described them, the operational or rhetorical method is marked by a commitment to “ordinary ways of life and ordinary uses of language, with no possible appeal to a reality beyond opposed opinions except through opinions about reality.” Truth is perspectival with “no overar-ching inclusive perspective” to appeal to, and the “methods of rhetoric constitute the whole of philosophic method” (1956 [1990], 124). In the problematic method, by contrast, reality is more than linguistic. Shared truths emerge around particular circumstances, problems, and efforts to address them. Rhetoric does not constitute the totality of methods but serves as an antecedent to the resolution of problems that clarifies lived experience and as a means of formulating arguments that can influ-ence audiences (ibid., 118, 124). McKeon cast Dewey’s pragmatism as problematic, James’ as operational. Taking his lead, we can distin-guish one strand of pragmatism that is focused on problems and shared epistemic inquiry into them and that runs from Peirce and Dewey to Nicholas Rescher. Another, more deeply perspectival strand of pragma-tism is then anchored in doxa (as opposed to knowledge) and language (not problems); it runs from James to neopragmatists like Rorty and Stanley Fish. Within contemporary communication theory, this distinc-tion helps us map the fault lines between, for example, Mats Bergman’s

42 P. SIMONSON

“habit-realism” on the one hand and the more strongly constructivist pragmatism of James Carey and, arguably, Robert Craig (see Bergman 2016; Craig 2016).

McKeon himself straddled the line between the rhetorical/oper-ational method and the problematic method of inquiry. From his early essay charting operations of the trivium through his steady attention to language and terms and his use of the commonplaces things/thoughts/actions/words, he recurrently engaged in the rhetorical method. Moreover, he was deeply attuned to the perspectivism inherent in philo-sophical orientations and their grounding principles. “The subject-matter and problems of philosophy change with problems of semantic sche-mata,” as he would put it (1970 [1987], 105). At the same time, he was not a relativist. He presented his semantic schema as “neutral” with regard to the four methods and as a metaphilosophical means for discov-ering truths shared across philosophies and cultures. Historical and phil-osophical semantics were for him not exercises in language use but ways of resolving problems not reducible to language. Moreover, instead of reducing all methods to the rhetorical, McKeon retained an Aristotelian commitment to a pluralistic range of arts and sciences suited to differ-ent kinds of inquiries, each driven by its own characteristic problems.12 While he aligned most often with the problematic method, he embraced it with a sense of historical contingency as one method among several, each of which periodically rises to dominance. In contrast, Dewey’s problematic method of inquiry was a kind of evolutionary achievement that dialectically corrected earlier philosophical mistakes. By the middle third of the twentieth century, when the Darwinian naturalism that did so much to shape first-generation pragmatism was overlaid with a lin-guistic turn in contemporary philosophy, the problematic way of action needed to be supplemented by the operational way of words. In that context, McKeon embraced elements of both “the skeptical pluralism of opinions and perspectives [and] the problematic pluralism of methods and principles” (1956 [1990], 122). He also lay the groundwork for a grander philosophical rhetoric he would develop in the next decade.

12 Here I disagree with Barankowski’s characterization of McKeon as practicing an “aesthetic pragmatism” that challenged Dewey’s linkage of science and democracy, emphasized the power of words to construct realities, and interjected a corrective based on art instead of science. This underplays McKeon’s allegiance to a Dewey-inspired problematic method and the plural forms of inquiry it required.


PrAgmAtist rhetoric for An Age of communicAtion

Entwined historically, the problematic and operational methods came together philosophically in McKeon’s mature theories of rhetoric and communication of the 1960s and ’70s. This period birthed some of McKeon’s most accessible writings and his most impenetrable ones, which implicitly marked the public and the technical sides of pragmatism. The public side was evinced by “Philosophy as Humanism” (1965), a lovely and readable essay which explicitly addressed pragmatism, rheto-ric, and communication and laid the groundwork for work to come. In defining humanism, McKeon implicitly sketched his own intellectual orientation through four principles: (1) concern for the past manifest in “studies of tradition…as a basis for innovation”; (2) “exploration of plu-ralism of orientation” not as relativism but as “interested differentiation” of alternative positions and “active choice among the possible courses of thought and action”; (3) attention to “the concrete, in unique individu-als, in experienced occurrences…[as] a specification of what is discovered in common places relevant to particular questions”; and (4) commitment to the “problematic [and] exploratory” as a way of seeking “the solution of problems and the expression of meanings and values” (166). Along with Existentialism, Marxism, and Science, Pragmatism was for McKeon a leading example of contemporary humanism. Like their predecessors, these newer humanisms “have arisen in periods in which diverse cul-tures have been brought into contact by world-oriented movements” that are marked by “recognition of pluralisms and the development of new modes of communication” (156). In this context, he wagered that “humanistic methods of rhetoric and communication” could pro-duce “a new mode of philosophizing about common problems” (157). Pragmatism had rightfully abandoned metaphysics and ontology, but its revolution “lacked instrumentalities to carry it out successfully because no art of rhetoric had been formed adequate to the possibilities of com-munication” (1966 [1987], 57; cf. Danisch 2008).

From 1965 until his death in 1985, McKeon authored a dozen or so essays that addressed rhetoric and communication (many collected in McKeon 1987). Two gather much of his most exciting, mature think-ing on the subjects and should be read as culminating companion pieces: “Philosophy of Communications and the Arts” (1970 [1987]) and “The Uses of Rhetoric in a Technological Age: Architectonic Productive Arts” (1971 [1987]). Together they articulate a new rhetoric that encompasses

44 P. SIMONSON

both the problematic and operational strains of pragmatism, creatively bend tradition toward innovation, and advance his four principles of philosophical humanism. The essays extended his important “Discourse, Demonstration, Verification, and Justification” ([1969] 1987), which lay out a sweeping theory of discourse as structured by commonplaces, or terms whose productive ambiguities of meaning make them seats of dis-covery and invention. That insight would fuel a creative recounting of the history of philosophical and scientific discourse as arising from the art of rhetoric, and of Cicero’s refiguring of the Aristotelian commonplaces of deliberative, judicial, and demonstrative oratory (42ff.). This revi-sionist tale reflected McKeon’s deepened identification with philosophy understood not as metaphysical, epistemological, or ontological mirror of nature but rather as an art of communication and the construction of its own subject matter (1970 [1987], 108).

In this philosophical and cultural age, rhetoric took its place as one of the four traditional arts of discourse radically refigured. Like grammar, logic, and dialectic, rhetoric for McKeon had a history as “a continuing art undergoing revolutionary changes” (1971 [1987], 2). In the current age, the four had shed their earlier status as arts of thought to become “arts of expression and communication and of experimentation and con-struction” (1970 [1987], 104). Among them, rhetoric was central, “a universal and architectonic art” (108). Through its creative use of com-monplaces, the new architectonic rhetoric produced things, thoughts, and actions—not just words and arguments as the old verbal rhetoric had done. It was an art of invention and discovery that also constructed the common objects of social attention by making them manifest and pres-ent (109–110). Most grandly, McKeon spoke of a “fundamental rhetoric of all elements which enter into the perspective of everything commu-nicated relative to what has already been done and said,” a sweeping restatement of his earlier metaphor of culture as dialogue over time (110). Echoing his earliest writings, McKeon made the case that rhet-oric provided methods for “the discovery of ourselves and our times” and contributed “to the formation of the culture of the modern world…by function[ing] productively in the resolution of new problems and architectonically in the formation of new inclusive communities” (1971 [1987], 11, 2).

Refigured for the twentieth century, rhetoric encompassed the entwined problematics of words and actions that defined the intel-lectual milieu and captured the two strands of pragmatism. Verbal


commonplaces—say demonstration, movement, creativity, or public—had productive ambiguities that could lead inquirers to discover previously unseen dimensions of the political and cultural present that was unfold-ing in the late 1960s. At the same time, rhetoric was an architectonic art that above all responded to the felt problems of the day, when experience itself had broadened to become “a framework of cultural conditions and natural circumstances” (1970 [1987], 99). This architectonic art tran-scended the operational method which the rhetorical tradition had often embraced and instead played a fundamental role in defining and address-ing problems not reducible to language. McKeon’s increasingly complex philosophical semantics (1966 [1990]) would play a metatheoretical role in organizing pluralistic inquiry, or so he and his followers hoped. But philosophy, policy, and culture would all need to be informed by the methods of rhetoric to make possible the continuation of the liberal democratic project that lay at the center of political pragmatism since the Progressive Era. The new architectonic rhetoric would provide the con-ceptual vocabulary and arts of inquiry for addressing problems of com-munication, cooperation, and their consequences in the modern world. It was indeed “pragmatism in a new key.”

concluding thoughts

McKeon’s work illuminates lines of pragmatism’s development, shows its entanglements with ideas of rhetoric and communication, and provides resources to think with today. I’ve shown that while McKeon may have resisted explicit identification as a “pragmatist,” he made use of central topoi and problematics of Deweyan pragmatism and advanced its lines of thinking. Though the historiography of pragmatism has mostly been silent about him, McKeon occupies a key position between Dewey and Rorty, which his own schema of methods helps us chart. Dewey sat squarely within a problem-focused method grounded in experience and open to science. Rorty wrote a dissertation indebted to McKeon and early essays on metaphilosophy, but his later neopragmatism represented an operational/rhetorical method grounded in language and culture and opening toward poetics. As I argued above, McKeon embraced elements of both methods and in a way sits between Deweyan modernism and Rortyean postmodernism. Dewey’s experience morphs into McKeon’s culture, which Rorty turns toward language. History is central to phi-losophy for all three but takes different forms: Dewey’s evolutionary

46 P. SIMONSON

naturalism and Hegelian march toward a pragmatist philosophy fit for democratic culture; McKeon’s cyclical historicism, where the philosoph-ical starting points of things, thoughts, or words/actions each provide different conceptual frameworks for investigating transhistorical truths; and Rorty’s more thoroughgoing historicism, where truths are contin-gent and fully embedded in culture. Notably, McKeon is the only one of the three who embraced rhetoric, which provided him the architectonic framework that enjoined these two strands of pragmatism—one centered on problems, the other on language. This gave him a more incisive sense of the historically specific linguistic construction of problems than Dewey had, and a greater sense of the reality of problems independent of the way we talk about them than Rorty.

This hybrid character of McKeon’s pragmatism is one source of its contemporary relevance for rhetorical and communication theory. His style of rhetorical pragmatism is newly powerful today as we recognize the limits of the linguistic constructivism that has dominated the field since the 1970s. As a rhetoric of things, thoughts, and actions as well as words, it provides a spacious framework for accommodating recent insights by new materialists and others into the power of things and the world beyond language. As Wess (2015) has noted, the meta-historical dimension of McKeon’s quartet also gives us a way to think about the transition perhaps underway from an era where theory centered lan-guage to one where things and the methods of investigating them are now in fashion. At the same time, McKeon also gives us resources to resist this latest turn as definitive or decisive. The deep pluralism of his rhetorical pragmatism keeps open our capacity to foreground any mem-ber of this quartet and use it as a locus of inquiry into the problems of our age. Each is a commonplace for discovering truths and building communities, and each can accommodate multiple methods of inquiry that are themselves more than rhetorical. McKeon’s embrace of the problem-oriented side of pragmatism invites rhetoricians, philosophers, and communication scholars to embrace heterogeneous forms of inquiry and action responsive to the social and material challenges we face in the warming, late-capitalist Anthropocene. That requires wading through his corpus and selectively reappropriating the useful insights, redeploying his commonplaces in creative ways.13

13 Thanks to Chris Voparil and Robert Danisch for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this essay.


references

Aiken, Scott F., and Robert B. Talisse. 2017. Pragmatism, Pluralism, and the Nature of Philosophy. New York: Routledge.

Baranowski, Brad. 2016. “The Unending Conversation: Kenneth Burke and Richard McKeon’s Aesthetic Pragmatism, 1920–1960.” Modern Intellectual History 1 (1): 1–32.

Bergman, Mats. 2016. “Melioristic Inquiry and Critical Habits: Pragmatism and the Ends of Communication Research.” Empedocles: European Journal for the Philosophy of Communication 7 (2): 173–188.

Bryson, Lyman. 1948. The Communication of Ideas. New York: Harper and Row.Buchanan, Richard. 2000. “The Ecology of Culture: Pluralism and

Circumstantial Metaphysics.” In Pluralism in Theory and Practice, edited by R. Buchanan and E. Garver, 135–162. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press.

Buchanan, Richard, and Eugene Garver, eds. 2000. Pluralism in Theory and Practice: Richard McKeon and American Philosophy. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press.

Craig, Robert T. 2016. “Pragmatist Realism in Communication Theory.” Empedocles: European Journal for the Philosophy of Communication 7 (2): 115–128.

Danisch, Robert. 2008. Pragmatism, Democracy, and the Necessity of Rhetoric. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press.

———. 2015. “Richard McKeon’s Philosophy of Rhetoric.” In Building a Social Democracy: The Promise of Rhetorical Pragmatism, 119–151. Lanham, MD: Lexington Press.

Depew, David J. 2000. “Between Pragmatism and Realism: Richard McKeon’s Philosophical Semantics.” In Pluralism in Theory and Practice, edited by R. Buchanan and E. Garver, 29–53. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press.

———. 2010. “Revisiting McKeon’s Architectonic Rhetoric.” In Reengaging the Prospects of Rhetoric, edited by Mark Porrovecchio, 37–56. New York: Routledge.

Dewey, John. 1920 [1957]. Reconstruction in Philosophy. Boston: Beacon Press.———. 1925 [1958]. Experience and Nature. New York: Dover.———. 1929 [1980]. The Quest for Certainty: A Study of the Relation of

Knowledge and Action. New York: Perigree Books.Doxtader, Eric. 2010. “The Rhetorical Question of Human Rights—A Preface.”

Quarterly Journal of Speech 96 (4): 353–379.Garver, Eugene. 1984. “Richard McKeon’s Chapter in the History of Rhetoric:

Or, Why Does McKeon Write So Funny?” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 14 (1/2): 3–14.

———. 2000. “Pluralism and the Virtues of Philosophy.” In Pluralism in Theory and Practice, edited by R. Buchanan and E. Garver, 110–134. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press.

48 P. SIMONSON

Goodnight, G. Thomas. 2014. “From Architectonics to Polytechtonics: Rhetoric, Communication, and Information.” POROI: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Rhetorical Analysis and Invention 10 (1): 1–21.

Gross, Neil. 2008. Richard Rorty: The Making of an American Philosopher. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Hauser, Gerard, and Donald Cushman. 1973. “McKeon’s Philosophy of Communication: The Architectonic and Interdisciplinary Arts.” Philosophy and Rhetoric 6: 211–234.

Harvanek, Robert. 1956. “Historical Semantics: A Discussion of the Recent Work of Richard McKeon.” New Scholasticism 30: 257–285.

Koopman, Colin. 2013. “Review of Michael Bacon, Pragmatism: An Introduction.” Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 04 (31). http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/pragmatis-an-introduction/. Accessed 27 June 2017.

Levine, Donald. 2006. “Richard McKeon: Architecton of the Human Mind.” In Powers of the Mind: The Reinvention of Liberal Learning in America, 91–113. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Mitchell, Douglas. (2016). “Creating Community Through Communication: Richard McKeon’s Philosophical Pluralism.” In Schools: Studies in Education, vol. 13, no. 2, 243–248.

McKeon, Richard. 1929. “The Empiricist and Experimentalist Temper in the Middle Ages: A Prolegomenon to the Study of Mediaeval Science.” In Essays in Honor of John Dewey, 216–234. New York: Henry Holt.

———. 1933. “Utility and Philosophy in the Middle Ages.” Speculum: A Journal of Mediaeval Studies 8: 431–436.

———. 1935. “Renaissance and Method in Philosophy.” In Studies in the History of Ideas, edited by Columbia University Department of Philosophy, vol. 3, 37–114. New York: Columbia University Press.

———. 1941. “Introduction: The Philosophy of Aristotle.” In The Basic Works of Aristotle, xi–xxxiv. New York: Random House.

———. 1947. “Economic, Political, and Moral Communities in the World Society.” Ethics 57: 79–91.

———. 1949 [2005]. “The Nature and Teaching of the Humanities.” Rpt. In Selected Writings of Richard McKeon, Vol. 2: Culture, Education, and the Arts, vol. 2, 235–254. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

———. 1950a. “An American Reaction to the Present Situation in French Philosophy.” In Philosophic Thought in France and the United States, 337–362. Buffalo: University of Buffalo Publications in Philosophy.

———. 1950b. “Introduction to the Philosophy of Cicero.” In Brutus: On the Nature of the Gods; On Divination; On Duties, edited by Marcus Tullius Cicero, 1–65. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

———. 1950c. “Philosophy and the Diversity of Cultures.” Ethics 60: 233–260.

http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/pragmatis-an-introduction/

http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/pragmatis-an-introduction/


———. 1952 [1987]. “A Philosopher Meditates on Discovery.” Rpt. In Rhetoric: Essays in Invention and Discovery, edited and with an introduction by Mark Backman, 194–220. Woodbridge, CT: Ox Bow Press.

———. 1952 [1990]. “Freedom and History.” Rpt. In Freedom and History and Other Essays.

———. 1952. “Philosophy and Action.” Ethics 62: 79–100.———. 1953 [1990]. “Spiritual Autobiography.” Rpt. In Freedom and History

and Other Essays, 3–36. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.———. 1953. “Communication and Community as Philosophy.” Ethics 63 (3),

Part 1: 190–206.———. 1956 [1990]. “Dialogue and Controversy in Philosophy.” Rpt. In

Freedom and History and Other Essays, 103–125. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

———. 1957 [1990]. “Communication, Truth, and Society.” Rpt. In Freedom and History and Other Essays, 88–102.

———. 1965. “Philosophy as a Humanism.” Philosophy Today 9: 151–167.———. 1966 [1987]. “The Methods of Rhetoric and Philosophy: Invention and

Judgment.” Rpt. In Rhetoric: Essays in Invention and Discovery, edited and with an introduction by Mark Backman, 56–65. Woodbridge, CT: Ox Bow Press.

———. 1966 [1990]. “Philosophical Semantics and Philosophical Inquiry. Published for the First Time.” In Freedom and History and Other Essays, 242–256. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

———. 1970 [1987]. “Philosophy of Communications and the Arts.” Rpt. In Rhetoric: Essays in Invention and Discovery, edited and with an introduction by Mark Backman, 95–120. Woodbridge, CT: Ox Bow Press.

———. 1970 [1990]. “Philosophy and History in the Development of Human Rights.” In Freedom and History and Other Essays, 37–61. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

———. 1971 [1987]. “The Uses of Rhetoric in a Technological Age: Architectonic Productive Arts.” Rpt. In Rhetoric: Essays in Invention and Discovery, edited and with an introduction by Mark Backman, 1–24. Woodbridge, CT: Ox Bow Press.

———. 1975. “The Circumstances and Functions of Philosophy.” In Philosophers on Their Own Work, edited by André Mercier and Maja Svilar, 95–142. Bern: Verlag Herbert Lang.

———. 1982. “Criticism and the Liberal Arts: The Chicago School of Criticism.” Profession 82: 1–26.

———. 1986. “Pluralism of Interpretation and Pluralism of Objects, Actions, and Statements Interpreted.” Critical Inquiry 12: 576–596.

50 P. SIMONSON

———. 1987. Rhetoric: Essays in Invention and Discovery, edited and with an introduction by Mark Backman. Woodbridge, CT: Ox Bow Press.

———. 1990. Freedom and History and Other Essays. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

———. 2005. Selected Writings of Richard McKeon, Vol. 2: Culture, Education, and the Arts. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

McKeon, Richard, and Kenneth Burke. 1970. Rhetoric and Poetic. Transcript of Public Discussion, 13 November. Richard McKeon Papers, Special Collections, University of Chicago Libraries, Box 123, Folder 5.

McKeon, Zahava. 1998. “Introduction to McKeon.” In Selected Writings, vol. 1, edited by Zahava K. McKeon and G. William, 1–21. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Plochmann, George. 1990. Richard McKeon: A Study. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Robinson, James Harvey. 1912. The New History: Essays Illustrating the Modern Historical Outlook. New York: Macmillan.

Ryan, Alan. 1995. John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism. New York: Norton.

Selzer, Jack. 1996. Kenneth Burke in Greenwich Village. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.

Simonson, Peter. 2001. “The Varieties of Pragmatism and Communication: Visions and Revisions from Peirce to Peters.” In Pragmatism and Communication Research, edited by David K. Perry, 1–26. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Talisse, Robert B. 2013. “Recovering American Philosophy.” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 49 (3): 424–433.

UNESCO. 1947. The Grounds of an International Declaration of Human Rights. Paris, 31 July. http://unesdoc.UNESCO.org/imag-es/0012/001243/124350eb.pdf. Accessed 20 June 2017.

UNESCO. 1948. Human Rights: Comments and Interpretations. Symposium with an Introduction by Jacques Maritain. Paris, 25 July. http://unesdoc.UNESCO.org/images/0015/001550/155042eb.pdf. Accessed 20 June 2017.

University of Chicago. 1942. Study in Communications and Public Opinion. Brochure for the Academic Year 1942–1943. Richard P. McKeon Papers, Special Collections, University of Chicago Library. Box 87, Folder 11.

Watson, Walter. 1994. “McKeon’s Semantic Schema.” Philosophy and Rhetoric 27 (2): 85–103.

Wess, Robert. 2008. “Burke’s McKeon Side: Burke’s Pentad and McKeon’s Quartet.” In Kenneth Burke and His Circles, edited by Jack Selzer and R. Wess. West Lafayette, IN: Parlor Press.

http://unesdoc.UNESCO.org/images/0012/001243/124350eb.pdf





———. 2015. “A McKeonist Understanding of Kenneth Burke’s Rhetorical Realism in Particular and Constructivism in General.” KB Journal 11 (1): np. http://www.kbjournal.org/wess_mckeon.

Woodbridge, Frederick J. E. 1912. The Purpose of History. New York: Columbia University Press.

http://www.kbjournal.org/wess_mckeon

53

CHAPTER 3

Hu Shi’s Search for the “Chinese Sophist” and “Spirit of Courageous Doubt”

Rya Butterfield

On May 4, 1919, students swarmed the streets of Peking to air their frustration over Japan’s successful claim to Chinese territory at the Paris Peace Conference and the Chinese Nationalist government’s submission to the Treaty of Versailles (Grieder 1999, 176). They organized on the pages of student-run periodicals, the likes of which played a fundamental role in the spread of radical ideas about revolution and reform. In 1919 alone, approximately four hundred new student publications appeared across the nation. They were written in pai hua, the spoken vernac-ular language that was popularized by Hu Shi’s Literary Revolution (Hu 1919, 110).1 It was a reform movement intended to revolution-ize the use and accessibility of language by expanding the availability of


R. Butterfield (*) Department of Mass Communication, Nicholls State University, Thibodaux, LA, USAe-mail: [email protected]

1 For consistency within the text, words written in the Wade-Giles Romanization system in direct quotes have been changed to the contemporary pinyin Romanization system. Likewise, Hu Shi’s name is written according to pinyin in the text. The older variation, Hu Shih, is used in citations if the source was originally written using Wade-Giles.

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14343-5_3


54 R. BUTTERFIELD

vernacular literature and creating new vernacular works to introduce and accustom people to progressive cultural and scientific ideas.

Hu’s plan for a Literary Revolution was popularized on the pages of The New Youth, a forerunner among the student publications, as “Tentative Proposals for the Improvement of Literature” (Grieder 1999, 76). Hu wrote the article while studying in America, first for his B.A. and one year of graduate study at Cornell University (1910–1914), and then for his Ph.D., under the advisement of John Dewey, at Columbia University (1914–1917). His “tentative proposals” were given a more radical inter-pretation by the journal’s editor, who christened the movement to reform language and literature as the “Literary Revolution” and Hu as its father (Grieder 1999, 76). After a widespread show of support, The New Youth adopted much of Hu’s platform for its operative policies.

The struggle between tentative experimental reform and drastic revolution was a defining characteristic of Hu’s rhetorical context. There are multiple names associated with this time period. The term “May Fourth Movement” is used for the student protests that began on May 4. It is part of the larger New Culture Movement, also referred to as the Chinese Renaissance. Hu explains the Chinese Renaissance as the time marking “a new phase, a new life…not a complete breaking away from the past…a conscious effort to make articulate all the valuable elements we already pos-sessed. At the same time the methods were modern, the inspirations were modern. It thus presented to the people a new and living idea” (Hu 1926, 272–273). At some points, this was a hopeful time. At other points, it was dark, colored by feelings of hopelessness, humiliation, and anger.

Anger tended toward revolution and Hu would try to talk fellow radicals off of the revolutionary path in favor of a tempered, gradual reform. It was a difficult task. As Grieder (1999) writes, Hu’s was “an era when revolutionary agitation engulfed the streets of China’s cities and filtered even into the narrow alleys of hinterland villages” (pp. 175–176). The anger had been brewing for a long time. It was rooted in subju-gation at the hands of foreigners like the Manchu dynasty, the British Opium trade, and Japanese exploitation of China’s political corruption and national resources.

Hu and his peers were especially immersed in the atmosphere of revo-lutionary anger. In 1904, 13-year-old Hu moved to Shanghai where the revolutionaries of the first wave of “Young China” had returned from stud-ying abroad and offered a nontraditional education to a new crop of young intellectuals. Students in Shanghai were exposed to strong advocacy of

3 HU SHI’S SEARCH FOR THE ‘CHINESE SOPHIST’ … 55

westernization and a steady stream of revolutionary propaganda. As Grieder (1999) explains, the “new education” in Shanghai was engrossed by issues of China claiming status in the world and making sense of the calamities that had overrun the latter half of the nineteenth century (21).

A sense of national deficiency would follow Hu and his peers as some of them left Shanghai to study in the United States on scholarships pro-vided as part of the Boxer Indemnity Remittance. Hu characterizes the Boxer War of 1900, often called the Boxer Rising, as “a war which was the embodiment of anti-foreign and anti-modern reaction running wild after the early military and naval reforms had failed to insure national security against foreign aggression” (Hu 2013, 133). Elsewhere, Hu’s passionate way of characterizing the Boxer Rising reveals its potency as a reminder of China’s humiliation in the minds of students. He says, “that episode so disgraced the nation that for many years China was not considered a respectable member of the Family of Nations” (Hu 1926, 268). Hu and the others would have such things at the forefront of their minds when they accepted funds from the Boxer Indemnity remittances to search in universities abroad for tools to build a modern China.

Oscillation between optimism and anger made it difficult to keep reform on a steady track. Hu maintained that Chinese intellectuals should forego politics to instead concentrate on nonpolitical cultural and intellectual transformation. From 1917 to 1919, the journal that had popularized his guidelines for literary reform upheld this sentiment (Grieder 1999, 176). In 1919, however, the journal was caught in the crosshairs between those who desired reform and those who desired rev-olution. As Grieder (1999) explains, “1919 marked a turning point that made such a preoccupation with literary and cultural concerns appear to many only peripheral to the vital issues of the movement” (176). The liberal reformers all agreed that China had so far failed in achieving a republican government and that any attempt at responsible government was continuously marred by warlords, preservationist monarchists, and militaristic factions. They also agreed that China needed cultural and intellectual rejuvenation and the means of standing unaided in the mod-ern world. The contention was essentially about sequence; which should come first, political or social reform?

Although Hu was “convinced that intellectual and cultural regeneration must take precedence over political reform” (Grieder 1999, 175) he had mixed feelings about how the nonpolitical forces had developed by 1919. Initially, after the student movements when hundreds of student periodicals

56 R. BUTTERFIELD

that adhered to the principles of liberal reform sprung up around the nation, he applauded the students’ efforts. He said that the events of 1919 had imparted a “new lesson,” that activities like these could be “democratizing forces,” “new channels of activity…to rebuild a new foundation for Chinese democracy” (Hu 1919, 113–114). Later, “Hu described the May Fourth movement as ‘a most unwelcome interruption’ of the work initiated in 1917 and 1918, a blow from which the New Culture movement never fully recov-ered” (Grieder 1999, 176–177). He saw that nonpolitical forces, even when they seem to arise from new intellectual awareness, can, and were, employed for antagonistic political ends that undermine lasting reform.

To help China along the path of Renaissance, Hu developed a two-pronged plan for rhetorical pragmatic reform specifically focused on developing democratic thought and democratic communication. These developments were intended to “improve [the] lived experience” of Chinese people, which puts Hu in step with the ambitions of “rhetor-ical pragmatism” (Danisch 2015, xvi). The first arm of the reform, the Literary Revolution, focused on the adoption of the vernacular lan-guage for new intellectual and literary creation and translation of exist-ing works. The Literary Revolution was intended to develop a shared logical consciousness among the people and allow for consolidation of rapid, and sometimes drastic, social changes into a stable cultural whole. See my essay on Hu Shi’s Literary Revolution in China Media Research for a more detailed account of that part of the reform. The present chapter focuses on the second arm of Hu’s leadership, the intellectual project undertaken in his Ph.D. dissertation, “The Development of Logical Method in Ancient China.”

Written under the advisement of John Dewey, the dissertation was itself an exercise in pragmatic judgment. It employed a theory of crit-ical sophistic logic to evaluate China’s ancient intellectual traditions of humanism and rationalism. Hu holds that reclamation of the progres-sive aspects of these traditions is the most necessary step for China’s transition into the modern world. The latter part of this essay evaluates three intellectual traditions, the Daojia, Rujia,2 and Mojia, that Hu

2 Confucianism is not the Romanization of a Chinese term; it is not a term used in Chinese. The term for Confucian teachings and practices is “Ru.” As Xinzhong Yao (2000) explains, “Confucius,” named Kongzi in Chinese, “was recognized as the symbol of the Ru” (p. 27). The term “Rujia” refers to “the school or tradition of literati or scholars who have committed themselves to the tradition of the Ru” (Yao 2000, 27).


concentrated on for their resources and limitations when considered in relation to Hu’s ambitions to carry out what I identify as rhetorical prag-matic reform. First, however, I will orient Hu in the pragmatic tradition and explain why he has thus far remained overlooked.

hu’s PlAce in the PrAgmAtist trAdition

In his book Building a Social Democracy (2015), Danisch explains how “atten[tion] to…and cultivat[ion of] specific forms of rhetorical practice” (xiii) is the necessary outgrowth of early philosophical pragmatism. This is because early, philosophical pragmatists held a strong commitment to social democracy, which “foreground[s] social interaction, pluralism, and contingency as basic facts of human experience” (Danisch 2015, xii). The best, if not only, way to develop and maintain a social democracy in these conditions is to form what he refers to as “deliberative ecologies,” meaning environments that are “capable of generating good decisions about pressing public issues and promoting individual self-development through community life” (Danisch 2015, xiv, xiii). The argument that democracy is a “way of life,” Danisch (2015) says, is “pragmatism’s most important and enduring contribution to American intellectual history and political theory” (xi).

When accounting for some of the other overlooked pragmatists outlined in Danisch’s (2015) work, Hu fits into the American pragmatist tradition along with the neo-pragmatists, somewhere in between Jane Addams, Richard McKeon, also a student of Dewey’s, and Hugh Dalziel Duncan. Although their time overlapped, in the development of the pragmatist tradition, we might say Hu began by picking up where Addams left off. Danisch (2015) emphasizes the importance of developing the right rhetorical practices in fostering social democracy and says this was “a project Jane Addams started but one that has sadly been left unfinished” (xiii).

The understanding of the need to develop a “deliberative ecology” conducive to democratic rhetorical practices was with Hu before he ever came to the United States or sought the advisement of John Dewey. For instance, in 1906, eleven years before he began studying with Dewey, Hu was a contributor to, and later the sole editor of, a periodical founded by some of his schoolmates called The Struggle. The name, he explains, was “another instance of the popularity of the Darwinian theory” and the periodical was written in the vernacular spoken language because it was

58 R. BUTTERFIELD

“primarily interested in instilling new ideas into the undereducated masses” (Hu 2013, 92). Hu’s focus on spreading ideas to the uneducated is a direct attempt at creating a “deliberative ecology.”

The overlap between Hu’s thought and pragmatism before he trav-eled to the United States shows that there was something authentically suitable about American Pragmatism for China’s reform needs. It also shows that Dewey was not the sole cause of Hu’s pragmatic outlook. Rather, Hu sought Dewey out as a teacher because he found consist-ency between Dewey’s pragmatic thought and the ideas Hu had already been forming. From there, they went on to influence one another. For instance, it seems that Hu played a particularly influential role in Dewey’s experience in China (1919–1921), acting as host and interpreter of events, and in Dewey’s reception in China, as translator of his lectures for publication in Chinese. Therefore, Apart from the few times that Hu directly attributes an idea to Dewey, I use points of consistency between them simply to establish Hu’s place in the pragmatist genealogy.

Hu has been mischaracterized in Chinese memory as a proponent of wholesale Westernization. This may have resulted in part from his close connection to Dewey and American pragmatism, but it was likely com-pounded by the fact that many of Hu’s fellow radicals did develop into proponents of wholesale Westernization. The pull of Westernization was particularly strong during Hu’s “new education” as a teenager in Shanghai. The first wave of Young China spread the ideas of Western thinkers like Hobbes, Descartes, Rousseau, Bentham, Kant, and Darwin. Works like John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty and Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics were available in translation (Hu 1931, 395). Huxley’s work received particularly warm reception among Chinese intellectuals who believed “the Darwinian hypothesis, especially in its social and political application, was a welcome stimulus to a nation suffering from age-long inertia and stagnation” (Hu 1931, 396). Terms and phrases associated with evolution were trendy. They appeared often in journalism and peo-ple even took them as names. Even Hu’s name reflects the evolutionary vogue of the time. He adopted Shi on his brother’s suggestion. It means fitness, in reference to the slogan “survival of the fittest.” In 1910, he officially took it as his permanent name (Hu 1931, 397).

Between proponents of westernization and traditionalists, others tried to complicate the authoritative narrative in attempt to forge a new path out of the past. This critical approach is more consistent with Hu’s work and the pragmatist tradition. One of these movements, known as


the “‘doubt antiquity’ (yigu) movement,” is consistent with the pragma-tism of McKeon’s approach to rhetoric, which Danisch (2015) explains, is “concern[ed] with pluralism and its historical circumstances” (128). The doubt antiquity movement “led by the 20th century historian, Gu Jiegang, turned a critical eye on the accepted narrative of China’s intel-lectual history (Johnson 2016). Scholars in the movement to “doubt antiquity” questioned gaps and inconsistencies in the ancient canon to highlight the loss of ideas during the unification of China under the first imperial dynasty of Qin (221 BCE) (Johnson 2016). These scholars were aware that the standard intellectual narrative hadn’t always existed with-out challenge and believed modern China would benefit from an appre-ciation of the diversity of ideas in its past.

Any preservation of tradition had to be undertaken with critical care lest it reassert itself under a new guise. Over time, the traditional cul-ture has demonstrated a remarkable capacity to adapt and maintain some degree of culture consistency. From a short term perspective, the capac-ity for cultural adaptation is helpful. Long term, this capacity would be an obstruction to reform if not consciously accounted for. Originally, adaptability developed in response to the need for socio-political unifica-tion across a vast land. It was a process of translating new and different influences into the old philosophical structure to negate the disruptive potential of new thought. For example, Hu Shi explains how Daojia was developed as a Chinese cultural counter to the influence of Indian thought. Daojia, he says, was essentially a reassertion of the old Sinitic religion3 disguised along the lines of the foreign Buddhist influences it sought to subsume (Hu 1934, 86). Philosophical adaptability functioned as a cultural defense mechanism. By adapting some of the desirable char-acteristics of an invading system, even if only superficially, the tradition could placate would-be reformers and things could remain basically unchanged.

When new needs face off against an old culture, the capacity to main-tain cultural consistency become a “trained incapacity.” By subsuming or altering new thought, traditional philosophy did not allow people to confront and adequately deal with new problems. A “trained incapacity,” according to Kenneth Burke (1984), is a tendency in thought or action that develops as a capability, or “capacity,” but loses its benefit under

3 Hu says the faith “never had a generic name.” Elsewhere he calls it Siniticism (Hu 1995a, 441).

60 R. BUTTERFIELD

new and different conditions. Instead of being beneficial, a thought or action that is a “trained incapacity” can be harmful to the thinker or actor (7) because it can develop into an issue of faulty means-selection, or a poor choice of tools (Burke 1984, 10).

Various things can prevent people from selecting adequate means, including choices inherited from the past, intellectual ability, and cultural attitudes (Burke 1984, 10). Hu looks at the tension between traditional-ists and leftists in a way consistent with what contemporary rhetoricians would describe as a rhetorical problem created by the struggle between alternative sets of conflicting means. This struggle provides an exam-ple of why Hu sought the help of the Sophistic lens. One of the frag-ments of writing left by Protagoras, first of the ancient Greek sophists, maintained that on any topic, people will hold oppositional views. “The two-logoi fragment,” Crick (2015) explains, “states the central fact of politics—that because human beings measure appearances differently, the life of politics is disputation” (p. 71). If modern China was to emerge from under the paternalistic control of traditionalists, the people would need to communicate on issues for which a single satisfactory logos, or accounting of, would never exist. Crick (2015) explains this burden as it was understood by the ancient Greeks in contrast to the rule of a tyrant:

Whereas conventional tyrants survived by restricting to a minimum the sphere of freedom in both action and speech, the tyranny of logos forced freedom upon its citizens, drawing them out of their homes to speak and be spoken to within the constant chatter of the assembly, the court, and the agora. (p. 78)

Hu recognized that people needed to learn to critically engage, which would mean accepting the responsibility placed on their shoulders by the “tyranny of logos.”

To take on such a responsibility of critical engagement, the peo-ple needed to see rhetorical power as something that should be theirs. This marks an example of one of the ways Hu’s contributions to the method of rhetorical pragmatic reform advanced the pragmatist tra-dition. Danisch (2015) refers to this notion of rhetorical responsibil-ity as “communicative agency” and explains that while Addams had much to say about social organization at Hull house, she had little to say about the forms of “communicative agency” enabled there (Danisch 2015, 202). Hu’s reform lends far more insight into the function of


the rhetorical practices his reforms aimed at. In a word, they were to function by enabling new means of making power.

Here, considering the means by which a citizen can claim rhetorical power in a social democracy, is one place where Hu’s focus overlaps with that of Hugh Dalziel Duncan. Duncan pointed to the differences between the rhetorical practices that enable authoritarianism and those that enable democracy. Democracy, he argued, demands conditions that “[value] disagreement, debate, and discussion (classic pragmatist preoccupations)” (Danisch 2015, 163). There are also comparisons to be drawn between Hu’s focus on literature and poetry and Duncan’s focus on art in its comic form. For Duncan, studies of comic art could “explain how communication between equals fosters social integration” (Danisch 2015, 169–170). Hu’s approach to creations in the vernacular language were aimed at social equality and integration.

The authority traditionally attributed to the scholarly ruling class needed to be recognized as a faulty means-selection. Hu’s Literary Revolution was intended to carry out something that had already begun in Chinese society akin to the sophistical movement in ancient Greece—“a fundamental shift in how power was distributed and formed” (Crick 2015, 67). Hu wanted to upend the structure and means of making power. It should be clarified that his predicament was less in a dis-tant space between the traditional and modern and more in a transition between the two. So, unlike Kierkegaard, Marx, and Nietzsche, whom Arendt (2006) refers to in her 1954 work Between Past and Future, as “nineteenth-century rebels against tradition,” who “tried desperately to think against the tradition while using its own conceptual tools,” Hu tried to show that there was, in fact, consistency between Chinese tradition and what he hoped to see develop as modern Chinese thought (pp. 24, 26). An important consequence of this was that a “conscious” political reform could be enough. Hu explains this concept of consciousness here:

We are not willing to be led by the nose by a set of blind leaders. At this time we must open our eyes and look ahead to the different roads which branch before us, and see which road takes us to which place, see for ourselves which road we may, indeed must, travel. Of course we cannot guarantee that our observation and judgment will be free of error, but we have a deep belief that a conscious search for the road is far better than allowing ourselves to be led blindly. We also hope that by public discussion the search will result in enabling us to find a truer and rounder route. (Hu 1930, 934)

62 R. BUTTERFIELD

However, if the cultural and intellectual revolutions were not complete, and the people not enabled to make sound judgment about their path, than a political revolution would seem, and would perhaps be, the only course and that would be a dangerous and wasteful route.

rhetoricAl PrAgmAtic reform

Both arms of Hu’s reform were exercises in developing the rhetorical practices that would provide adequate means and communicative agency. The Literary Revolution worked with vernacular language to reposition social power. This arm of the reform is a strong point of consistency between Hu and Dewey. “Dewey tells us that art is the characteristic form of human experience, but he never tells us what form of art can be used to think about and change social aspects of experience” (Danisch 2015, 247). By offering this advice, Hu makes the “pivot from philo-sophical to rhetorical pragmatism” (Danisch 2015, 247). Each element of the Literary Revolution was an example of a form of art used to remake social experience. In total, they would undermine the paternalis-tic authority of the literati by developing social awareness and rhetorical responsibility.

The other arm of Hu’s reform focused on the intellectual tradition and the institutions that arose from it to create a social landscape that would enable democratic behaviors and develop a pragmatic “attitude toward ideas.” To create a landscape conducive to democratic behavior, Hu worked to free the intellectual-elite from the bonds of their own cul-tural superiority. This attempt to equalize cultural authority in the belief that all people were capable of fulfilling the responsibilities of democratic citizenship is in direct agreement with Dewey’s position. “Dewey…advo-cates an essentially anti-elitist position while describing democracy as…a set of social relationships embodied in the social structures within which we interact with other citizens” (Danisch 2015, 204). Like Addams and McKeon, Hu paid close attention to social relationships. However, how he dealt with them shows where Hu advanced rhetorical pragmatism further than the other neo-pragmatists.

Danisch (2015) asserts that “McKeon is one of the first figures in the history of pragmatism to explicitly make…[the rhetorical] turn,” by which he means going beyond rhetorical theory into rhetorical exercise (121). This assertion overlooks Hu. McKeon wasn’t the first of Dewey’s students to make this advancement. In fact, Danisch (2015) does


recognize that some of Dewey’s works that most directly point toward the rhetorical turn, and that would have most influenced McKeon, were written after Dewey’s time in China under the guidance of Hu (123). Nonetheless, Addams, McKeon, and Hu are consistent in their attention to social pluralism. As Danisch (2015) writes, “The pragmatist emphasis on associated living and the need for identification between plural people operates at McKeon’s intellectual center of gravity just as it operated for someone like Jane Addams” (138). However, “McKeon did not leave us a handbook by which we could practice this new rhetoric in a social and political context” (Danisch 2015, 138). Hu, on the other hand, was try-ing to provide that kind of practical guidance. Similarly, like Addams in Hull House, Hu was trying to “inhabit” the right rhetorical structures and tried to set an example of how one ought to communicate within such structures so as to “promote positive social and political change” (Danisch 2015, 257). As a result, Hu likely suffered a similar fate as Addams, which was likely compounded by the fact that he undertook reform far away in China. Of the former point Danisch (2015) explains, “I believe Addams is largely left out of the history of pragmatism because she functions more as a rhetorical leader and less as a philosopher” (257). Hu was always very active as a leader in the reform and was likely overlooked in much the same way.

The firm divide between the two strata of society kept the intellec-tual-elite, who might have otherwise given the people the tools they needed to effectively confront modern challenges, too separate from the experiences of the common people to fully understand their diffi-culties or the living philosophy that guided them. Likewise, the future was uncertain for the elite class following the abolition of the civil ser-vice examination system. As Wang Ke-wen writes, “with the collapse of its institutional basis in 1905, the gentry ceased to be an active class. Its various social and political roles were gradually assumed by landlords, bureaucrats, merchants, or local bullies, in the twentieth century” (Ke-wen 1998, 67). The absence of the examination system left a hole in Chinese society, which created panic among young peo-ple who now saw no clear means of social or political advancement. Hu, however, sought to temporarily preserve this new separation from politics. He asked intellectuals to abstain from dealing with the established political system, to instead help develop a cultural ground-work capable of giving rise to an alternative responsible system of government.

64 R. BUTTERFIELD

A pragmatic attitude toward ideas is one that sees ideas as tools for confronting social problems (Danisch 2007, 4). Danisch (2007) writes, “by believing that ideas are useful and adaptable social tools, the pragma-tists implicitly rejected dogma, moral certainty, and the quest for abso-lute truth” (4). Also, consistent with Hu’s perspective on reform is the emphasis Dewey places on conscious decision making. Since “political facts are not outside human desire and judgment” (Dewey 1954, 6), one must purposefully choose “between blind, unreasoned attack and defense on the one hand and discriminating criticism employing intelligent method and a conscious criterion on the other” (Dewey 1954, 6–7). However, it is beyond clear that Hu’s assessment of China’s need and evaluation of China’s intellectual history were guided by this “attitude toward ideas.” He recognized the adaptability of Rujia thought, which accounted for its centuries long staying power, and in turn, recognized how Rujia lost its adaptability once entrenched in intellectual institu-tions used to preserve political power. The progressive qualities of Rujia were stifled and the regressive qualities encouraged. Likewise, the propa-gandized revolutionary zeal of young twentieth-century intellectuals was no less dogmatic. In step with the way Dewey conceived of democracy as a “social idea, a way of life” (Danisch 2015, 204), Hu regarded democ-racy less as a concrete system of political institutions than a state of mind conducive to the maintenance of a particular social condition. It followed that the creation of a democratic society would be essentially an intellec-tual, rather than a political, accomplishment (Grieder 1999, 178).

Hu wanted to create the cultural space for “genuine politics.” “Genuine politics comes into being” Crick (2015) writes, “when the resources of logos can be harnessed by ordinary citizens to challenge, invert, and transform…[the] established hierarchies” that held “strength and morality…[as] synonymous” (p. 73). Hu wanted to shift author-ity from an idea’s origin or professed moral aptitude, where it had been attributed by Rujia, to its performance in an intellectual space con-structed in the spirit of scientific inquiry. Traditional domestic ideas and modern foreign ideas should be judged on equal footing according to their practical merit within a particular situation of need.

Hu saw the lack of a scientific spirit as the chief obstacle to develop-ing a pragmatic “attitude toward ideas” and enabling “genuine politics.” Like Dewey, Hu understood the process of critical inquiry as fundamental to democratic culture. Danisch explains, “at the core of Dewey’s commit-ment to inquiry as a vital matter for the organization of community life lie


two complimentary but distinct practices: inquiry that requires deliberation and discussion, and inquiry based on the methods of scientific thinking” (Danisch 2015, 206–207).

Hu described the “scientific spirit,” as a “critical consciousness,” or way of apprehending the physical and social world that values situational analysis, views history as relevant to present-day events and attitudes, and has the ability to bring ideas and behaviors into accord. Hu said it was the lack of critical consciousness that prevented China from adopting a popular government after the success of the anti-Manchu revolution and abdication of the Qing dynasty in the early twentieth century, when China’s time to modernize had arrived (Hu 1926, 266). As he explained to a London audience in 1926:

The Republic has failed, not because modern China has failed—there has never been a modern China—but because in all these processes the changes have been superficial and have hardly touched the fundamental issues of political transformation. There has been practically no modern leadership, practically no genuine admission of our real weaknesses, no recognition of the spiritual possibilities of the new [civilization]. (Hu 1926, 269)

A critical consciousness was necessary for all of these things: modern leadership, admission of weakness, and recognition of spiritual potential.

The only thing capable of enabling critical consciousness is the spirit of critical doubt, which Hu believed could be reawakened from China’s intellectual past. The scholastic traditions of Rujia that had domi-nated China’s intellectual and political institutions had overshadowed other schools of thought and its own constructive tenants. Hu (1931) called himself “a historical research worker,” that thinks “genetically” to reveal the hidden history of thought (403). Today, we might extend the analogy to call him a genetic engineer, developing a modern scientific spirit from dormant seeds of humanism.

Humanist doubt, the germ of critical consciousness that developed in the west with the Sophists was also present in ancient China. As Hu (1963) writes, “the spirit of doubt has ingrained itself in the Chinese mentality ever since the days of [Laozi] and [Kongzi]”4 (299).

4 The English name “Confucius” is replaced with the Chinese “Kongzi” in brackets.

66 R. BUTTERFIELD

This spirit of doubt has always manifested itself in every age in a critical examination of our own civilization and its ideas and institutions. Such self-critical examination of one’s own civilization is the prerequisite with-out which no ‘profound and sweeping’ cultural changes are ever possible in any country with an old civilization. (Hu 1963, 299)

His rhetorical pragmatic reform, prompted by dissatisfaction with China’s predicament and the trained incapacities imposed by historical inheritance, would be another installment in China’s legacy of critical doubt. The remainder of this chapter focuses here, on Hu Shi’s project to critically eval-uate China’s ancient intellectual traditions of humanism and rationalism.

hu’s seArch for logicAl method in Ancient chinA

Hu saw the groundwork for a pragmatic “attitude toward ideas” in China’s ancient intellectual traditions of humanism and rationalism, such as the original “spirit of courageous doubt” of the Daojia (Daoist/Taoist), the “Socratic Tradition of [Kongzi],” or Rujia, which Hu describes as “the tradition of free discussion, criticism, and intellectual honesty,” and the Mojia (Mohist) practical advancement of logical theory. These philo-sophical foundations were born of a difficult transition between the age of poetry and the age of logic. The old Sinitic religion, the religion of ancient China, that worshipped the Supreme power of Tien (often translated as “Heaven”), the spirits of the dead, the forces of nature, belief in good and evil retribution, and a belief in a variety of divinations, based around the daily experiences in agrarian or nomadic society, had passed (Hu 1934, 80–81). So too had the stable age of the great Zhou dynasty, from elev-enth to seventh-century BC, when social life was highly ritualized and social relations were regulated down to the smallest of details.

After the fall of the Zhou, the imperial state turned dark. The state began to “decay… under weak and wicked emperors” (Hu 1922, 9). Poets relayed the desperate conditions, as in this quote from the Book of Poetry:

You awe-inspiring Ministers of State, why are you so unjust? Heaven is multiplying its afflictions; the people are grumbling, and yet you do not correct nor bemoan yourselves! (Hu 1922, 12)

The strict social system of the Zhou dynasty held society stable for cen-turies. “The Emperor, or ‘Son of Heaven,’” Hu explains, “was not only


the temporal but also the spiritual head of the empire, ruling in the name of Heaven to which he alone was privileged to sacrifice” (Hu 1922, 9). The emperor was lord atop a feudal pyramid. Every tier of the pyramid was governed by strict rules and duties. With a benevolent emperor, the system had kept society stable but after the Zhou dynasty, when led by weak and wicked leaders, the entire system turned weak and wicked in turn. While poets like the one quoted above continued to appeal to the righteousness of the old order, other poets believed they were experiencing the disdain of Heaven itself. Hu mentions one such poet “who…in bitter distress and despair,” acquiesced that his fate must be the unfortunate “decree of Providence” (Hu 1922, 13).

The people are now in peril, In vain they look to Heaven:All is dark and dumb.Let its determination be fixedAnd there is none whom it will not overcome.There is the great GodDoes He hate anyone? (Hu 1922, 13)

China had been aided through many difficult historical transitions by its foundational philosophies. Hu believed these foundations could aid China again. However, none of them were individually adequate to the task of developing a modern form of thought and he was not looking for a replication of their previous manifestations. For, in the past, they had led to the classicism, conservatism, and stratification that had taken over Chinese society and obscured the foundations of critical logic. Yet, with their help, the people could acquire the skill set to cultivate critical logic, and through Hu’s pragmatic reform, they could develop the environ-ment to sustain it. He confronts the foundational philosophies of Daojia, Rujia, and Mojia to expose their limitations and reveal their potential. He looked to each for rhetorical tools. As Hu writes:

Three great leaders, [Laozi], [Kongzi], and [Mozi], arose within the brief space of less than two hundred years (about 570-420 BC) and laid the foundation of Chinese philosophy for all the centuries to come. All of the three can only be best understood in their respective relation to the tottering Sinitic religion and to the critical and skeptical atmosphere of their times. Broadly speaking, [Laozi] stood at the extreme Left in the attitude towards the old religion; [Kongzi] occupied the center with strong leanings towards the Left; and [Mozi], founder of the Mo Sect,

68 R. BUTTERFIELD

represented the Conservative Right. [Laozi] was a rebel in religion and a revolutionary in philosophy; [Kongzi] was a Humanist and an Agnostic; and [Mozi] was a religious leader who sought to save the old Sinitic reli-gion by purifying it and giving it a new significance. (Hu 1995, 443)

lAozi

Laozi was a critic, a doubter, and a rebel; Hu Shi calls him “the Protagoras of ancient China” (Hu 1922, 16). As an individual figure, Hu saw Laozi as beneficial to the advancement of logic in ancient China because he was a bold critic of the established social order. In response to the poet who asked if God hates anyone, Laozi likely would have responded that God neither hates nor loves nor cares at all. Heaven, for Laozi, was indifferent.

Laozi was a “Sophist” Hu says, because his philosophy was fueled by skepticism and creative doubt (Hu 1922, 14). He juxtaposed the warped and malfunctioning imperial order of his time with life earlier, during the time of the old Sinitic faith, before detailed rules and regula-tions bound the common people to their maltreated lot. The old Sinitic religion considered only what was relevant in daily experience. The peo-ple lived on the land and experienced the cruelty of the elements as if they were part of the land. In the world Laozi knew, this sentiment had much more fidelity than the conception of a benevolent Son of Heaven. “Nature,” he says, “is not benevolent: it treats all beings as if they were mere grass and dogs” (Hu 1922, 17). He thought the existing politi-cal and social hierarchy was “foolishly civilized and refined and artificial” (Hu 1922, 16). Worse, not only was the social organization contrived, but it had also become dangerous to those who partook in its foolish-ness. Hu explains this with Laozi’s “Master Executioner” analogy for “nature”:

There is always the Master Executioner who kills. To undertake executions for the Master Executioner is like hewing wood for the Master Carpenter. Whoever undertakes to hew wood for the Master Carpenter rarely escapes injuring his own hand. (Hu 1922, 17)

Nature will steamroll anyone who stands in the way of its inevitable path. Thus, Laozi maintained that people should live in a state of noninterfer-ence and nonresistance.


Hu saw the critical aspect of Daojia as good, but if the destructive energy is taken too far and not directed into a constructive medium, crit-icism is unable to advance logic or pragmatic reform. Still, the subversive and revolutionary element of Laozi’s philosophy is a rhetorical resource because it laid the foundation for constructive philosophies. Confucian humanism picked up here; “the age of Sophistry was fading into the age of Logic” (Hu 1922, 19).

kongzi

Kongzi was not a common kind of philosopher, “he was concerned with drawing up a set of rules for human conduct… [not] the elaboration of theories” (Hu 1995, 431). This aspect of Rujia helped the philosophy develop into bureaucratic form. Kongzi was more tempered in his criticism than Laozi. “His philosophy was a compromise” between the naturalistic influence of the sixth-century and the cautious attitude toward traditional values he maintained as a statesman (Hu 1995, 431). “Whereas [Laozi’s] naturalism was radically nihilistic,” Rujia can be called a philosophy of moderation (Hu 1995, 431). It favored consistency, and thus, promoted a highly stable bureaucracy as a structure of authority. The authority’s legit-imacy came from a literary tradition revolving around universal original ideas recorded by sages of antiquity. Due to the reverence, Kongzi attrib-uted to the history and institutions of the literary tradition, he was called the “father of Chinese history” (Hu 1995, 431).

The most important rhetorical resource of Rujia thought came from the important role played by doubt. Hu (1919) writes, “doubt is rarely purely negative. It leads to inquiries which in most cases lead in turn to positive reconstructions” (116). The positive kind of doubt is exem-plified by the “skepticism” that is part of the “‘Socratic Tradition’ of [Rujia]—the tradition of free discussion, criticism, and intellectual hon-esty” (Hu 1959, 29). Rujia skepticism asserted “the right to doubt,” Hu (1963) writes “even in matters traditionally regarded as sacred or sacrosanct” (296). Kongzi said that some things, like death, fall out-side of our ability to know and we should not claim to know about those topics. He kept social focus on the secular world and prevented formation of metaphysical beliefs, such as belief in an afterlife. This wholly secular focus worked to further simplify the old Sinitic religion that already had little mythology or ritual but maintained practices like burial and ancestor worship.

70 R. BUTTERFIELD

Unlike the Daojia style of criticism, intended to fully deconstruct all systems of social organization and social naming, in Rujia skep-ticism, critique was but the first step in a larger reformative process. First, Rujia sought to critique and deconstruct, but then, to re-form whatever had been broken down. Kongzi was responding to the same conditions as Laozi, who was roughly his contemporary, but Kongzi attributed the “moral perversity and degradation of his age” to a “long and gradual process of intellectual disorganization, decadence of beliefs and convictions, and relaxation of duties and relations” (Hu 1922, 21). Social disorder accompanies intellectual disorder, or in other words, wrong practice follows from wrong belief.

Discussions of logical theory were naturally attendant to the Rujia conception of change. Hu explains this connection via the Rujia cam-paign for the rectification of names. Both Daojia and Rujia saw the use of names as an important rhetorical resource. While the Daojia aimed at a state of namelessness and nonaction, the Rujia employed a critical campaign premised on the idea that institutions and relational roles no longer functioned as originally intended. Known as rectification, it was a process that consisted of reevaluation, intellectual reorganization, and ultimately, aimed to re-form. Hu understood the reform-oriented process of critiquing, judging, and molding in response to social disorder to be an essentially practical affair. Judgments made about the original meaning and value of the name “tell whither things are tending, point to what is good and what is evil, and thereby ‘inspire the activities of the world’” (Hu 1922, 33). To reform on the basis of names, is to change the system of practice by reworking it to align with the structure of belief.

The original meaning held within a name was referred to as “a [xiang]…an image or ‘idea’ which one forms of a thing” (Hu 1922, 27). Having no means other than language, the sages of antiquity expressed the xiang, or original ideas, in the form of names. The theory of xiang, or original ideas, impacted society in two extremely significant ways. First, since the sages’ impressions of the universe and perfect ideals were held in names, language, and the keeping of language, became a very important affair. The Classical language held all the tools needed for intellectual reorganization, and authority was predicated on moral strength, which was obtained by vigorous study of the words and meanings of the sages. Classical literature became the avenue for appre-hending “the simple,” unadulterated meanings of names in the past. Since scholarship in the classics meant access to the moral authority of


the sages, scholarship in the classics became the gateway to social power. Second, since instruments, customs, and institutions were developed as social representations, or implementations, of these names, the historical record of these developments became an extremely important tool for social reform and intellectual reorganization. The arts of writing became inextricably linked with the arts of ruling. Hu saw this structure of intel-lectual authority as a major constraint to reform.

It has been justly said that the greatest obstacle to progress in China is the deductive habit of mind; that is, the willingness to accept things on authority, to acquiesce in ideas and ideals without questioning whence they are derived and whether they are true or not. A quotation from the classics is sufficient argument for national policy, and a serious saying of [Kongzi] is good enough to justify the existence of any obsolete custom or institu-tion. This habit is the most formidable enemy to innovation and progress. (Hu 1919, 116)

While the Rujia program for reform contributed to the constructive turn in philosophy, the constructivist elements were ultimately overshad-owed by the philosophy’s conservative aim. Even the campaign to rec-tify names, which originated from the reformist impulse that was a great contribution exhibited the strength of Rujia’s regressive tendencies. The critique and judgment of the name was the only practical aspect of rec-tification. Unlike the pragmatic kind of reform that Hu advocated, the success of rectification was not checked against the situational context.

Hu explains that investigation of the past would be good if it was used to determine what lessons are applicable and helpful to understanding the complexities of the present. For Kongzi, the reason to investigate the past was to “manifest what has come before,” to turn away from the complex and retreat to the simple. Hu maintained that this regressive tendency must be excised from modern Chinese intellectualism. A cul-ture should not be forced to stand still despite the continual movement of the world around it.

The Rujia doctrine of determinism, however, held that the less a culture changes, the happier the people will be. Rujia determinism is rooted in the ancient belief in divination. The tradition of divination informed man of his particular position in the world. If a culture has a history of divination, the culture has a history of records, which Hu connects to “the beginning of literary education and of an intellectual

72 R. BUTTERFIELD

class” (Hu 1995, 440). It was one of the first places where the roles of priests, scientists, and philosophers clearly merged. They read the ora-cles and interpreted them as guides for moral behavior. They looked into the skies and made the calendar. They recorded their findings and main-tained their class hierarchy (Hu 1995, 441). On the one hand, Rujia class organization led to the bureaucratic tendency of thought that later became an impediment, but the intellectual organization it represented accounted for a constructive aspect of the Rujia philosophy.

Even though Rujia introduced constructivist elements into Chinese intellectualism, it had a similar shortcoming as Daojia in that its final aim made it essentially a passive philosophy. They both wanted an end to the disorder that plagued society. Likewise, both tried to determine a method of limiting the kinds of disruption that antagonized the dis-order. Kongzi maintained that “all change…arises from motion, which is produced by the pushing of that which is active against that which is passive” (Hu 1922, 26). Thus, for Kongzi, to be “passive” is to remain simple and close to the original ideas. The “passive” is natural, good, and difficult. The “active” is the unnatural, bad, and easy. All other major elements of Rujia thought must be considered in this context. Rujia gave society access to the original ideas that all things should closely adhere to. Further, since Rujia determinism maintained that “wealth and honors are in the hands of Providence” (Hu 1922, 40) and since Rujia skepticism prevented belief in an afterlife, all of man’s energy should be focused on the one thing over which he has any control—keeping man’s institutions aligned with their ideal purpose.

mozi

The promise of Mojia is in the critical tendencies of thought and argu-mentative traditions it developed. This promise is countered, however, by its philosophical and religious encouragement of conformity. Hu credits Mozi with the beginning of logic in China, writing, “As John Dewey has long ago pointed out, logic always arose as an instrument for the defense of a faith that was in danger of being overthrown” (Hu 1995, 448). The polemic machinery of Mojia was engineered to counter the protests of atheist rebels and agnostic reformers with a united reli-gion of altruism. Mozi “openly condemned the [Rujia] as ‘atheists’ who denied the existence of gods and ghosts and yet ceremoniously practiced all the rites of ancestral worship” (Hu 1995, 446–447)! He said it was


useless to practice the rituals premised on belief in the gods, but at the same time, deny the gods. “That is as meaningless as throwing a fishing net where you are sure to find no fish” (Hu 1995, 447)! It was with the intention to defend his theism against the atheists and agnostics that Mozi “invented the logic of three-fold argument,” which maintained the importance of history and the sages of antiquity, but which also devel-oped the importance of practicality. In short, the most pragmatic of the leaders in the foundational Chinese philosophies, Mozi, was also the most conservative. For him, there was nothing inherently impractical about theism. Theism became impractical when theistic practices were maintained in the absence of belief; at that point, how could the prac-tices serve any utility at all?

Mozi was a great religious leader and reformer born around 10 years after the death of Kongzi (Hu 1922, 39–40).5 Hu likes Mozi as a char-acter; he explains him as the type of public intellectual who was strong enough, and could endure enough, to advance a different kind of think-ing. In particular, Mozi aimed at reducing doubt.

[Mozi] doubted the doubters, and wanted to restore faith and belief in the traditional religion of the people—the religion of God’s Spirit. He believed that all evil came from doubt, from freedom of thought and belief, espe-cially from diversity and standards of right and wrong.

Hu understands Mojia as very similar to pragmatic thought (Hu 1922, 41). It focuses on practical questions about the benefits of things and ideas in light of present-day circumstances. As a historical figure, Hu maintains that Mozi represented important characteristics that in heavy concentra-tions create leaders and in lower concentrations create modern scientifically minded individuals.

Mozi rebelled against Rujia ritualism and formalism, the atheism and agnosticism begot by Rujia skepticism, and the doctrine of determinism, and most importantly, “he rebelled against their attitudinarianism which refused to consider the practical consequences of beliefs, theories, and institutions” (Hu 1922, 40). Mozi worried that people would lose the capacity for practical judgment if they did not exercise it. He believed that Rujia naming tended to bring about this sort of regression by

5 Also Hu (1995, 446).

74 R. BUTTERFIELD

keeping the intellectual and ruling class focused on the classical literature written by the sages rather than the practical world surrounding them. The rulers would continue to be drawn into the literature until they became very distant from society and its problems.

By constantly confining one’s mind to defining and re-defining general principles without testing their validity by examining the kind of conduct and character they are fitted to produce, one gradually loses one’s sense of proportion and valuation and tends to ‘strain at a gnat and swallow a camel.’ (Hu 1922, 40)

Both Mozi and Hu believed that knowledge involves the process of choice; knowledge is not related to the ability to name, but the ability to choose, to make a practical judgment.

The difference between Rujia and Mojia is essentially the difference between what and how (Hu 1922, 44). While Rujia asked what is good government? Mojia said, we know what good government is; how do we make it happen? The Rujia deductive habit of mind, that accepted the prevalence of a truth without practical assessment, disabled the construc-tive potential of Rujia principles of intellectual reorganization.

Applicability of the Rujia model to Hu’s reform includes criticism of the current institutions and investigation into their origins, but it can-not extend any further because the Rujia model did not allow for ideas or institutions to be revised into anything other than what they were. The Mojia model realizes that the original idea of an institution was conceived in relation to the circumstances of the originating day. Thus, the principle should stay the same but not necessarily the institution (Hu 1922, 45). Hu uses the following passage from Mozi to show where Mojia separated from Rujia.

Now a blind man may say, ‘That which shines with brilliancy is white, and that which is like soot is black.’ Even those who can see cannot reject these definitions. But if you place both white and black things before the blind man and ask him to choose the one from the other, then he fails. Therefore I say, ‘A blind man knows not white from black, not because he cannot name them, but because he cannot choose them.’ (Hu 1922, 46–48)

Rujia does not consider the practical results when setting a course for the ideal. Mojia considers the ideal, considers the practical results, and then, sets a course. This shift is important for the consideration of practical


consequence, but also because it incorporates the aspect of choice into the philosophical equation. One must consider the possible outcomes, weigh them against the ideal, and make a judgment about the relative value of each. For Hu, this is a great stride toward the scientific spirit.

However, Mojia is problematic, Hu says, because it did not always acknowledge short term verse long term consequences, “the difference between that which is immediately practical and that the practical worth of which cannot be immediately seen” (Hu 1922, 52). Hu says this is a problem across all of Chinese philosophy. There must be a leap of faith in science that asserts the promise of potential benefits to discoveries that register no immediate viability. This is the pragmatic assertion that allows for investment in science—I don’t see the consequences yet but I will know them when I do. Further, Hu maintains that there are practical conse-quences that have to do with the aesthetic and larger sense of life. These are consequences of quality that should not be viewed or judged in terms of instrumental value—while I don’t understand the value of the things I see right in front of me, I know that they are of a large and encompassing value. Hu sought to develop a more nuanced and inclusive conception of science as a “spirit” that would touch all aspects of daily life and thought. He also tried to introduce a more mature and expansive conception of pragmatism that would allow for reforms that did not promise quick returns.

Hu’s critique of Mozi’s shortsightedness is very telling of the difficulties Hu faced in pursuit of intellectual reform. When practicality was mistaken for immediate utility, even purported proponents of prag-matic reform would mistakenly judge knowledge based on the exceed-ingly limited criteria of knowable benefit. As an advocate for gradual reform, the kind that is founded in tendencies of thought, encouraged by institutional changes, and only becomes visible much later, Hu needed people to understand that the practical benefits of the scientific spirit are rolling and the line of causality is not always immediately apparent.

conclusion

Hu’s intellectual project was an exercise in rhetorical pragmatic reform that pushed against regressiveness and dogmatism and worked toward progressiveness and critical doubt. After the Communist Revolution, nuanced representations of Hu’s ideas and project were quieted and he is now largely known as a Westernizer who wanted to press China into a Western mold of development at the expense of traditional Chinese

76 R. BUTTERFIELD

culture and thought. Far from this caricatured misrepresentation, Hu should be remembered for his efforts to uncover and restore the humanistic and rationalistic strains of thought that had been overshad-owed by the classicism, conservatism, and stratification that had become the institutional manifestation of the foundational philosophies in tra-ditional China. Similarly, Hu should also be appreciated for making the rhetorical turn in the development of Pragmatism. He was likely over-looked for reasons similar to Addams; he was more of a rhetorical leader than a philosopher, but that is the direction toward which pragmatist phi-losophy tends. He was likely also overlooked because the foreignness of the Chinese context in which he undertook most of his rhetorical prag-matic reform. However, this shouldn’t make scholars hesitate to situate Hu in the American pragmatist tradition. Rather, the suitability of prag-matism in Hu’s context is a testament to its viability in conditions of plu-ralism and discord that must account for particular historic circumstance.

The cash value of Hu Shi in communication studies is the great insight he offers us in developing a rhetorical pragmatist reform theory. Reform should be a gradual process. He equated the pattern of prag-matic thought with gradualism; it is not acutely utilitarian and it does not expect grand, sweeping, and immediate changes, the likes of a revolu-tion. It has faith that practical reasoning and procedural science will bring forth benefits and it understands that some of the benefits will not be immediately recognized for what they are or could one day be. Hu held faith in the potential of rationality and consciousness and the subsequent potential of the human species to improve the quality of their existence.

Likewise, he came closer than other neo-pragmatists in providing something of a handbook for applied rhetorical pragmatic reform. Most of his reform efforts revolved around establishing progressive modes of communication and inquiry. Hu sought to construct a theory of logic from the building blocks of the Chinese intellectual tradition, includ-ing: the ability to doubt and criticize, attention to one’s situation and immediate practical consequences, a far-reaching vision of consequences, an appreciation of history as a resource for reconstruction, and an abil-ity to form knowledge from various forms of reasoning. Hu was guided by both Western and Chinese philosophy, but more importantly, he was guided by the pragmatists concern for creating the conditions suitable for a democratic lifestyle. Our recognition of this helps us advance a call made Xing Lu for the advancement of comparative rhetoric. “scholars of comparative rhetoric,” Lu (2015) says, “need to continue expanding


our ‘contact zones’ and rhetorical repertoire by adopting culturally specific terms into shared rhetorical tropes and in the creation of new knowledge” (267). This is yet another way Hu seemed to be ahead of the game. He walked among philosophies of the world so he might create something new to do something new.

references

Arendt, Hannah. 2006. Between Past and Future. New York: Penguin Group.Burke, Kenneth. 1984. Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose, 3rd ed.

Berkeley: University of California Press.Crick, Nathan. 2015. Rhetoric & Power: The Drama of Classical Greece.

Columbia: The University of South Carolina Press.Danisch, Robert. 2007. Pragmatism, Democracy, and the Necessity of Rhetoric.

Columbia: The University of South Carolina Press.———. 2015. Building a Social Democracy: The Promise of Rhetorical

Pragmatism. New York: Lexington Books.Dewey, John. 1954. The Public & Its Problems. Athens: Swallow Press, Ohio

University Press.Grieder, Jerome B. 1999. Hu Shih and the Chinese Renaissance: Liberalism in the

Chinese Revolution, 1917–1937. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Hu, Shih. 1919. “Intellectual China in 1919 (The Chinese Social and Political

Review 4, no. 4).” In Hu Shih Yingwen Wencun (胡適英文文存, A Collection of Hu Shih’s English Writings), 3 vols., Compiled by Chih-P’ing Chou (周質平), 345–355. Taibei: Yuanliu chub.

———. 1922. The Development of Logical Method in Ancient China. Shanghai: Shanghai Oriental Book Co.

———. 1926. “The Renaissance in China.” Journal of the Royal Institute of International Affairs 5 (6): 265–283.

———. 1930. “Which Road Are We Going?” Pacific Affairs 3 (10): 933–946.———. 1931. “Essay in Living Philosophies.” In A Collection of Hu Shih’s

English Writings, vol. I, 235–263. New York: Simon & Schuster.———. 1934. The Chinese Renaissance: The Haskell Lectures 1933. Chicago: The

University of Chicago Press.———. 1959. “The Scientific Spirit and Method in Chinese Philosophy.” 9

(1/2, Preliminary Report on the Third East-West Philosophers’ Conference).———. 1963. “The Right to Doubt in Ancient Chinese Thought.” Philosophy

East and West 12 (4): 295–300.———. 1995. “Confucianism (Edwin R.A. Seligman, ed., Encyclopedia of the

Social Sciences Vol. 4. NY: Macmillan Co, 1931, pp. 198–200).” In Hu Shih Yingwen Wencun (胡適英文文存, A Collection of Hu Shih’s English Writings), Compiled by Chih-P’ing Chou (周質平). Taibei: Yuanliu chuban.

78 R. BUTTERFIELD

———. 2013. “Essay in Living Philosophies.” In English Writings of Hu Shih, 85–100. New York: Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.

Johnson, Ian. 2016. “A Revolutionary Discovery in China, a Review of: Sarah Allan ‘Legends of Abdication and Ideal Government in Early Chinese Bamboo-Slip’ (2016).” New York Review of Books, April.

Ke-wen, Wang. 1998. Modern China: An Encyclopedia of History, Culture, and Nationalism. New York: Garland.

Lu, Xing. 2015. “Comparative Rhetoric: Contemplating on Tasks and Methodologies in the Twenty-First Century.” Rhetoric Review 34 (2): 266–273.

Yao, Xinzhong. 2000. An Introduction to Confucianism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

79

CHAPTER 4

Echoes of Pragmatism in India: Bhimrao Ambedkar and Reconstructive Rhetoric

Scott R. Stroud

Pragmatism is often assumed to be a tradition indigenous to the North American context. Yet the pluralism and flexibility of pragmatism, not to mention the international reach of many of its American scholars, surely should result in international appropriation of its methods and doctrines. This chapter will begin to tell the untold story of pragmatism’s influence in India, a land that none of the classical pragmatists ever visited. It will do this by focusing largely on pragmatism’s leading champion in India, Bhimrao Ambedkar (1891–1956), the architect of India’s constitution and a fervent crusader for “untouchable” rights (Jaffrelot 2005). By reclaiming Ambedkar as a pragmatist and as a master of communicative persuasion, we can highlight pragmatism’s influence in Indian politics, and conversely, India’s effects on what we think of as central to prag-matism. Pragmatism not only informed Ambedkar’s constitution-shaping views of democracy—distinguishing him from Indian communists and orthodox reformers such as Gandhi—but it also laid forth a rhetorical path of appropriation and reconstruction (Stroud 2017b).


S. R. Stroud (*) University of Texas, Austin, TX, USAe-mail: [email protected]

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14343-5_4


80 S. R. STROUD

This chapter will argue that Ambedkar was the leading pragmatist in the Indian context, given both his emphasis on a deep sense of democ-racy as well as his use of Dewey’s pragmatic method of reconstruction. In the Indian context, Ambedkar selectively appropriates ideas and texts from Dewey and uses them in his many nuanced attempts to persuade Indians to act justly toward his fellow untouchables. Ambedkar’s prag-matism became a way to communicatively meld Indian tradition with enlightenment ideas, a fact evident in his writing of the Indian constitu-tion later in his life in English, with a preface that included the enlight-enment ideals of equality, liberty, and fraternity. Always a pragmatist democrat, Ambedkar strove to preserve what was useful in tradition while throwing out what was harmful or dead. Initially, I will introduce the context from which Ambedkar came, as well as his connection to the pragmatist tradition represented by John Dewey. Why should we con-sider pragmatism central to his thought, and not an amusing side episode or influence? I will then explore this question through a detailed analy-sis of one of his most important works: the 1936 speech— undelivered, due to its controversial nature—titled “Annihilation of Caste.” This speech is important for many reasons, but, most importantly, this speech serves as Ambedkar’s longest and most sustained engagement with and use of Dewey’s pragmatism. In examining the rhetorical techniques in this work, we can see Ambedkar practice what can be identified as recon-structive rhetoric, or the communicative technique of appropriating and reconstructing past resources to meet present social problems. This shows the deep influence of Dewey’s pragmatism at two levels: first, in terms of the method of reconstruction, and second, in terms of the con-ceptual resources appropriated by Ambedkar. Ambedkar’s pragmatism is worth more attention that we traditionally give him—it serves as the most notable appropriation of Dewey’s pragmatism in South Asia, one that is integrally tied to a strong view of persuasion in rectifying social injustice.

why consider AmbedkAr As PArt of the PrAgmAtist trAdition?

Ambedkar was born into an “untouchable” caste in 1891 in Mhow, Maharashtra, and was immediately inserted into a system of identity and limitation dating back over 2000 years. As a Mahar, Ambedkar fell

4 ECHOES OF PRAGMATISM IN INDIA: BHIMRAO AMBEDKAR … 81

outside of the four varnas of brahmins (priests), kshatriyas (warriors), vaishyas (merchants), and shudras (servants). As an avarna or out-caste, he was lower than even the most menial servants in this hierarchy: so low, in fact, that his touch or presence was considered religiously pol-luting. His youth was defined and determined to many extents by the injustices he suffered through being identified as an “untouchable” (now relabeled by many as “dalit,” or literary “crushed”). His biographers have done a thorough job of detailing how Ambedkar suffered in school because his classmates did not want him to sit near them or their posses-sions, or to even use the school’s water source. At other points, he failed to find transport or housing because no one would assist an untouchable out of fear of religious pollution (Keer 1990; Zelliot 2005).

Through luck and hard work, Ambedkar found a path out of the normal fate associated with being an untouchable (e.g., removing dead livestock from streets, emptying latrines, and so forth). This path was education. Early on, his father insisted that young Bhimrao go to school. While struggling with schoolyard bullying at Elphinstone High School in Bombay, young Ambedkar met the Maharashtra-based reformer and teacher, Krishna Arjun Keluskar, around 1904 or 1905 (Omvedt 2004). Keluskar befriended the young man, and began introducing him to his significant library of books. He also was an important figure at Ambedkar’s modest graduation celebration in 1907, giving him a copy of his book on the Buddha’s life (Keer 1990). Keluskar would be an important figure later, encouraging Ambedkar to apply for funds from an enlightened prince, the Gaikwad of Baroda, for his university educa-tion in America 1913–1916. There is even evidence that Keluskar gave Ambedkar a copy of John Dewey and James Tufts’ 1908 Ethics, although it is difficult to determine when exactly this transaction happened (Stroud 2017a).

What we do know for certain was that Ambedkar’s experience in America was life-changing. Enrolled at Columbia University in New York from 1913 to 1916, Ambedkar experienced the relative freedom of American society. Beyond his experience of a society that knew little of Hinduism and cared even less about Vedic castes, he took classes in politics, economics, and anthropology from some of the best scholars in America. Even though his focus was on economics, he somehow found himself in three philosophy classes taught by John Dewey. Ambedkar took the following classes from Dewey: Philosophy 231: “Psychological Ethics and Moral and Political Philosophy” in the fall of 1914 and

82 S. R. STROUD

Dewey’s two-course series, Philosophy 131–132: “Moral and Political Philosophy,” during 1915–1916 (Stroud 2017b). The bulk of what Ambedkar knew of the western philosophical tradition therefore came from the time he spent in Dewey’s classes.

Over a decade later, after he completed his work at Columbia, as well as a variety of London-based schools and institutions, Ambedkar remembered Dewey fondly: “The best friends I have had in my life were some of my classmates at Columbia and my great professors, John Dewey, James Shotwell, Edwin Seligman and James Harvey Robinson” (Columbia Alumni News 1930, 12). Eleanor Zelliot parses the influ-ence of all of these academics and concludes: “John Dewey seems to have had the greatest influence on Ambedkar” (2013, 69). Others make a similar judgment. K. N. Kadam observes that “Dr. Ambedkar took down every word uttered by his great teacher [Dewey] in the course of his lectures; and it seems that Ambedkar used to tell his friends that, if unfortunately Dewey died of a sudden, ‘I could reproduce every lec-ture verbatim’” (1997, 1). Dewey seemed to captivate young Ambedkar. Arun Mukherjee (2009) goes as far as to warn scholars against engaging Ambedkar and his thought “in isolation, without paying attention to his dialogue with Dewey” (368). How exactly do we attend and do justice to the Ambedkar–Dewey relationship?

One way of fleshing out claims of influence is to investigate expo-sure and contact, such as what happened in Ambedkar’s time with Dewey at Columbia. While I have found no evidence that Dewey and Ambedkar corresponded during the latter’s time at Columbia, or after Ambedkar returned to India, we do have a confirmed vector of influ-ence in the form of the three classes that Ambedkar took with Dewey. In these courses, Ambedkar surely absorbed Dewey’s psychology and focus on habits as contingent and culturally mediated ways of shaping impulses and resulting activities. He also learned about a range of political philos-ophies and Dewey’s evolving reading of means and ends as inter-related (see Stroud 2017b). Dewey’s influence extended beyond these three courses, however, and lasted throughout Ambedkar’s life in the form of books. Ambedkar voraciously consumed books, and seemed especially attuned to Dewey’s works—both during and after his days as a student in the west.

Preserved among his remaining personal books on a range of sub-jects is a large collection of works by pragmatists or on pragmatism. At Siddharth College, one can find Ambedkar’s original copies of some


of William James’s works: A Pluralistic Universe (1912), Radical Empiricism (1912), and Psychology (1948). The largest collection of books by one specific author, in any tradition, belonged to Dewey. Ambedkar owned copies of Dewey’s Ethics (with James H. Tufts, 1908), The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy (1910), German Philosophy and Politics (1915), Democracy and Education (1916), Experience and Nature (1929), The Quest for Certainty (1930), Freedom and Culture (1939), and Problems of Men (1946). He also collected books about Dewey’s pragmatism that were published well after Ambedkar’s days at Columbia: A. H. Johnson’s The Wit and Wisdom of John Dewey (1949), Sidney Hook’s John Dewey: Philosopher of Science and Freedom (1950), Jerome Nathanson’s John Dewey: The Reconstruction of the Democratic Life (1951), and Paul Arthur Schilp’s The Philosophy of John Dewey (1951). In another collection of his personal books housed at the Symbiosis Institute, two other books related to pragmatism can be found: Dewey’s Essays in Experimental Logic (1953) and Joseph Ratner’s collection of Dewey’s essays, Intelligence in the Modern World: John Dewey’s Philosophy (1939). The collection housed at Ambedkar’s Milind College in Aurangabad contains Dewey’s Human Nature and Conduct (1948) and James’s Talks to Teachers on Psychology (1913).

All of these vectors of influence lead us to ask: What did Ambedkar learn from Dewey’s pragmatism? How might Ambedkar have been dif-ferent if there was no influence of Dewey on his life and work? Ambedkar said he liked Dewey and pragmatism, and he was exposed to Dewey’s courses and books, but what difference did it make in his life? This larger question asks for a counterfactual that we don’t have a good grasp on—what Ambedkar’s writings and activism would look like had he fol-lowed in the tracks of Gandhi and most other Indian intellectuals of his day and sought an education solely from British institutions. We must find a way to answer the skeptic who places Dewey as one among many influences on Ambedkar.

There are two ways to answer the question of how Dewey influenced Ambedkar. First, we can follow the lead of Christopher Queen (2015) and examine Ambedkar’s annotations in his books as a sign of engage-ment with ideas and authors. One does not underline or highlight some-thing that is not that significant in one’s attention. Using this method, I have made the case elsewhere that Ambedkar’s annotations in his cop-ies of Ethics and Democracy and Education bring to light a pattern of influence from Dewey’s philosophy that can help explain his latter activist

84 S. R. STROUD

strategies (Stroud 2017a, c). From his own annotation in his personal copy, we know that Ambedkar acquired his copy of Dewey’s Democracy and Education in January 1917 while in London. Looking at the anno-tations and underlining in his copy of this book, we see many passages highlighted that bear on important Deweyan themes: experience as educative, the idea of reconstruction in improving society from its past states, and the relation between individual dispositions and social func-tioning. His copy of the 1908 Ethics is also heavily marked, but it is more difficult to determine when he acquired this copy. As I speculate else-where (e.g., Stroud 2017c), it is most likely that he received this book as a gift from K. A. Keluskar in the late 1920s or early 1930s. Looking at the fifty plus pages that are marked in this book, one sees Ambedkar the reader becoming entranced with Deweyan points that would find a place later in Ambedkar’s mature speeches and writings. For instance, the 1908 version of Tufts and Dewey’s Ethics places a greater emphasis on the role of the individual in moral progress than does the later edi-tion in 1932. Societies make moral progress when the individuals within them move from a reliance on customary morality to what Tufts and Dewey call a “reflective morality.” Another point that one sees Ambedkar highlight in his copy of Ethics is the well-known Deweyan distinc-tion between rules and principles. Ambedkar, whenever he was reading the 1908 Ethics, saw clearly one of its most important themes: society improves in moral quality as its members rely more and more on such individualized habits of reflective thinking.

A second way is to examine influence as something that is evident from the effect—the texts or works that he produced. This method has the advantage of sorting through influences and potential lines of influence—not everything Ambedkar heard from Dewey (or any other teacher) “stuck.” This approach also allows some flexibility in assessing what exactly was influencing a present text. As Meera Nanda (2003) has demonstrated, Deweyan conceptions of science and inquiry have ready parallels with Ambedkar’s revisioning of Buddhism as a rational faith later in his life. This operates at a general or more probabilistic level of influence: one thinks it more likely than not that Ambedkar’s reading of Buddhism as rational and scientific was influenced by Dewey, but he nowhere writes or says this is the case. This is useful, though, as it shows a powerful way of understanding what lies behind Ambedkar’s works on the Buddha—and why he emphasizes or changes some points of the tex-tual record of the Buddha’s own activities (see Queen 2004; Fiske and


Emmrich 2004). Keya Maitra (2012) also operates at the level of philo-sophical convergences, arguing for the influence of Dewey’s experimen-tal method on Ambedkar’s views on the ideal constitution for Indian democracy.

A more specific way of assessing influence from Ambedkar’s work would be to look for specific passages or concepts taken from Dewey’s work. This method has the strength of clearly identifying what parts are influenced by material within Dewey’s corpus. Mukherjee (2009) has done an admirable job pursuing a specific version of this textual-trace method of influence estimating, scanning Ambedkar’s 1936 “Annihilation of Caste” address for its Deweyan resonances:

Ambedkar’s writings mark his affiliation with Dewey through extensive quotations from Dewey’s work. So deeply embedded is Dewey’s thought in Ambedkar’s consciousness that quite often his words flow through Ambedkar’s discourse without quotation marks. Ambedkar not only bor-rowed concepts and ideas from Dewey, his methodological approach and ways of argumentation also show Dewey’s influence. (347–348)

It is this observation that I want to explore in depth, as it exposes a prag-matism based upon the appropriation of specific pragmatist concepts and texts, as well as his use of a pragmatist method of reconstructive rhetoric.

echoes of deweyAn PrAgmAtism in “AnnihilAtion of cAste”

To illustrate Ambedkar’s pragmatist inheritance in both ideas and rhe-torical method, let us examine his most important and well-known work, the 1936 speech “Annihilation of Caste.” The 1930s were a tumultu-ous time for Ambedkar. The 1920s were spent attempting to secure untouchable rights to temple entry and water use, activities that upper-caste Hindus staunchly opposed. Ambedkar conceived of the untouch-ables as members of the Hindu fold that could regain rights that were lost long ago. Yet after securing concessions from the British for sepa-rate electorates for the untouchables, Gandhi embarked on a “fast until death” until Ambedkar gave back these protections (Jaffrelot 2005). Rather than be responsible for the death of an idol, Ambedkar relented and gave up most of his gains. He would never forgive Gandhi for this forceful tactic. By 1935, Ambedkar was certain—respect could

86 S. R. STROUD

not be gained for him and his millions of untouchable followers within Hinduism. He delivered a bombshell of an address at Yeola in October 1935 that even though he was born as a Hindu, “I solemnly assure you that I will not die a Hindu” (Ambedkar 2003, 95). This announcement caused a stir across India, as Ambedkar was the undisputed leader of the millions of untouchables and outcastes throughout the colony; he would inevitably take millions out of the Hindu fold with him. Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, and other delegations visited with him in an attempt to gain this mass of converts. Ambedkar spent twenty years before he formally announced that Buddhism was to be the religion of his, and his people’s, conversion.

In 1936, Ambedkar was invited to give the Presidential Address for the Jat-Pat-Todak Mandal of Lahore, a group of upper-caste Hindus dedicated to erasing caste discrimination. As Keer (1990) documents, the Mandal’s leaders eventually got wind of Ambedkar’s address—which he had printed in advance—and demurred at his mention of destroying the vedas, or Hindu holy books, as the only way to eradicate caste. In the prologue to the published version of the address, Ambedkar reprinted the letters from one official of the Mandal, Sant Ram, who worried: “I am now very anxious to read the exposition of your new formula—‘It is not possible to break Caste without annihilating the religious notions on which it, the Caste system, is founded’” (Ambedkar 2003, 27). The Mandal saw this path of eliminating the textual basis of Hinduism as too big of a threat to the version of Hinduism they sought to preserve; it probably also perturbed them that the month before the conference was to be held, Ambedkar was meeting with Sikhs in Amritsar, a possible tar-get for untouchable conversion (Keer 1990, 267). The Mandal decided to postpone the conference indefinitely so as to prevent Ambedkar’s delivery of his incendiary speech. Ambedkar, having already printed up 1500 copies of “Annihilation of Caste,” sold them all within two months in 1936. A second edition would be printed in 1937, this time with Gandhi’s reply to the speech and Ambedkar’s subsequent response. This speech has an interesting rhetorical history of its own, seeing that it was read at a range of subsequent untouchable conferences as a sort of stand-in for the great leader, Ambedkar (Zelliot 2013). The address was composed in English, a move with its own normative dimensions—untouchables were not allowed to learn Sanskrit in Hindu schools, so the English of the colonial educational system became a way to have agency,


sophistication, and a sort of universal reach across India and beyond (Anand 1999; Stroud 2016).

The “Annihilation” address can be examined as an effect of Ambedkar’s pragmatist legacy, and not simply as a manifesto of his dis-gust at Hindu tradition and its incorporation of the caste system. If we do so, we will see integral and undeniable traces of pragmatist philos-ophy in its central arguments. Beyond this, we will see how pragma-tism also influenced Ambedkar’s rhetoric, or manner of addressing and persuading his various audiences. This analysis will build on and extend Mukherjee’s (2009) study, specifically in the realm of rhetoric. What grounds this study is a simple, but odd, occurrence in this text that only some will notice. While Ambedkar approvingly quotes Dewey later in the essay, the entire text is filled with words that should strike a reader of Dewey as similar to those of Dewey’s own works. Let us start by illus-trating this pervasive feature of Ambedkar’s “Annihilation of Caste,” and then ask what it means for his rhetorical practice.

The “Annihilation of Caste” address is straightforward in its critique of those in the South Asian setting that refuses to see social reform as vital for India’s political independence and advancement. Ambedkar comes out swinging against those in the Indian National Congress who insist on political reform before any sort of social reform, or those influenced by Marxist socialism that demand economic reform before or instead of social reform. All of these, Ambedkar maintains, miss the fundamental decay that lies inside of the Indian proto-nation: the caste system that divides and devalues vast groups within the millions of peo-ple that would make up a free India. Answering those that would defend caste based upon a useful societal division of labor, Ambedkar coun-ters that “It is also a division of labourers…it is a hierarchy in which the divisions of labourers are graded one above the other” (1989, 47). Ambedkar fleshes out this claim in the following passage:

This division of labour is not spontaneous; it is not based on natural apti-tudes. Social and individual efficiency requires us to develop the capacity of an individual to the point of competency to choose and to make his own career. This principle is violated in the Caste System in so far as it involves an attempt to appoint tasks to individuals in advance, selected not on the basis of trained original capacities, but on that of the social status of the parents. … Industry is never static. It undergoes rapid and abrupt changes. With such changes an individual must be free to change his occupation.

88 S. R. STROUD

Without such freedom to adjust himself to changing circumstances it would be impossible for him to gain his livelihood. (47)

This seems like a pointed argument that caste divides workers based upon a metaphysics of karma, thus writing unjust social exclusion and servitude into the nature of the world. But looking closer at this text next to a book that we know Ambedkar read and annotated—Dewey’s 1916 Democracy and Education—we begin to see something curious. Ambedkar uses, without any citation or reference, Dewey’s own phrases and sentences in this novel argument against the Indian caste system. Here is Dewey’s original passage from Democracy and Education, with the words appropriated by Ambedkar emphasized:

A democratic criterion requires us to develop capacity to the point of compe-tency to choose and make its own career. This principle is violated when the attempt is made to fit individuals in advance for definite industrial call-ings, selected not on the basis of trained original capacities, but on that of the wealth or social status of parents. As a matter of fact, industry at the present time undergoes rapid and abrupt changes through the evolution of new inven-tions…. When the occupation changes its methods, such individuals are left behind with even less ability to readjust themselves than if they had a less definite training. (1916 [1985], 126, emphasis added)

This point is originally situated in Dewey’s critique of methods of edu-cation biased toward tracking individuals into menial jobs in increasingly large and impersonal corporations. It was clearly not about caste or reli-gious pollution due to karma, yet Ambedkar takes it and echoes parts of it—with his changes—to make it a vigorous critique against the inflexi-bility of the caste system.

This echoing of Dewey’s Democracy and Education continues as Ambedkar implicates the caste system in the creation of unjust condi-tions of existence for untouchable and lower-caste individuals. On the next page, one sees a similar echoing in Ambedkar’s text:

Considerations of social efficiency would compel us to recognize that the greatest evil in the industrial system is not so much poverty and the suffering that it involves as the fact that so many persons have callings which make no appeal to those who are engaged in them. Such callings constantly provoke one to aversion, ill will and the desire to evade. There are many occupations in India which on account of the fact that they are


regarded as degraded by the Hindus provoke those who are engaged in them to aversion. There is a constant desire to evade and escape from such occupations which arises solely because of the blighting effect which they produce upon those who follow them owing to the slight and stigma cast upon them by the Hindu religion. What efficiency can there be in a system under which neither men’s hearts nor their minds are in their work? As an economic organization Caste is therefore a harmful institution, inasmuch as, it involves the subordination of man’s natural powers and inclinations to the exigencies of social rules. (48)

The caste system assigned occupations to individuals based upon family birth, including those of a menial and degrading character for untouch-ables like Ambedkar. This is not an optimal way to set up society, argues Ambedkar using an incipient pragmatist criterion of organizing econo-mies based upon the maximum value or meaning added to individuals with a diverse range of capacities and interests. What we notice, however, upon closer inspection is that this argument echoes Dewey’s critique of industrialized education in Democracy and Education:

Sentimentally, it may seem harsh to say that the greatest evil of the present régime is not found in poverty and in the suffering which it entails, but in the fact that so many persons have callings which make no appeal to them, which are pursued simply for the money reward that accrues. For such callings constantly provoke one to aversion, ill will, and a desire to slight and evade. Neither men’s hearts nor their minds are in their work. On the other hand, those who are not only much better off in worldly goods, but who are in excessive, if not monopolistic, control of the activities of the many are shut off from equality and generality of social intercourse. (Dewey 1916 [1985], 326–327, emphasis added)

Dewey’s point about acquisitiveness and greed in capitalist schemes of work—and the consequent meaninglessness they so often give to occu-pational activity—is taken by Ambedkar and changed into a critique of caste-based occupational sorting. Ambedkar leaves out the phrases concerning the rich or the focus on monetary reward by workers; in their place, he emphasizes the meaninglessness of occupations forced upon individuals by caste placement. Dewey’s argument is echoed in Ambedkar’s “Annihilation of Caste,” but with a distinctive change in meaning and focus.

90 S. R. STROUD

After arguing that caste is not defensible on economic grounds or a racial basis, Ambedkar turns toward the core of his argument: caste must be resisted because it fragments communities of individuals. Throughout this argument one also finds the ideas and words of Dewey being sum-moned, changed, and echoed in Ambedkar’s attack on caste ideology. For instance, Ambedkar writes

The Hindus often complain of the isolation and exclusiveness of a gang or a clique and blame them for anti-social spirit. But they conveniently forget that this anti-social spirit is the worst feature of their own Caste System… An anti-social spirit is found wherever one group has “interests of its own” which shut it out from full interaction with other groups, so that its pre-vailing purpose is protection of what it has got. This anti-social spirit, this spirit of protecting its own interests is as much a marked feature of the dif-ferent castes in their isolation from one another as it is of nations in their isolation. (51)

While his target is uniquely Indian, some of the ideas are not. Compare this passage to Dewey’s argument about the nature of democracy in Democracy and Education, with overlapping phrases highlighted:

The isolation and exclusiveness of a gang or clique brings its antisocial spirit into relief. But this same spirit is found wherever one group has interests “of its own” which shut it out from full interaction with other groups, so that its prevailing purpose is the protection of what it has got, instead of reorgani-zation and progress through wider relationships. It marks nations in their isolation from one another; families which seclude their domestic concerns as if they had no connection with a larger life; schools when separated from the interest of home and community; the divisions of rich and poor; learned and unlearned. (1916 [1985], 91)

The argument in “Annihilation of Caste” is recognizably Deweyan in its focus on what makes democratic communities ideally democratic, yet Ambedkar molds the point to target caste deformations in-group interactions.

Castes are animated by an anti-social spirit that does not contribute shared interests and meanings to all in the community; instead, caste ori-ents each sub-group against all other sub-groups. The idea of interests and how they affect activity is a recognizable Deweyan point, but we see its altered application a few pages later:


The assertion by the individual of his own opinions and beliefs, his own independence and interest as over against group standards, group authority and group interests is the beginning of all reform…. It is true that man cannot get on with his fellows. But it is also true that he cannot do with-out them. He would like to have the society of his fellows on his terms. If he cannot get it on his terms then he will be ready to have it on any terms even amounting to complete surrender. This is because he cannot do with-out society. (56)

The ideas and concepts in these lines can be traced back to Ethics, a work that Dewey published with James H. Tufts in 1908. While the first and third sections of this book are authored by Tufts and the second section by Dewey, the preface indicates that each author made “suggestions and criticisms to the work of the other in sufficient degree to make the book throughout a joint work” (Dewey 1908 [1978]). In the first section, authored by Tufts, we find material (with the echoed portioned empha-sized) that must have been in the mind of Ambedkar as he wrote the pre-vious passage in “Annihilation of Caste”:

They constitute what Kant calls the unsocial sociableness of man. “Man cannot get on with his fellows and he cannot do without them.” Individualism.—The assertion by the individual of his own opinions and beliefs, his own independence and interests, as over against group standards, authority, and interests, is known as individualism. (75)

We see here the same tactic of echoing, and the insertion of small changes—the order in “Annihilation of Caste” is different than it is the original text, and Ambedkar breaks the quotations about Kant’s notion of unsocial sociability into two parts, deleting Dewey’s reference to the Prussian philosopher along the way. The argument becomes Ambedkar’s, but it remains tied to its original pragmatist formulation.

Turning our attention to one of the most crucial passages in “Annihilation of Caste,” we see Ambedkar use this echoing technique alongside an evocation of enlightenment values in his critique of caste. He turns to the “constructive side of the problem” (57), and inquires as to what the “ideal society” will be based upon: “If you ask me, my ideal would be a society based on Liberty, Equality and Fraternity” (57). These values—tied to French revolution—were probably first heard by an attentive Ambedkar in Dewey’s course in spring 1916, judging from

92 S. R. STROUD

the lecture notes we have of what Ambedkar heard in this course (Stroud 2017b). In “Annihilation of Caste,” Ambedkar defends these values, especially fraternity or fellow-feeling, without referring to Dewey:

An ideal society should be mobile, should be full of channels for conveying a change taking place in one part to other parts. In an ideal society there should be many interests consciously communicated and shared. There should be varied and free points of contact with other modes of associa-tion. In other words there must be social endosmosis. This is fraternity, which is only another name for democracy. Democracy is not merely a form of Government. It is primarily a mode of associated living, of con-joint communicated experience. It is essentially an attitude of respect and reverence towards fellowmen. (57)

This passage is riddled with echoes of Dewey’s distinctive formulations of democracy and the democratic ideal. For instance, Dewey describes the democratic ideal as follows:

In short, there are many interests consciously communicated and shared; and there are varied and free points of contact with other modes of association. (1916 [1985], 89, emphasis added)

Ambedkar uses the highlighted portions of this passage in an uncon-nected part of his argument against caste. Ambedkar also echoes the core to Dewey’s position on democracy from Democracy and Education:

A democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience. (1916 [1985], 93, emphasis added)

Even the concept of “social endosmosis” referenced by Ambedkar shows his pragmatist debt to Dewey. As Mukherjee (2009) notes, “the term ‘social endosmosis’ was used by him [Dewey] only once,” but it became “a major heuristic tool that [Ambedkar] used repeatedly in his writ-ings” (353). Mukherjee explains the meaning behind Ambedkar’s use of this term—“When a society has groups that are separated into ‘a privi-leged and a subject class,’ social endosmosis—free circulation of individ-uals, with various points of contact—cannot take place.” This leads to “a sort of atherosclerosis of the social body…Ambedkar’s frequent use of metaphors of disease and pathology to describe Indian society is thus


an extension of the metaphorical possibilities of endosmosis” (353). This term, of course, can be found in Dewey’s Democracy and Education: “And the experience of each party loses in meaning, when the free inter-change of varying modes of life-experience is arrested. A separation into a privileged and a subject-class prevents social endosmosis” (1916 [1985], 90). In Ambedkar’s restructured use of Deweyan terms and positions, caste destroys the fellow feeling that is so vital in allowing a free interchange or communication between various groups in a society. Democracy demands such a free interchange being existent, regardless of the status of voting rights or constitutions. Like Dewey, Ambedkar sees democracy as a deep habit of interaction among individuals and groups, not as a matter of institutions.

In defending the value of liberty in this community ideal, Ambedkar again echoes Dewey in his “Annihilation of Caste”:

But to object to this kind of liberty is to perpetuate slavery. For slavery does not merely mean a legalized form of subjection. It means a state of society in which some men are forced to accept from other the purposes which control their conduct. This condition obtains even where there is no slavery in the legal sense. It is found where, as in the Caste System, some persons are compelled to carry on certain prescribed callings which are not of their choice. (57)

Part of this passage is drawn from Dewey’s discussion of Plato in Democracy and Education:

Plato defined a slave as one who accepts from another the purposes which control his conduct. This condition obtains even where there is no slavery in the legal sense. It is found wherever men are engaged in activity which is socially serviceable, but whose service they do not understand and have no personal interest in. (1916 [1985], 90–91, emphasis added)

Dewey provides much of Ambedkar’s conceptual structure; Ambedkar bends and uses it for a new purpose that Dewey did not seem cogni-zant of—the critique of caste as inherently harmful for freedom and liberty.

Even the value of equality gets a Dewey-influenced treatment in “Annihilation of Caste.” Ambedkar explains his reliance on this key value in the following terms:

94 S. R. STROUD

Equality may be a fiction but nonetheless one must accept it as the gov-erning principle. A man’s power is dependent upon (1) physical heredity, (2) social inheritance or endowment in the form of parental care, educa-tion, accumulation of scientific knowledge, everything which enables him to be more efficient than the savage, and finally, (3) on his own efforts. In all these three respects men are undoubtedly unequal. But the question is, shall we treat them as unequal because they are unequal? This is a question which the opponents of equality must answer. From the standpoint of the individualist it may be just to treat men unequally so far as their efforts are unequal. It may be desirable to give as much incentive as possible to the full development of every one’s powers…. On the other hand it can be urged that if it is good for the social body to get the most out of its members, it can get most out of them only by making them equal as far as possible at the very start of the race. (58)

From what source does Ambedkar draw some of the inspiration for this argument? Our answer lies in Tufts’ final section in Ethics, identified here with the appropriated parts highlighted:

A man’s power is due (1) to physical heredity; (2) to social heredity, includ-ing care, education, and the stock of inventions, information, and institu-tions which enables him to be more efficient than the savage; and finally (3) to his own efforts. Individualism may properly claim this third factor. It is just to treat men unequally so far as their efforts are unequal. It is socially desirable to give as much incentive as possible to the full development of every one’s powers. But the very same reason demands that in the first two respects we treat men as equally as possible. For it is for the good of the social body to get the most out of its members, and it can get the most out of them only by giving them the best start possible. (1908 [1978], 490, emphasis added)

We see Ambedkar building upon another Deweyan text—this time, the 1908 Ethics—and using verbatim and summarized portions in his novel argument against caste. Ambedkar, dealing with the structural and reli-gious inequalities bequeathed to India from a millennia-old religious framework, uniquely emphasizes the inequalities among people in his context. He couples this emphasis with a stronger reading of equality as a moral ideal. Even though caste members are unequal now, it does not mean it is ideal or virtuous for our future actions to continue to reenforce this equality.


In the following portions of the controversial “Annihilation of Caste,” Ambedkar advises the virtual destruction of the current form of Hinduism that created this state of injustice—including its shastras and holy Vedas. This was the same Ambedkar who burned a copy of the most famous shastra or law book, the Manusmrti, in 1927 during a protest for untouchable rights to communal water sources (Shastri 2012). His audience would surely have been horrified had he uttered these solu-tions in a presidential address. But as his printed copy of his speech reveals, he was ultimately a pragmatist about such matters. He did not seek to destroy religion simply to be free of all religious guidance. Even in the 1930s, a period of time identified with his rejection of his native Hinduism, he strives to clear up what he means “by destruction of reli-gion.” Acknowledging that “some may find the idea revolting to them and some may find it revolutionary,” he explains his position by drawing a distinction between “principles and rules” (75). He then explains this distinction as follows:

Rules are practical; they are habitual ways of doing things according to prescription. But principles are intellectual; they are useful methods of judging things. Rules seek to tell an agent just what course of action to pursue. Principles do not prescribe a specific course of action. Rules, like cooking recipes, do tell just what to do and how to do it. A principle, such as that of justice, supplies a main head by reference to which he is to con-sider the bearings of his desires and purposes, it guides him in his thinking by suggesting to him the important consideration which he should bear in mind. This difference between rules and principles makes the acts done in pursuit of them different in quality and in content. (75)

This, of course, is a distinction derived from Dewey’s (and Tufts’) Ethics. One can tell that Ambedkar is drawing from the 1908 version of this text by the presence of the adjective “useful,” since the 1932 revision of Ethics replaces “useful” with “final.” Here is how Dewey and Tufts put the distinction in the 1908 Ethics, with echoed passages highlighted:

Rules are practical; they are habitual ways of doing things. But principles are intellectual; they are useful methods of judging things. The fundamen-tal error of the intuitionalist and of the utilitarian (represented in the quotation from Mill) is that they are on the lookout for rules which will of themselves tell agents just what course of action to pursue; whereas the object of moral principles is to supply standpoints and methods which will

96 S. R. STROUD

enable the individual to make for himself an analysis of the elements of good and evil in the particular situation in which he finds himself. No gen-uine moral principle prescribes a specific course of action; rules, like cooking recipes, may tell just what to do and how to do it. A moral principle, such as that of chastity, of justice, of the golden rule, gives the agent a basis for looking at and examining a particular question that comes up. It holds before him certain possible aspects of the act; it warns him against taking a short or partial view of the act. (Dewey 1908 [1978], 301–302, emphasis added)

Ambedkar takes this point from Dewey and Tufts’ vision of ethics as an evolution from customary morality to reflective morality and applies it to the caste system. Caste is a harmful habit that needs reflective attention and melioration; it is based upon rules that cannot adapt to situations of injustice and detriment. What is needed is the use of principles to sort through this complex, problematic social situation in India; Ambedkar wants to destroy Hinduism as set of rules and replace it with “Religion in the sense of spiritual principles” (75). This would be a type of religious orientation that would be “truly universal, applicable to all races, to all countries, to all times” (75). Whereas Dewey and Tufts’ critique applied to overly sedimented habits of moral judgment, Ambedkar adapts their ideas and text to religion: “Religion must mainly be matter of principles only. It cannot be a matter of rules” (75). Hinduism, as a religion of rules, promulgates caste and results in a situation that Deweyan prag-matists would abhor: “[it] tends to deprive moral life of freedom and spontaneity and to reduce it (for the conscientious at any rate) to a more or less anxious and servile conformity to externally imposed rules” (76). The words and ideas of Deweyan pragmatism seep into both his indictment of Hinduism and the advocated solution to its caste-based problems. Ambedkar could not make these same points with the same strength if he had lacked the guidance of pragmatist texts such as Ethics and Democracy and Education.

AmbedkAr And reconstructiVe rhetoric

What lies behind this curious tactic employed by Ambedkar in “Annihilation of Caste” and various other works? The fact that I have only been able to find this tactic with Deweyan source texts reaffirms the importance of calling Ambedkar an Indian pragmatist. He was so


captivated by pragmatism that he often used the words, phrases, and ideas of Dewey without drawing explicit attention to their source in the western pragmatist’s corpus. This manner of address is intriguing and important for a reason beyond establishing the centrality of pragmatist ideas to Ambedkar’s thought.. In this final section, I will explore the rhetorical import of Ambedkar’s form of Indian pragmatism and illustrate his commitment to reconstruction, meliorism, and rhetorical practice.

We must first ask the question—why doesn’t Ambedkar explicitly ref-erence Dewey’s works in many (but not all) of the places that he employs them? He obviously knows how to cite sources, having produced schol-arly theses at a variety of western educational institutions. And he does cite Dewey elsewhere (even in “Annihilation of Caste”). Given the con-text of lecturing and writing in India, it is not clear that he is taking own-ership over the ideas of Dewey, so we must conclude that this is different than cases involving the plagiarism of the ideas of others. As demon-strated previously, Ambedkar cuts and alters Dewey’s passages to fit his quest for social justice in an Indian setting that is vastly different than the context that Dewey engaged.

The explanation that Ambedkar’s strategy stems from his unique cul-tural placement can be bolstered by the parallel rhetorical practices of Martin Luther King, Jr. While I will ultimately find this sort of explana-tion lacking, it is useful, to a certain extent, to show the range of choices that rhetors have in how they make their arguments to various audiences. Keith Miller’s (1992) work on King, Jr. could be used to support this argument, since King often borrowed lines and passages from previous pastors in addressing white and African-American church congregations. This tactic is not totally removed from Indian matters, since in one of his major essays on nonviolence, he uses a range of uncited authors and their words to “delineate his interpretation of Gandhi and nonviolence…The intertextual pattern is plain: King uses lines from lesser-known writ-ers to account of his responses to famous philosophers, theologians, and Gandhi” (55). We can ask a similar question about King’s rhetori-cal tactics—why did he follow this path of argument construction for his audiences?

There are at least three reasons that Miller’s study finds as explaining King’s techniques of borrowing and voice-merging. Both of these tech-niques muddy the distinction between the voice of another preacher or author and the voice of the person (King) speaking in front of a particu-lar audience or writing a particular text. The first of these reasons deals

98 S. R. STROUD

with the protection of the speaker. King’s activist goals were extreme for his day, and even white civil rights partisans might be shocked at portions of his message. King’s use of “approved” sources in his own arguments then allows him to advance relatively radical points:

Encased in an exceedingly orthodox sermon about balanced Christian living, King’s argument about black America becomes almost irrefutable because his larger, framing argument is as balanced theologically as it is geometrically. By wrapping his racial protest in what amounts to theolog-ically indisputable discourse, King comes as close as possible to foolproof-ing his protest. (76)

By mixing revolutionary appeals with accepted texts that have passed the test of time, King gives his message the aura of acceptability while still pushing for novel conclusions and radical goals. This does not seem to account for Ambedkar’s echoing of Dewey, since Ambedkar did not hold much back from his audience. “Annihilation of Caste” was censured through the indefinite delay of the Mandal’s conference precisely because its ideas were overtly offensive to caste Hindus, and incurred some amount of danger to Ambedkar. Hiding Deweyan references did nothing for Ambedkar’s safety or effectiveness.

A second reason that Miller gives for King’s borrowing and voice-merging relates to the context of rhetorical activity he usually oper-ated in: that of preaching, and not writing theology or philosophy. Such appropriation of Christian sources displayed and performed his mastery of these standard sources and stories. Part of its efficacy came in signal-ing his authority through the masterful use of other Christian authority figures: “For King and others, borrowing sermons also served as a way of arguing from authority…When King reiterated their texts, he evoked the authority of those certified by all of liberal Protestantism” (Miller 1992, 137). This rhetorical tactic constructed his persona and personal authority through the reaction of his Christian audience that was famil-iar with the context of preaching in African-American churches: “Like folk preachers before him, he gained an authoritative self in part through ideas and language that were known and honored by those who had already heard them” (137). Beyond protection for radical ideas, bor-rowing and voice-merging conferred a powerful ethos to King. This does not seem to exactly account for Ambedkar’s use of Dewey, how-ever, since most in British-dominated India had not heard of the great


American pragmatist. Dewey’s international reputation did not noticea-bly extend to India, and he never visited India on his international lec-turing tours. One finds few references to the work of Dewey to Indian intellectuals, and Dewey’s Democracy and Education was first translated into one of the native languages of India (Ambedkar’s native Marathi) only in 1959 (Boydston 1969). It is not clear that Ambedkar would curry favor from either his educated or illiterate audiences by subtly evoking the American pragmatist, John Dewey.

A third reason that King may have employed these techniques relates to dominant epistemological commitments in the Christian tradition. As Miller (1992) argues, the epistemology underlying King was the same that guided Paul and Jesus, “who often repeated and adapted mate-rial from the Old Testament and apparently from oral rabbinic sources as well” (136). This not only established credibility with their audi-ences, it also met the requirements of the Christian view that truth was immutable and established by divine decree long ago. Thus, innova-tion is prized less than repetition and fidelity to an original version of the truth. In terms of rhetorical method, “King’s preaching also sprang from the assumption that God’s Word is repeated and repeatable” (117). Borrowing and voice-merging are necessary tactics entailed by this foundational view of truth. This sort of explanation also falls short in accounting for Ambedkar’s tactics, however, as it relies on a founda-tional view of truth and communication as the repetition of that truth. Pragmatism does not start with a notion of truth being settled in some remote past.

While all of these reasons fail to satisfy our quest for the method behind Ambedkar’s rhetorical practices, they help us fine-tune our ques-tion. The third reason with its emphasis on foundational truth being echoed brings our quest into focus. Ambedkar clearly disagreed with views of truth as eternal (sanatan, in the Sanskrit tradition), given his demurs in “Annihilation of Caste” to old texts and practices such as those infesting Hinduism that lead to the crushing reality and reifi-cation of the caste system. Ambedkar, like Dewey, saw knowledge as ever progressing through controlled processes of inquiry and reflec-tion, not simply through the preservation of foundational truths of the past. Herein lies our key to understanding his use of echoing—it is a way of operationalizing a rhetoric of reconstruction. What does this term mean? Ironically, we can find its pragmatist roots in plain sight. In one of the two places that Ambedkar explicitly refers to or cites Dewey in

100 S. R. STROUD

“Annihilation of Caste,” he also spells out his appreciation for pragma-tism’s emphasis on reconstruction:

Prof. John Dewey, who was my teacher and to whom I owe so much, has said: “Every society gets encumbered with what is trivial, with dead wood from the past, and with what is positively perverse… As a society becomes more enlightened, it realizes that it is responsible not to conserve and transmit, the whole of its existing achievements, but only such as make for a better future society”. (1989, 79, ellipses in original)

Ambedkar both cites Dewey and approves of his teacher’s relation of past to present. Following Dewey, Ambedkar insists that the materials of the past do not need to be used in the same fashion in the present and the future; these materials can be trimmed or reconstructed to fit our chang-ing needs of the present. It is helpful to look at the original passage from Dewey’s Democracy and Education, however:

Every society gets encumbered with what is trivial, with dead wood from the past, and with what is positively perverse. The school has the duty of omit-ting such things from the environment which it supplies, and thereby doing what it can to counteract their influence in the ordinary social environment. By selecting the best for its exclusive use, it strives to reenforce the power of this best. As a society becomes more enlightened, it realizes that it is respon-sible not to transmit and conserve the whole of its existing achievements, but only such as make for a better future society. The school is its chief agency for the accomplishment of this end. (1916 [1985], 24, emphasis added)

With the echoes emphasized, we see both Ambedkar’s continuation of Dewey’s notion of reconstructing the past in light of present needs and a reconstruction of Dewey’s emphasis on schools as a method for this meliorative activity. Ambedkar excises any mention of schools, staying true to Dewey’s own words about past materials not determining future means and ends in activity. Ambedkar’s textual resources, drawn from his copy of Democracy and Education acquired in 1917, could be trimmed and reconstructed to meet the needs of his present situation. Ambedkar’s situation was different from the one Dewey was addressing in his treatise on education; education was important, but as “Annihilation of Caste” made clear, what was most needed in India was a change in the religious notions and orientations evidence in oppressed and oppressor.


We arrive at a tentative answer to the question of echoing in Ambedkar’s “Annihilation of Caste.” Ambedkar did not cite Dewey because he was treating the pragmatist texts as pragmatism itself dictated—as resources to be used, altered, or set aside in one’s present battles for more meaningful experience. Citing Dewey would cement the passages and ideas as either authoritative, or as settled, and either out-come does not harmonize with the pragmatist theme of reconstruction. Ambedkar was practicing a pragmatist rhetoric of reconstruction in argu-ing against the caste system. Thus, we can see his debt to Dewey in two levels: first, at the level of Dewey’s emphasis on habits and individual orientation as vital for meliorative projects, and second, at the level of method and reconstructive temper.

This rhetorical method Ambedkar relies upon is calculated to exert the optimal level of force upon the problems of his communicative or social present. In the face of illiteracy, injustice, and oppression, it does not get distracted by issues of citation and reference to past (and for-eign) texts. We see this in an unnoticed echo of Dewey in Ambedkar’s “Annihilation of Caste.” In later editions, this text included Gandhi’s response, as well as Ambedkar’s rebuttal to the Mahatma. In the final section, Ambedkar problematizes the mindless adherence to the past exemplified by Gandhi’s reaction:

The Mahatma appears not to believe in thinking. He prefers to follow the saints. Like a conservative with his reverence for consecrated notions he is afraid that if he once starts thinking, many ideals and institutions to which he clings will be doomed. One must sympathize with him. For every act of independent thinking puts some portion of apparently stable world in peril. (1989, 95)

We can sense here the Deweyan ideas of reflective thinking and inquiry, perhaps even the final stage of moral development in the Ethics known as reflective morality. But what we also see is that in his response to Gandhi, Ambedkar continues to use and adapt Dewey’s texts—situated in a vastly different context—as vital tools in his rhetorical struggles against the habits of caste. Looking at Dewey’s 1925 Experience and Nature, a book that can be found among the remains of his personal library, we can identify where Ambedkar gets part of his response to Gandhi:

102 S. R. STROUD

Let us admit the case of the conservative; if we once start thinking no one can guarantee where we shall come out, except that many objects, ends and institutions are surely doomed. Every thinker puts some portion of an apparently stable world in peril and no one can wholly predict what will emerge in its place. (1925 [1981], 172, emphasis added)

Ambedkar is inspired by Dewey’s statement of the value of reflective thought, but ultimately feels licensed to reconstruct it to fit his reli-giously situated context of oppression. “Ideals” is added next to Dewey’s “institutions,” and “objects” and “ends” are minimized through dele-tion. Ambedkar builds upon Dewey’s statement of this vital pragmatist point, but he clearly makes it his own—it now targets this specific reli-gious conservative with a unique, Indian respect and reliance on reli-gious texts that have been followed for millennia. In this final missive, we see the contours of Ambedkar’s distinctive Indian pragmatism: it will be a flexible program of melioration that relies upon and rebuilds the materials of some imperfect past in the project of reconstructing a bet-ter future. Ambedkar would not have this sort of emphasis, method, or exact democratic ideal if not for his engagement with and reconstruction of Deweyan pragmatism.

references

Ambedkar, Bhimrao R. 1989. “Annihilation of Caste.” In Writings and Speeches, vol. 1, edited by Vasant Moon, 23–98. Bombay: Government of Maharashtra.

———. 2003. “Unfortunately I Was Born a Hindu Untouchable but I Will Not Die a Hindu.” In Writings and Speeches, vol. 17 part 3, edited by Hari Narake, N. G. Kamble, M. L. Kasare, and Ashok Godghate, 94–99. Bombay: Government of Maharashtra.

Anand, S. 1999. “Sanskrit, English and Dalits.” Economic and Political Weekly 34 (30, July 24): 2053–2056.

Boydston, Jo Ann. 1969. John Dewey: A Checklist of Translations, 1900–1967. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

Dewey, John. 1908 [1978]. “Ethics.” In The Middle Works of John Dewey, vol. 5, edited by Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

———. 1916 [1985]. “Democracy and Education.” In The Middle Works of John Dewey, vol. 9, edited by Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

———. 1925 [1981]. “Experience and Nature.” In The Later Works of John Dewey, vol. 1, edited by Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.


Fiske, Adele, and Christoph Emmrich. 2004. “The Use of Buddhist Scriptures in B.R. Ambedkar’s The Buddha and His Dhamma.” In Reconstructing the World: B.R. Ambedkar and Buddhism in India, edited by Surendra Jondhale and Johannes Beltz, 97–119. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Jaffrelot, Christophe. 2005. Dr. Ambedkar and Untouchability: Fighting the Indian Caste System. New York: Columbia University Press.

Kadam, K. N. 1997. The Meaning of the Ambedkarite Conversion to Buddhism and Other Essays. New Delhi: Popular Prakashan.

Keer, Dhananjay. 1990. Dr. Ambedkar: Life and Mission. Bombay: Popular Prakashan.Maitra, Keya. 2012. “Ambedkar and the Constitution of India: A Deweyan

Experiment.” Contemporary Pragmatism 9: 301–320.Miller, Keith. 1992. Voice of Deliverance: The Language of Martin Luther King,

Jr. and Its Sources. New York: The Free Press.Mukherjee, Arun P. 2009. “B.R. Ambedkar, John Dewey, and the Meaning of

Democracy.” New Literary History 40: 345–370.Nanda, Meera. 2003. Prophets Facing Backward: Postmodern Critiques of Science

and Hindu Nationalism in India. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.Omvedt, Gail. 2004. Ambedkar: Towards an Enlightened India. New York:

Penguin Books.Queen, Christopher S. 2004. “Ambedkar’s Dhamma: Source and Method in

the Construction of Engaged Buddhism.” In Reconstructing the World: B.R. Ambedkar and Buddhism in India, edited by Surendra Jondhale and Johannes Beltz, 132–150. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

———. 2015. “A Pedagogy of the Dhamma: B. R. Ambedkar and John Dewey on Education.” International Journal of Buddhist Thought and Culture 24: 7–21.

Shastri, Shankranand. 2012. My Experience and Memories of Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar. Delhi: Gautam Book Centre.

Stroud, Scott R. 2016. “Pragmatism and the Pursuit of Social Justice in India: Bhimrao Ambedkar and the Rhetoric of Religious Reorientation.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 46 (1): 5–27.

———. 2017a. “The Influence of John Dewey and James Tufts’ Ethics on Ambedkar’s Quest for Social Justice.” In The Relevance of Dr. Ambedkar: Today and Tomorrow, edited by Pradeep Aglave, 33–54. Nagpur: Nagpur University Press.

———. 2017b. “Pragmatism, Persuasion, and Force in Bhimrao Ambedkar’s Reconstruction of Buddhism.” Journal of Religion 97 (2): 204–243.

———. 2017c. “What Did Bhimrao Ambedkar Learn from John Dewey’s Democracy and Education?” The Pluralist 12 (2): 78–103.

Zelliot, Eleanor. 2005. From Untouchable to Dalit: Essays on the Ambedkar Movement. New Delhi: Manohar.

———. 2013. Ambedkar’s World: The Making of Babasaheb and the Dalit Movement. New Delhi: Navayana.

105

CHAPTER 5

The Art of Adjustment: Ralph Ellison’s Pragmatist Critique of Irving Howe

Jansen B. Werner

Ralph Ellison was a pragmatist. His expansive corpus of intellectual work—spanning his landmark novel Invisible Man, two collections of essays, and lesser known pieces of short fiction and political report-age—is teeming with penetrating meditations on pragmatist principles such as experience, consciousness, and pluralism. And, embodying the experimental spirit of his pragmatist forebears, Ellison’s work routinely accents the traditional with generative new riffs. Indeed, alongside his engagement with established pragmatist concerns, Ellison added depth to pragmatist thought by underscoring the significance of previously underappreciated concepts such as chaos, complexity, and improvisation (Callahan 1987; Wright 1987; Albrecht 2012; Magee 2003).

Given his engagement with, and extension of, pragmatism, it is some-what puzzling that Ellison has not received greater consideration within the published literature on pragmatism. Among the range of factors that may have contributed to this relative lack of engagement, three possi-bilities emerge as particularly plausible. First, perhaps the most likely explanation for Ellison’s limited inclusion within pragmatist scholarship is that his intellectual legacy has been tethered largely to the literary


J. B. Werner (*) Independent Scholar, Minneapolis, MN, USA

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14343-5_5


106 J. B. WERNER

contributions of Invisible Man. More than six decades after its pub-lication, not only does Invisible Man remain a wildly popular book, it also continues to draw significant scholarly attention (Germana 2018; Harriss 2017; Conner and Morel 2016). Furthermore, within the field of Ellison scholarship, even when projects do not take Invisible Man as their primary focus, there is still a tendency for scholars to link their projects to Invisible Man in some fashion—often treating the success of Invisible Man as a justification for why further research on Ellison is war-ranted (note, for example, that it took this chapter merely two sentences to invoke Invisible Man) (Foley 2010; Parrish 2012; Turner 2012). In short, it is possible that the scholarly fixation with Invisible Man has attenuated scholars’ appreciation for the richness of Ellison’s overall cor-pus by deflecting critical attention from the nonfiction works wherein he grapples most overtly with pragmatist concepts.

Second, and closely related to the previous point, it seems that a consequence of Invisible Man’s popularity has been for Ellison to be regarded principally as a novelist. Though such a categorization is under-standable, it is also reductive. After all, throughout his career, Ellison produced two volumes of essays—one of which, the 1964 Shadow & Act, is widely considered to be among the greatest essay collections ever published (Callahan 1987, 125–143). Nevertheless, the critical acclaim and enduring popularity of Invisible Man has enshrined Ellison chiefly as a novelist within the public imaginary. And while there does not exist a mandate of mutual exclusivity that would prevent one from being both a novelist and pragmatist, in reality, novelists (or, at least, those who are regarded as novelists) have received only sparing attention within the published literature on pragmatism. Within my disciplinary homes of Communication Studies and Rhetorical Studies, for example, the work on pragmatism has focused almost exclusively on academicians, legal figures, and social reformers—which is sensible, given the fact that such roles tend to coincide with robust involvement in public affairs. In this respect, perceptions that Ellison was principally a novelist may help to further explain why his work has not received greater considera-tion within pragmatist circles.

Finally, and particularly germane to the focus this chapter will take, it is possible that Ellison’s relative lack of uptake within pragmatist schol-arship owes at least in part to his proclivity for vitriol. For example, in his biography of Ellison, Arnold Rampersad (2007) notes that Ellison’s contemporary, James Baldwin, referred to Ellison as “the angriest man

5 THE ART OF ADJUSTMENT: RALPH ELLISON’S PRAGMATIST CRITIQUE … 107

he knew” (455). It is perhaps fitting that Ellison, the man who crafted the iconic “Battle Royal” scene in Invisible Man, happed to find himself involved in skirmishes of his own periodically—albeit of the intellec-tual variety. A journey through Ellison’s corpus reveals some rather acidic exchanges with other thinkers. Such a tendency toward clash seems out of step with the spirit of reflective, experimental inquiry that is normally ascribed to pragmatism. And, so, it is possible that Ellison’s reputation as something of a scornful, counterpuncher may offer yet another explanation for his relatively cool reception within pragmatist scholarship.

In a broad sense, this chapter proposes that scholars of pragmatism ought to give greater consideration to Ralph Ellison’s work. To advance that general claim, I explore what many Ellison scholars regard as perhaps Ellison’s most vitriolic public exchange: his multi-part essayistic feud with Irving Howe (Porter 2001; Jackson 2005; Posnock 2005). To briefly recap the sequence of the exchange: The feud was set in motion by Howe’s 1963 essay “Black Boys and Native Sons”; Howe’s essay prompted a rebuttal from Ellison, entitled “The World and the Jug”; Howe answered Ellison’s rebuttal with a rebuttal of his own; and the feud came to a close with a final rejoinder from Ellison (in the interest of clarity, it must be noted that, following his clash with Howe, Ellison published his contributions to the exchange as a single essay entitled “The World and the Jug” in his 1964 essay collection Shadow and Act; hence, throughout the chapter, I use “The World and the Jug” to refer to that combined version of the texts). Shaped by the trajectory of Howe’s initial essay, the exchange essentially gravitated around the following questions: (1) Is there such a thing as a representative—or authentic—African American experience? (2) What is the basis for African American identity? (3) What, if any, political obliga-tions, do African American writers face? (4) Who has the authority to define the objectives of African American artistic expression? Frustrated by what he viewed as the ideological limitations of Howe’s perspective, at times, Ellison regarded his interlocutor with contempt; indeed, at one point in the exchange, Ellison (1964 [1995]) even suggested that Howe—a socialist literary critic and civil rights advocate—was just as complicit in stymieing African American advancement as the most ardent southern white supremacist (120). In issuing critiques of that nature, it would seem unlikely that, in the very same exchange, Ellison would also perform a masterful pragmatist critique of Howe’s position. Yet, as this chapter will demonstrate, such was precisely the case. And that dynamic—the pairing of

108 J. B. WERNER

vitriol and pragmatism—is pertinent to my overall purpose of elucidating Ellison’s commitment to pragmatism. That is, in part, my analysis will attempt to demonstrate that, even when Ellison was at his most antagonis-tic, he still managed to operate through a pragmatist modality.

Alongside this general aim of clarifying Ellison’s commitment to prag-matism, more specifically, this chapter will illustrate that, in his exchange with Howe, Ellison showcased the civic value of a particular pragma-tist concept: adjustment. Among pragmatist thinkers, John Dewey was perhaps the leading theorist of adjustment. As Dewey (1911a [1968], 1916 [2008], 1934 [1980]) understood it, adjustment was the outcome of an interaction between an individual and his environment. Through such interaction, Dewey maintains, adjustment induces a change in the individ-ual that disposes him to more favorably pursue his needs or aims. Drawing upon that understanding of adjustment, this chapter contends that, in his exchange with Howe, Ellison advocated a Deweyan notion of adjustment as a vital resource for navigating the civic challenges that emerge within a diverse, pluralistic society such as the United States. Ultimately, by exam-ining Ellison’s appeal for adjustment, we are able to appreciate the ways in which Ellison elaborated and extended Dewey’s crucial insight that democ-racy is not merely a political system, but, rather, a “way of life.”

democrAcy, meliorism, And Adjustment

Ellison’s democratic vision closely paralleled Dewey’s. As Ross Posnock (1998) points out, Ellison and Dewey were unified in viewing democracy as a “strenuous way of being in the world” (203). Dewey’s opposition to bureaucratic views of democracy has been well documented. Ellison, too, resisted simplistic notions of democracy, emphasizing instead the ways in which democracy was enacted through expressions of love, risk, and sacrifice (Allen 2004). For example, in his address at the 1953 National Book Award ceremony, Ellison stated, “For the novelist, Proteus stands for both America and the inheritance of illusion through which all men must fight to achieve reality; the offended god stands for our sins against those principles we all hold sacred. The way home we seek is that con-dition of man’s being at home in the world, which is called love, and which we term democracy” (2003, 154). Given the overlap between Ellison’s and Dewey’s views of democracy, our appreciation of Ellison’s call for adjustment can be enriched by placing Ellison’s appeal alongside major concepts from within the civic nexus of Dewey’s thought.


Throughout his work, Dewey championed the idea that democ-racy was more than merely a system of government; rather, for Dewey, democracy was an ethos: an ethical way of dwelling with others (Asen 2003; Keith 2007; Stroud 2011). Though Dewey (1939 [1988]) frequently voiced this viewpoint, he perhaps best captured it in “Creative Democracy—The Task Before Us,” where he writes, “Democracy as compared with other ways of life is the sole way of living which believes wholeheartedly in the process of experience as end and as means.” “[T]he task of democracy,” he continued a few sentences later, “is for-ever that of creation of a freer and more humane experience in which all share and to which all contribute” (229–230). Addressing such charac-terizations, William M. Keith rightly argues that Dewey viewed democ-racy as a “ubiquitous possibility.” For Dewey, any situation that carries the possibility for joint action and collaborative decision-making—in other words, virtually every context of human sociality—is a potential site of democracy. The radical implication of that insight is that democ-racy is nearly boundless. Democracy can be practiced anywhere there exists a possibility for human interaction.

As a complement to his organic view of democracy, Dewey also espoused the notion of meliorism. In the most basic sense, the term meliorism refers to the idea that worldly conditions can be improved by human effort (Stroud 2011; Stob 2005). As Dewey (1920 [1982]) out-lines in Reconstruction in Philosophy,

Meliorism is the belief that the specific conditions which exist at one moment, be they comparatively bad or comparatively good, in any event may be bettered. It encourages intelligence to study the positive means of good and the obstruction to their realization, and to put forth endeavor for the improvement of conditions. (181–182)

Scott Stroud (2010) has written extensively on Dewey’s view of meli-orism and, through close engagement with Dewey’s work, Stroud has devised a framework for the implementation of meliorism. Among the valuable insights Stroud’s work provides, he proposes that, for meliorism to achieve practical potency, the philosophical orientation of meliorism must be paired with means of engagement—in other words, tangible habits, techniques, and practices.

The concept of adjustment offers a compelling response to Stroud’s call for meliorism to be extended through specific means of engagement.

110 J. B. WERNER

Within Dewey’s work, “adjustment” is articulated alongside two related phenomena: “accommodation” and “adaptation.” Dewey approaches each of those phenomena as distinct modalities for coping with the evolving scenic conditions of existence. What differentiates the three phenomena is the character of the interactions they signify. Accommodation, for Dewey (1911b [1968]), entails an individual assim-ilating to his “existing environment” in a manner that involves minimal effort to resist or alter that environment (35). At the other end of the spectrum, adaptation occurs when the individual manipulates the envi-ronment to better meet his “needs and ends” (38–39). With adjustment, the individual neither submits to the limitations of the environment nor alters the environment; rather, adjustment occurs when an indi-vidual undergoes “deep seated” changes “in relation” to his environ-ment—changes that enable the individual to better pursue his purposes (Dewey 1934 [1998], 406). As that description conveys, for Dewey, adjustment somewhat straddles the space between orientation and habit. On the one hand, insofar as adjustment requires skillful execution, it would seem to approximate a habit that is cultivated through mindful practice; on the other hand, it seems only reasonable to argue that the skillful execution of an adjustment generally necessitates that one is first receptive—on some level—to making adjustments, which, in turn, seems to locate adjustment on the side of orientation. In light of this hybridity, adjustment possesses great potential as a medium for moving from a melioristic orientation to the development of tangible, civic habits.

Especially in a diverse, pluralistic society, adjustment possesses tre-mendous civic value. Moreover, following the arc of Dewey’s thought, it would seem that adjustment constitutes a resource that could be employed to purposefully align the overlapping projects of democ-racy and meliorism. That is, through a conscious, disciplined practice of adjustment, citizens could develop symbolic and social habits that enhance their ability to democratize the various civic spaces they inhabit. In “The World and the Jug,” Ellison would vividly illustrate how African Americans had already put adjustment to such uses.

ellison’s cAll for Adjustment

Ellison’s clash with Howe offers an interesting case study because it typifies the idea of “antagonistic cooperation” that Ellison was so fond of promoting—a concept that Ellison just so happened to invoke in his


second reply to Howe. The basic premise to “antagonistic cooperation” is that ostensibly antagonist interactions, such as Ellison’s clash with Howe, when viewed from an ironic perspective, can actually be inter-preted as acts of cooperation. As an example, in baseball, a hitter cannot experience the exultation of driving in the game-winning run without the antagonism provided in the form of the opposing pitcher. Following this framework, whatever valuable insights that Ellison produced within his exchange with Howe, those insights are indebted to the antagonistic presence that Howe provided.

Howe (1963 [2011]) activated his antagonistic presence through the publication of his essay “Black Boys and Native Sons,” which appeared in the autumn 1963 issue of the Leftist magazine Dissent. At its core, the essay was an encomium of Richard Wright and his novel Native Son. “The day Native Son appeared,” asserted, “American culture was changed forever” (660). Howe insisted that Native Son was pathbreak-ing for the way in which it gave voice to suppressed black rage, which, in turn, he argued, had induced a dual recognition: “A blow at the white man, the novel forced him to recognize himself as an oppressor. A blow at the black man, the novel forced him to recognize the cost of his sub-mission” (660). Howe’s praise for Wright was accompanied by criticism of both Ellison and James Baldwin. In short, Howe questioned Ellison’s and Baldwin’s ostensible aversions to overtly political writing. Countering such reservations, Howe maintained “the clenched militancy” that Wright had modeled signified the “only” way that “men with black skins, and for that matter, all the oppressed of the world, [could] achieve their human-ity” (664). Howe rendered a similarly sweeping critique in response to Baldwin’s contention from Notes of a Native Son (1955 [1998]) that “One writes out of one thing only—one’s own experience” (8). After quoting Baldwin’s passage directly, Howe countered:

What, then, was the experience of man with a black skin, what could it be in this country? How could a Negro put pen to paper, how could he so much as think or breathe, without some impulsion to protest, be it harsh or mild, political or private, released or buried? The “sociology” of his existence formed a constant pressure on his literary work, and not merely in the way this might be true for any writer, but with a pain and ferocity that nothing could remove. (660)

These kinds of sweeping generalization would be subjected to harsh scrutiny in Ellison’s rebuttals.

112 J. B. WERNER

In the analysis that follows, I will illustrate that “The World and the Jug” articulated a Deweyan sense of adjustment. In order to establish this claim, I focus on two sets of moves that Ellison performed in the text. First, Ellison suggested that Howe operated from a flawed orien-tation; in gesturing to that flawed orientation, Ellison implicitly signaled the need for adjustment. Second, by outlining the wide range of strat-egies that African Americans have devised to counter white supremacy, Ellison showed that adjustment possesses dynamic possibilities for the invention of civic agency. In tandem, these moves constituted a call for a renewed civic commitment to adjustment.

orientAtionAl critiques

At root, “The World and the Jug” marked Ellison’s rhetorical corrective to the orientation that Howe had expressed in “Black Boys and Native Sons.” Synthesizing insights from Dewey, Scott Stroud (2014) concep-tualizes “orientation” as the “deep-seated habituation of an organism toward its environment” (51). Orientations, then, are like the figuration that emerges from a constellation of habits. And, like habits, orienta-tions “set up ways of acting/reacting in future situations” (Stroud 2014, 59). From this standpoint, one’s orientation is not innate. Rather, as Stroud points out, orientations are formed culturally, in accordance with “the range of experiences we undergo” (56). Insofar as our experience is mediated through language, discourse plays a powerful role in shap-ing our orientations. “The World and the Jug” teemed with Ellison’s critiques of Howe’s orientation. However, Ellison’s critiques did more than just highlight the shortcomings of Howe’s individual orientation; “The World and the Jug” demonstrated that orientation, in general, was instrumental to the development of civic consciousness.

In a sense, Ellison’s response in “The World and the Jug” was insti-gated by Howe’s interpretation of Richard Wright’s significance. In Ellison’s view, Howe misinterpreted Wright as synecdochal of black writ-ers in particular and black American experience more generally. Ellison’s critique advanced the sense that Howe’s assessment of Wright stemmed from orientational flaws. Addressing what he judged to be Howe’s dis-torted view of Wright, Ellison (1964 [1995]) stated, “Wright, for Howe, is the genuine article, the authentic Negro writer, and his tone the only authentic tone” (118). Though not overtly critical, Ellison’s use of the terms “genuine” and “authentic” was significant. As many scholars have


noted, throughout his career as a writer and critic, Ellison consistently challenged static concepts such as “genuineness” and “authenticity”—especially when applied to the complex matter of racial or cultural iden-tity (Callahan 1987; Eddy; Turner 2012).

Aside from the general orientational problems inherent to viewing any individual’s perspective as the “authentic” perspective, Ellison offered further reasons for why Howe’s interpretation of Wright suffered from orientational shortcomings. As Ellison saw it, part of the trouble with approaching Wright’s novel, Native Son, as an “authentic” portrayal of black American life was that the novel itself suffered from orientational problems. Discussing Native Son, and particularly the development of “Bigger Thomas’s” character, Ellison remarked critically that “envi-ronment is all” (1964 [1995], 114). In other words, Ellison critiqued Wright’s portrayal of “Bigger Thomas” on the basis that it relied upon the logics of social determinism, that “Bigger’s” character was wholly a product of the material and social forces of his context.

In keeping with Dewey’s attention to the interaction between the organism and its environment, Ellison was a staunch critic of virtually any “deterministic” framework.

Demonstrating the efficacy of his anti-deterministic approach, Ellison pointed to the ironic tension between Wright the man and the protag-onist he had invented in Native Son. “Wright could imagine Bigger,” Ellison wrote, “but Bigger could not possibly imagine Richard Wright” (114). Indeed, as Ellison explained, Wright had endured conditions that at least approximated those of his protagonist “Bigger Thomas,” but nevertheless Wright went on to become an accomplished and celebrated writer—a reality that Ellison positioned as evidence that “deterministic” frameworks failed to account for individual agency.

Of course, this did not mean that Native Son was worthless; it sim-ply served to underscore the deficiencies of Howe’s orientation. Rather than simply deconstruct the flaws in Howe’s orientation, Ellison enacted a pragmatist corrective by demonstrating an alternative, more flexible orientation to Wright and his novel Native Son. “While I rejected Bigger Thomas as any final image of Negro personality,” Ellison explained, “I recognized Native Son as an achievement; as one man’s essay in defin-ing the human condition as seen from a specific Negro perspective at a given time in a given place” (118). Such framing captured the signifi-cance of the interplay between Wright, his individual experiences, and his context of production. In similar fashion, Ellison revised Baldwin’s

114 J. B. WERNER

aforementioned contention that “One writes out of one thing only—one’s own experience.” Quoting Baldwin directly, Ellison parenthetically stated “(I would have added, for the novelist, this qualification: one’s own experience as understood and ordered through one’s knowledge of self, culture and literature)” (110–111). Modifying Baldwin’s for-mulation, Ellison countered that there was not a pure correspondence between one’s experience and one’s writing; rather, capturing the influ-ence of orientation, Ellison maintained that, in the act of writing, one’s experience was always already articulated from a perspective that had been shaped by a confluence of cultural forces.

To be sure, Ellison was concerned with much more than just Howe’s interpretations of Native Son and Richard Wright. Howe’s judgment demanded scrutiny, Ellison reasoned, because it carried the potential to shape public understanding of race, especially blackness. Thus, Ellison’s critique addressed not just Howe’s orientation toward Wright and Native Son, but, more broadly, Howe’s orientation toward black expe-rience and black identity. “One unfamiliar with what Howe stands for,” said Ellison, “would get the impression that when he looks at a Negro he sees not a human being but an abstract embodiment of living hell” (112). This comment closely resembled a statement that James Baldwin made in his 1963 book The Fire Next Time, published just a few months prior to Ellison’s exchange with Howe. Therein, Baldwin (1963 [1993]) had posited that “white liberals … could deal with the Negro as a sym-bol or a victim but had no sense of him as a man” (58). Like Baldwin, Ellison insisted that even self-identified antiracists, such as Howe, were often complicit in perpetuating regressive understandings of blackness.

Ellison further established the significance of orientation by inter-rogating the specific terms by which Howe promoted a reductive con-cept of blackness. One aspect that troubled Ellison was the way that Howe’s conception of blackness appeared to support theories of racial essentialism. Employing Howe’s own comments to justify that judg-ment, Ellison wrote, “When [Howe] uses the term ‘Negro’ he speaks of it as a ‘stigma,’ and again, he speaks of ‘Negroness’ as a ‘sterile’ cat-egory” (1964 [1995], 130). Further elaborating the point, Ellison insisted that Howe approached “‘Negroness’ [as] a metaphysical con-dition, one that is a state of irremediable agony which all but engulfs the mind” (130–131). In addition to this issue, Ellison also voiced concern that Howe seemed to believe in a universal black experience. “Evidently,” he wrote, “Howe feels that unrelieved suffering is the only


‘real’ Negro experience” (111). To counter such a notion, Ellison drew upon an anecdote from his own life experience: “Some twelve years ago, a friend argued with me for hours that I could not possibly write a novel because my experience as a Negro had been too excruciating to allow me to achieve that psychological and emotional distance neces-sary to artistic creation. Since he ‘knew’ Negro experience better than I, I could not convince him that he might be wrong” (111). Gesturing to his critically acclaimed novel Invisible Man, recipient of the 1953 National Book Award, the point of the anecdote was that it showed that Ellison’s “friend” had been woefully mistaken about the constraints of “Negro experience.” Placed alongside Ellison’s critique of Howe, the anecdote functioned enthymematically to imply that Howe, like Ellison’s “friend,” was also woefully mistaken about the character of “Negro experience.”

Another way that Ellison demonstrated the importance of orientation was by subordinating political motive to symbolic action. An admirer and friend of Kenneth Burke, Ellison was well versed in Burke’s theories of rhetoric and symbolic action. According to Michael Magee, Ellison’s understanding of symbolic action entailed interrogating how lan-guage “operates,” paying close attention to what language “does” (239). Reflecting that perspective, Ellison made clear that he was less concerned with Howe’s motives—indeed, he even acknowledged that Howe had maintained a commitment to advancing racial justice—than he was with the symbolic implications of his discourse. For example, while discuss-ing the generic limitations that Howe imposed on black writers, Ellison wrote, “In his effort to resuscitate [Richard] Wright, Irving Howe would designate the role which Negro writers are to play more rigidly than any Southern politician—and for the best of reasons” (1964 [1995], 120). The statement functioned as a “perspective by incongruity.” Though Howe acted from “the best of reasons,” and presumably had nobler motives than the hypothetical “Southern politician,” it was nevertheless Howe, Ellison argued, who imposed the more rigid racial constraints.

Ellison not only complicated the connection between motive and effect but also redirected attention to the significance of symbolic action. In a passage that expressed a keen understanding of rhetoric’s constitu-tive properties, Ellison stated:

Howe is not the first writer given to sociological categories who has had unconscious value judgments slip into his “analytical” or “scien-tific” descriptions. Thus I can believe that his approach was meant to be

116 J. B. WERNER

“analytic, not exhortatory; descriptive, not prescriptive.” The results, how-ever, are something else again. And are we to believe that he simply does not recognize rhetoric when he practices it? That when he asks, “what could [his italics] the experience of a man with a black skin be …” etc., he thinks he is describing a situation as viewed by each and every Negro writer rather than expressing, yes, and in the mode of “exhortation,” the views of Irving Howe? Doesn’t he recognize that just as the anti-Negro stereotype is a command to Negroes to mold themselves in its image, there sounds through his descriptive “thus it is” the command “thus you become”? And doesn’t he realize that in this emotion-charged area defini-tive description is, in effect prescription (129)?

Here, Ellison suggested that Howe seemed to misunderstand the sym-bolic consequences endemic to the act of “describing” African American life. Prefiguring Burke’s formulation in Language as Symbolic Action, Ellison argued that Howe’s description was not merely observational, but, rather, “hortatory” (44). That is, in ostensibly describing the con-ditions of African American life, Howe simultaneously enunciated a symbolic directive for how African American life ought to be. In short, Ellison’s critique implied that Howe’s orientation toward language was lacking in that it failed to account for such constitutive dynamics.

While Ellison took issue with Howe’s orientation toward language, he took greater issue with what he interpreted as Howe’s absolutist view of blackness. Such an orientation was faulty in that it obscured the particu-larity and complexity of actual black individuals. More troubling still, in Ellison’s assessment, Howe’s view was “merely symptomatic” of a more fundamental “public disorientation” (1964 [1995], 123). “Those who regard blackness as an absolute,” Ellison wrote, “see in it a release from the complications of the real world” (121). In other words, for individu-als who shared Howe’s orientation, blackness provided an escape. When conceived as a monolith, blackness offered a source of stability in an oth-erwise chaotic world. Such a viewpoint was untenable to Ellison—and not simply because of its reductive conception of blackness. As others have noted, Ellison viewed “chaos” as a vital source of democratic pos-sibility. Thus, by approaching blackness as a remedy to chaos, individuals such as Howe were suppressing the growth of democracy.

In contrast to the absolutism he attributed to Howe, Ellison advo-cated an orientation that acknowledged and promoted pluralism. Addressing Howe’s critical judgments of his and Baldwin’s deviations from Richard Wright, Ellison wrote, “In his loyalty to Richard Wright,


Howe considers Ellison and Baldwin guilty of filial betrayal because, in their own work, they have rejected the path laid down by Native Son, phonies because, while actually ‘black boys,’ they pretend to be mere American writers trying to react to something of the pluralism of their predicament” (115). Here Ellison argued that Howe’s “loyalty” to Wright—and, by extension, his commitment to an absolutist view of blackness—had prevented him from considering the plurality of issues that black writers might address in their work. And the pluralism to which Ellison referred owed to the diversity of experience within black American life. Ellison extended this point by disputing the extent to which institutional racism had prevented African Americans from forg-ing connections with the larger society in which they were embedded. He declared,

Howe seems to see segregation as an opaque steel jug with the Negroes inside waiting for some black messiah to come along and blow the cork. Wright is his hero and he sticks with him loyally. But if we are in a jug it is transparent, not opaque, and one is allowed not only to see outside but to read what is going on out there; to make identifications as to values and human quality. (116)

Employing metonymy, the trope of reduction, Ellison conveyed the sense that Howe grossly overestimated the degree to which segregation disconnected African Americans from the rest of American society. The second half of the passage, then, countered the reductive image of the “opaque steel jug” by directing attention to the tangible practices, such as seeing and reading, that enabled African Americans “to make identifi-cations” with the wider society.

Perhaps even more compelling was Ellison’s appeal to the converse of this point: that African Americans had indelibly shaped the culture of Southern society. Again emphasizing Howe’s orientational short-comings, Ellison posited that Howe was “so committed to a sociologi-cal vision of society that he apparently cannot see … that whatever the efficiency of segregation as a socio-political arrangement, it has been far from absolute on the level of culture” (116). Importantly, the state-ment proposed that it was Howe’s “sociological vision” that prevented him from seeing that ostensible reality. Elaborating the cultural dynamic to which he gestured, Ellison explained, “Southern whites cannot walk, talk, sing, conceive of laws or justice, think of sex, love, the family or

118 J. B. WERNER

freedom without responding to the presence of Negroes” (116). Ellison’s counterpoint carried considerable weight. As Kirt H. Wilson (2002) has pointed out, racialized rhetorics of “place” powerfully shaped the Southern imaginary from Reconstruction up through the 1960s era from which Ellison wrote.

Taken collectively, Ellison’s various critiques of Howe’s orientation signaled that Howe’s conception of blackness did not comport with the actual character of black American life—or, for that matter, the character of American life writ large. Howe’s orientation privileged theory at the expense of practice. In Deweyan parlance, Ellison’s orientational critiques implicitly invited consideration of adjustment. In A Common Faith, for example, Dewey (1934 [2008]) positions “orientation” and adjust-ment as correlates. In a section that probes the dynamics of “religious experience,” Dewey asserts that, at the root of the perceived “religious experience” is “some complex of conditions” that produces “an adjust-ment” and, with it, a corresponding “orientation” (10). While Ellison’s critiques of Howe’s orientation implicitly encouraged an adjustment, “The World and the Jug” did not stop there. Rather, through a variety of appeals, Ellison characterized adjustment as a valuable resource for grap-pling with the hardships that emerged from US institutional racism.

demonstrAting the VAlue of Adjustment

Linked closely to the aforementioned orientational critiques, a prom-inent cluster of Ellison’s appeals for adjustment were premised on the idea that Howe approached African American consciousness as merely the byproduct of white supremacy. To be sure, Ellison did not refute that white supremacy had played a significant role in shaping African American consciousness; rather, Ellison countered deterministic view-points with appeals that underscored interaction. Expressing his rejection of the view that African American consciousness was marked by passivity, Ellison wrote, “For even as his life toughens the Negro, even as it bru-talizes him, sensitizes him, dulls him, goads him to anger, moves him to irony, sometimes fracturing and sometimes affirming his hopes; even as it shapes his attitudes toward family, sex, love, religion; even as it modu-lates his humor, tempers his joy—it conditions [emphasis original] him to deal with his life and with himself” (1964 [1995], 112). Then, shifting his focus to the interactive dimensions of African American conscious-ness, he added:


Because it is his [emphasis original] life and no mere abstraction in some-one’s head. He must live it and try consciously to grasp its complexity until he can change it; must live it as [emphasis original] he changes it. He is no mere product of his socio-political predicament. He is a product of the inter-action [emphasis added] between his racial predicament, his individual will and the broader American cultural freedom in which he finds his ambiguous existence. Thus he, too, in a limited way is his own creation. (112–113)

Such a statement contested powerfully the deterministic assumption that African American consciousness was merely a side effect of white supremacy.

In conjunction with such appeals to interactivity, Ellison further cap-tured the function of adjustment by proposing that what appeared to be African American submission did not always reflect a genuine stance of submission. That is, Ellison proposed that, through their interactions with white supremacy, African Americans had devised strategic ways of performing their identities so as to meet the demands of particular cir-cumstances. African American life, Ellison stated, was “not only a bur-den (and not always that) but also a discipline—just as any human life which has endured so long is a discipline teaching its own insights into the human condition, its own strategies of survival” (112). From this perspective, what appeared to be a sign of involuntary submission was, perhaps, actually a conscious, calculated strategy for navigating racism. There was, Ellison asserted, an entire “American Negro tradition which teaches one to deflect racial provocation and to master and contain pain,” a tradition that “springs not from a desire to deny the harshness of existence but from a will to deal with it as men at their best have always done” (111). Such a conception resembles what Houston A. Baker, Jr. (1987) refers to as the “mastery of form,” a modality in which one “con-ceals, disguises, floats like a trickster butterfly in order to sting like a bee” (50). Moving from the general to the particular, Ellison testified to his own enactment of such a modality:

I could escape the reduction imposed by unjust laws and customs, but not that imposed by ideas which defined me as no more than the sum of those laws and customs. I learned to outmaneuver those who inter-preted my silence as submission, my efforts at self-control as fear, my contempt as awe before superior status, my dream of faraway places and room at the top of the heap as defeat before the barriers of their stifling, provincial world. And my struggle became a desperate battle which was

120 J. B. WERNER

usually fought, though not always, in silence; a guerilla action in a larger war in which I found some of the most treacherous assaults against me committed by those who regarded themselves either as neutrals, as sympa-thizers, or as disinterested military advisers. (1964 [1995], 122)

What others had misinterpreted as “submission,” Ellison insisted, had actually constituted “a guerilla action in a larger war.” Highlighting the value of such adjustment, he maintained that his strategic identity per-formance had proven valuable in drawing out the attitudes of individ-uals such as Howe—individuals who did not appear hostile to African Americans, but, when given the opportunity, revealed assumptions that were antagonistic to African Americans’ progress. In short, Ellison showed that behaviors that seemed to signal “submission” could actu-ally reflect a subversive adjustment to the racial hostilities endemic to American life.

Ellison did more than just identify covert modes of African American adjustment Rather, “The World and the Jug” characterized adjustment as a key facet of African American life. Consider, for example, Ellison’s description of African American “consciousness”: “Negro American con-sciousness is not a product (as so often seems true of so many American groups) of a will to historical forgetfulness. It is a product of our memory, sustained and constantly reinforced by events, by our watchful waiting, and by our hopeful suspension of final judgment as to the meaning of our grievances” (124). Ellison’s phrasing here was striking. For exam-ple, the phrase, “will to historical forgetfulness,” insofar as it evoked an unqualified acceptance of the United States’ racist past, closely paral-leled Dewey’s notion of “accommodation.” In contrast to that, the col-lective “memory” that Ellison positioned as the actual source of African American “consciousness” was infused with a sense of adjustment. This collective “memory,” Ellison contended, was “sustained and con-stantly reinforced by events”; furthermore, it was marked by a move-ment between recollection of the past, attention to emerging events, and the exercise of critical judgment. According to Ellison, then, African Americans adjusted their “consciousness” in accordance with the tug-and- pull of those dimensions.

A similar sense of adjustment emerged from other portions of the text in which Ellison discussed what he considered the distinguishing features of African American life. Refuting the equation of skin pigment with racial identity, Ellison asserted, “It is not skin color which makes a


Negro American but cultural heritage as shaped by the American expe-rience, the social and political predicament; a sharing of that ‘concord of sensibilities’ which the group expresses through historical circum-stance and through which it has come to constitute a subdivision of the larger American culture” (131). The view of blackness as “skin color” was static and devoid of any sense of adjustment Ellison’s corrective pivot to “cultural heritage,” on the other hand, captured the dynamic interaction between “individual” and “environment” on which adjust-ment was predicated. Environmental factors, such as “the American experience” and “the social and political predicament,” undeniably exerted influence; however, in Ellison’s rendering, African Americans had “constituted” their identities by interacting with that environment, particularly through communicative acts in which they expressed and negotiated cultural values in accordance with shifting circumstances. In a subsequent passage, Ellison further explicated the diverse matrix of envi-ronmental factors and cultural practices from which African American lives were shaped and textured. Among the elements he included within that matrix, Ellison cited, for example: “forms of labor”; “forms of pleasure”; “manners”; “customs”; and “a special perspective on the national ideals and the national conduct.” Though such a constellation of factors gestured indirectly to a sense of adjustment, this particular sec-tion of the text also entailed more explicit appeals to adjustment. For example, Ellison stated that African American life was distinguished by “a rugged initiation into the mysteries and rites of color which makes it possible for Negro Americans to suffer the injustice which race and color are used to excuse without losing sight of either the humanity of those who inflict that injustice or the motive, rational or irrational, out of which they act” (131). Though racism was structured into the US envi-ronment, Ellison again highlighted adjustment by asserting that African Americans’ interaction with that oppressive environment had allowed them to still acknowledge the humanity of their oppressors. Ellison would render an even more conspicuous appeal to adjustment in the very next sentence. Closing this lengthy section on the distinctive fea-tures of African American life, Ellison concluded that African Americans’ interactions with US society had ultimately furnished “the uneasy burden and occasional joy of a complex double vision, a fluid, ambiv-alent response to men and events which represents at its finest, a pro-foundly civilized adjustment to the cost of being human in this modern world” (131–132).

122 J. B. WERNER

In accordance with such characterizations of African American life, Ellison urged African Americans to maintain a unique attunement to their experiences, with a particular eye toward how those experiences could inform future acts of adjustment. The basic reasoning for this was that experience could function like a compass and thereby point the way to conditions that needed to be remedied. Capturing that point, Ellison exhorted African Americans to pursue their freedom “by depending upon the validity of their own experience for an accurate picture of the reality which they seek to change, and for gauge of the values they would see manifest” (114). Dewey extends a similar point in Art as Experience. “[E]xperience,” Dewey writes, “becomes conscious, a matter of perception, only when meanings enter it that are derived from prior experiences.” For Dewey, the only way those prior experiences gain meaning in subsequent interactions is through “imagination,” which, significantly, Dewey describes as “the conscious adjustment of old and new” (272). Thus, by calling for African Americans to draw upon their experiences as indicators of the “val-ues” that needed to be emphasized in society, Ellison had essentially con-verted Dewey’s conception of adjustment into a principle of social change.

Ellison doubled down on that principle as it pertained to the respon-sibilities of black writers. Discussing the central questions that black writers should address, Ellison notably included: “What values emerg-ing from Negro experience does he [the black writer] try to affirm” (1964 [1995], 113)? Not only did this extend a Deweyan notion of adjustment, it also responded to the issue that had prompted Ellison to compose the text in the first place: Howe’s reductive view of African American experience. Pressing against what he interpreted as the “socio-logical” biases of Howe’s orientation, Ellison countered, “What moves a writer to eloquence is less meaningful than what he makes of it” (112). In a sense, such a stance seemed to merely invert Howe’s orientation; indeed, it ostensibly stressed the individual’s agency at the expense of considering the individual’s environment. However, Ellison’s emphasis on the production of “eloquence” signaled an attunement to the inter-activity of the aesthetic process. In a statement that incorporated Howe’s phrasing, Ellison declared, “It would seem to me … that the question of how the ‘sociology of his existence’ presses upon a Negro writer’s work depends upon how much of his life the individual writer is able to trans-form into art” (111–112). By focusing on the production of “eloquence” and the transformation of experience into “art,” Ellison placed adjust-ment at the center of African American aesthetic practice.


Although “The World and the Jug” primarily addressed questions related to black Americans in general and black writers in particular, Ellison also demonstrated that the brand of adjustment he advocated was beneficial to US society writ large. As Ellison pointed out, the ongoing freedom struggle that underwrote his and Howe’s exchange “involve[d] not merely Negroes but all Americans” (132). Insofar as there existed a “basic unity of human experience,” Ellison maintained, that freedom struggle possessed the “possibility” to induce “empathic and symbolic identification with those of other backgrounds” (123). According to Ellison, writers—whether white, black, or otherwise—were ideally sit-uated to cultivate that sense of identification between diverse individ-uals. For example, discussing his role as an “American writer,” Ellison characterized himself as “a custodian of the American language”—a crucial aspect of which entailed, in Ellison’s words, “contributing as much as he is capable to the clear perception of American social reality” (125–126). In a subsequent section of the text, Ellison positioned adjustment as fundamental to making such a contribution. “[T]he writ-er’s real way of sharing the experience of his group,” posited Ellison, “is to convert its mutual suffering into lasting value” (139). Capturing the character of adjustment, the statement suggested that works of “lasting value” were those in which the writer employed an interactive movement between “experience” and aesthetic production. Following Ellison’s logic, insofar as a writer adopted that mode of adjustment, she was better disposed to produce a work of “lasting value”—a work that could induce “empathic and symbolic identification” between diverse individuals. Such a framework could be readily converted to the everyday communicative practices of civic life. Communicative exchanges that were animated by a spirit of adjustment could transcend ostensible boundaries of difference and, in turn, forge new symbolic bonds.

conclusion

Viewed within the overall landscape of Ellison’s public discourse, “The World and the Jug” embodied a pair of rhetorical patterns that were prevalent within his work. As Jack Turner notes, Ellison’s work gener-ally signals a commitment to at least two intellectual projects. The first project is “diagnostic” and functions by “identifying the individual and social psychoses underlying American white supremacy” (Turner 2012, 72). Ellison’s criticism of Howe’s orientation marked just such

124 J. B. WERNER

a diagnostic move. That diagnostic move was also intriguing in that it seemingly ran counter to prevailing trends within the ongoing black free-dom struggle. While the prominent spokespersons of the 1960s directed attention outward to structural and policy issues, Ellison’s focus on ori-entation seemed to direct attention inward to the individual. It is perhaps tempting to dismiss the significance of that divergent focus as merely a sign of what other scholars have described as Ellison’s stubborn commit-ment to individualism. To do so, however, would be to underappreci-ate the value of Ellison’s diagnostic move. By stressing the relationship between orientation and white supremacy, Ellison reminded his readers of the depths to which white supremacy plagued US society. As much as white supremacy was a structural problem with policy implications, it was expressed through, and exercised by, individual persons. Of course, Ellison was not suggesting that efforts at structural change should be abandoned. Rather, his focus on orientation signaled that it would not be enough to just tear away white supremacy’s superstructure and replace it with more equitable laws and policies. A comprehensive cam-paign against white supremacy would need to attend to its bedrock: the social conditions of civic life. In this way, Ellison’s focus on orientation redirected attention to the social foundations of participatory democracy.

The second project that emerges from Ellison’s overall body of work, according to Turner, is a “reconstructive” one. This reconstructive project centers on providing “Americans with the imaginative equip-ment they need to escape racialized social outlooks and see the world from the perspectives of racial others” (73). As this chapter has argued, “The World and the Jug” participated in such a reconstructive project by advocating a Deweyan notion of adjustment Ellison’s articulation of adjustment possessed considerable civic value. With greater attention to adjustment, individuals could better appreciate the matrix of elements from which their fellow citizens crafted and expressed their identities. Furthermore, attunement to that dynamic could enable individuals to adjust their civic practices in ways that might promote a deeper sense of connection with citizens whose experiences or perspectives differed widely from their own. Particularly on matters of race, in which the pre-sumption of a priori difference often hinders the possibility for identifica-tion across racial categories, greater attention to adjustment could offer insights for how to mediate seemingly intransigent conflicts.

Ellison’s critiques of race and racism also yield a more general set of insights regarding identity. Specifically, Ellison’s appeals for adjustment


underscored the pitfalls of determinism. In identifying the novel meth-ods that African Americans had devised for navigating white supremacy, Ellison highlighted that human agency can never be fully determined—or delimited—by situational constraints. Ellison showed that our human capacity for adjustment endows us with the ability to improvise in the face of uncertainty and to counter challenges with creative activity.

And, still, for many of his contemporaries, Ellison’s call for adjustment was almost certainly underwhelming. As it pertained to contesting white supremacy, adjustment had somewhat of a conservative ring to it. For Dewey, though, adjustment was the stuff from which democracy was made. Indeed, in The Public and Its Problems, Dewey notably remarks: “Political democracy has emerged as a kind of net consequence of a vast multitude of responsive adjustments to a vast number of situations.” Echoing Dewey’s insights, Ellison exhorted his readers to embrace an ecological view of social change. From this perspective, sustaina-ble social change would not result from seismic shifts. Rather, enduring social change would need to be accumulated through wave after wave of adjustments to the evolving predicaments of life in a plural democracy.

references

Albrecht, James M. 2012. Reconstructing Individualism: A Pragmatic Tradition from Emerson to Ellison. New York: Fordham University Press.

Allen, Danielle. 2004. Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship Since Brown v. Board of Education. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Asen, Robert. 2003. “The Multiple Mr. Dewey: Multiple Publics and Permeable Borders in John Dewey’s Theory of the Public Sphere.” Argumentation and Advocacy 39: 174–188.

Baker, Houston, Jr. 1987. Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Baldwin, James. 1955 [1998]. “Notes of a Native Son.” In James Baldwin: Collected Essays, edited by Toni Morrison. New York: Library of America.

Baldwin, James. 1963 [1993]. The Fire Next Time. New York: Vintage Books.Callahan, John F. 1987. “Choas, Complexity, and Possibility: The Historical

Frequencies of Ralph Waldo Ellison.” In Speaking for You: The Vision of Ralph Ellison, edited by Kimberly W. Benston, 125–143. Washington, DC: Howard University Press.

Conner, Marc C., and Lucas E. Morel, eds. 2016. The New Territory: Ralph Ellison and the Twenty-First Century. Jackson: The University Press of Mississippi.

Dewey, John. 1911a [1968]. “Adjustment.” In A Cyclopedia of Education, vol. 1, edited by Paul Monroe, 38–39. Detroit: Gale Research Company.

126 J. B. WERNER

Dewey, John. 1911b [1968]. “‘Accommodation,’ and Adaptation.” In A Cyclopedia of Education, vol. I, edited by Paul Monroe. Detroit: Gale Research Company.

Dewey, John. 1916 [2008]. “Democracy and Education.” In The Middle Works of John Dewey, vol. 9, edited by Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.

Dewey, John. 1920 [1982]. “Reconstruction in Philosophy.” In The Middle Works of John Dewey, vol. 12, edited by Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.

Dewey, John. 1934 [1980]. Art as Experience. New York: Perigree.Dewey, John. 1934 [1998]. “Religion Versus the Religious.” In The Essential

Dewey, Vol. 1: Pragmatism, Education, Democracy, edited by Larry A. Hickman and Thomas M. Alexander. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Dewey, John. 1934 [2008]. “A Common Faith.” In The Later Works of John Dewey, vol. 9, edited by Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.

Dewey, John. 1939 [1988]. “Creative Democracy—The Task Before Us.” In The Later Works of John Dewey, vol. 14, edited by Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.

Ellison, Ralph. 1964 [1995]. Shadow and Act. New York: Vintage Books.Ellison, Ralph. 2003. The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, edited by John F.

Callahan. New York: Modern Library.Foley, Barbara. 2010. Wrestling with the Left: The Making of Ralph Ellison’s

Invisible Man. Durham: Duke University Press.Germana, Michael. 2018. Ralph Ellison: Temporal Technologist. New York:

Oxford University Press.Harriss, M. Cooper. 2017. Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Theology. New York: New

York University Press.Howe, Irving. 1963 [2011]. “Black Boys and Native Sons.” In Call and

Response: Key Debates in African American Studies, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Jennifer Burton. New York: W. W. Norton.

Jackson, Lawrence. 2005. “Ralph Ellison’s Invented Life: A Meeting with Ancestors.” In The Cambridge Companion to Ralph Ellison, edited by Ross Posnock, 11–34. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Keith, William. 2007. Democracy as Discussion: Civic Education and the American Forum Movement. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

Magee, Michael. 2003. “Ralph Ellison: Pragmatism, Jazz and the American Vernacular.” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 39: 227–258.

Parrish, Timothy. 2012. Ralph Ellison and the Genius of America. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.

Porter, Horace. 2001. Jazz Country: Ralph Ellison in America. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.


Posnock, Ross. 1998. Color and Culture: Black Writers and the Making of the Modern Intellectual. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Posnock, Ross. 2005. “Ralph Ellison, Hannah Arendt, and the Meaning of Politics.” In The Cambridge Companion to Ralph Ellison, edited by Ross Posnock. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Rampersad, Arnold. 2007. Ralph Ellison: A Biography. New York: Knopf.Stob, Paul. 2005. “Kenneth Burke, John Dewey, and the Pursuit of the Public.”

Philosophy and Rhetoric 38: 226–247.Stroud, Scott. 2010. “What Does Pragmatic Meliorism Mean for Rhetoric?”

Western Journal of Communication 74: 43–60.Stroud, Scott. 2011. “Mindful Argument, Deweyan Pragmatism, and the

Ideal of Democracy.” Controversia: An International Journal of Debate and Democratic Renewal 7: 15–33.

Stroud, Scott. 2014. “John Dewey, Kenneth Burke, and the Role of Orientation in Rhetoric.” In Trained Capacities: John Dewey, Rhetoric, and Democratic Practice, edited by Brian Jackson and Gregory Clark. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press.

Turner, Jack. 2012. Awakening to Race: Individualism and Social Consciousness in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Wilson, Kirt. 2002. The Reconstruction Desegregation Debate: The Politics of Equality and the Rhetoric of Place, 1870–1875. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press.

Wright, John S. 1987. “Shadowing Ellison.” In Speaking for You: The Vision of Ralph Ellison, edited by Kimberly W. Benston, 63–88. Washington, DC: Howard University Press.

129

CHAPTER 6

Living Pragmatism: Alice Dewey’s Open-Minded Approach to Experiential

Education and Cross-Cultural Immersion

Karen Shea and Krysten Manke

The increasing recuperation of John Dewey’s corpus among twenty-first-century scholars has alternately illustrated the ways in which ethical rhetorical practices are crucial to the development of democratic culture, invited people of different educational and cultural backgrounds into conversations, and uncovered strategies to help individuals navi-gate the complexities of social engagement among diverse citizens with open-mindedness. Taken together, these examples demonstrate how Dewey’s pragmatism expresses social, communicative, and political goals that often fit in contemporary definitions and motivations of rhetoric.

While much has been written about John Dewey, far less has been written about his wife, Alice Chipman Dewey. John Dewey demonstrates continued gratitude for his wife’s efforts both in published works and in lengthy correspondence between the couple over multiple decades, but


K. Shea (*) Johnson & Wales University, Providence, RI, USAe-mail: [email protected]

K. Manke University of Rhode Island, South Kingstown, RI, USA

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14343-5_6


130 K. SHEA AND K. MANKE

few others have openly acknowledged Alice’s contributions to pragma-tism, since she never published any texts within the philosophical canon. Yet a closer look into John Dewey’s pragmatism, both in its inchoate and more developed forms, reveals Alice Dewey’s influence at nearly every turn. Her work—both in collaboration with and independent of John Dewey—is emblematic of pragmatism in action. This chapter will argue that Alice’s impact on Deweyan pragmatism has been understated and overlooked. In service of this argument, it will trace how Alice’s impact on this emerging philosophy can be seen through her work with the Dewey Laboratory School as well as her firsthand experience with other-ness while living with John in Asia for two years. It will further consider the degree to which Alice’s rhetoric shaped the pedagogical processes at the Laboratory School and John Dewey’s increasingly open-minded philosophies.

When they first met at the University of Michigan, Alice captivated John with her willful spirit, her dedication to education and women’s rights, and her ability to translate theory into practice; the year they mar-ried, John writes to her, “You make me know something every day.”1 Alice is also generally credited with helping her husband to shift “from pietistic ethics to ethical culture” (Martin 2002, 96). More specifically, Alice’s insistence that philosophy have an application inspired John’s thinking to transition from neo-Hegelian thinking into more practically motivated ideation (Whipps and Lake 2017). While George Herbert Mead opened John’s thinking beyond Hegelian dualisms and into plu-ralistic thinking, it was Alice who capitalized on this in order to open John’s mind and bring it into contact with present social issues—so that “things which had previously been matters of theory acquired through his contact with her a vital and direct human significance” (Rockefeller 1991, 150).

A former student of John Dewey’s remembered years later how “Mrs. Dewey would grab Dewey’s ideas—and grab him—and insist that something be done” (Durst 2010, 13). Chicago colleagues Katherine Camp Mayhew and Anna Edwards also confirm in a draft of their manu-script for The Dewey School that Alice was described by many as a woman “with a fierce and independent intelligence who was deeply concerned with matters of justice and equality” (12). There is no doubt that Alice was a

1 John Dewey to Alice Dewey, April 1, 1886 (00038) The Correspondence of John Dewey (electronic resource) (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999–2004).

6 LIVING PRAGMATISM: ALICE DEWEY’S OPEN-MINDED … 131

strong-minded woman who stated her ideas straightforwardly, and that John took her input quite seriously in matters both personal and profes-sional: as an activist, educator, partner, and parent. She supported him likewise, and their work, while not always performed together, tended to grow together.

john And Alice dewey: the eArly yeArs At chicAgo

A primary influence on the way that John came to understand educa-tion and develop his theories about education was through his relation-ship with Alice and their children (Dyehouse and Manke 2017, 5). He marveled at the way children experienced their worlds and learned based on what they encountered, and grew increasingly more interested in the issues of child study and elementary education, which had long been of interest to Alice since her own education had led her to study Froebel, an educator and philosopher who had focused on early childhood devel-opment. Through Froebelian pedagogy, Alice learned about the impor-tance of familial connection, play, activities with tools, and imaginative exploration in education; in sum, she acknowledged a pedagogical the-ory centered upon the impulse to create, which she then applied in her own parenting of her and John’s children. She worried, however, at the lack of these features in the typical child’s education, and increasingly drew John into conversations about these concerns. It was Alice who advocated: “We must not underestimate the intelligence of the child—by intelligence meaning his training and whatever power he has acquired in judging and discriminating—in short his experience: for he has expe-rience all his own, and he will not tell you what it is, and no one knows its full nature” (Dewey 1903). For Alice, there was a considerable value in allowing students to be agents in their own education, and in let-ting a curriculum be shaped by creative impulses—that is, by a desire to create.

In November 1894, John echoed these sentiments when he wrote to Alice, “I think sometimes I will drop teaching philosophy directly… and teach it via pedagogy.” He went on to explain:

There is an image of a school growing up in my mind all the time; a school where some actual & literal constructive activity shall be the centre & source of the whole thing, & from which the work should be always growing out in two directions—one the social bearings of that constructive


industry, the other the contact with nature which supplies it with its mate-rials. … This general theorizing is very edifying when our own children can’t get even a poor school to go to….2

As they observed unsatisfactory schooling conditions, the pair began considering how John’s emerging philosophies could be actively applied toward that very problem. Together, they considered a school that would put students in constant contact with the social nature of the issues they encountered and would allow those students to have some amount of agency in their learning in order to facilitate the growth of individuals who would go on to be active participants in their democ-racy. Such a project, in their minds, required a working laboratory school where these ideas could be tested in practice, and they gained support from William Harper, President of the University of Chicago. A little over a year later, Robert Westbrook writes, the Deweys had their school (Westbrook 1992, 402). In The School and Society, John Dewey describes the school as a joint undertaking with Alice, and writes that “the clear and experienced intelligence of my wife is wrought everywhere into its texture” (Dewey 1899, xiii–xiv). While John Dewey traditionally receives credit for the Laboratory School, as Westbrook suggests and John Dewey outright states, Alice was instrumental in bringing the project to fruition, and ownership of the school—and the ideas that drove it—was shared.

The Laboratory School opened in January 1896 with twelve students and two teachers, and by 1901 had grown to house 140 students, 23 teachers, and 10 graduate teaching assistants. The school allowed stu-dents to garden, create in an art studio, build with carpentry and met-alworking, cook meals, and learn about concepts of science, arithmetic, and language in relation to their activities along these areas. For exam-ple, students learned about principles of weight and measurement as they created and altered recipes for lunches. They learned about botany in relation to the gardens that they cultivated each year, and saw social benefit when those who gardened shared what they had grown with those who prepared the meals. Finally, when a recipe was mastered, they learned both literacy and bookbinding in order to fashion a recipe

2 John Dewey to Alice Dewey, November 1, 1895 (00218) The Correspondence of John Dewey (electronic resource) (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999–2004).


book that would hold their creations. In this school, educators took on the role of mentors, and treated the school like a home environment. Students, by turn, learned activities through an “occupational” lens; that is, they learned skills in relation to how those skills were used to create the environment with which the children were familiar.

These activities were all in service of building among students the kind of habits that would imbue in them “the idea of responsibility, of obligation to do something, to produce something, in the world” (Dewey 1899, 7). The occupational curriculum was meant to bring each child into “contact with realities” with the hope that, “with the growth of the child’s mind in power and the knowledge it ceases to be a pleas-ant occupation merely and becomes more and more a medium, and instrument, and organ of understanding—and is thereby transformed” (19–20). Given these motivations, it is easy to see how the pedagogy John and Alice worked together to promote at the Dewey School aligns with current conversations about rhetorical education, which include “any educational program that develops in students a communal and civic identity and articulates for them rhetorical strategies, language practices, and bodily and social behaviors that make possible their participation in communal and civic affairs” (Enoch 2008, 7–8). In all activities, children were focused on working together to learn skills that would allow them to positively impact the “embryonic community” of their classroom, so that they might be better prepared for the responsibilities of a demo-cratic citizen later.

In order to discover the best means to achieve these pragmatic ped-agogical goals, the Laboratory School was largely experimental, and students, instructors, and administrators navigated a constantly chang-ing curriculum that sought, as well as possible, to accommodate each individual and that individual’s relationship with the larger social envi-ronment. This process was meant to demonstrate the revision process inherent to democracy, a process that John Dewey described in The Public and its Problems: “By its very nature, a state is ever something to be scrutinized, investigated, searched for. Almost as soon as its form is stabilized, it needs to be remade” (Dewey 1927, 56). As John Dewey saw it, endeavors in democracies and in the classrooms that educated citi-zens required constant revision in order to be actively applicable.

Such a system meant that students did not follow the traditional pat-terns of learning, which meant that parents often bore anxiety when their children had not learned skills, like literacy, that were seen as compulsory


by a certain age. Teachers and administrators constantly had to defend their policies, even as they revised them from within. In this, Alice took an active role, and provided a defense for the literacy practices that trou-bled so many observers and parents at the Laboratory School:

Parents who are anxious to have their children learn reading and writing before the years mentioned are not urged to place their children in the school unless they are willing to wait for the later results to justify the methods used. The chief aims with children of ten and older, are to cul-tivate a love of good literature, to form a habit of consulting books, and of using them independently as tools - both being points in which those methods of teaching language which lay the emphasis upon facility in deal-ing with symbols only are lamentably defective.3

As the director of language instruction at the Laboratory School, Alice explained in the University Elementary Record the reasoning for intro-ducing literacy at a later point—in order to allow the students to arrive at the use and love of literature through their own experiences with language, rather than having such encounters artificially imposed on them. Further, she straightforwardly stated that parents who would be anxious about these methods should not enroll their children in the school, because it would not meet their expectations—the school would only suit those who were willing to cultivate that spirit of prag-matic open-mindedness. This explanatory statement both outlined the methods of the school regarding literacy and laid out the parameters for participants—namely, that the parents be willing to see the experiment through to its conclusion, and to not enroll in the program unless they believed in its methods. As a rhetor, Alice was keenly aware of her audi-ences, and composed a direct statement of purpose with those groups in mind.

While anxiety still arose around the unconventional methods, through efforts like Alice’s the students at the Laboratory School were largely receptive of the experimental curriculum, and years later, both parents and students reflected positively on their experiences. In gathering mate-rial for The Dewey School, Mayhew and Edwards reached out to parents

3 Article in the 1900 Elementary School record, a nine-part monograph that explained the theory and practice of the Laboratory School, Box 12 Folder 2, Katherine Camp Mayhew Papers (6561), Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library.


and students alike to find out where Laboratory School alumni had ended up. One parent explained that her child was now a lawyer at a firm.4 Another stated:

One of the girls of the class in later years, as part of her entrance require-ments to Bryn Mawr, wrote a paper on this subject of great outstand-ing quality. The head of the Department of Physiography declared: ‘this girl must have been a pupil of Professor Salisbury’s.’ [Professor Salisbury taught at the University of Chicago and lent his support to the Laboratory School by instructing students.] Needless to say, the same teacher made for this pupil an easy way into her department classes.5

One student reflected that there were so many great events at The Dewey School that it was difficult to recall them all.6 Still another for-mer student reflected that, with her own children, she found that in “the problem of preparing them for life I find that my greatest aid on help-ing them is my ‘Dewey School’ background,” explaining that since she was understood by her teachers, she has been able to raise her children under that same premise, in a way that makes it possible for her to “enter into my children’s childhood life with them, and influence not merely through my point of view born of experience but through theirs too.”7 A note at the end of her letter indicates that Mrs. Russell had gone on to open her own Dewey School in California.

Of course, there were students who recognized the problematic nature of the curriculum. Paul McClintock was a perfect example; he did not learn to read until he was fourteen years old, much to the despair of his literary parents. In 1930, McClintock reflected to Mayhew and Edwards:

4 Correspondence from Mrs. C.M. Burns to Katherine Camp Mayhew and Anna Edwards describing her son’s life following The Laboratory School, Box 17 Folder 7, Katherine Camp Mayhew Papers (6561), Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library.

5 Footnote in draft for Chapter 9 of The Dewey School, Box 17 Folder 3, Katherine Camp Mayhew Papers (6561), Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library.

6 Article by Brent Dow Allinson, former student of The Laboratory School, Box 17 Folder 7, Katherine Camp Mayhew Papers (6561), Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library.

7 Correspondence from Helen Greeley Russell to Katherine Camp Mayhew and Anna Edwards, Box 18 Folder 3, Katherine Camp Mayhew Papers (6561), Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library.


“The school as an experiment stopped just before we non-book people came to the point where we wanted to write or read. This was bad for the experiment and was very bad for us” (Mayhew and Edwards 1936, 404). McClintock’s memories at The Dewey School encapsulate the very concerns that led Alice to defend the workings of the experiment, and it is true that he did not learn to read fluently until he was fourteen. Yet it is the nature of his eventual literacy acquisition and its successful results that demonstrate the Laboratory School’s pedagogy in action. At age fourteen, Mayhew and Edwards reported, “an interest in Geology developed, and, of his own initiative, he began to read widely on this sub-ject.” Following his graduation, his parents unveiled, McClintock went on to study at the University of Chicago and went on to join the fac-ulty as a professor in the department of Geology.8 So while McClintock did not necessarily develop an appreciation for the pedagogy of the Laboratory School, his eventual success demonstrates that the ends jus-tified the means. In light of his eventual success as a geology professor at the University of Chicago, Mayhew and Edwards speculated “whether the superior literary quality of his later writing as a geologist might not be due, in some measure at least, to his freedom from coercion in those early years, when pleasure in the use and form of language had not yet dawned on him.”9 Though she had passed before these words were writ-ten, Alice’s rhetoric in these ruminations rings clear.

The success of this school has been argued variously by some who contest that the school was an interesting but ultimately unremarkable experience, others who see inexcusable ethnocentric implications in the curriculum, and still others who see the school as a valuable lesson with still-relevant implications to teaching. Like the experiment itself, Alice’s role in the Laboratory School has received alternating celebration and denunciation, which has led to a relative obfuscation of her full role in the experiment, and by extension her role in John Dewey’s developing theories. Yet in John Dewey’s How We Think, he expresses “fundamen-tal indebtedness” to Alice (Dewey 1910, 83), “by whom the ideas of this book were inspired, and through whose work with the Laboratory

8 Letter from McClintock’s parents, Box 18 Folder 3, Katherine Camp Mayhew Papers (6561), Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library.

9 Footnote in draft of Chapter 19 “Parents and Children” in The Dewey School, Box 17 Folder 11, Katherine Camp Mayhew Papers (6561), Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library.


School, existing in Chicago between 1896 and 1903, the ideas attained such concreteness as comes from embodiment and testing in prac-tice” (Dewey 1910, iv). Similarly, in The Dewey School, Katherine Camp Mayhew and Anna Edwards write, “The school was deeply indebted to Mrs. Alice C. Dewey for her exceptional insight in solving many of its problems” (Dewey 1910, vii). They go on to explain that it was Alice who made sure records of the experiment were maintained, and that she had preserved a large part of the source materials that they used to write their book. Deweyan scholars have also noted that Alice’s influence was a controlling factor in improvement of the Laboratory School, and intro-duced a system of order that it had previously lacked (Lagemann 1996, 176; Nebeker 2002, 16).

When the school opened, Alice was an instructor of literature, Director of the Department of English and Literature, and coordinator of language expression at the school (Mayhew and Edwards 1936, 9). In 1901, she became principal. Assuming this position was particularly dif-ficult, especially since her dedication to the Laboratory School and to its following a truly experimental, organic course combined with her admin-istrative duties meant that she was frequently the face of what could be a frustrating curriculum. These difficulties became particularly pronounced following the increased association and eventual merging with William Parker’s University Elementary School, another elementary school on campus. Alice maintained her position as principal during this time, which meant that she was constantly embroiled in the issues surround-ing this integration, which was already fraught as it had been opposed by both schools and only carried forward out of budgetary necessity.

Some historians have placed blame directly on Alice for the issues associated with the merger. Knoll asserts that teachers both at the Dewey School and the Parker School disliked Alice, and contends that: “Because of her unprofessional conduct and poor management, less because of the issue of nepotism, Alice Dewey faced such powerful opposition, in particular from the former Parker School faculty … that Harper had no other choice than to ask for her resignation as school principal” (Knoll 2014, 455). Biographer Joan K. Smith further contends that Alice and John lacked the personal and administrative skills necessary to make the experiment successful. It is true that Alice Dewey expected nothing less than the best from her teachers (Stack 2009, 30), and to be sure, Alice’s strong-willed demeanor was certainly not typical for a woman of her time. Instead, she was a woman ahead of her time, and her strength of


mind combined with her powers of advocacy would seem far less out of place today. Given the political climate of her own time regarding wom-en’s rights, it is worth considering the extent to which systemized sexism undermined the true nature of Alice’s pragmatic contributions.

Evidence of such inequity can be seen in correspondence regarding the Dewey School. As the plans to merge the Dewey School with the Parker School progressed, John Dewey and Wilbur Jackman, head of the Parker School, exchanged a series of letters regarding the future of their educational endeavors together. In one such letter, Jackman sent over 4000 words to Dewey suggesting revisions to the school on administra-tive levels, organization of the grades, and suggestions for faculty. In this last, Jackman specified that, with regard to the position of principal in this combined school, “I would suggest delaying the appointment until the plan of organization has been decided upon and then I should get a strong man for the place” [emphasis in original].10 With Alice still serv-ing as principal, Jackman’s specificity seems to underscore his disapproval that a woman occupied the position.

It also stands to reason that another gender-related dispute occurring throughout the university shaped the public perception of Alice as prin-cipal. At the time, the university was trying to decide whether to separate the men and women in the junior colleges. John and Alice Dewey were both fervently opposed to the idea, and John expressed:

The fundamental reason for coeducation is that by association in intellec-tual inquiry and discussion men and women become acquainted with each other’s points of view, ideas, and methods of work, and learn mutual sym-pathy and respect; and that such intellectual sympathy and respect is a pro-found factor in the proper social and moral attitude of the sexes to each other… The move will tend to lower the level of instruction of women in the University.11

Both Deweys were perpetual supporters of women’s rights who had seen firsthand how people from both genders could collaborate to better an

10 Wilbur Jackman to John Dewey, June 10, 1902 (01503) The Correspondence of John Dewey (electronic resource) (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999–2004).

11 John Dewey to Alonzo K. Parker, July 25, 1902 (00765) The Correspondence of John Dewey (electronic resource) (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999–2004).


educational setting. Further, they had maintained a co-educational setting at the Laboratory School and insisted that boys and girls be given the same opportunities to learn and experiment. Thus, it also stands to reason that the nature of the gender-related debate at the University of Chicago likely had some impact on the perception of Alice gaining a position of authority in the schools, particularly in light of Jackman’s phrasing.

The correspondence regarding both schools further supports the idea that most of the problems that arose specifically surrounding Alice began following the school’s new and closer quarters with the Parker School at Blaine Hall. To an extent, this discomfort makes sense. Alice was one of the school’s strongest advocates, and as principal, she was also the face of the school’s administrative operations. Not only did that mean that she was tasked with the job of turning John’s complex thinking into pedagogical practice, but it also meant she had to help teachers navigate complications and manage frustrations. Alice acknowledged that the teacher had the problem not only of discerning the best methods of instruction but also of figuring out what the children in the class were to learn from each other in this new environment (Dewey 1903, 278). It was key not to underes-timate the intelligence that the child had gained through experience, and Alice firmly believed that teachers should operate with that understanding in mind despite the practical complications that mentality introduced.

If these parameters were challenging to the teachers at the Laboratory School, who had willingly signed onto the project, it is easy to under-stand the frustration of teachers at the Parker School about continuing these methods. For the Parker School, which enacted progressive ped-agogies but in quite different ways from the Laboratory School, Alice’s position as principal over schools meant a clear preference for one school’s methods and teachers over the other. While Alice remained the principal through 1903, the opposition against her intensified. Teachers who had originated at the Parker School registered their con-cern with Alice’s continued position as principal. One teacher explained how Parker School teachers worried that Alice Dewey would not sup-port them, and that it would be difficult to reconcile the different meth-ods among teachers who had come from both schools.12 Yet that same

12 Anita McCormick Blaine to Whom it May Concern, Report of conversation between Miss Rice, Miss Baber, and Mrs. Blaine, teachers at the Parker School, April 17, 1903 (08087) The Correspondence of John Dewey (electronic resource) (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999–2004).


instructor admitted that she “felt intellectually Mrs. Dewey should lead the school well.” Following the registration of these objections, the faculty of the School of Education unanimously voted to ask Alice to become Editor of the Elementary School Teacher, which she declined in fear that it would cause further tension.

In Spring 1904, the final straw came in the form of a misunderstand-ing about Alice Dewey’s tenure as principal. President Harper claimed he had explained the temporary nature of Alice’s position as principal, but the Deweys did not believe themselves to be informed of that decision. On April 5, 1904, on President Harper’s request, Alice submitted a letter of resignation in which she acknowledged “the satisfaction I have had in sharing in the furtherance of this interesting educational experiment.”13 John’s resignation immediately followed, and thus, the Laboratory School in its original iteration came to an end. The nature of its demise continues to be a topic of debate among Deweyan scholars, and the neg-ative attention that Alice sometimes received obscures the level to which her contributions to the Laboratory School identify her as a pragmatist.

This is particularly true since Alice’s disassociation with the Laboratory School by no means signaled an end to Alice’s staunch support of experiential education, social justice, and equal opportu-nities, as she continued to defend the rights of minorities, particularly by becoming involved with the NAACP. As Larry Hickman explains, Alice’s “involvement in the progressive causes such as securing the vote of women and defending the rights of ethnic minorities had a great influ-ence on John Dewey’s growing awareness of social justice” (Hickman 2009, 5). Dewey biographer Jay Martin reiterates this activism, and once again highlights how Alice is often the catalyst and the vehicle for action:

When John was passionate about some aspect of social justice, Alice was likely to be even more active. No sooner had the NAACP been formed than Alice organized a big meeting of a group of African American women at her house, in an attempt to join with them and to join them to the women’s suffrage movement. Hearing of this, the owner of the building forbade by letter any further integrated meetings in the Dewey apartment. (Martin 2002, 248)

13 Alice Dewey to President Harper, resignation letter, April 5, 1904 (00931) The Correspondence of John Dewey (electronic resource) (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999–2004).


Of course, Alice held the meeting anyway, and her support launched a new dialogue about rights to assemble. Her ability to cultivate open-mindedness in her own environment as she had in the Laboratory School meant that her contributions to women’s suffrage were many, and her involvement gave her new opportunities to engage with people from different cultures and backgrounds. When granted the opportu-nity to expand her efforts to understand others, then, it is not surprising that Alice agreed to venture to Asia with John, a journey that opened her mind to difference in ways that would not have been possible had she remained in the United States.

In 1918, while living in California, Alice and John decided to voyage across the Pacific in order to explore Japan for a few months. When John was invited to lecture in China as a visiting scholar by his former student, Hu Shih (Wang 2007, 3), their stay was extended to a year in Asia. One year ultimately became two, which enabled the Deweys to experience the diverse cultures of two Asian countries far more comprehensively than if they had been tourists on a temporary visit.

Prior to experiencing life as a foreigner in Japan and China, John had dedicated much of his early twentieth-century writings to advocating open-mindedness as a critical value for education—an idea which had been proven valuable through his experiences with Alice and with the Laboratory School. Rather than a passive kind of tolerance that is acquired through intellectual consideration alone, he recommended open-mind-edness that is attained through a combination of contemplation and embodied experience. The profound impact that experiencing the unfamil-iar cultures of Japan and China had on his understanding of difference compared to considering them from afar is apparent in his personal corre-spondence sent to friends, colleagues, and family members in the United States between 1919 and 1921, while he was living in Asia. Although some attention has been given to the concept of open- mindedness in John’s personal correspondence from Japan and China (see Shea 2016), there has been far less regard for Alice’s correspondence dur-ing the same time, particularly her letters related to the ways in which a pragmatic rather than merely contemplative approach to cultural aware-ness led to her deeper understanding of otherness. Like John, Alice wrote several letters to the Dewey children in which she recounted experienc-ing the language, food, and ways of thinking in Japan and China, with an added emphasis on what it meant to appreciate nature, enjoy food, and be a woman there. Alice’s letters, then, not only support John’s idea


that open-mindedness results from experiencing other cultures, but also expand the breadth of topics that John addresses in his own letters and publications.

Alice’s correspondence reflects the ways in which her firsthand experi-ence of the local cultures contributed to her understanding and appreci-ation of how her own ideas, actions, habits, and behaviors compared to those of the people of Japan and China. A close examination of Alice’s rhetoric in these letters leaves little doubt that her experiences in Asia reconfirmed and arguably expanded her pragmatic beliefs in the bene-fits of experience that she had actualized at the Laboratory School, as she came to understand the ways in which immersion in unfamiliar sur-roundings opens the eyes, the mind, and the body to a deeper under-standing and appreciation of difference. Alice’s insights regarding the new cultures, in turn, arguably influenced John’s contemplation of prag-matism during this time, as they traveled and engaged in philosophical and educational endeavors side-by-side in Asia.

Years prior to the Deweys’ journey to Asia, pragmatist William James promoted “directly, personally feeling” other people’s experiences “as they feel” them as opposed to merely contemplating, imagining, or read-ing about them in order to understand otherness. In other words, James asserted that consideration alone does not lead to consummate under-standing, since “philosophers are dealing in shades, while those who live and feel know truth” (James 1995, 12). He disagreed with philos-ophers who sought to find “the truth” or “the way” to live a productive life, asking what difference it would make “if this world-formula or that world-formula be the true one” (James 1995, 20). While living in Japan and China and subsequently experiencing diverse physical and mental realities of eating, sleeping, communicating, and interacting with people and nature, Alice lives James’s words by experiencing otherness and cul-tivating an openness to these new perspectives through that exposure. While Alice had encouraged that experience at the Laboratory School, her time in Asia allows her to immerse herself in otherness to truly test the limits of her open-mindedness.

At first, Alice is shocked and disgusted by some of the cultural habits of the Japanese. Appalled by the sight of the black teeth of the geisha, for example, she writes to the Dewey children, “The teeth of these [little] girls are so bad that I asked if they blackened them … when they smile as they do a great deal their [mouths] are ugly black holes in their painted faces.” Alice is also critical of the smell of Japanese women, noting in


the same letter, “One thing about the J woman I can never get used to … the thing I cannot like is the odor she spreads. The grease on her hair always gives out a stale odor and then the perfume of the powder and perfumery mixes with that rather than for a blend to shock you into wondering what she is trying to cover up.” Alice is equally disturbed by the slurping sounds made by Japanese men while eating, and she com-plains, “The Japanese have the worst [table manners] in the world.”14

Perhaps the most significant cultural difference that Alice experiences in Japan and China, and one that she cannot accept even after two years, is the attitude toward women. A strong woman who has raised strong daughters, Alice emphasizes in her letters her frustration as a woman and for all women in Japan and China. She notes, for example, that speaking Japanese is “impossible” for a foreign woman since Japanese language books are tailored to men. As she explains to her children, “The way given in the phrases of the guide book is the way the man speaks,” an injustice of which she is constantly reminded when she is corrected by the Japanese women who find her “male speak” quite amusing. She con-tinues, “So when I stammer off those phrases the girls are literally tickled to death. When they tell me what I ought to say in the more elaborated polite way of the women, then I am floored.” In the same letter, she describes how men and women are separated into two different rooms at typical dinner parties, “the men all seated and smoking in one, and the women in the other.”15 Later, when she and John visit a shrine, they learn that ladies could not enter without “visiting dresses,” a surprisingly discriminatory experience that John relays in a letter to the Dewey chil-dren.16 In Japan, Alice learns that women are legally prohibited from “taking any part in politics,”17 and in China, she dines with John and

14 Alice Dewey to Dewey children, April 27, 1919 (03893) The Correspondence of John Dewey (electronic resource) (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999–2004).

15 Alice Dewey to Dewey children, March 14, 1919 (10743) The Correspondence of John Dewey (electronic resource) (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999–2004).

16 John Dewey to Dewey children, April 12, 1919 (10749) The Correspondence of John Dewey (electronic resource) (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999–2004).



their male host at a dinner party while the man’s wife remains in the kitchen for the duration of the meal. While Alice has played major roles both at home and in the workplace, she describes with dismay women in China who are constantly “plodding to keep up with the house work and sewing with no stimulation from without.”18 She notes that women are segregated at public gatherings and in theaters.19 After attending a wedding, she reports that “none of the men spoke to the women.”20 Although these firsthand experiences open Alice’s mind to difference, she never accepts the gender inequality that she witnesses in Asia, even though she is forced to acknowledge its social primacy. Although John may have noticed this discrimination even if he had traveled to Asia alone, Alice’s direct experiences as a woman expose John to experiences that he may not have had without her.

Alice is particularly appalled by the gender inequality in Japanese and Chinese schools, describing to the Dewey children the rare and mainly unsupported efforts to raise funds to educate girls “that make you want to sell your earrings.”21 In a letter to her daughter Evelyn, Alice calls the supposed efforts of the Chinese government to foster democratic educa-tion “a farce,” and claims that the “authorities” are satisfied by minimal efforts to promote education for women. She asserts that “to teach dem-ocratic education to men only is a false representation of democracy,” and in frustration concludes, “I for my own part shall refuse to have any part in it.”22 Not long after filling this letter with anti-government rhet-oric in the face of such discrimination, she reports in another letter to

18 Alice Dewey to Dewey children, May 3, 4, 1919 (03899) The Correspondence of John Dewey (electronic resource) (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999–2004).

19 Alice Dewey to Dewey children, June 7, 1919 (10762) The Correspondence of John Dewey (electronic resource) (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999–2004).

20 Alice Dewey to Dewey children, June 25, 1919 (10766) The Correspondence of John Dewey (electronic resource) (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999–2004).


22 Alice Dewey to Evelyn Dewey, May 26, 1919 (03906) The Correspondence of John Dewey (electronic resource) (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999–2004).


her children that a girls’ “Normal School” has been established. Rather than citing this as a victory for girls, however, she sarcastically highlights the fact that the principal assigned to oversee the school is “thin in h[i]s body as in his mind,” and that those in charge of reluctantly establish-ing a school for girls have simply found “a convenient place to unload an antiquated official who really [can’t] be endured any longer by real folks.”23 Alice’s steadfast promotion of gender-equal education at the Laboratory School and in the University of Chicago’s junior colleges clearly laid the foundation for her frustration, which was undoubtedly expressed to John in person as it was to their children in these letters. John’s decades-long philosophical consideration of just about any topic in his published works prior to 1920 implies that when Alice vented her frustration, he not only paid attention but was deeply influenced by her perspective on their experiences in Asia.

Alice’s experiences in Asia as a foreign woman exemplify the kind of immersion that William James describes when he compares water to reality and air to abstraction, noting that experience results from immer-sion in the water (James 1995, 49). Submersion in the new environment understandably causes preliminary shock, but in time, Alice begins to appreciate the beauty and other-worldliness surrounding her. New visual and physical experiences gradually convince Alice that reality is relative, and her stay in Asia supports William James’s suggestion that the uni-verse be considered a “pluriverse” (Menand 88) and that truth must constantly be reevaluated (James 1995, 27). Likewise, immersion in the Asian cultures leads Alice to reconsider her own culturally determined definitions of “beautiful,” “clean,” “delicious,” “respectful,” “uncom-fortable,” and “fair,” and confirms the futility of a dogmatic belief in one truth and one reality, just as William James did when he called for a world in which individual differences are respected, “in which the eaches form an All and the All a One that logically presupposes, co-implicates, and secures each each without exception” (Menand 2001, 102).

In her correspondence to the Dewey children, Alice describes with awe and envy the ability of the rickshaw drivers to tolerate without com-plaint what she perceives to be unbearable discomfort. Even experiencing

23 Alice Dewey to the Dewey children, June 1, 5, 1919 (03907) The Correspondence of John Dewey (electronic resource) (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999–2004).


the oppressive heat as a passenger encourages her contemplation of the fortitude of the drivers. In a letter to her children, she explains, “The ricksha men … run all day through the mud and snow and wet in these things made of cotton cloth that are neither stockings nor shoes but both, and they stand about or sit on steps and wait, and yet they get through the day alive.”24 Bumping her way as an overheated passen-ger through the streets of Japan on rickshaws aroused in Alice a level of empathy that would arguably have been impossible to attain by read-ing guidebooks. Alice’s concerned and awed rhetoric for the drivers demonstrates her continued attempts to inhabit the perspectives of those around her, which undeniably affects John’s interpretation of the experi-ence as well.

The pins and needles that accompany her and John’s attempts to sit on the floor in the Japanese “seiza,” or “correct sitting,” style serves as another reminder that they are not accustomed to the physical stress that the Japanese seemingly endure with ease. When Alice and John try to sit on the floor with their backs straight, legs bent, shins abutting the floor, and buttocks resting on their ankles, they realize that even the sim-ple act of sitting is culturally defined. While Alice is able to sit “seiza” at least for a short time, John soon welcomes the opportunity to sit in a chair. Considering their age at the time, neither Alice’s discomfort nor John’s inability to sit in the traditional Japanese style is surprising, and Alice pokes fun at herself and John in a letter to their children, writing, “One of the amusements of the Japanese is seeing the foreign visitors try to sit, and you can’t wonder they are amused. I can manage it, in awk-ward fashion, but your father can’t even bend for the pose … Getting up properly is the hardest part.”25 Alice’s good-humored rhetoric regarding this issue further diffuses the awkwardness of difference and physical dis-comfort, showing the good nature with which it is possible to respond in new and different situations. Her reactions, in turn, may have led John to write about experience more explicitly in his post-1920 publica-tions than he had prior to their stay in Asia. In the 1910 publication of

24 Alice Dewey to the Dewey children, February 10, 1919 (10735) The Correspondence of John Dewey (electronic resource) (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999–2004).

25 Alice Dewey to the Dewey children, March 4, 1919 (10740) The Correspondence of John Dewey (electronic resource) (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999–2004).


How We Think, for example, John calls for “conclusions that are prop-erly grounded” (Dewey 1910, 202) but stops short of explicit references to the importance of firsthand experience. In the revised 1933 edition of How We Think, in contrast, he asserts, “No one can think about everything, to be sure; no one can think about anything without expe-rience and information about it” (Dewey 1933, 139). Although John delivered the message regarding the importance of experience in the attainment of open-mindedness in his post-1920 publications, his ideas were supported, reinforced, and expanded by Alice.

While Alice struggles to embrace some of the cultural differences that she experiences in Asia, she is envious of others, particularly the polite-ness and respect expressed toward foreigners in Japan. In a letter to the Dewey children, she describes a typical scene: “This morning a man came out of a curio shop. Bow. ‘Exguse me, madame, is this not Mrs. Daway? … Will you not come in and look at our many curios? I shall have the pleasure of bringing them to your hotel’ … Bow. ‘No, please do not bring them to my room, for I am always out. I will come in and see them sometime.’ ‘Thank you, madame, please do so, madame …’ Bow. ‘Good-morning, madame.’”26 A few days later, John explains their warm reception upon returning home, writing to the Dewey children, “There were five maids bowing and smiling to get our slippers and hang up our hats,” and that “just going in or out is like going to a picnic.”27

Alice and John are similarly impressed by the hospitality of the Chinese people, describing a time when they were lost in Shanghai: “First we got to the wrong hotel and there while we were waiting they gave us tea. We were struck by the fact that they asked for noth-ing when we [left] and thanked us for coming to the wrong place.”28 Likewise, trying to utter Japanese or Chinese words and phrases leaves Alice feeling thankful for the patient kindness of the locals. In Japan, for


27 John Dewey to the Dewey children, February 22, 1919 (03877) The Correspondence of John Dewey (electronic resource) (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999–2004).

28 John and Alice Dewey to the Dewey children, May 1, 1919 (03898) The Correspondence of John Dewey (electronic resource) (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999–2004).


example, even her most pathetic attempts to practice guidebook phrases are received with warm encouragement. This, she writes in a letter to the Dewey children, is quite unlike the attitude toward foreigners in the United States. “One thing no one expects is for a foreigner to know a word of Japanese. Therefore, when you pop out an awkward word or two, you are applauded by laughter and compliments on your good pronunciation.”29

Although Alice at first relays these stories to her children as quaint, humorous anecdotes, her rhetoric later takes on a more pensive tone as she realizes the fundamental significance of respect in Japan. As Alice explains in a letter to the Dewey children, “The Japanese do one thing that we should do well to imitate. They teach their children in school a very nice lesson about the beauty and the responsibility of being polite and kind to the foreigner, like being so to the guests of your own house. This adds to the national dignity.”30 As an elementary school teacher and mother, Alice was arguably more deeply impressed by this cultural ten-dency than John, which may have influenced both his experience of the new culture as well as his later writing on these topics.

In time, Alice and John feel a shift in their own perceptions of val-uable cultural attributes, commenting that they may be unrecogniza-ble when they come home, or intolerant of the lack of the same level of politeness in their own culture. John writes to the Dewey children, “The fact is that politeness is so universal here that when we get back we shall either be so civil that you [won’t] know us, or else we shall be so irri-tated that nobody is sufficiently civil that you [won’t] know us either.”31 Likewise, Alice’s letters imply that she will return to the United States having attained new expectations regarding cleanliness. In a letter to the Dewey children, for example, she describes a restaurant as “cleaner than

29 Alice Dewey to the Dewey children, April 19, 1919 (10752) The Correspondence of John Dewey (electronic resource) (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999–2004).


31 John Dewey to the Dewey children, February 22, 1919 (03877) The Correspondence of John Dewey (electronic resource) (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999–2004).


any American one, even the best.”32 In another, she praises the Japanese for leaving their shoes at the door to keep their homes, schools, and other buildings tidy, concluding, “Truly, the Japanese are a cleaner peo-ple than we are.” In the same letter, she compliments the Japanese for their reverence toward the “o-furo,” or “honorable bathtub,” a sacred part of the bathing ritual of the Japanese. She writes, “Have I told you we bathe in a Japanese tub? Every night a hot, very hot wooden box over three feet deep is filled for us … It seems all right and I regret all the years our country went without bath tubs.”33 By exchanging her shoes for slippers upon entering any building and soaking in the Japanese o-furo, Alice feels rather than only imagines a new definition of “clean.” Even after dedicating much of their personal and professional lives to experiential education at the Chicago Laboratory School, both Alice and John further comprehend the emotional and physical impact of experi-ence by living in Japan and China; their conversations surrounding such experience undoubtedly influenced John’s later philosophical works, in which his earlier beliefs about the importance of experience become firm convictions regarding the necessity of experience in understanding difference.

Alice’s correspondence reveals a more contemplative approach to their experiences of nature and art than John’s letters do; in a letter to the Dewey children, for example, Alice describes the “wonderful temples of enormous size, of natural wood filled with paintings and sculptures of an ancient and unknown kind … a combination of nature and art as one dreams of” and temples that “fascinate to the point of feeling there must be many more worlds when such multiplicity of ideas and feelings can exist on a single planet, and we live unconscious of the whole of it or even any part of its extent.” And while at first, she cannot see the beauty of the popular screens in Japan, after some time, her descriptions begin to shift, as she reveals in a letter to the Dewey children, “The kakemonas and the screens and the makemonas … are wonderful and I am glad to say that we have got over seeing them as grotesque and we feel their




beauty.”34 Alice also describes Japanese lanterns as “impressive beyond anything I had imagined” and the cups and kimonos of the traditional Japanese tea ceremony as “even more [wonderfully] interesting than we anticipated.”35 She revels in the artistic presentation of the food, con-cluding, “Every dish is a work of art in its arrangement.”36 In the same letter, she tries to relay the “magical appearance” of the fields and “sharp precipices leading up from the water” that she observes while on the Kumano Maru, headed for China. Appreciating the value of experience over words, she writes to her children, “Come and see the Inland sea sometime. It is worth a trip across the world.”37

Gradually, Alice realizes the truth in William James’s pragmatism, as she comes to understand that being “other” is simply a matter of per-spective. She hones in on the important moment in the acculturation process when she realizes that being “foreign” is relative, explaining, “We are as much curiosities to them as they are to us, though we live where the most foreigners go. Now on top of it all we can no more make a car driver understand where we want to go than if we were monkeys. We can’t find any names on the streets, we can’t read a sign except the few that are in English.”38 Although she and John had experienced life as foreigners in other countries, they had never experienced being illiterate foreigners before finding themselves surrounded by logographs rather than Roman letters in both Japan and China.

While in Asia, Alice reconsiders the rules of society, ultimately real-izing that the effectiveness of an operating system for each culture is

35 Alice Dewey to Dewey children, February 11, 1919 (13873) The Correspondence of John Dewey (electronic resource) (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999–2004).



38 Alice Dewey to Dewey children, February 10, 1919 (10735) The Correspondence of John Dewey (electronic resource) (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999–2004).



relative. Although Alice’s letters continue to convey frustration regarding the educational inequality for girls, she is gradually able to find the local food delicious, the art beautiful, the respectful attitude toward others commendable, and the cleanliness of the people enviable. As a result of living as a foreigner in Asia, in other words, Alice realizes that the operat-ing systems of societies determine beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors.

Ultimately, living in Japan and China as a foreigner reconfirms and enhances Alice’s notions about the significant role of experience in the attainment of knowledge and open-mindedness. In Japan and China, exploring the culture with her body rather than only with her mind enables her to viscerally experience otherness. Her experiences, at best humorous and at worst painful, are constant reminders of the differ-ences between her cultural expectations and those of the people of Japan and China. In a letter to a family friend, Alice summarizes her profound awareness of the significance of experience in the attainment of open-ness toward difference, explaining that her experience in Asia “is thrill-ing and reconstructive and revolutionary and reorganizing” and that it has taught her to “realize that after all everything is experience, expe-rience we are feeling for in the newer world. Having that new world become remote, and this the real one, knowing the ‘dead past’ is not past at all, but simply the base on which we are resting our air castles, moving not so much in space as in time, having a ricsha man pull you two thousand years into that past in half an hour … one can go on indef-initely.”39 Although Alice admired some of the unfamiliar cultural hab-its and rejected others, the years that she spent in Asia, similar to the years that she spent at the Chicago Laboratory School, signified for her the sweet spot of pragmatism, where the impact of experience leads the mind to profound understanding and an ability to conceive of pluralities. Through personal anecdotes relayed primarily to the Dewey children in her correspondence from Asia, as well as her shifting rhetoric from disap-proving references to cultural peculiarities as “grotesque” to complimen-tary acclamations of differences as “wonderful” and “impressive,” Alice repeatedly validates John’s belief that open-mindedness is something more than “empty-mindedness,” and that pragmatism is a philosophy that ultimately leads to intercultural understanding.

39 Alice Dewey to Albert C. Barnes, August 19, 1920 (04099) The Correspondence of John Dewey (electronic resource) (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999–2004).


incorPorAting Alice into the cAnon

Though John Dewey has been credited for his philosophical analyses of the importance of experience in education and in the attainment of open-mindedness, a closer look at his partnership with Alice while at the Chicago Laboratory School as well as in Asia reveals the undenia-bly significant role that Alice played in catalyzing his contemplations, and in particular those which have had the greatest resonance in the field of rhetoric. As Alice directed affairs at the Laboratory School and experi-enced life as a woman in Japan and China, she affirmed the pragmatic ideas that John had been developing for years, and demonstrated a per-spective rooted in the context of practice. Taken together, these exam-ples demonstrate how Alice’s lived experiences helped to shape John’s philosophies in ways that continue to align with rhetoric, communica-tion, and political action.

In the Laboratory School, Alice orchestrated the activities that allowed John to hone his pedagogic philosophies. Through her work as adminis-trator, principal, teacher, archivist, and advocate of the school, Alice had the immense task of translating John’s complex philosophy into daily prac-tice, and of cultivating an open-mindedness in her faculty, her students and herself that would allow such an experiment to succeed. Over the course of seven years, Alice demonstrated constant willingness to try new ideas and pedagogies that focused on preparing students more directly for the world in which they would find themselves. Her rotating list of administrative duties demonstrated not only her dedication to this prag-matic endeavor, but also her abilities as a communicator. Through her straightforward rhetoric and her keen sense of audience, Alice defended an often misunderstood program by explaining the methodology in a way that would speak to the families who would be most willing to try it out, as well as deter those who would be least open-minded to the new, occu-pation-based pedagogy. Alice articulated the need to attend to each child’s past and future, and to use the former to help each individual develop agency in the latter. It was her instruction that propelled language and lit-erature education at the Laboratory School. All told, there is no part of this school, which so greatly influenced Dewey’s thinking about the con-nections among education, writing, communication, and democracy, that Alice did not touch. Through her work as an administrator and educa-tor, she made significant contributions to a project that is characteristic of pragmatism, and which today is emblematic of rhetorical education.


In later years, Alice continued not only to validate but also to expand the scope of John’s confidence in pragmatism as a guiding philosophy while they experienced life as foreigners in Asia for two years. In Asia, as with the Laboratory School, Alice and John revised and rebuilt their expectations about otherness, this time by immersing themselves into a new and sometimes uncomfortable setting. Unlike John, Alice expe-rienced Japan and China as a woman, mother, and elementary school teacher, which arguably encouraged John to consider both the treatment of women and the education of children in new ways, and bolstered the open-mindedness of his pragmatism. Their extensive correspondence with their children during this time period demonstrates the rhetorical strategies by which Alice relays her various experiences to her husband, and John’s later works reveal the extent to which these communications had an impact on his thinking.

As various historians, friends and associates, and even the Deweys’ own children have pointed out, Alice perpetually drew her husband out of his own mind and into the world around him. She was a driving force that helped him to realize that merely considering great concepts does not lead to greater awareness of those concepts. Actually creating, inventing, exploring, and experiencing them, on the other hand, results in the kind of openness of mind that fosters understanding of otherness and advances social issues. Under this interpretation, it is clear that Alice demonstrated the workings of a consummate pragmatist whose efforts at home and abroad should not be overlooked. Her efforts to realize gender-equal, experiential education by co-creating the University of Chicago Laboratory School, combined with her suffrage work and personal experiences in the face of genuine difference in Asia, opened countless minds, including John’s, to the epistemic nature of experience. Through her time in Chicago, Japan, and China, Alice proved herself to be the practitioner of John’s theories about education and open- mindedness. Throughout their lives together, John and Alice came not only to know, but more importantly to feel, that pragmatism is a philosophy that makes things happen.

Although Alice did not receive the credit that she deserved in con-tributing to John’s philosophical insights and contemplations, he himself must have been aware of the influence that she had on his conclusions regarding the power of pragmatism to help members of a society attain knowledge and openness of mind. As John writes in The Public and Its Problems, “Nothing has been discovered which acts in entire isolation.


The action of everything is along with the action of other things” (Dewey 1927, 250). Reflections like this lead us to consider: would John’s actions have changed had he not experienced the lab school and Asia with Alice? Of course, we can never know the answers to hypo-thetical alternate histories, but Alice’s actions and words, as well as the observations of those close to the Deweys, lend credence to the con-clusion that Alice should be lauded as an influential pragmatist due to her invaluable, influential, and constant contributions to John’s prag-matic convictions. She had no publications on the philosophical tradi-tion of pragmatism, and in fact little of her writing remains except for correspondence. Nonetheless, she did what a true pragmatist should do, which is to live the philosophy, and by so doing, has earned a spot wor-thy of attention among the great pragmatists in the canon. Her efforts, just like John Dewey’s, can contribute to our understanding of the inter-sections between pragmatism, communication, and active citizenship.

references

Dewey, Alice. 1903. “The Place of the Kindergarten.” The Elementary School Teacher 3 (5): 273–288.

Dewey, John. 1899. The School and Society. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

———. 1910. How We Think. Boston: D.C. Heath & Co.———. 1927. The Public and Its Problems. New York: H. Holt and Company.Durst, Anne. 2010. Women Educators in the Progressive Era: The Women Behind

Dewey’s Laboratory School. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.Dyehouse Jeremiah, and Krysten Manke. 2017. “The Philosopher as Parent:

John Dewey’s Observations of His Children’s Language Development and the Development of His Thinking About Communication.” Education and Culture 33 (1): 3–22.

Enoch, Jessica. 2008. Refiguring Rhetorical Education: Women Teaching African American, Native American, and Chicano/a Students, 1865–1911. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

Hickman, Larry A. 2009. John Dewey Between Pragmatism and Constructivism. New York: Fordham University.

James, William. 1995. Pragmatism. New York: Dover Publications.Katherine Camp Mayhew Papers, #6561. Division of Rare and Manuscript

Collections, Cornell University Library.Knoll, Michael. 2014. “Laboratory School, University of Chicago.” In

Encyclopedia of Educational Theory and Philosophy, edited by D. C. Phillips, 455–458. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.


Lagemann, Ellen Condliffe. 1996. “Experimenting with Education: John Dewey and Ella Flagg Young at the University of Chicago.” American Journal of Education 104 (3): 171–185.

Martin, Jay. 2002. The Education of John Dewey: A Biography. New York: Columbia University Press.

Mayhew, Katherine Camp, and Anna Camp Edwards. 1936. The Dewey School: The Laboratory School of the University of Chicago 1896–1903. New York: D. Appleton-Century Company, Inc.

Menand, Louis. 2001. The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Nebeker, Melia L. 2002. “The Teacher and Society: John Dewey and the Experience of Teachers.” Education and Culture 18 (2): 14–20.

Rockefeller, Steven C. 1991. John Dewey: Religious Faith and Democratic Humanism. New York: Columbia University Press.

Shea, Karen Pierce. 2016. “John Dewey’s Letters from Asia: Implications for Redefining ‘Openness’ in Rhetoric and Composition”. Dissertations and Master’s Theses (Campus Access). Paper AAI10240649. http://digitalcom-mons.uri.edu/dissertations/AAI10240649.

Stack Jr., Sam F. 2009. “Alice Chipman Dewey: Still a Mystery?” Journal of Philosophy and History of Education 59: 29–38.

“The Correspondence of John Dewey, 1871–1952” (I–IV). Electronic Edition. Past Masters. Intelex Corporation, n.d. Web. 30 December 2017.

Wang, Jessica Ching-Sze. 2007. John Dewey in China: To Teach and to Learn. New York: State University of New York Press.

Westbrook, Robert B. 1992. “Schools for Industrial Democrats: Social Origins of John Dewey’s Philosophy Education.” American Journal of Education 100 (3, August): 401–419.

Whipps, Judy, and Danielle Lake. 2017. “Pragmatist Feminism.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/femapproach-pragmatism/.

http://digitalcommons.uri.edu/dissertations/AAI10240649

http://digitalcommons.uri.edu/dissertations/AAI10240649

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/femapproach-pragmatism/

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/femapproach-pragmatism/

157

CHAPTER 7

The Accidental Pragmatist: Jonathan Haidt’s Moral Psychology as Pragmatic

Popular Science

Jeremy Smyczek

In The Public and Its Problems, John Dewey famously writes, “The essential need, in other words, is the improvement of the methods and conditions of debate, discussion, and persuasion. That is the problem of the public. We have asserted that this improvement depends essentially on freeing and per-fecting the processes of inquiry and the dissemination of their conclusions” (1927 [1954], 208). In the passage, Dewey neatly combines a number of his central and always-interrelated concerns: communication, deliberation, logic, science, and education. Successful communication is enabled by bet-ter information, the product of good-faith inquiry into the problems that arise in human experience. Read thus, two of Dewey’s seemingly contra-dictory impulses—a lionization of democracy and communication and an ostensible affection for technocracy—become expressions of appreciation for problem-solving endeavors springing from a common origin in the experience of humans dealing with uncertainty. William Keith and Robert Danisch (2014) explain that Dewey used the term “science” to mean both “the professional practices of those who pursue knowledge, not for its own


J. Smyczek (*) St. Bonaventure University, Allegany, NY, USAe-mail: [email protected]

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14343-5_7


158 J. SMYCZEK

sake but as a professional occupation” as well as “the cultural understand-ing of a variety of practices having a strong family resemblance to the pro-fessional science and its epistemology” (35). They write that for Dewey, “both kinds of science are most beneficial when used in response to every-day, social, or rhetorical situations and become knowledge by virtue of their communication and practical action, not their reflection of some objective reality” (42). They add that “Dewey sought a sociology of rhetoric that cultivated community-based inquiry and participation. He believed that this was essential to the improvement of American democracy and that it required specific forms of communication. He also believed that scientific thinking was a model for this form of inquiry and could therefore serve as an important resource for building a better democratic culture” (44). If we follow Dewey in recognizing the common roots of democratic public deliberation and scientific inquiry and then follow the Keith and Danisch contention that Dewey “was committed to a belief in the meliorism of sci-entific work if it emerged from a democratic society,” we might then ask a practical question: what does scientific work that speaks to the shared problems of public communication, democratic participation, and scientific inquiry look like? What are working examples of the kinds of texts pro-duced by a pragmatist rhetoric of science?

To that end, we would likely look for science communication that both extols the virtues of the scientific method and yet recognizes the responsibility of the sciences to be ethical participants in a broadly construed democracy—communication that shares Dewey’s view of science as inquiry meant to enrich experience. To find such a scientific– democratic intervention, we might look at science communication that is meliorative—that seeks to better a situation by reaching a broader audi-ence than a disciplinary or professional community of other scientists. As Paul Stob (2013) has argued, early pragmatist thinking was dispropor-tionately well-received by nonacademic publics due to William James’ willingness to lecture popularly. In other words, we would be looking for popular science outreach efforts which are presently so abundant across both traditional and new media.

Second, we might hope that the science communication in question would in practice recognize that knowledge emerges from situational contexts and is essentially a practical affair rather than a collection of for-mal propositions, the opposite of science outreach based in contempo-rary forms of rationalism. Dewey describes this empirical sense when he writes:

7 THE ACCIDENTAL PRAGMATIST: JONATHAN HAIDT’S MORAL … 159

The commonsense world includes, to be sure, perceived objects, but these are understood only in the context of an environment. An environment is constituted by the interactions between things and a living creature. It is primarily the scene of actions performed and of consequences undergone in the processes of interaction; only secondarily to parts and aspects of it become objects of knowledge. (1938 [1949], 150)

Likewise, Dewey was doubtful about efforts to “prove” anything via for-mal logical propositions divorced from the empirical content of a specific unresolved situation. Use of such theory “is formal only in the sense of being empty and mechanical. It neither reflects existence already known nor forwards inquiry into what may be known. It is a logical vermiform appendix” (198). Yet because so much science outreach proceeds from rationalist models of persuasion that appeal to objective universals of rea-son and argument, it is apparent that Deweyan pragmatism is in short supply in this genre of published writing. In looking for pragmatist sci-ence outreach, we would look for writing that minimizes or eschews such strategies.

Nevertheless, I will propose that there is science outreach that oper-ates upon pragmatic rather than rationalist principles, and as an exam-ple, I offer selections from the work of the moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt as examples of such outreach. Haidt both models science com-munication that is both pragmatic in the general sense of being effec-tive but also in the historically specific sense that Haidt is consciously applying the work of William James. Based on his opposition to naive realism, philosophical monism, and rationalism, his assiduous emphasis on living beings negotiating a world of sense and meaning, his interest in elevated, “peak,” experiences, and his generally unnoticed citations of James (James is quoted at length in Haidt’s major works and on occa-sion echoes James’ language), I want to situate Haidt’s writings within the extended philosophical context of American pragmatism. Finally, I suggest that by looking for pragmatists outside of the traditional lines of transmission within philosophy departments, we may help to ameliorate debates about the extent to which pragmatism goes into periodic eclipse. My claim, though, is somewhat heterodox: although Haidt cites James but not Dewey, he uses science to provide practical tools for everyday living and to promote improved democratic deliberation in the service of Dewey’s democratic and melioristic project. I will first introduce Haidt’s work and contextualize my claim that Haidt should be considered a

160 J. SMYCZEK

pragmatist by examining other arguments for inclusion in, and exclu-sion from, the pragmatist canon. I will then review four pieces of Haidt’s published work and specifically chart his rejection of scientific rational-ism and universalism and his use of James. Finally I will suggest ways in which this distinction might be productive for future scholarship.

hAidt As A PrAgmAtist

The undergrad-philosophy-major-cum-moral-psychologist Jonathan Haidt has become, in recent years, a polarizing figure in the culture wars through his work with the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), the politically centrist campus free-speech organiza-tion opposed to what it sees as creeping censorship practices in higher education. His 2015 co-authored Atlantic piece with FIRE president and attorney Greg Lukianoff (2015), “The Coddling of the American Mind,” in particular drew criticism for its opposition to safe spaces, trig-ger warnings, and campus speech restrictions favored principally by the American left (Jensen 2016; Hanlon 2015; Sleeper 2016). Haidt has also drawn both acclaim and controversy for his popular scientific works such as The Happiness Hypothesis and The Righteous Mind, which address the role of religion, politics, and group affiliation in human identity, con-flict, and happiness (Haidt 2006, 2012). Ironically, positive (Berg 2012) and negative (Fromm 2013) responses have largely centered around the same contentions: Haidt rejects monist foundational views of both ethics and epistemology, instead contending that humans define what is ethical and true using plural and sometimes radically different crite-ria (that frequently align with one’s political and religious identifica-tion), and, as controversially, Haidt’s “social intuitionist” ethical model significantly diminishes the causally prior role of moral reasoning in eth-ical decision-making. Downplaying universal rationales and logical rea-soning, Haidt sketches a moral theory in which empirical observations about ethics are tools for better living—“moral thinking is for social doing” is how he puts it (2012, 323)—rather than metaethical means for understanding a single foundational essence of good. His views stand in opposition to claims about the objectivity and universality of science—as well as its role in determining what is right—commonly encountered in other recent popular science books addressing morality, such as Sam Harris’ 2010 The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values, a book Haidt specifically refutes in his later work. Looking at


Haidt’s work as a form of melioristic science outreach that is also explic-itly invested in public deliberation, this essay argues for a novel reading of Haidt’s oeuvre: Jonathan Haidt as modern pragmatist.

A pragmatist (or at least pragmatic) response to this proposed expan-sion of the canon might be: what’s in a name? What are the beneficial effects of such a declaration? Often, the answer seems likely to be “very little of interest,” and yet the issue of defining who is and is not a prag-matist has carried on since the putative founder of this functionalist phil-osophical school, C.S. Peirce, renamed his thinking “pragmaticism” to distance it from the pragmatism of William James. Defining the narrower concerns of the former, Peirce (1905) defined its content thus: “The entire intellectual purport of any symbol consists in the total of all gen-eral modes of rational conduct which, conditionally upon all the possible different circumstances and desires, would ensue upon the acceptance of the symbol” (481). Much more recently, Stanley Cavell, arguing in 1998 against the inclusion of Emerson in the pragmatist canon, tersely asserted that “sometimes labels should be struggled over” (72). Generally, though, what is the cash value of a label? What work does it enable or advance to include an individual in a movement, especially if the individ-ual has never claimed the label or sought the distinction, as is the case with Emerson, who died 16 years before William James could give this burgeoning functionalist philosophical school a name, or in the case of Haidt? When should canons extend labels to recover existing thinkers and when should they use them recruit them? Specifically, how should we define a pragmatist?

The philosopher John Shook takes a genealogical approach, trac-ing a detailed institutional history through which pragmatism is passed across geographic and generational divides by students of the original Cambridge Metaphysical Club members Peirce, James, Holmes, Royce, and Santayana diasporic fashion. Cornel West (1989) instead writes of the “frightening wilderness of pragmatism and historicism with their concomitant concerns of social theory, cultural criticism, and histori-ography,” a wilderness that follows no path of direct descent, contains multiple European thinkers, and finds its beginnings in—Emerson (3). Morris Dickstein (1998) casts an even wider net, writing that “Emerson and Frost, Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, Santayana and Stevens, DuBois and Ellison … have been reconsidered in the light of a broader con-ception of pragmatist thinking” (3). Giles Gunn similarly contends that “pragmatism has never been an exclusively American phenomenon

162 J. SMYCZEK

or movement” (xiii). Also seeking to expand the pragmatist canon to include Kenneth Burke, David Hildebrand (1995) argues that intellec-tual affinity is enough to at least consider the label and spur additional interest: “Burke’s work has enough in common with the epistemologi-cal and metaphysical doctrines of Classical pragmatism to merit renewed consideration by philosophers” (623). Clearly, many roads lead to (prag-matist) Rome.

My reading of Haidt-as-pragmatist, however, mostly closely responds to Larry Hickman’s (2009) blanket description of pragmatism as a guid-ing idea:

Its broad reach transcends the analysis of concepts and definitions in order to engage the real-world problems of men and women. And at the same time it rejects the notion of a “grand narrative,” it also transcends the postmodernist denial of commonality and referentiality. It engages the physical and social sciences, as well as technology, in ways that are rarely found within other philosophical traditions. (3)

In other words, if we follow Hickman, pragmatism might be described in a bare-bones kind of way as: (a) the rejection of the separation of the intellectual and the practical (or the epistemic from the ethical); (b) the acknowledgment of experience and materiality as the common denom-inators that ameliorate the putative divide between them; and (c) the use of a broad swath of available tools for scientifically and technologi-cally informed civic engagement. If we also add an element of American historical and geographic specificity, and imagine pragmatism as a tradi-tion integrally related to the historical, cultural, and intellectual trends of the United States, the inclusion of Haidt can provide a productive working distinction as opposed to an arbitrary claim without meaningful consequence.

In 2001s “The Emotional Dog and its Rational Tail: A Social Intuitionist Approach to Moral Judgment,” Haidt articulates a theory of moral psychology that stands opposed to rationalist models, instead of arguing for schema of moral deliberation that are thoroughly infused with emotional cognition. In fact, forms of verbal reasoning (what Haidt roughly equates with rationality) mainly function in Haidt’s model as post hoc justifications for the deliberating individual’s cognitive intuitions.

Relying heavily on Hume’s comments on affect combined with his own research, Haidt (2001) reaches the following conclusion:


Rationalist models made sense in the 1960s and 1970s. The cognitive rev-olution had opened up new ways of thinking about morality and moral development, and it was surely an advance to think about moral judgment as a form of information processing. But times have changed. Now we know (again) that most of cognition occurs automatically and outside of consciousness (Bargh & Chartrand, 1999) and that people cannot tell us how they really reached a judgment (Nisbett & Wilson, 1977). Now we know that the brain is a connectionist system that tunes up slowly but is then able to evaluate complex situations quickly (Bechtel & Abrahamsen, 1991). Now we know that emotions are not as irrational (Frank, 1988), that reasoning is not as reliable (Kahneman & Tversky, 1984), and that animals are not as amoral (de Waal. 1996) as we thought in the 1970s. The time may be right, therefore, to take another look at Hume’s perverse thesis: that moral emotions and intuitions drive moral reasoning, just as surely as a dog wags its tail. (830)

Although Haidt’s principal aim here is to create a clinical model for understanding moral decision-making and not, clearly, to advance a particular school of philosophy, he already engages in a pragmatist pro-ject of ameliorating reason–emotion and ethical–aesthetic binaries, situ-ating human beings on a spectrum with other live creatures interacting with environments, and emphasizing the idea of situational response over permanent principles of moral thought. And in Haidt’s subse-quent work, he begins to flesh out this anti-rationalist critique by sup-plementing his Humean orientation with reference to American thinkers such as Emerson, Thoreau, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and James. What, we might ask, would push Haidt to supplement Hume’s emotivism and intuitionism with these subsequent philosophical developments? One answer might be that Hume’s conception of rhetoric demonizes the aes-thetic dimensions of communication that Haidt will explore in this sub-sequent works. As Nathan Crick (2010) puts it, “Hume [articulates] a method that would effectively eliminate all rhetorical discourse that fails to address itself to unadorned understanding” when he claims that argu-ments not based in mathematics or empirical demonstration “can con-tain nothing but sophistry and illusion” (130). Haidt’s move away from Hume could also be prefaced by Sharon Krause’s (2008) critique of Hume’s incompleteness: “The irrepressible political dimensions of moral sentiment mean that Hume’s account needs to be supplemented by a commitment to democratic equality, liberal rights, and contestatory pub-lic debate, a commitment that takes us beyond Hume’s own philosophy”

164 J. SMYCZEK

(78). In significant part, it will take Haidt from Hume’s emotivism to William James and to pragmatism.

Haidt’s first popular book, 2006s The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom, continues his project of contesting rationalist claims about ethics, claiming that “moral judgment is like aesthetic judgment,” based in often-unconscious affective responses occurring prior to the verbal justifications given by individuals (21). The book also bears a subtitle that likely echoes that of James’s Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking. Haidt’s stated purpose for writing each chapter was to “savor one idea that has been discovered by several of the world’s civilizations—to question it in light of what we now know from scientific research, and to extract from it the lessons that still apply to our modern lives” (ix). Unlike “The Emotional Dog,” The Happiness Hypothesis does specifically cite both Principles of Psychology and The Varieties of Religious Experience, calling the latter “still the greatest work on the psychology of religion” (235). He cites James in the book’s two final long chapters, “Divinity with or without God” and “Happiness Comes from Between.” In the former, Haidt begins with the surprisingly pragmatist contention that “Our life is the creation of our minds, and we do much of that creating with metaphor. We see things in terms of what we already understand: Life is a journey, an argument is a war, the mind is a rider on an elephant” (181). Paul Stob, paraphrasing James’ earlier use by Kenneth Burke, makes a similar claim: “We employ symbols that construct our social realities, similar to the way a contractor employs the materials and labor that construct a house. Consequently, the realities we face are not inherent in nature but are built up discur-sively and can therefore be reconstructed as we alter our discursive prac-tices” (131). In short, Haidt displays a pragmatist tendency toward what might be called “social construction.”

The idea of reconstituting our perceptions and attitudes in experience is the central theme of “Divinity with or without God”: not merely any experiences, but experiences of elevation and clarity, in which elements seem purposive and the aesthetic character of the entirety seems reflected in its constituent elements—what James called “religious experience,” in a broad sense or what Dewey refers to as “having an experience” (1934 [2005], 36). Although the chapter includes eclectic examples of such transcendent, awesome, and elevated experiences, drawing examples from literature ranging from Abbott’s Flatland to Thomas Jefferson’s letters to Arjuna’s realization of the divine perspective in the Bhagavad


Gita, Haidt reserves a special emphasis, including a lengthy paraphrase and 13-line quotation (the longest nonfiction quotation in the book), for James and The Varieties of Religious Experience. Haidt paraphrases James’ interest in “rapid” conversion experiences, in which we “experi-ence life as a divided self, torn by conflicting desires” before an encoun-ter that leaves the individual feeling “whole and at peace” (2006, 204). James uses the term “melting moods,” inspired by life events or encoun-ters with theater or literature, “leaving us now washed and soft of heart and open to every nobler leading” (205). Haidt suggests that modern psychological research into what Maslow calls “peak experiences” locates common features, “nearly all of which can be found somewhere in William James”—high praise, indeed (205).

Haidt’s second extended use of James occurs in the final long chapter of The Happiness Hypothesis, “Happiness Comes from Between.” Here, Haidt cites James’ erasure of conventional distinctions between Eastern and Western mystical exercises (e.g., meditation and yoga vs. repetitive prayer) to introduce modern neuroscience research explaining how a person immersed in religious practice “feels merged with something vast, something larger than the self” (237).

Like James, Haidt maintains that the existence and value of religious experience is in no way causally connected to the existence of any god or gods. (He refers to himself as a “Jewish atheist.”) His estimation of faith conforms to the functionalist measure of belief offered by James in “The Pragmatic Method”:

Pragmatism asks its usual question. “Grant an idea or belief to be true,” it says, “what concrete difference will its being true make in anyone’s actual life? How will the truth be realized? What experiences will be different from those which would obtain if the belief were false? What, in short, is the truth’s cash-value in experiential terms (312)?”

For Haidt, the answer is that religion has positive affiliations with human happiness, and that “a society that utterly ignored the ethic of divin-ity would be ugly and unsatisfying” (211). He adds that, “If religious people are right in believing that religion is the source of their great-est happiness, then maybe the rest of us who are looking for happiness and meaning can learn something from them, whether or not we believe in God” (211). In other words, religion has “cash-value in experiential terms.” It offers benefits that are practical and social, and in this regard, Haidt closely mirrors James’ thought.

166 J. SMYCZEK

Because The Happiness Hypothesis is, like most popular science books, an ambitious synthesis of hundreds of books and peer-reviewed articles, James may not initially seem to have outsized influence on the argu-ment. I think, however, even though the first discussion of James is both lengthy and laudatory, that James looms still larger in the work than is apparent on a casual reading. Beyond the fact that both specific discus-sions situate James as a still-valuable starting point for research on expe-rience and perception, Haidt’s conclusion that “happiness comes from between” and is neither a purely internal condition nor a quest for exte-rior goods—that in fact, this internal–external boundary is both arbitrary and malleable—is a solvent that ameliorates reason–emotion, East–West, religion–philosophy, thought–action binaries in ways that deserve to be described as pragmatist in their treatment of these concepts (238).

Haidt cites James three more times in 2012s The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, his longest work and, in its attempt to understand and ameliorate the more vitriolic aspects of the contemporary US culture wars, Haidt’s project that is most osten-sibly focused on rhetoric and communication. Haidt frames the book’s purpose in three interrelated ways that strike me as broadly Deweyan in their orientation, despite Haidt’s reliance on James and unfamiliarity with Dewey. The first is to alleviate conflict through applied intelligence. Haidt asserts, “My goal in this book is to draw some of the heat, anger and divisiveness out of these topics and replace them with awe, won-der, and curiosity” (xii). The second is to encourage more effective and democratic communication. Haidt writes, “My hope is that this book will make conversations about morality, politics, and religion more com-mon, more civil, and more fun, even in mixed company. My hope is that it will help us to get along” (xii). The third is to extol the valuation of many perspectives in ways that lead to interconnectedness and coopera-tion combined with checks and balances rather than violence and coer-cion. Haidt shares that “When I was a teenager I wished for world peace, but now I yearn for a world in which competing ideologies are kept in balance, systems of accountability keep us all from getting away with too much, and fewer people believe that righteous ends justify violent means” (xiii).

To achieve those ends, Haidt uses James in a variety of ways. First, in “Elephants Rule,” an expansion of the elephant-rider metaphor intro-duced in The Happiness Hypothesis, Haidt contends that babies enter into life unable to easily map and categorize the stimuli in the world around


them, confronting their environment as what James in The Principles of Psychology called “one great blooming, buzzing confusion” (63). While critics of James have decried the blank-slate character of his depic-tion (Hawks 2010; Goldman 2012), Haidt then puts this observation to work in a framework that pragmatically blurs the lines between the ethical and the epistemic as well as infants’ innate and acquired capac-ities. The emergence of infant intelligence from the Jamesian state of confusion occurs concurrently with the emergence of moral intuitions. “Babies,” Haidt writes, “seem to have some innate ability to process events in their physical world—the world of objects. But when psy-chologists dug deeper, they found that infants come equipped with innate abilities to understand their social worlds as well. They understand things like harming and helping” (2012, 63). In other words, Haidt puts James’ description in service of the idea that humans learn to per-ceive and to act—their formative epistemologies and ethics—in ways that work prior to and outside of what is conventionally thought of as reason. The emergence of perceptual differentiation and synthesis is hence not unrelated to the development of moral approval and disapproval. These capacities emerge out of the characteristic abilities of living beings well in advance of the acquisition of language and thus also prior to anything that might ground formal systems of reasoning.

Haidt returns to James in his next chapter, titled “Vote for Me (Here’s Why),” a discussion of moral reputation as a necessary compo-nent of an individual or group’s ethical orientation. Here, Haidt provides a lengthy summary of James:

William James, one of the founders of American psychology, urged psy-chologists to take a “functionalist” approach to the mind. That means examining things in terms of what they do, within a larger system. The function of the heart is to pump blood within the circulatory system, and you can’t understand the heart unless you keep that in mind. James applied the same logic to psychology: if you want to understand any men-tal mechanism or process, you have to know its function within some larger system. Thinking is for doing, he said. (2012, 74)

Having endorsed James’ view of human psychology as functional and adaptive, in a familiar and Jamesian move, situates this understanding in opposition to rationalist systems like those of “Plato, Socrates, and Kohlberg” (74). Just as James at one point divides the world of thought

168 J. SMYCZEK

into pragmatism and anti-pragmatism, Haidt defines his brand of social theory in opposition to realist views that deny the motivated, situational, and functional aspects of reasoning and belief (443).

Haidt’s third and final citation of James is actually somewhat critical of James’ reliance on individual perspective as the lens to best under-stand belief. James is cited in a footnote to Haidt’s chapter “Religion Is a Team Sport.” Haidt argues in the chapter that scholars of religion such as Durkheim and Eliade—who understand religions as systems that ena-ble coordinated social action—describe them more accurately than sci-entists who perceive them as sets of perceptual errors transmitted within groups. He writes that “the greatest scholar of religion in psychology, William James (1961 [1902]) took a lone-believer perspective too. He defined religion as ‘the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine’” (Haidt 2012, 366). Haidt contrasts this focus on individual belief, “common to psychologists, biol-ogists, and other natural scientists” with the understanding of “sociolo-gists, anthropologists, and scholars in religious studies departments, all of whom are more skilled at what Durkheim called ‘social facts’” (366).

What is interesting about Haidt’s identification of James’ blindness to the sociological rather than the psychological dimensions of religious thought, however, is how it reiterates Haidt’s commitment to using sci-ence as a tool to better understand public association in order to improve it. This is, after all, Haidt’s stated goal in writing the book. If it is a move away from James, the psychologist, it is one toward a Deweyan project of building a democracy in and through communication.

The last work that we will examine is a collaborative article from 2013 Haidt wrote with authors Jesse Graham et al. (2013) titled “Moral Foundations Theory: The Pragmatic Validity of Moral Pluralism.” Although the language of foundations may carry reductionist implica-tions, the rest of the title indicates the Jamesian flavor that Haidt imparts to the article. The purpose of the piece as a whole. As the authors put it, is to explain how moral judgments are “often so similar across cultures, but sometimes so variable” while offering a theory that has both “parsi-mony as well as explanatory adequacy” while recognizing” an inherent tension between the two values” (56). To that end, the authors juxta-pose monist views which emphasize parsimony at the expense of accuracy with pluralist views (such as theirs) that attempt to reconcile these values.


Monists, including the psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg and the author Sam Harris, argue that “all manifestations of morality are derived from an underlying psychological architecture for implementing the one basic value or virtue they propose” as opposed to pluralists such as Aristotle, Isaiah Berlin, and most importantly, William James, for whom the num-ber of moral foundations is “more than one” (57). The authors include a lengthy quotation from James’ “extended critique of monism and absolutism, A Pluralistic Universe,” which contains James’ opposition to “rationalizing pictures … aimed at cleaning up the litter with which the world is apparently filled” instead of James’ “pluralistic empiricism,” a “muddled, gothic sort of affair, without a sweeping outline and with little pictorial nobility” (57). Taking James as their starting point and practical lens, the authors write that “We are unabashed pluralists and … we will try to convince you that you should be, too” (57). They pro-pose Moral Foundations Theory, a “pluralist view of moral psychology” a theory that “has led to discoveries missed by monists,” and one to be judged on the merits of its “pragmatic validity … its scientific useful-ness for both answering existing questions about morality and allowing researchers to formulate new questions” (57).

After being used to frame MFT as a whole, James is cited twice more in the chapter. Describing the piecemeal evolutionary adaptations that would lead to a pluralistic moral psychology, the authors write that “evo-lutionary thinking also encourages functionalism. Thinking is for doing,” a reiteration of how Haidt used James’ functionalism in both of the books already discussed (67). James’ final appearance comes as part of a reply to the rationalist author Sam Harris, who is critical of Haidt’s work in the former’s 2010 The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values, arguing that the multiple moral foundations Haidt’s work identifies reduce to a single concern about harm. Haidt pointedly replies:

But even if one agrees with Harris’s normative views, would the reduction of all morality to harm help us understand how morality actually works? Or Would it be (to paraphrase William James) another attempt to clean up the litter the world actually contains? A monist model in which all moral judgments(even those based on explicitly harmless transgressions) are pro-duced by a single mental process (perceptions of intentional dyadic harm) cleans up much of the “litter” of empirically observed moral life, and in this cleaning suffers as a scientific description of morality.

170 J. SMYCZEK

In this final citation, Haidt frames both the positive features of his descriptive model of ethics as derived from James as well as his oppo-sition to reductionist and rationalist prescriptive models. Moreover, by adding a third of James’ major works to his growing list of citations, Haidt indicates an ongoing and evolving relationship with the great pragmatist thinker.

Answering objections

Next, I want to consider some objections to the definitional claim that has been made thus far. My contention is that the definition is a pro-ductive one in that, by following the ways pragmatists are cited by those off the direct line of descent from accepted pragmatists, we gain a method for assessing the pragmatist canon as well as a new take on the rhetorical analysis of scientific outreach. Although there will be signifi-cant differences between Haidt and any currently canonical pragmatist, these differences need not be fatal to the argument: differences exist, of course, between any two pragmatists who are rough contemporaries or between the pragmatism of early scholars such as James and Dewey and neo-pragmatists such as Rorty and Fish. Given the thoroughgoing com-mitment to pluralism demonstrated by pragmatist thinkers, uniformity of perspective has never seemed much of a goal. Nevertheless, there must be some evidence, some test-in-experience that would work against a claim of similarity between any two things to be worth debating. What kind of arguments might problematize such a suggestion?

First, we might consider James’ status as a seminal figure in American psychology. Although Haidt’s citations of James are weighty and indi-cate a significant influence relative to his other sources, it could be the case that a broad survey of similar works—that is to say popular books written by psychologists—might show that Haidt cites James neither more frequently nor meaningfully on average than other practitioners of his discipline of psychology or sub-disciplines of positive or moral psy-chology. While it appears that Haidt’s commitment to James’ theory of religion and moral pluralism take Haidt outside of the mainstream of popular writing about psychology, it might be conceded that such a finding would, nevertheless, undermine the distinction—that Haidt is “doing” pragmatism—that has been proposed. Nevertheless, that might be a battle lost on the way to a war won: if James is or other pragma-tists are cited more frequently in psychology than scholars of rhetoric


and communication have previously imagined, then we simply have addi-tional resources to examine how pragmatism continues to function and to inform science outreach, enabling continued and better-informed conversations about pragmatism and communication as well as the rheto-ric of science. Looking at how pragmatists are cited by rhetors not on the immediate lines of descent articulated by Shook or West might provide a method of gauging the influence of pragmatism across disciplines and eras, a method not yet fully explored. It might give scholars interested in these traditions some things to do.

A second objection that might be advanced is that the search for moral foundations is not itself a pragmatist project, but something of a struc-turalist one, meaning that Haidt moves from a situational to a universal orientation as his thought evolves. Hildebrand makes a similar argument about Burke, suggesting that his earlier works are more pragmatist and his later development of his universal and famed pentad of discourse pulls him away from his pragmatist influences. Is Haidt attempting to formu-late unyielding rules and laws that suffocate the continuation of the very inquiry from which they purport to derive? It seems that Haidt and his co-authors anticipate the shape of this objection when they write that “One common critique of MFT has been that our list of foundations is arbitrary, chosen originally by Haidt and Joseph based on their reading of five books and articles” (2012, 107). Yet, they emphasize that their framework is tentative and revisable, working distinctions rather than laws of motion, writing “We think that our original list of five foundations did a good job of capturing the most obvious and least debatable foun-dations, but we acknowledge that there is still room for debate, and … we are confident that our initial list is not the final list.” Moreover, the Jamesian spirit of inquiry hardly compels one to avoid labeling or quan-tifying anything: it instead merely recommends that, as Haidt does, we understand our labels to be functional and situational rather than closed or “true” in any permanent epistemic sense detached from the formation of concepts in experience. As James (1968) puts it:

A completed theoretic philosophy can never be anything more than a com-pleted classification of the world’s ingredients; and its results must always be abstract, since the basis of every classification is the abstract essence embodied in the living fact–the rest of the living fact being for the time ignored by the classifier. This means that none of our explanations are complete. (320)

172 J. SMYCZEK

The spirit of his description is, then, that our abstractions do not sub-stitute for the living experiences that they represent in shorthand. Haidt seems to avoid situating the foundations as anything other than useful criteria based in other useful criteria, names given to cognitive responses humans experience as beings that evolved in certain evolutionary con-texts. Human capacities for moral feeling and judgment are then not discontinuous with those of other animals; they have been shaped by and they shape the material exigencies of live creatures in a world of things, always navigating the interplay between biology and environ-ment, innate and trained capacities, to solve the problems contained therein.

Lastly, I want to address the question of definitional rigor. Defined loosely enough, of course, everyone is a pragmatist in a very general sense of the word: we all devote substantial thought applying our intelli-gence to improve problematic situations, and it should come as no spe-cial surprise that a psychologist is interested in providing people with a toolkit for better living. The social sciences in general and psychology in particular have long been interested in human happiness more than the secrets of the cosmos, almost by definition. It is true that, from the founders of the pragmatic tradition such as James and Dewey, that there has been a strain of pragmatism in social science that one is less likely to find in, say, the popular works of physicists (Shook). Taking note of Haidt’s claim that rationalist arguments in popular science tend to be more the province of the physical sciences than the social ones, I’ve nevertheless tried to offer criteria that engage existing arguments about the lines of hereditary transmission, practical method, and the-oretical orientation that define the pragmatist canon in order to claim that Haidt’s public outreach efforts are pragmatic in both the melio-ristic sense of using intelligence as a tool to improve human situations as well engaging with the philosophical tradition of pragmatism. But I offer an additional word to Hickman (2009), who writes, “if you look to the sciences, the humanities, and the arts as informing and informed by philosophical inquiry and thus as sources of philosoph-ical insight and renewal—then you are aligned with the program of American Pragmatism” (3). It certainly seems that Haidt’s work fits that description well.


conclusion

Much of the scholarship on pragmatism speaks in tropes of eclipse and revival, ebb and flow. West writes in 1988 that “A small-scale intellec-tual renascence is occurring under the broad banner of pragmatism” (3). Dickstein writes in 1998 that “The revival of pragmatism has excited enormous interest and controversy in the intellectual community over the past two decades” (1). Nevertheless, this conception is hotly con-tested by Shook, who offers the following rejoinder:

There has been much talk of pragmatism’s “eclipse” during analytic phi-losophy’s greatest dominance from 1950 to 1990. The myth must be corrected: pragmatism was never eclipsed … Already quite marginalized in the 1920s and 1930s, the handful of pragmatist professors such as Dewey at Columbia and Mead at Chicago encouraged many of their students to go into psychology, sociology, anthropology, linguistics, education, and economics. Many of the best new minds favorable towards pragmatism strongly influenced the social sciences during the 1940s - 1980s.

Or perhaps many of the best new minds favorable toward pragmatism are still influencing social science, and because we are looking too closely at scholars who wish to adopt or reconstruct pragmatist philosophies in conspicuous and label-conscious ways, we neglect those who blend prag-matism and pragmatists into a mix of other qualitative and quantitative resources. It seems thoroughly pragmatic to track pragmatism by seeing the work that it does.

But more importantly, Haidt’s pragmatic work to form connec-tions between individual emotional affect and public deliberation helps to reestablish the importance of the relationship between rhetoric and psychology, itself a relationship with a marked historical ebb and flow. This may be one of the more salient services that his iteration of prag-matism offers to current theorists of communication, and one whose implications are presently least addressed. From Plato’s description of the divisions of the hearer’s soul in the Phaedrus to Aristotle’s detailed depic-tions of the character of the listener, rhetoric has from its earliest era as an organized branch of study been keenly interwoven with its notions of the character traits and behavioral inclinations of its audiences. Academic study has in the meanwhile expanded and stratified to an extent that rhetoric, psychology, and sociology have staked out territories of their

174 J. SMYCZEK

own, and knowledge in any given field is so vast that it is hard to claim general command of any one discipline, let alone several. But it is worth noting that despite writing about political and religious divisions in the United States that are poorly addressed by current argumentative strate-gies, Haidt cites pragmatists but not a single theorist of rhetoric besides Aristotle, and even then cites only the Nichomachean Ethics. The idea that interpersonal conflict, ethical values, and public deliberation can be spoken about through multiple academic lenses both historically and in the present is obvious; the idea that pragmatism offers a natural bridge between modern discussions of ethics, psychology, and communication is perhaps less so. Looking at how different thinkers in largely isolated fields continue to use pragmatism to advance their individual projects can not only expand our conceptions of whom we might call a pragmatist but may also offer a point of common ground between those looking to better understand the relationship between thought and communication.

references

Berg, Chris. 2012. “Why Can’t We All Just Get Along?” Review of The Righteous Mind, by Jonathan Haidt. Institute of Public Affairs Review 64 (2): 60–62. http://ipa.org.au.

Cavell, Stanley. 2009. “What’s the Use of Calling Emerson a Pragmatist?” In The Revival of Pragmatism: New Essays on Social Thought, Law, and Culture, edited by Morris Dickstein, 72–82. Durham: Duke University Press.

Christensen, Bryce. 2012. “Review of The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, by Jonathan Haidt.” Booklist, 6. March 15.

Crick, Nathan. 2010. Democracy and Rhetoric: John Dewey on the Arts of Becoming. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press.

Dewey, John. 1927 [1954]. The Public and Its Problems. New York: Henry Holt.———. 1934 [2005]. Art as Experience. New York: Perigee.———. 1938 [1949]. Logic: The Theory of Inquiry. New York: Henry Holt.DeWitt, Iain. 2013. “Moral Matter.” Review of Braintrust by Patricia

Churchland, The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt, Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite by Robert Kurzban, and Who’s in Charge? by Michael S. Gazzaniga. The American Interest 8 (4): 72–79.

Dickstein, Morris, ed. 1998. The Revival of Pragmatism: New Essays on Social Thought, Law, and Culture. Durham: Duke University Press.

Fromm, Harold. 2013. “Groping for Groups.” Review of The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, by Jonathan Haidt. Hudson Review 65 (4): 652–658. https://www.jstor.org/stable/43489291.

http://ipa.org.au

https://www.jstor.org/stable/43489291


Goldman, Jason G. 2012. “‘Blooming, Buzzing Confusion’—But Who Is Confused?” The Thoughtful Animal (blog), Scientific American, July 26. http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/thoughtful-animal/blooming-buzzing- confusion-but-who-is-confused/.

Goodnight, G. Thomas. 2012. “The Personal, Technical, and Public Spheres of Argument: A Speculative Inquiry into the Art of Public Deliberation.” Argumentation and Advocacy 48: 198–210.

Graham, Jesse, Jonathan Haidt, Sena Koleva, Matt Motyl, Ravi Iyer, Sean P. Wojcik, and Peter H. Ditto. 2013. “Moral Foundations Theory: The Pragmatic Validity of Moral Pluralism.” In Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, vol. 47, edited by Patricia Devine and Ashby Plant, 55–130. Elsevier. https://doi.org/10.1016/b978-0-12-407236-7.00002-4.

Haidt, Jonathan. 2001. “The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail: A Social Intuitionist Approach to Moral Judgment.” Psychological Review 108 (4): 814–834.

———. 2006. The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom. New York: Basic-Perseus.

———. 2012. The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. New York: Pantheon.

Hanlon, Aaron. 2015. “The Trigger Warning Myth.” The New Republic, August 14. http://newrepublic.com/article/122543/trigger-warning-myth.

Harris, Sam. 2011. The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values. New York: Free Press.

Hawks, John. 2010. “The ‘Blooming, Buzzing Confusion’ of William James.” John Hawks Weblog, April 30. http://johnhawks.net/weblog/topics/minds/baby/james-blooming-buzzing-baby-2010.html. Accessed 16 May 2018.

Hickman, Larry A. 2009. “Why American Philosophy? Why Now?” European Journal of American Philosophy 1 (1): 1–3.

Hildebrand, David L. 1995. “Was Kenneth Burke a Pragmatist?” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 31 (3): 632–658.

James, William. 1961 [1902]. The Varieties of Religious Experience. New York, NY: New American Library.

———. 1968. The Writings of William James, edited by John McDermott. New York: Random House.

Jensen, Robert. 2016. “The Coddling of the Capitalist, White-Supremacist, Patriarchal American Mind.” Crossing Genres (blog), Medium, March 7. http://crossingenres.com/the-coddling-of-the-capitalist-white-suprema-cist-patriarchal-american-mind-ca80a5891361. Accessed 26 May 2018.

Keith, William, and Robert Danisch. 2014. “Dewey on Science, Deliberation, and the Sociology of Rhetoric.” In Trained Capacities: John Dewey, Rhetoric, and Democratic Practice, edited by Brian Jackson and Gregory Clark, 27–46. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press.

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/thoughtful-animal/blooming-buzzing-confusion-but-who-is-confused/

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/thoughtful-animal/blooming-buzzing-confusion-but-who-is-confused/

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/b978-0-12-407236-7.00002-4

http://newrepublic.com/article/122543/trigger-warning-myth

http://johnhawks.net/weblog/topics/minds/baby/james-blooming-buzzing-baby-2010.html

http://johnhawks.net/weblog/topics/minds/baby/james-blooming-buzzing-baby-2010.html

http://crossingenres.com/the-coddling-of-the-capitalist-white-supremacist-patriarchal-american-mind-ca80a5891361

http://crossingenres.com/the-coddling-of-the-capitalist-white-supremacist-patriarchal-american-mind-ca80a5891361

176 J. SMYCZEK

Krause, Sharon. 2008. Civil Passions: Moral Sentiment and Democratic Deliberation. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Lukianoff, Greg, and Jonathan Haidt. 2015. “The Coddling of the American Mind.” The Atlantic, September 2015. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-coddling-of-the-american-mind/399356/.

Olson, Gary. 1994. “Fish Tales: A Conversation with ‘The Contemporary Sophist.’” In There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech, and It’s a Good Thing, Too, edited by Stanley Fish, 281–307. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Palumbo-Liu, David. 2015. “Coddled Students? That’s Not the Problem.” Huffpost: The Blog, September 2. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-palumboliu/coddled-students-thats-not-the-problem_b_8080166.html.

Peirce, Charles Saunders. 1905. “Issues of Pragmaticism.” The Monist XV (4): 481–499. http://archive.org/stream/monistquart15hegeuoft#page/480/mode/1up.

Shook, John. 2018. “The Eclipse of Pragmatism?” In Pragmatism Cybrary, edited by John Shook. http://www.pragmatism.org/.

———. “Where Have Pragmatists Come From? A Pragmatic Genealogy.” In Pragmatism Cybrary, edited by John Shook. http://www.pragmatism.org/genealogy.htm.

Sleeper, Jim. 2016. “The Coddling of the Conservative Mind.” Salon, January 13. http://www.salon.com/2016/01/13/the_coddling_of_the_ conservative_mind/.

Stob, Paul. 2013. William James and the Art of the Popular Statement. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press.

Stroud, Scott. 2011. John Dewey and the Artful Life: Pragmatism. Aesthetics, and Morality. University Park, PA: Penn State University Press.

West, Cornel. 1989. The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-coddling-of-the-american-mind/399356/

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-coddling-of-the-american-mind/399356/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-palumboliu/coddled-students-thats-not-the-problem_b_8080166.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-palumboliu/coddled-students-thats-not-the-problem_b_8080166.html

http://archive.org/stream/monistquart15hegeuoft#page/480/mode/1up

http://archive.org/stream/monistquart15hegeuoft#page/480/mode/1up

http://www.pragmatism.org/

http://www.pragmatism.org/genealogy.htm

http://www.pragmatism.org/genealogy.htm

http://www.salon.com/2016/01/13/the_coddling_of_the_conservative_mind/

http://www.salon.com/2016/01/13/the_coddling_of_the_conservative_mind/

177

CHAPTER 8

Jane Addams’ Rhetorical Ear: Teaching, Learning, and Listening

in the Settlement House Model

Amy E. Dayton

Accounts of Jane Addams—both her own and those of other people—often emphasize her commitment to and capacity for listening. One such account is given by Marie Diaz, a friend of Addams’, in an oral his-tory collected in the early 1980s.1 Diaz (1982) describes the day she met Addams. She went to Hull House in an angry state, after hearing that some neighborhood children were turned away from the settlement. As she put it, “I didn’t go there in a meek way… I went there demanding” (4). After she spoke with Jane Addams, Addams reassured her that the chil-dren were welcome and invited them to return. Diaz remarks, “That was our encounter. [It was] an unpleasant thing for her, an unpleasant thing


A. E. Dayton (*) The University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL, USAe-mail: [email protected]

1 The Diaz interview is part of a collection of oral histories taken in the 1980s to gather the recollections of people who worked or participated in the settlement activities and who interacted with Addams.

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14343-5_8


178 A. E. DAYTON

for me, because I went talking to her in [that] manner” (4).2 But instead of dismissing her, Addams “began listening … and the more [Diaz talked]—the more she asked about things” (6). As Diaz and Addams talked, their conversation spanned Diaz’ education in Mexico, her life in the United States, her family, her work as a teacher, and more. This encounter was the beginning of a long association marked by frequent visits and much conver-sation that Diaz still remembered fondly, many decades later.

Addams’ published work also demonstrates her love of listening. In fact, it is the impetus for her book The Long Road of Woman’s Memory (2002), which begins with an account of one summer at Hull House when local residents became caught up in a wild rumor that there was a possessed “Devil Baby” living at the settlement.3 For six weeks dur-ing that summer, people called the settlement and came to its doors, demanding to see the baby and refusing to believe that it did not exist, despite staff members’ denials. Although Addams recognized the clamor over the Devil Baby as a form of group hysteria; she nonetheless found herself compelled to talk—and listen—to some of the residents who came to see it. As she puts it, “when I heard the high eager voices of old women, I was irresistibly interested and left anything I might be doing in order to listen to them” (9). While they came out to see the mythical baby, the women lingered to share their own stories of marital strife, mis-carriage, loss of children, and trauma. Sharing these stories allowed them to protest the trauma and loss they had experienced, and to scold and teach the younger generation. As William Duffy puts it, Addams saw that the women’s stories “served to legitimate experience [and] gave them power to speak… from positions of knowledge and authority” (2011, 6). By sharing their stories, women could reinterpret and transform their

3 Several versions of the story circulated among the various ethnic groups that comprised the Hull House community, but the essential details of the tale were as follows: a young couple was expecting a baby and had a fight when the woman attempted to hang pictures of the saints on their wall. Her husband yelled that he would rather have a “devil for a baby” than religious pictures in his home. Upon his curse, the child was transformed into a demon. After its birth, it was brought to Hull House to be baptized and cared for.

2 The conflict that prompted Diaz to confront Addams was a racialized incident. The local children believed they were turned away because they were Mexican. Addams told Diaz that all children were welcome but that Hull House was open to children only for specific hours of the day when children’s programming was taking place. Stories like Diaz raise ques-tions about how racial conflicts might have played out at Hull House, but unfortunately do not answer that question.

8 JANE ADDAMS’ RHETORICAL EAR: TEACHING, LEARNING … 179

experiences. Through this process, remembering became an active and communal process of meaning-making (Duffy 2011, 7; Addams 2002). But of course, merely recounting their stories would not be sufficient to help the women transmute or interpret the past; it was necessary for them to have an audience—to be listened to, and understood.

The acts of talking and listening were central to the work of the US settlement house, a model of social reform that originated in England and was brought to the United States by Addams and other activists at the turn of the twentieth century. Settlement workers sought to address social problems brought on by mass urbanization, industrialization, and an influx of new immigrants, and to overturn traditional models of phi-lanthropy where the poor were passive recipients of largesse. Hull House residents—social workers, teachers, and other young professionals—lived cooperatively in their working-class neighborhood in West Chicago, and worked collaboratively with community members to address social issues such as poverty, labor rights, health/sanitation, childcare, education, and more. Operating as a kind of combined adult-education, daycare/nursery, health clinic, library, and social-recreational club combined, the settlement addressed the multi-faceted needs of both its middle-class residents and their working-class neighbors in its clubs, classes, and pro-grams. In their attempts to teach English and civics to new immigrants, settlement workers also took part in a larger national movement to Americanize the millions of new immigrants who arrived during this era.

Ultimately, the settlement came to represent a new model for both civic education and social activism. In keeping with the progressive emphasis on the “whole person,” settlement workers wove educational initiatives into many aspects of settlement life. Clubs and classes encouraged immi-grants to study current events and read great works of literature. Meals for immigrant women and their children became informal seminars on good nutrition. The Labor Museum became a place where people could share their artisanal knowledge and celebrate workers’ knowledge and experi-ence. These activities provided opportunities for cross-cultural exchange as well as personal development. But they relied on the willingness of teachers and students to talk and listen to one another in ways that did not resemble traditional classroom practice. This chapter examines the rhetor-ical practice of listening as it played out in Hull House’s public pedagogy. Influenced by her feminist, pragmatist ethos, Addams sees listening as an embodied, active, and reciprocal process, essential to the work of teaching, learning, and promoting social reform.

180 A. E. DAYTON

A feminist, PrAgmAtic rhetoric

The activist work of the social settlement relied on rhetorical engagement among the settlement workers, the neighborhood residents, civic leaders, and members of the broader public. Though Addams does not explic-itly use the term rhetoric to talk about the means and methods for civic engagement, she nonetheless models a set of communicative practices designed to foster collaboration and encourage listening and learning. For Addams, effective public dialogue should emphasize cooperation and collaboration over overt persuasion and conversion, focus on the con-crete results of human interaction, and allow for the expression and inter-pretation of individual experiences (Danisch 2007; Duffy 2011; Fiesta 2007; Jackson and Clark 2014; Knight 2014; McMillan 2002; Roskelly 2013). Addams eschews traditional modes of rhetoric in which one inter-locutor seeks to win an argument by verbally overpowering the other. As Duffy puts it, she seeks to create “discursive spaces where the foster-ing of identification takes priority over the achievement of persuasion” (2011, 137). Although she predates second-wave feminists by many dec-ades, she anticipates their concerns about the potential harm of antag-onistic rhetoric. Her mediating approach to language stands in contrast to the “conversion” model, which has been criticized by feminist schol-ars such as Sally Miller Gearhart (2004), who argues that the attempt to change other people through discourse is an act of violence (242). Moreover, in Gearhart’s analysis, non-violent means of persuasion— conversion instead of conquest—are not necessarily more ethical, because they can be more insidious, giving the illusion of consent where it may not exist (242).

Addams’ feminist style of rhetoric is influenced by her commitment to nonviolence and social cooperation. In the early years of their friendship, Addams avowed to John Dewey that antagonism was the result of a dan-gerous excess of emotion, and only harm could come of it. At that time, she believed that “objective differences… would always grow into unity if left alone” (Dewey 1916, qtd. in Knight 2014, 109; Knight 2010, 94). Louise Knight has argued that Addams’ views on conflict shifted over time, as she began to see that overt protest was sometimes necessary if it served common goods such as economic justice or world peace—as with the case of the Pullman Strike, or her opposition to World War I (2010, 96–106). Protesting the war, for instance, which resulted in widespread criticism and public ridicule of Addams, was, in her view, a necessary act


of antagonism. Over time, Addams developed a rhetorical style that could be “hard-hitting,” yet invited readers to rethink their prejudices and see the connections between themselves and others (Knight 2010, 106).

Addams’ goal of bringing different classes of people together, fostering reciprocal exchange, and encouraging cultural translation shaped her rhe-torical practices. For Gloria McMillan (2002), Addams represents a fem-inist style in which interlocutors (or readers, of written text) are invited to be “co-creators” of the future. This style is exemplified in Addams’ essay on the violent Pullman Strike, in which she urges all “public- spirited” Chicagoans who lived through the summer of the strike to ask themselves, “How … am I responsible for this social disorder? What can be done to prevent such outrageous manifestations of ill-will?” (Addams 1902, qtd. in McMillan 2002, 72). Through her invitational style of rhetoric, Addams conveys her belief that all citizens have a role to play in addressing and ameliorating broader social conflicts. This process, how-ever, relies on a willingness to listen to others with a spirit of affection-ate interpretation.4 Charlene Seigfried (1996) notes that Addams’ style of communication fit well within a pragmatist framework, which emphasizes “shared understanding and communal problem solving rather than ration-ally forced conclusions” (32). Moreover, as Hephzibah Roskelly (2013) notes, Addams’ style of rhetorical pragmatism embraces uncertainty as a means of motivating sustained inquiry. She shares with Oliver Wendell Homes a belief that too much certainty can be dangerous. Instead of coming to quick conclusions, Addams’ models the pragmatist impulse to test her beliefs in search of “usable truths” (38). Like Dewey, she focuses on the power of human experience to help people connect to one another and to move toward change, and she seeks to break down binaries and find common ground between mediating positions.

For someone who believes in the power of human experience to foster connections and transform social conditions, the use of narrative is an ideal mode of discourse. Stories are universal and democratic—everyone has access to them. In fact, Addams’ style of writing reflects her belief that all citizens have a role to play in public discourse. As Robert Danisch (2007) points out, this broad view of rhetoric may be Addams’ most significant contribution to communication theory. Her view of public rhetoric stands in contrast to the classical tradition, which treats

4 She uses this term in her essay, “A Modern Lear” (1912a).

182 A. E. DAYTON

deliberative rhetoric as a formal, highly stylized practice that takes place in institutional settings (like courtrooms, for example, or legislative chambers). Addams believes that important civic dialogue takes place in informal, grassroots settings outside of “authorized” spaces for such speech. Moreover, she does not draw sharp distinctions between pri-vate or domestic speech and public rhetoric because she sees the value of private discourse as a site for rhetorical activism and change since cross- cultural cooperation can emerge from private conversations like the one she shared with Marie Diaz. As Danisch points out, Addams’ project of expanding the domain of public discourse, and inviting marginalized groups to participate, “required a radically different set of rhetorical practices” as well as “the development of social structures and organi-zations capable of supporting the economic and social unity of citizens” (2007, 74–75).

Addams’ tendency to rely on narrative, especially in Twenty Years at Hull House, can sometimes give the impression that the book is a-theo-retical, a set of stories and recollections. Charlene Seigfried (1996) notes in her book that accounts of American pragmatism have tended to treat her as a practitioner rather than a theorist in her own right. And in some ways, Addams can even be read as suspicious of theory, as she frequently criticizes scientists and academic scholars who embrace abstraction with-out applying their knowledge to everyday life. Yet her writing style in Twenty Years, with its narrative, first-person approach, reflects her the-ory that people learn best through firsthand experience, and that social democracy can be better achieved when different classes of people have opportunities to learn from one another. She writes to future audience members who will never have the opportunity to visit Hull House, yet her use of narrative allows us to place ourselves in her shoes, to experi-ence life in the settlement, and to “hear” the voices of the people that Addams talks with. As Marilyn Fischer (2004) notes, a book like Twenty Years, therefore, is better understood as a philosophical treatise than an autobiography: “Telling stories is a good method for Addams to use, one that enables her to reveal aspects of experience that other methods might conceal” (22). Her use of narrative helps Addams to emphasize the com-plexity of human experience, and to model the process by which people can learn from listening to one another.

This style of listening is reciprocal. It avoids overt persuasion, instead of relying on generosity (or affectionate interpretation) toward her inter-locutors. She models this style of reciprocal, generous listening in a


story (in Twenty Years at Hull House) about a visitor to the settlement who criticizes it for being un-American. As the man looks around the settlement at artwork that celebrates the new immigrants’ cultures, he complains that Hull House is promoting “foreign views” (1961, 71). Addams listens to the man’s concerns, then responds by gently pointing out that the artwork at Hull House is meant to be “a familiar island to the immigrants in a sea of new and strange impressions.” Her comments spark a sympathetic response from the man, who admits that he feels the same way when he encounters “Yankee notions” from his home [back East]. Rather than judging or overtly criticizing the man’s rejection of “foreign” art, Addams invites him to place himself in the role of immi-grant or outsider. Because she recounts the story in her memoir, we the readers also get to “listen in” on this conversation and to imagine our-selves as part of the larger dialogue about what it means to be American, and about what we should expect from new citizens. Through exchanges like these, Addams shows the reader that the act of listening is essential to the work of interpreting America to its newcomers, and vice versa, and that thoughtful listening can lead to increased cooperation and tolerance.

In her book, The Dissonance of Democracy, political theorist Susan Bickford (1996) argues that an understanding of listening is critical to any theory of political action. Far from being a passive activity, “listening,” writes Bickford, “is a creative act, one that involves conscious effort” (144). Krista Ratcliffe (2005) notes that historically, western rhetor-ical theories have neglected the art of listening. Listening is often seen as a feminine practice, and thus, less important than speaking; moreover, dominant cultural groups have not historically seen a need to listen to people of color or the working class, though the opposite is not true (21). Ratcliffe promotes the practice of rhetorical listening—“a stance of open-ness that a person may choose to assume in relation to any person, text, or culture,” especially “in cross-cultural exchanges” (2005, 1). When we approach a text or situation with a stance of rhetorical listening:

we may become apprentices of listening rather than masters of discourse… . Such listening does not presume a naïve, relativistic empathy, but rather, an ethical responsibility to argue for what we deem fair and just while ques-tioning that which we deem fair and just. (25)

Looking again at Addams’ interaction with the visitor to Hull House, we can see how rhetorical listening operated in this context: Addams’

184 A. E. DAYTON

empathy for the man is not “naïve,” but rather, strategically designed to prompt reflection. Rather than passively accepting his criticism of Hull House, she gently argues for what she believes is “fair and just.”

To practice listening in a rhetorical fashion involves seeking to under-stand ourselves and others, and to be accountable for our actions. It means finding ways to identify with others without smoothing over or erasing differences. And finally, it requires that we seek to understand the other people’s claims as well as “the cultural logics in which these claims function” (Ratcliffe 2005, 26). As Wayne Booth (2004) puts it, listening rhetorically is an ethical practice that transforms the act of persuasion, from a one-directional process to a reciprocal one that sparks change from both speaker and listening. Listening rhetorically requires “not just seeking a truce” but “[pursuing] the truth behind our differences” (46). It requires that “both sides [pursue] not just victory but a new real-ity, a new agreement about what is real” (47). Seen through this lens, Addams’ responses to conflicts such as the Devil Baby incident, or visi-tor who criticized Hull House’s “foreign” influences, offer a good model of rhetorical listening. She seeks to achieve identification with others without negating her differences with them, and she looks for ways to connect individuals’ experiences to the larger social tensions playing out around them. And she expects that rhetorical engagement will lead to change from both parties. Addams herself was changed and moved by the time she spent listening to the women who came looking for the Devil Baby. The settlement’s image and mission is shaped through the interaction of the residents and their neighbors, and through rhetorical exchanges like those that Addams shares with local women, with Marie Diaz, with the visitor to Hull House, and with many others.

Public listening: rhetoric, teAching, And leArning in hull house

The emphasis on rhetorical listening—on narrative form, cross-cultural exchange, and identification rather than overt persuasion—infused the pedagogical efforts at Hull House. In their efforts to promote teaching and learning and to assimilate working-class immigrants into the larger culture, Addams and her colleagues took part in a nationwide move-ment to Americanize the new immigrants. A quintessentially progressive undertaking, Americanization can be best understood not as a unified effort but rather a series of initiatives that were sometimes in ideological


conflict with one another, as Robert Carlson (1975), Lawrence Cremin (1961), Mina Carson (1990), and others have noted. Organizations as diverse as public schools, YMCAs, libraries, labor unions, and factories developed classes for new immigrants under the campaign’s umbrella. While students in these settings learned English and civics under the ide-ological banners of their “literacy sponsors” (to use Deborah Brandt’s term), the pedagogies were quite similar. Instructors relied on drills and repetition of simple phrases, leaving little room for student participation. Textbooks for adult learners reflected a view of immigrants as passive, not active, citizens, encouraging them to adopt middle-class habits and customs in all aspects of their lives, from their clothes, to their house-keeping and hobbies. I have argued elsewhere that Americanization workers saw themselves as participants in a broader civic project to build a more linguistically and culturally homogenous nation (Dayton-Wood 2008).5 In this sense, Americanization was as much as rhetorical pro-ject as a pedagogical one, as teachers and policy makers sought to per-suade middle-class Americans to help assimilate the newcomers, and to convince new immigrants to adopt middle-class habits and values.

As previous scholars have pointed out, settlement workers saw them-selves as participants in a civic project to remake the American nation (Danisch 2007; O’Rourke 2014; Wendler 2014). In the settlement context, however, the focus was less on remaking individual immi-grants but on encouraging collective action to foster social democracy. Like Dewey and her pragmatist counterparts, Addams views democracy not merely as a political system, but a way of life—“a form of associa-tion especially appropriate for persons who are constituted by the mul-tiple relations through which consciousness evolves and values develop” (Seigfried 1999, 210). The settlement required a distinctive pedagogical model that would foster the “social ethic” required in the new democ-racy. Settlement workers sought to create a flexible space for innovation, one with the “power of quick adaptation, [and] readiness to change its methods as its environment [required]” (Addams 1961, 83–84). Education at Hull House was woven into many of its activities, in forms that didn’t like traditional classroom education. Pedagogical work took

5 There were some exceptions, as labor unions and other progressive groups taught classes designed to promote activism. Pedagogically speaking, however, even these ideo-logically liberal programs were not necessarily more progressive than the more conservative courses operated in the factories and the public schools.

186 A. E. DAYTON

place through clubs, lecture series, classes (including “university exten-sion” coursework), and physical demonstrations (of arts and crafts, for instance). Students read works of literature, studied civic problems by inviting local people to debate about them, and wrote essays about cur-rent events. Although settlement workers were appointed to be leaders of Hull House clubs, they were also expected to be participants who would investigate the subject matter and learn along with men and women from the community.

Despite their desire to be a laboratory for pedagogical innovation, the settlements were not immune from the larger conflicts dividing the Americanization movement. This sense of ideological conflict comes through in Addams’ discussion of teaching and learning. She vacillates between praise for immigrants’ heritage and skills, and despair at the entrenched habits and beliefs that prevent them from assimilating in the United States. She criticizes wealthy Americans who “send young peo-ple to Europe to see Italy, but … do not utilize Italy when it [exists in] the schoolhouse” (1994, 141), yet she draws firm distinctions between high culture and low culture, and establishes a hierarchy between indus-trial and pre-industrial nations. In the conclusion of Twenty Years, she argues that the role of the settlement is to preserve and perpetuate the traditions of “cultivated men” [emphasis added] and to incorporate the “best results of civilization” into the new social democracy (1961, 295). Addams’ conflicting goals play out in her views on language as well; she laments that Italian schoolboys “drop their English” the moment they leave the classroom, but she praises the Hull House theater program for offering plays in multiple languages, and criticizes those who hold neg-ative attitudes toward non-English speakers (1994, 81, 87). In their efforts to promote English speaking, to teach “cultivated” styles of living and to advance the “best” aspects of civilization, Addams and her set-tlement colleagues could be subtly coercive, suggesting that despite the value of immigrants’ knowledge and experience, white, middle-class, Protestant culture was the ideal (Carlson, Carson, Fiesta, Wendler). Moreover, she often fails to consider “the highly asymmetrical power dynamics” that shaped interactions between settlement workers and immigrants. She believes that immigrants “had to share American symbols— the English language—and have the cultural literacy necessary to make meaning of these symbols” (Wendler 2014, 41). Despite these limita-tions, Hull House’s public pedagogy was an alternate to existing models that emphasized student passivity and passive listening.


Hull House pedagogy had multiple aims: to help students lead produc-tive, meaningful lives; to prepare them to be active participants in a social democracy; and to allow them to make productive use of their experience. For Addams, a pedagogy of civic engagement should not create sepa-rate classes of people, or segregate the poor into vocational or manually learning programs that solidified their place within the working class, but rather, should “connect [the student] with all sorts of people by his ability to understand them” (1961, 285). In other words, Addams sees educa-tion as a critical tool for forging connections—between groups and classes of people, as well as between individuals and their larger communities. The Hull House model was built on real-world inquiries into civic and social problems. It invited learners to participate in exploring, understand-ing, and addressing those problems by bringing them in conversation with one another and with other members of the larger community. For Addams and her colleagues, good pedagogical practice requires rhetorical engagement. Moreover, following Dewey’s maxim that “education is not preparation for life, it is life itself,” Addams believes that all the activities of Hull House should serve an educational function.

Addams is critical of pedagogies that place students in a passive role and encourage students to listen passively. When a child arrives in a traditional school, “The first thing that [he] must do … is to sit still, at least part of the time, and … learn to listen … with all the perplexity of listening to a foreign tongue” (1907, 185).6 Public schools, in other words, encour-aged an a-rhetorical form of listening—one that was disconnected from the broader social world, and that placed students in a passive role as recepta-cles of new information, not possessors of pre-existing knowledge. Addams faults public schools both for operating in isolation from the larger com-munity and for offering rhetorical instruction that is removed from stu-dents’ lived experiences: They force students to write about dull topics unrelated to their own experience, “and [students] patiently accept this uninteresting information because they expect ‘education’ to be dull and hard. There seems to be a belief among educators that it is not possible for the mass of mankind to have experiences which are of themselves worth anything” (1994, 85–86). Rather than wanting to listen quietly, Addams says, students desired to “express in the newly acquired tongue some of

6 Addams and Dewey make similar critiques of the public schools. In Democracy and Education, Dewey criticizes schools for “the great premium put upon listening, reading, and the reproduction of what is told and read” (1916, 155).

188 A. E. DAYTON

the hopes and longing which had so much to do with their emigration” (1961, 285). In other words, they want to be listened to and heard.

In the settlement house context, numerous barriers to listening exist. One barrier was a traditional mode of pedagogy which did not allow for much interaction between student and teacher. Another was a literal lan-guage barrier, since Hull House residents did not always speak their neigh-bors’ language. Another barrier was cultural misunderstanding. For all of these reasons, the acts of translation and interpretation—acts that turn the passive process of listening into an active process of engagement—became central to the settlement’s mission. Addams frequently suggests that trans-lation is one of the most important activities that settlements can foster; the role of the settlement, says Addams, is to “interpret democracy in social terms” (1961, 83). In turn, for second generation immigrants who have been assimilated, their job is to become “transmitter[s]” and “help-er[s]”, who “teach the entire family and [form] a connection between them and the outside world, interpreting [emphasis added] political speeches and newspapers and eagerly transforming [native] customs into American ones” (1994, 81). Emphasizing translation and interpretation—whether linguistic interpretation or cultural interpretation—is a means by which the settlement promoted active, reciprocal forms of listening.

For Addams and her fellow pragmatists, however, the most important means by which to transform passive listening into meaningful, recip-rocal classroom engagement, is to make productive use of experience. Listening to students means creating opportunities for them to share and interpret their experiences. Addams draws on Dewey’s belief (drawn in turn from William James), that experience is both active and passive, a central component in how knowledge is made and how we come to understand the world. As Dewey (1916) puts it,

It is not an experience [emphasis added] when a child merely sticks his finger into a flame; it is experience when the movement is connected with the pain which he undergoes in consequence. … [It is] “cumulative growth which makes an experience in any vital sense of that term.” … To “learn from experience” is to make a backward and forward connection between what we do to things and what we enjoy or suffer from things in consequence. (139–140)

Experience is the primary means by which we come to know the world and arrive at an understanding of what is true. For William James, this


process involves confronting new evidence in light of our previously held beliefs, recognizing the disjuncture between the two, and estab-lishing new truths that account for both. The pragmatist view of experi-ence, then, treats it as the critical factor in shaping our knowledge of the world, an ongoing process by which new knowledge builds on previous frameworks.

Within the context of Hull House’s public pedagogy, experience is not merely an individual possession but one that can be communally held. Insofar as she feels that the educational efforts of the settlement should foster the goal of cultural translation and interpretation, Addams’ pedagogy emphasizes the potential for rhetorical listening to foster con-nections between social groups and to address civic conflicts. This com-munal notion of experience is reflected in the setting and structure of the Hull House Labor Museum, which stands as an illustrative example of how rhetorical listening is translated into pedagogical practice. The Museum was designed to collect, display, and share the community expe-rience represented in the traditional arts and crafts of the neighborhood residents. Demonstrating arts like spinning, basket-weaving, sewing, and cooking, the Museum exhibits traced the historical development of the raw materials and the processes for creating the final products. For young people working in textile factories and other industrial settings, the Museum helped them understand the history and origins of the materials they used in their daily work.

The Museum addressed a problem that was fundamentally rhetorical in nature: the failure of understanding and lapse in cross-cultural com-munication between native-born and immigrant Americans, and between first- and second-generation immigrants. This gap is crystallized for Addams (1961) in the story of a young Italian girl who came to Hull House to take cooking classes, while her mother came to teach spinning in the Labor Museum. The young woman would use the back entrance rather than enter the Museum with her mother, because she was ashamed of her mother’s kerchief, “uncouth boots, and short petticoats” (160). One day, however, Angelina visited her mother’s exhibit and found a group of professors from the nearby School of Education gath-ered around her mother to learn about her spinning (160). Upon wit-nessing this demonstration, “she openly came into the Labor Museum by the same door as her mother, proud … of the craft which had been so much admired” (161). The Labor Museum opened a space for listening in the form of shared knowledge between individuals such as Angelina

190 A. E. DAYTON

and her mother, as well as between groups of people, including the native-born and immigrant Americans, the working class and the elite, Hull House social workers and their Hull House neighbors. It fostered listening that was not one directional (as with a lecture or speech), but collaborative and reciprocal, placing immigrants in the role of teachers while they were learning English and other skills.

In addition to being collaborative and active, rather than passive, rhetorical listening, in Addams’ framework, addresses the affective and interpersonal needs of the community. In sharing the story about Angelina and her mother, Addams suggests that the domestic conflicts of her students matter, and that successful pedagogies will take those conflicts into account when working with families. Moreover, she shows that “individual” problems are often not individual at all, but manifes-tations of larger social patterns, like the cultural gap between first gen-eration immigrants and their children. Addams sees emotions as a central factor in how individuals perceive and act in the world, and an important source of knowledge, as sociologists Patricia Lengermann and Gillian Niebrugge (2015) point out. By exploring the affective domain of immigrants’ lives, she can “build an analytic bridge between the microsocial and the macrosocial, between emotion and social struc-ture” (19). Moreover, it is worth noting the gendered dimension of Addams’ attention to emotion. It is not only important for Addams that we listen to immigrants, but that we listen to immigrant women, and to elderly women, who are doubly marginalized due to their gender and age.

Rhetorical listening, within the context of Hull House’s public peda-gogy, was also an embodied act. Steph Ceraso (2014) argues that from a pedagogical perspective, it is more productive to think of listening as a “bodily practice” that involves attention to sensory input as well as “material and environmental” factors that shape our interactions. Addams’ stories of teaching and learning at Hull House point to the ways that material and environmental factors, as well as bodily activities, con-tributed to students’ learning. This is true in the Labor Museum where students actively demonstrated their knowledge, and it worked in other settings as well. Addams notes that teachers at Hull House were con-cerned about the nutritional practices of parents who gave young children bread soaked in tea (or sometimes wine) for breakfasts. They attempted to make home visits and talk to mothers about the need for better nutrition,


but made little progress; ultimately, Addams says, “It has been possible to teach some of these women to feed their children oatmeal instead of tea-soaked bread, but it has been done, not by statements at all, but by a series of gay little Sunday morning breakfasts” (1961, 67–68; 1994, 89). In fact, Addams frequently suggests that embodied listening trumps any kind of lectures or statements that the settlement workers could make. She envisions classes in which Americans would teach English to immigrants while the immigrants teach them how to make Italian pasta, or how to handle tools and materials. As in the Labor Museum, this approach makes learning “a comparatively easy thing” because students are learning something new while conducting a physical activity (cooking, for instance) that is already familiar to them (1994, 121).

I have argued that in its pedagogical approach, Hull House— especially its Labor Museum, offered a space that redefined listening as a reciprocal, embodied process with the potential to foster civic progress through rhetorical engagement. In Twenty Years at Hull House and her various essays on education, Addams illustrates the importance of this specific kind of listening. But she also conveys her commitment to lis-tening implicitly, through her use of narrative as a tool for teaching. Her use of narrative and autobiography shows us what the process of rhetori-cal listening can look, especially when it is accompanied by the reflection that is required to make sense of experience. Addams frequently takes the approach of sharing an experience from the settlement, and then walking the reader through the process of reflection that allows her to learn from it. She does this even when her stories don’t paint her in the best light, illustrating her willingness to be uncertain and to work from contingent truths. One example is the story of a man who comes to the settlement to request aid for his family. Addams gently suggests that he should look for work before seeking charity, and points him toward an opportunity to work on a local drainage canal. After two days of work, she reports, he collapses and died of pneumonia. Addams says: “I have never lost trace of the two little children he left behind him, although I cannot see them without a bitter consciousness that it was at their expense I learned that life cannot be administered by definite rules and regulations” (1961, 108). Through this unfortunate experience, Addams recognizes the flaws in a “charity” model that faults the poor while it purports to help them. In contrast to this model, she points out that she has often been struck “with the kindness of the poor to each other; the woman who lives

192 A. E. DAYTON

upstairs will willingly share her breakfast with the family below because she knows they are ‘hard up’” (108). She connects these observations to some emerging research on unemployment among the working class, synthesizing her experience with the more abstract knowledge of expert research. Addams is willing to model her own process of listening, reflec-tion, and learning, even when that process implicates her in some of the social problems that she critiques.

Addams’ use of narrative and reflection place the audience in the posi-tion of listener and learner—perhaps more so than that of reader. After all, reading is an act that is marked by separation between writer and audience. Listening, on the other hand, involves personal, immediate interaction with our interlocutors. Though her future audience cannot have first-hand experience of Hull House, Addams’ narratives provide a window in these experiences. For O’Rourke (2014), this use of sto-rytelling reflects Addams’ philosophical stance and her educational phi-losophy: “Addams’ use of storytelling rather than objective analysis … exemplifies her philosophical position that abstractions are best defined by daily actions” (36). Addams not only promotes a pragmatist, feminist style of rhetorical and pedagogical engagement, she models it in her own writing.

conclusion

Jane Addams’ Hull House represents a unique space—historically, a sig-nificant social movement that attempted to redefine democracy to fit the changing needs of an increasing diverse, industrial, and urban soci-ety; rhetorically, a movement that championed new methods for talk-ing, listening, and communicating across social and cultural divides; and pedagogically, as a model that brought these social and rhetorical goals into the classroom and made them an explicit focus for teaching and learning. Jane Addams was troubled by the wide gap between the social classes, which was a function of geographical, cultural, and rhetor-ical/ideological differences. If citizens were to overcome those divides, it was necessary not only to find new means of rhetorical engagement but also to learn how to use those new methods—to find spaces where stu-dents could study social issues, discuss solutions, and practice engaging in debate and discussion that could lead to social change. It is true, as critics have pointed out, that the Hull House model of public pedagogy


sometimes fell short, and that settlement workers were sometimes una-ware of their own biases and limitations. Despite its limitations, how-ever, the settlement represents an educational model that was unlike any other of its day, and that continues to shape our understanding of what community-based rhetorical instruction can achieve. It was quintessen-tial pragmatist in its emphasis on individual experience and concrete con-sequences. It foreshadows feminist efforts to give voice to women, the working-class, and other marginalized groups. It illustrates the potential for rhetorical and pedagogical engagement to contribute to a more just, robust democracy for all.

references

Addams, Jane. 1902. First Report of the Labor Museum at Hull House, Chicago, 1901–1902, 1–16. https://hullhouse.uic.edu/hull/urbanexp/main.cgi?-file=new/show_doc.ptt&doc=293&chap=61.

———. 1907 [1964]. Democracy and Social Ethics, edited by Anne Firor Scott. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

———. 1912a. “A Modern Lear.” Survey 29 (5): 131–37.———. 1912b [1961]. Twenty Years at Hull House. New York: Penguin, Signet

Classic.———. 1916 [2002]. The Long Road of Woman’s Memory. Urbana and Chicago:

University of Illinois Press.———. 1994. On Education. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.Bickford, Susan. 1996. The Dissonance of Democracy: Listening, Conflict, and

Citizenship. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.Booth, Wayne. 2004. The Rhetoric of Rhetoric: The Quest for Effective

Communication. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.Carlson, Robert A. 1975. The Quest for Conformity: Americanization Through

Education. New York: John Wiley and Sons.Carson, Mina. 1990. Social Thought and the American Social Settlement, 1885–

1930. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.Ceraso, Steph. 2014. “(Re-)Educating the Senses. Multimodal Listening, Bodily

Learning, and the Composition of Sonic Experiences.” College English 77 (2): 102–123.

Cremin, Lawrence. 1961. The Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American Education, 1876–1957. New York: Vintage.

Danisch, Robert. 2007. Pragmatism, Democracy, and the Necessity of Rhetoric. Columbia, SC: The University of South Carolina Press.

https://hullhouse.uic.edu/hull/urbanexp/main.cgi%3ffile%3dnew/show_doc.ptt%26doc%3d293%26chap%3d61

https://hullhouse.uic.edu/hull/urbanexp/main.cgi%3ffile%3dnew/show_doc.ptt%26doc%3d293%26chap%3d61

194 A. E. DAYTON

Dayton-Wood, Amy. 2008. “Teaching English for a Better America.” Rhetoric Review 27 (4): 397–414. https://www-jstor-org.libdata.lib.ua.edu/stable/25655917.

Dewey, John. 1916. Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education. New York: The Free Press.

Diaz, Marie. Oral History-018. March 4, 1982. Jane Addams Memorial Collection. Box 2, Folder 24. University of Illinois-Chicago Special Collections.

Duffy, William. 2011. “Remembering is the Remedy: Jane Addams Response to Conflicted Discourse.” Rhetoric Review 30 (2): 135–152. https://doi.org/10.1080/07350198.2011.551499.

Fiesta, Melissa. 2007. “Unsettling Working-Class Commonplaces in Jane Addams Settlement House Rhetoric.” In Who Says? Working-Class Rhetoric, Class Consciousness, and Community, edited by William Degenaro, 69–87. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.

Fischer, Marilyn. 2004. On Addams. Toronto: Thomson/Wadsworth.Gearhart, Sally Miller. 1979 [2004]. “The Womanization of Rhetoric.” In

Readings in Feminist Rhetorical Theory, edited by Karen A. Foss, Sonja K. Foss, and Cindy L. Griffin, 241–259. London: Sage.

Jackson, Brian, and Gregory Clark. 2014. Trained Capacities: John Dewey, Rhetoric, and Democratic Practice. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press.

Knight, Louise. 2010. Jane Addams: Spirit in Action. New York: Norton.Knight, Louise. 2014. “John Dewey and Jane Addams Debate War.” In Trained

Capacities: John Dewey, Rhetoric, and Democratic Practice, edited by Brian Jackson and Gregory Clark, 106–124. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press.

Lengermann, Patricia, and Gillian Niebrugge. 2015. “Emotion and the World of Sociological Theory.” Conference Papers—American Sociological Association. January 1 (22). SocINDEX with Full Text, EBSCOhost. Accessed September 1, 2018.

McMillan, Gloria. 2002. “Keeping the Conversation Going: Jane Addams’ Rhetorical Strategies in ‘A Modern Lear.’” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 32 (3): 61–75. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3886009.

O’Rourke, Bridget. 2014. Jane Addams in the Classroom, edited by David Schaafsma, 32–42. Urbana and Champaign: University of Illinois Press.

Ratcliffe, Krista. 2005. Rhetorical Listening: Identification, Gender, and Whiteness. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

Roskelly, Hephzibah. 2013. “The Hope for Peace and Bread.” In Women and Rhetoric Between the Wars, edited by Ann George, M. Elizabeth Weiser, and Janet Zepernick, 32–47. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press.

https://www-jstor-org.libdata.lib.ua.edu/stable/25655917

https://www-jstor-org.libdata.lib.ua.edu/stable/25655917

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07350198.2011.551499

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07350198.2011.551499

https://www.jstor.org/stable/3886009


Seigfried, Charlene Haddock. 1996. Pragmatism and Feminism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Seigfried, Charlene Haddock. 1999. “Socializing Democracy: Jane Addams and John Dewey.” Philosophy of the Social Sciences 29 (2): 207–230.

Wendler, Rachel. 2014. “‘Socializing Democracy’: The Community Literacy Pedagogy of Jane Addams.” Community Literacy Journal 8 (2): 33–48.

197

CHAPTER 9

Emergent Publics, Public Emergencies: The Importance of John Dewey in Jane Bennett’s Nonhuman Politics of Vital

Materialism

Daniel P. Richards

“Thus spoke the grid.”—Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter (2010, 34)

Larry A. Hickman’s (2007) predictive assertion that John Dewey awaits us at the end of the road of postmodernism has been borne out, as we see those seeking to move beyond postmodern theory—namely those under the posthuman or new materialist umbrellas—grappling with over-coming the same restrictive capacities of Cartesian dualisms (Bernstein 1983) and false fissures between nature and culture and objectivity and subjectivity, to name just a couple, that Dewey grappled with a cen-tury ago. Armed with a pragmatist invocation that theory should help us do better, new materialists, such as political theorist Jane Bennett, have returned to Dewey’s expansive vision of publics to help address the public problems facing us in the twenty-first century, particularly in


D. P. Richards (*) Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA, USAe-mail: [email protected]

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14343-5_9


198 D. P. RICHARDS

what Ulrich Beck (1999) coins our “world risk society.” For Bennett, this means thinking more inclusively about our political ecologies, which, in the key ontological shift marked by posthumanist and new materi-alist thinkers, now require more thorough theorization about the role of nonhuman entities in our political lives—entities that were indeed acknowledged as part of publics but left under-theorized by Dewey, part of Latour’s (1992) lamentable “missing masses” (225). Faulty power grids, deepwater carbon deposits, litter, pesticides—all co-constitute our public spaces and affect and are affected by human agency. This is in no small part an aspect of Hickman’s articulation of pragmatism as a post-postmodern enterprise able to address the questions postmodernism left unresolved (14).

This chapter delves into Bennett’s specific project on political ecol-ogies and positions her work as inherently pragmatist, not only in its explicit use of Dewey to think more holistically about the human and nonhuman co-constitution of publics, but moreover in its move toward using this vision of publics to facilitate a more prudent, socially respon-sible communicative approach in the context of risk, accidents, and dis-asters. More than just engaging in definitional work, this chapter deploys Bennett’s theory of vital materialism to articulate a more prudent way to engage with the troubling prospect of communicating causality and blame in disasters, using the Deepwater Horizon blowout and subse-quent oil spill of 2010 as an example. In doing so, this chapter furthers the conversation of communicative prudence in the context of risk com-munication in the ever-changing role of risk in changing political cul-ture (Danisch 2010) and reasserts the importance of moving beyond the inadequate postmodern toolkit (Latour 2004) to address technoscien-tific problems currently facing rhetoricians and communication scholars. When it comes to ecological disasters such as Deepwater Horizon, chalk-ing fault and blame up to miscommunication or organizational disjuncts is losing usefulness in the larger role of science in our everyday lives. Attention to new materialist approaches, which call to mind pragmatist principles and impulses, is allowing us more and more to think forward about improving our relations across ontological lines through renewed forms of communication.

But before moving on, it is worthwhile to pause for a moment on my phrasing above, that new materialist approaches “call to mind” pragma-tist principles and impulses. I realize that this chapter is not digging dil-igently through the canon to dust off a lost figure with clear pragmatist

9 EMERGENT PUBLICS, PUBLIC EMERGENCIES: THE IMPORTANCE … 199

connections. Bennett’s work is too contemporary to be considered overlooked in the historical sense. No, this chapter instead takes on “overlooked” in a more contemporaneous sense, that work in the new materialist and posthuman corners of philosophy are, right before our eyes and without due acknowledgement, fulfilling Hickman’s vision of the post-postmodern value of pragmatism by foregrounding experience with materiality and rethinking the constitutive bodies of publics. The reasons why perhaps we do not think of Bennett and other new mate-rialists as part of the pragmatist tradition or fulfilling pragmatist goals are ample. First, the analytical and continental divide in philosophy is striking and, despite efforts to position pragmatism as bridging the two (Hildebrand 2003), pragmatism gets cast as a member of the former with writers in new materialism being educated in the latter. Second, and subsequently, not many new materialists consider themselves as pragma-tist, or are simply unaware of the nuance and influence of the pragmatist tradition, which is unfortunate since the exhilaration for a pragmatist in seeing Bennett use Dewey or Bruno Latour use William James (albeit ever so sparingly) comes from a nagging sense that Bennett and Latour, to name just two, are grappling with the same things and in the same way the American pragmatists did from the Civil War, onward: the unproductivity of stubbornly axiomatic stances, the impotence of cri-tique to bring about change. Third, new materialist work is not inher-ently political, in the narrow sense of the term. Bennett’s project is groundbreaking in its very attempt to take new materialist ontologies to democratic governance. And lastly, as Morris Raphael Cohen pointed out in 1940, pragmatism, particularly of the Deweyan variety, can be a fairly anthropocentric enterprise. It is not full-blown subjectivism, but it is, as Hildebrand (2003) points out, still perspectival. Still, even in the light of these potentially damning obstacles, Bennett utilizes Dewey at a critical juncture in her work and offers a framework for how pragmatism and new materialism—of which Bennett’s flavor is “vital materialism”—can work together on the same projects and with the same ends in sight.

In terms of structure, this chapter is divided into three main sections. The first section explores Bennett’s project of vital materialism, which calls for a more refined, theoretical attentiveness to the very public roles of nonhuman things. The second section covers Bennett’s treatment and usage of Dewey in her expanding of publics to support this pro-ject. The third section merges both thinkers in their shared vision of a more prudent way to deliberate in public matters of disaster, ultimately

200 D. P. RICHARDS

culminating into the argument that Bennett has indeed been to this point an overlooked or under-defined pragmatist and that, as articulated in the conclusion, much is to be gained by reading Bennett and pragma-tism together.

bennett’s VitAl mAteriAlism

If there is one line that aptly abridges Jane Bennett’s project in Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (2010), it is not a contention but rather a question appearing near the end of the book:

If we were more attentive to the indispensable foreignness that we are, would we continue to produce and consume in the same recklessly violent ways? (113)

Bennett broaches this question not from the perspective of protest rhet-orics or engineering inquiry or media messaging but from a philosoph-ical standpoint of ontology. A political theorist, Bennett is certainly concerned with crafting more responsible environmental policy; how-ever, this position is predicated on the argument that the reason why we might not have the best extant policies to date is precisely because we have not been attentive enough to the complexity involved in the pre-cipitation of public events, specifically ecological and technoscientific disasters. This complexity of causality hinges upon questions of agency as Bennett asks us to think slowly through the idea that matter itself is “passive stuff” and instead consider the proposition that our material surroundings are imbued with a vitality—“thing power”—that philos-ophy, by and large up until recent surges in new materialist and post-human thinkers, has overlooked. Bruno Latour refers to this work as uncovering philosophy’s and sociology’s “missing masses.” While not Bennett’s lone focus, disasters are apt exigencies for this project since they act as ruptures that allow her to “highlight the active role of nonhu-man materials in public life” (2).

Bennett proffers a genealogy (in the Neitzschean sense) exploring the vitality of nonhuman things beginning well before the posthuman project of Donna Haraway or the anthropological and science and tech-nology studies (STS) Actor-Network Theory project of Bruno Latour and John Law to the work of Baruch Spinoza’s Ethics published post-humously in 1677. There, readers find an ecologically minded Spinoza


ascribing to all bodies a “striving,” what Spinoza coined conatus that describes an “active impulsion,” (3.6) or what Bennett herself phrases as a “trending tendency to persist” (2). This tendency, this conatus exists in all human and nonhuman bodies, even banal objects engaging in banal activity; as Spinoza (1677) illustrates,

Any thing whatsoever, whether it be more perfect or less perfect, will always be able to persist in existing with that same force whereby it begins to exist, so that in this respect all things are equal. [Even a falling stone] is endeavoring, as far as in it lies, to continue in its motion. (3.6)

This conative nature, shared as it is by all human and nonhuman bodies, inspires Bennett to focus on the “power present in every body” (Bennett 2). Spinoza’s consistent emphasis on the continuity between humans and all other things and beings is the admittedly speculative space in which Bennett’s project resides, and affords Bennett both (i) the possibility to theorize the “thing-power” inherent in the missing masses of our phil-osophical and political thinking and (ii) a productive genealogy that challenges our assumptions of Enlightenment thinkers as ubiquitously hierarchical in their positioning of mind above materiality.

Spinoza’s assertion that “all things are equal” in their persistence of existence uncannily anticipates the larger philosophical project of “onto-logical flattening” between human and nonhuman objects currently taking place in the seminal work of Bruno Latour, Timothy Morton, Levi Bryant, Rosi Braidotti—those who loosely fall under the umbrella of new materialists, object-oriented ontologists, and posthumanists, held together by their concern to theorize and legitimize the presence, energy, agency, and affect of nonhuman artifacts, things, and objects in our world. Collectively, they ask: What happens to our philosophies and politics when we de-instate humans from the top of the ontological lad-der? What does this ontological coup d’état mean for the way we theorize epistemology? science? sociology? politics? How does this humility recal-ibrate who or what is effecting change and creating affect in our world?

For Bennett and her concern with the vitality of things, these ques-tions can be explored and speculated about even through the most banal interactions, as banal and common as Spinoza’s falling rock. In one of her “speculative onto-stories,” Bennett describes an encounter she had with debris over a Chesapeake Bay-bound grate of a storm drain outside a bagel store in Baltimore:

202 D. P. RICHARDS

When the materiality of the glove, the rat, the pollen, the bottle cap, and the stick started to shimmer and spark, it was in part because of the con-tingent tableau that they formed with each other, with the street, with the weather that morning, with me. For had the sun not glinted on the black glove, I might not have seen the rat; had the rat not been there, I might not have noted the bottle cap, and so on. But they were all there just as they were, and so I caught a glimpse of an energetic vitality inside each of these things, things that I generally conceived as inert. In this assemblage, objects appeared as things, that is, as vivid entities not entirely exhausted by their semiotics. (5)

While perhaps uncharacteristically poetic for a political theorist, this debris-centric encounter is meant to highlight how things produce effects, how they make things happen, and perhaps even how inorganic matter and things, as Manuel De Landa (1997) notes, might possess the propensity to self-organize. This requires a certain readiness and atten-tiveness on the behalf of the observing human, of course, as vital materi-alists “try to linger in those moments during which they find themselves fascinated by objects, taking them as clues to the material vitality that they share with them” (17). In this fashion, the objects themselves and their own conative trajectories might be understood more intentionally as provocative, in contrast to Sherry Turkle’s articulation of objects we think with as evocative (2007).

Such street-level musings are not the end of Bennett’s project, as one might imagine. Rather the mundanity of such an example to exemplify the thing-power about which she speaks is necessary, in her estima-tion, to then theorize more large scale interactions between things. For example, as a way to overcome the “latent individualism” in the specu-lative thinking of thing-power, Bennett develops a theory of distributive agency by way of examining a real-life effect brought about by the inter-activity of human and nonhuman bodies: the power blackout in North America in 2003 that affected over 50 million people. In using Spinoza’s notion of “affective bodies” and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s notion of “assemblage” to analyze the faltering power grid as an “agen-tic assemblage,” Bennett attempts to reconfigure our understanding of agency to include forces within and across bodies, both human and nonhuman, ultimately seeking to address the question: “How would an understanding of agency as a confederation of human and nonhuman elements alter established notions of moral responsibility and political accountability?” (38). That is, rather than focus on the lone electrical


engineer or site manager closest to the fault or accident, should not an accident with the massive scope of the blackout turn our attention out-ward and more expansively—and more inclusively—to all bodies impli-cated in the event?

Bennett’s ontological flattening thus becomes even more meaning-ful in the context of disaster. Since exploring how agency works on an ontological level is Bennett’s pursuit, traditional models of agency in the context of accidents, faults, and disasters need to be challenged. Her position is that if we aren’t even quite sure how human agency works after all these years, then how can we be entirely sure that nonhumans “make their mark” (34) in any substantially different way? While she does not deny the impact of a “willing subject,” Bennett points out that there is a certain “slipperiness” to a human-centered location of agency:

[T]here is not so much a doer (an agent) behind the deed [blackout] as a doing and an effecting by a human-nonhuman assemblage. This federation of actants is a creature that the concept of moral responsibility fits only loosely and to which the charge of blame will not quite stick. (28, empha-sis added)

In an effort to move even further beyond the phenomenological work of Maurice Merleau Ponty (1981), who developed theory that extends agency beyond the scope of human rationality, Bennett wants to include nonhumans in the demos (30). She wants to do this because she thinks that seeking to answer the question “Why?”—representing an inquiry into the moral state of a doer or group of doers—is unproductive because it demands reductive moral responsibility from a complex assemblage. While individual culpability might frame legal proceedings, it makes for poor development of policy. Bennett thus seeks a theory of distributed agency that does not “posit a subject as the root cause of an effect” (31). Simply associating the blackened night sky of powerless homes and cities or the slicked ecosystem in the Gulf of Mexico with a moral decision is drawing a straight line over and through a complex web of interactions and intersubjectivities, to borrow Diana Coole’s (2010) new materialist terminology.

Rather, Bennett, like Latour, favors more of a tracing methodology aimed at delineating all the actants involved in the swarm: “To figure the generative source of effects as a swarm is to see human intentions as always in competition and confederation with many other strivings” (32).

204 D. P. RICHARDS

This approach frames an accident or disaster more as the result of com-peting forces of human and nonhuman actants, even if that theory is supported within a more traditional approach to blame. In the aftermath of the North American blackout of 2003, the news media struggled to explain the complexity of the outage as it related specifically to the (dys)functionality of the power grid. Bennett sees this struggle as point-ing to the inadequacy of understanding the grid as a discrete object that either works or does not work; Bennett is quick to note that, “to the vital materialist, the electrical grid is better understood as a volatile mix of coal, sweat, electromagnetic fields, computer programs, electron streams, profit motives, heat, lifestyles, nuclear fuel, plastic, fantasies of mastery, static, legislation, water, economic theory, wire, and wood—to name just some of the actants” (25). Bennett’s intentionally juxtaposed list of act-ants resembles the litanies of Latour, operating as a rhetorical strategy to flatten the ontological status of things and transform abstract concepts and mundane artifacts into the same bowl of ontological potpourri, or perhaps even an ontological grocery list where items lack meaningful cat-egorization or distinction. This complexity is borne out, even years after the event:

Investigators still do not understand why the cascade ever stopped itself, after affecting 50 million people over approximately twenty-four thou-sand square kilometers and shutting down over one hundred power plants, including twenty-two nuclear reactors. The U.S.-Canada Power Outage Task Force report was more confident about how the cascade began, insisting on a variety of agential loci. These included electricity, with its internal differentiation into “active” and “reactive” power; the power plants, understaffed by humans but overprotective in their mechanisms; transmission wires, which tolerate only so much heat before they refuse to transmit the electron flow; a brush fire on Ohio; Enron FirstEnergy and other energy-trading corporations, who, by legal and illegal means, had been piling the grid without maintaining its infrastructure; consum-ers, whose demand for electricity grows and is encouraged to grow by the government without concern for consequences; and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, whose Energy Policy Act of 1992 deregulated the grid, separated the generation of electricity from its transmission and distri-bution, and advanced the privatization of electricity. (26–27)

The phrase “agential loci” is critical in understanding Bennett’s concern to trace the various things involved in the precipitation of the blackout


listed above because it undermines traditional conceptions of agency that tend to frame agency as an undeniably intentional move, resembling Kantian and neo-Kantian accounts (29), stemming from an autonomous, willing human person. Bennett seeks a “radical displacement” of agency from its exclusive moorings to the human, while still acknowledging that each different materiality will express different types and degrees of power within a given situation or assemblage. To do so a vital materialist needs to identify the “contours of the swarm”—as Bennett does astutely above concerning the blackout—to better understand the differentiation of power and agency, and specifically in the context of a disaster, rethink the topos of causality (Richards 2017).

In terms of locating causality, Bennett distinguishes between efficient causality and emergent causality. Efficient causality can be understood as a “chain of simple bodies acting as the sole impetus for the next effect” (32), and is, according to her, “impossibly rare”: “Is George W. Bush the efficient cause of the American invasion of Iraq? Is Osama bin Laden?” (32). Efficient causality assumes that events operate as chains, as dis-cernible, linear, hierarchical systems of cause and effect and “rank[s] the actants involved, treating some as external causes and others as depend-ent effects” (33). Emergent causality, by contrast, “places the focus on the process as itself an actant, as itself in possession of degrees of agentic capacity” (Bennett 33). Bringing it to the Deepwater Horizon accident of 2010—which will be discussed in section three of this chapter—we see this version of ontology present in journalistic accounts of the one, singular cause, usually with the intention of educating the public. On June 10, 2010, The New York Times published their own impressive, demonstrative epideixis—an interactive, multimodal, six-page write-up of the key areas of public concern regarding the blowout (Gröndahl et al. 2010): where the oil is; where it made landfall; the efforts being made to stop the leak; the effects on wildlife; the final moments of the rig; and of course the investigation of the cause. Appealing to the public con-cern, The New York Times used experts from the field to “get inside” the blowout preventer (the piece broadly understood as the “main” technical cause), to show every single last component of the complicated back-up safety mechanism, to the blind shear ram within the blowout preventer, and even further to the faulty shuttle valve with the shear ram. Working toward the weakest link of the blowout preventer, and reducing the explosion to such a minute interaction, signals an attempt to restrict cau-sality to a moment in time, which is, according to Bennett, a problematic

206 D. P. RICHARDS

characteristic of efficient causality: “If one extends the time frame of the action beyond that of even an instant, billiard-ball causality falters” (33). Journalistic attempts to identify the “initial” cause in lay language rests on the implicit ontological assertion that, in the chain of agency, identi-fication of the technical cause reigns supreme atop the hierarchy of agen-cies and, more importantly, that other utterances of blame are entirely contingent upon the identification of that initial cause.

For Bennett, distributing agency and thus pinning the locus of polit-ical responsibility in a human–nonhuman assemblage (36) reflects a larger value system that resists reductive attributions. In her examples of Middle East conflict, this reductiveness often leads to violence. On the great North American blackout of 2003, she writes: “Though it would give me great pleasure to assert that deregulation and corporate greed are the real culprits in the blackout, the most I can honestly affirm is that corporations are one of the sites at which human efforts at reform can be applied, that corporate regulation is one place where intentions might initiate a cascade of effects” (37). Bennett intentionally withholds the temptation to dole out blame to individual parties because for her “autonomy and strong responsibility seem […] empirically false, and thus their invocation seems tinged with injustice” (37). If considering the Deepwater Horizon blowout, one can anticipate Bennett feeling uncomfortable with the anti-BP protestors or the heavy-handedness with which the Obama administration levied out blame and subsequent penal-ties and fines because her distributed ontological/philosophical purview of the disaster produces a less reductive approach to causality and, thus, blame.

As such, Bennett’s project to think more slowly and thoroughly about the roles of nonhuman things in public events is simultaneously a phil-osophical argument about ontology but also and inevitably a political argument about how shifting the way we conceive of publics might pro-ductively alter our communicative frameworks and lead to more appro-priate and productive policy.

bennett, dewey, And the constitution of Publics

While Bennett appears to migrate seamlessly from mundane street-level encounters with debris to massive multinational malfunctions as a way to hint at the political possibilities involved in such encounters, these spec-ulative onto-stories do not in and of themselves, as she readily admits,


confront the more difficult questions of articulating the directly political capacity of actants (94):

Even if a convincing case is made for worms as active members of, say, the ecosystem of a rainforest, can worms be considered members of a public? What is the difference between an ecosystem and a political system? Are they analogs? Two names for the same system at different scales? What is the difference between an actant and a political actor? Is there a clear difference? Does an action count as political by virtue of its having taken place “in public”? Are there nonhuman members of a public? What, in sum, are the implications of a (meta)physics of vibrant materiality for polit-ical theory? (94)

To address such difficult questions pertaining to the politics of the non-human, Bennett engages two theories of democracy—those of John Dewey and Jacques Rancière—to explore what constitutes a public, how they form and deform, and was constitutes a distinctly political act. For the specific purposes of this chapter and the scope of this collection, I will focus on Bennett’s treatment and use of Dewey, in particular his important work in the early part of the twentieth century on the emer-gent properties of publics.

There are two reasons why Bennett is drawn to Dewey’s work to explore the political ramifications of her vital materialism. The first is broad: Dewey’s analogy between an ecosystem and political system lends thinkers metaphorical affordances through which to draw explicit parallels between “natural” and “cultural” processes. These parallels reveal similarities between, say, a citizen voting and the “small agency of worms”—as Bennett phrases it in borrowing from Charles Darwin—exacted in these tiny creatures’ decisions to select and carry leaves for their burrows; decisions that, as Darwin noted, vary by situation and the resources afforded to them. Worms “pay attention,” and, in their crucial role below the ground in cultivating productive vegetable mold and pre-serving soil and by extension human artifacts, move alongside humans in history. In this sense, the “small agency” of worms play significant roles in the anthropological and agricultural success of humans. Using this analogy, a person casting one vote within a country of thirty mil-lion might also be said to have “small agency” in the political ecology of democracy. While Darwin was not as literal as Bennett, or even Spinoza before him—indeed Darwin was engaging in a certain type of whimsy anthropomorphism—such metaphorical or creative work can reveal

208 D. P. RICHARDS

structural similarities within “nature” and “culture” and as such “can catalyze a sensibility that finds a world filled not with ontologically dis-tinct categories of beings (subjects and objects) but with variously com-posed materialities that form confederations” (99). As was the case with the debris over the drainage grate, expanding the nonhuman purview of agency requires a type of openness and disposition within the observer.

The second reason why Bennett is drawn to Dewey’s work is because the “gap between action and political action is relatively small” (95). Of importance here is Dewey’s generative concept of “conjoint action,” which refers to “the agency behind the emergence of a public; a pub-lic’s agency or capacity to produce effects is also a function of conjoint action” (95). Bennett’s underlying thesis here is that Dewey’s theory “leaves open the possibility that some of the acts of conjoint action orig-inate in nonhuman (natural and technological) bodies” (95) and thus political action can theoretically be directly generated and effectual from a suasive relationship between a human and nonhuman body—a sort of nonhuman or posthuman public.

A considerable, underlying part of Bennett’s project, then, is to advance, expand, and challenge just what constitutes a public. This too was the underlying project of Dewey in The Public and Its Problems (1954). For Dewey, the improvement of the conditions of debate, dis-cussion, and persuasion resides in a fundamental alteration in just what constitutes a public, or the public, or the publics. For Dewey, if we could move beyond the stifling and false dichotomies of the state and the pub-lic, then individual citizens and groups of citizens would be in a better, more empowered position, able to mobilize through the creation and re-creation of multiple publics that best help address their felt needs. Wearisome of his own artificial distinction between the “state” and the “public,” as well as the widespread acceptance of Walter Lippmann’s (1922) repudiating the very existence of a rational public, Dewey used his earlier theories on “naturalism” in Experience and Nature (originally published in 1925) to expound an articulation of publics that at times is rather analogous to the natural interactions in a given ecosystem or collection of ecosystems. From Bennett: “Like the conjoint action of Darwin’s worms, the conjoint action of Dewey’s citizens is not under the control of any rational place or deliberate intention. No efficient cause of the problems it generates can really be pinpointed” (100). The field of political action is in many ways ecological, with no one body solely responsible for action as each body is conjoined with another, clustered


together as they respond to harm, and then re-acting from this for-mation into new trans-actions and new groups (or “swarms”) to be affected—and publics (r)emerge ad infinitum: “Any action is always a trans-action […] This is because an act can only take place in a field already crowded with other endeavors and their consequences, a crowd with which the new entrant immediately interacts, overlaps, and inter-feres. The file of political action is thus for Dewey a kind of ecology” (101). For Dewey, conjoint actions generate “multitudinous conse-quences” and “each of these consequences ‘crosses the others’ to gen-erate its own problems, and thus its own publics or ‘group of persons especially affected’” (101).

According to Dewey publics do not, however, preexist. Publics are not simply willed into existence. They arise or emerge in response to particular problems; enrollment of individuals into these publics is char-acterized by induction rather than willing volunteering. Because pub-lics emerge as responses to events, as responses to problems, they can be characterized in terms of their shared harm: a public “consists of all those who are affected by the indirect consequences of transactions to such an extent that it is deemed necessary to have those consequences systematically cared for” (Public 16). The homeowners with no energy in 2003, the individuals running fisheries in coastal Louisiana, and the progressive clean energy protestors during the spill in 2010—they con-stitute a cohesive public because they are a group that emerged out of shared harm, provoked together by the “indirect, serious and enduring [consequences of] conjoint action” (Public 16). Conjoint action can be best understood as the intentional and unintentional effects of a given interaction, an interaction in which “no efficient cause of the problems it generates can really be pinpointed” (Bennett 100). In characteristically pragmatist fashion, publics for Dewey do not concern themselves with infighting over the specifics of their genesis but rather with their ability to produce effects and affect to resolve a given problem at hand. This is how rural, coastal fishers can conjoin with progressive protestors. There is an emphasis on consequences, not intentions—of the ethical responsi-bility of responding to harm, not identifying blame. This is precisely how Bennett sees Deweyan theories of publics as “[paving] the way for a the-ory of action” (103).

Bennett reads Dewey as ahead of his time in terms of addressing the complicated intersections of humans, technologies, and ecologies, stat-ing that even current theories of democracy are not equipped to address

210 D. P. RICHARDS

or explain such nuanced relationships: “Theories of democracy that assume a world of active subjects and passive objects begin to appear as thin descriptions at a time when the interactions between human, viral, animal, and technological bodies are becoming more and more intense” (108). The weak distinction between active subjects and passive objects, as articulated carefully by Dewey in Art as Experience (1934), is like the epidermis of the skin, which is “the most superficial way an indication of where an organism ends and its environment begins. There are things inside the body that are foreign to it, and there are things outside of it that belong to it de jure if not de facto” (61). Bennett’s contention is that if Dewey sees the objective and the subjective as superficially dis-crete, and publics as emergent from conjoint action between two bodies, then the likely conclusion to draw—albeit without direct evidence—would be that Dewey, given the language, would have been amenable to the possibility of a distinctly posthuman public. While, generally speak-ing, Dewey positions conjoint action as a human activity in the politi-cal realm, his ecological framework for interactivity and his biological metaphors to describe in concert the fluidity across which agency flows through human and nonhuman bodies, a public as emergent from a trans-action between a human and nonhuman body affords Bennett the space to theorize the political role of nonhuman, vital materiality in our demos, our state of affairs, indeed our policy and protests: “In naming a problem (rather than an act of will) as the driving force behind the for-mation of a public, Dewey (almost) acknowledges that a political action need not originate in human bodies at all” (102). She admits that he “flirts” with the posthuman and, in Art as Experience, “comes close to saying that even human initiatives are not exclusively human” (102).

This idea of public initiatives as “not exclusively human” stems from Dewey’s definition of a member of a public as one “affected by the indi-rect consequences of transactions to such an extent that it is deemed necessary to have those consequences systematically cared for” (Dewey 1925, 277). For Bennett, this characterization encourages us to think of how to better attend how nonhuman bodies participate in conjoint action and will help us “more clearly discern instances of harm to the (affective) bodies of animals, vegetables, minerals, and their ecocultures” (103), which would then in turn provoke responses. In circling back to an earlier question posed by Bennett—“If we were more attentive to the indispensable foreignness that we are, would we continue to produce and consume in the same recklessly violent ways?” (113)—we see that the


answer approaches the notion that an acknowledgment of the inclusion of nonhuman bodies in the harms generating and shaping our publics would hopefully produce a more ethical and prudential and productive framework through which to solve problems.

At first blush, you might ponder, as I did: to what extent is the dis-tinction between Bennett and Dewey a terminological one? Might a swarm or assemblage be synonyms for publics, as Dewey broadly con-strued them? But upon deeper consideration, Bennett’s project is in no small part hinged upon the idea of publics as emergent, with the emer-gence taking place through Dewey’s conjoint action between a human and potentially a nonhuman body. Without an expansive vision of pub-lics provided by Dewey, Bennett’s project remains mostly theoretical and lacking in a framework for political mobilization. My contention is that Bennett’s thinking about how publics are formed and her building off of Dewey’s notion of “conjoint action” between humans and nonhumans to do so moves her closer to being part of the pragmatist tradition, yes, but also him closer to becoming increasingly relevant for contemporary projects in new materialism.

chAnging the “conditions of debAte” in disAsters

As stated earlier, this project of ontological inclusion of nonhuman things requires more attentiveness from humans; Bennett’s ecologi-cal-minded ethical framework hinges upon an ethic of listening. The next issue, obvious as it may be, is how we precisely listen to nonhu-man, “nonlinguistic” bodies? If nonhuman actants participate in our publics, then how can communication proceed in meaningful, practical ways? Bennett, in acknowledging this conceptual obstacle and practi-cal limitation, asks: “Can we theorize more closely the various forms of such communicative energies? How can humans learn to hear or enhance our receptivity for ‘propositions’ not expressed in words? How to trans-late between them? What kinds of institutions and rituals of democracy would be appropriate?” (104). In this final section, I use the case of the Deepwater Horizon blowout out and subsequent oil spill much in the same way Bennett uses the North American blackout: to account for the swarms of actants involved in an event, particularly a fault, accident, or disaster. I contend that it is in these dire contexts that the role of non-human constituents of publics become apparent, become examples of how attention to the nonhuman constituents to publics might actually

212 D. P. RICHARDS

move us forward in solving problems by shifting our conversations post-disaster away from singular ways of thinking of causality and blame. Akin to Dewey’s contention in The Public and Its Problems that impor-tant work needs to be done not only in the arguments of debate but in the very conditions of debate itself, Bennett seeks to provide readers with a productive, nonreductive framework from which to develop robust communication theories of political-ecological disaster.

The explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, along with the subsequent spilling of oil from the Macondo 252 well in the northern part of the Gulf of Mexico, took place starting on April 20, 2010. The Deepwater Horizon blowout includes the explosion stemming from a pressure gauge; the subsequent oil spill resulting from the opening of the oil well from said explosion; and the ecological impacts that rever-berated—and continually reverberate—throughout the Gulf waters, shorelines, and beyond. And while the event is colloquially referred to as the BP Oil Spill, the name only paints part of the picture. BP in this instance leased the Deepwater Horizon rig from Transocean, one of the few rigs in the world large enough to meet the requirements necessary of drilling at unprecedented depths. Halliburton was contracted to com-plete cement jobs around the pipeline itself for reinforcement purposes. Cameron, a parts company, sold the blowout preventer, which would play a major role in the precipitation of the explosion, to Transocean. Save for Cameron, each of the companies—BP, Transocean, and Halliburton—had employees working side by side aboard the Deepwater Horizon rig that night.

Fordham University law professor Howard Erichson, when inter-viewed during the spring 2013 court trials of the oil spill, was quoted as saying that, “In terms of sheer dollar amounts and public attention, [Deepwater Horizon] is one of the most complex and massive disputes ever faced by the courts” (“Gulf Spill Trial”). And with the courtroom occupied with almost a dozen teams of lawyers representing the major stakeholders, namely BP, contractors Transocean, Halliburton, and Cameron, the US Justice Department, and five Gulf states, it is easy to see why. Yet, in 2010, in the spring and summer months following the spill, and before the courtroom drama, it was seemingly not that compli-cated. For the media and the public, there was only one party to look to, and that was BP. Protestors, environmentalist groups, and images of oil-soaked pelicans and sullied BP logos all contributed to the notion that BP, a corporation with a terrible track record, was at fault. Even more


than their counterparts, BP has been known to “cut corners” to save money, leading people to believe that the oil ravaging their local eco-systems, oil that belonged to BP and from which BP would profit, was directly BP’s fault.

Yet, while it was BP’s oil from which to gain, and while greedy deci-sions were no doubt made, I contend that the singular aggression toward the oil giant represented an over-attribution to human will and human character, echoing the autonomous visions of agency proffered by Immanuel Kant. BP was operating in a larger swarm of actants involved, from the United States government, which overlooked some key safety issues and contributed heavily to deregulation in the industry, to leased blowout preventers, which were made overseas and leased as a separate component of the rig itself. Protesting one certain company over an event represents a belief that agency is located in the moral responsibil-ity of an individual’s actions. This Kantian approach to agency casts the “autonomous will,” specifically its choice or inability to abide by moral law, as the cause of “evil.” This Kantian approach, however, is problem-atic not because of any theological obstacles but rather because it works reductively rather than toward a more comprehensive view of an event.

Thus in any disaster, but specifically in one as ecologically catastrophic as Deepwater Horizon, there emerges a distinct intersection of dis-courses with competing patterns and motives. Protest rhetorics demand justice for environmental harm caused by greedy corporations who place public health and well-being down the list of priorities. Technical discourse consists of engineers and industry experts seeking to trace the mechanisms of the broken machine back to a single inefficiency or break. News media outlets attempt to update the public on dramatic recent developments in organizational inquiries, such as who was on shift that night and who was in charge of overseeing that particular aspect. Regarding a disaster of this scale, there exists not merely a post-disaster narrative, as Schwartzman et al. (2011) have phrased it, but competing post-disaster narratives far more complex than mere finger-pointing, as underlying each narrative are assumptions about agency, risk, and pub-lic health—each in their own right trying to answer a broader question: “What causes disaster?” Yet, if viewed through the lens of Dewey’s nat-uralistic political pragmatism, an approach that “makes responsibil-ity more a matter of responding to harms than of identifying objects of blame” (Bennett 2010, 101–102, emphasis added), we are left won-dering what precisely the value in this question is. Lawsuits need to be

214 D. P. RICHARDS

filed; government agencies need to be improved; businesses need to be assigned reparations. A stakeholder, practically speaking, needs to liter-ally “pay” for causing such harmful effects. But the litigation and engi-neering discourses oftentimes become entwined with political discourse about energy sources and regulations in a way that conflates ethics and moralism. After the spill, many were left just with protest. How else can individuals rise up and change regulatory structures on unclean energy?

Dewey himself not only laments the general powerlessness of dem-ocratic citizens but the subsequent impotence or difficulty of enacting productive public deliberation. While others writing at the time, specifi-cally Walter Lippmann, did not believe that the “public” had the rational capability of engaging in democratic methods of communication, Dewey remained hopeful and optimistic. For Dewey, the “public”—more as a concept than an identifiable entity—was to regain its voice, indeed re-empower its very sense of self/selves through communication: “The essential need, in other words, is the improvement of the methods and conditions of debate, discussion and persuasion. That is the problem of the public” (1954, 208). Dewey’s work, from all three epochs of his writing (early, middle, and later), shows a consistent concern to funda-mentally reconfigure the conditions of debate. If persuasive methods can be understood as situation-based prescriptive techniques for effective communication, then the conditions of debate, discussion, and persuasion can be understood as the social structures, philosophies, and material realities within which said methods are situated.

I argue here, in lockstep with Bennett, that the best way to mitigate and protect against future catastrophes such as Deepwater Horizon is not to merely levy fines and restrictions on the most culpable of stake-holders involved in the complex extraction of carbon from the ocean floor but rather to frame the conversation around the confluence of pre-cipitating factors involved in such an event. To move forward the con-ditions of debate, there needs to be a separation of blame and causality. In this approach, blame and causality need not be conflated or even taken so nonchalantly as synonymous because agency is seen as emer-gent rather than as a moral quality. This is not to say that approaches to disaster do not seek justice. As Bennett writes, there should not be an effort to release the overseers of the power grid of any legal culpabil-ity: “Outrage will not and should not disappear, but a politics devoted too exclusively to moral condemnation and not enough to a cultivated discernment of the web of agentic capacities can do little good, [for in]


a world of distributed agency, a hesitant attitude toward assigning sin-gular blame becomes a presumptive virtue” (38). Her theory of distrib-uted agency calls us to be more attentive to the specific agentic swarms involved in the given event. In a vital materialist framework, the task of the rhetorician or writer is not to unethically hone in on one single agent like a technical investigator. Rather, the task is to negotiate the “delicate balance”: How to negotiate the centripetal forces of blame with the centrifugal distributive forces of causality when these two opposing forces are seemingly so closely, positively correlated with each other? The identification of a singular, technical cause in the midst of disaster drives the inquiry process because it is the fulcrum of all legal, moral, and epideictic discourses. The legal accountability and pub-lic responsibility in large part is understood and doled out by an iden-tification of who “allowed” the technical malfunction to occur, but, as Bennett points out, a “federation of actants is a creature that the concept of moral responsibility fits only loosely and to which the charge of blame will not stick” (Bennett 28).

Bennett challenges us with the following task: to account for the wide range of human and nonhuman forces involved in the precipitating of a disaster while still remaining firm in the ethical accountability of its stake-holders. This is underwritten by the notion that the acknowledgement of the agential capacity on nonhuman objects within larger assemblages renders the task of assigning singular blame (1) impossible because the human-centered notions of disaster rely on a conflation between blame and causality that new materialist approaches work to detach, and (2) unproductive because it does nothing to enhance the accountabil-ity of all stakeholders involved in the precipitation of the event. Where agency is distributed and recourse of action focuses on a more full-scale approach to individuals and ethics, the problematic conflation of blame and causality begins to unravel, and we are given an approach to dis-aster that would “detach ethics from moralism” (Bennett 38). In many current usages of epideictic rhetorics in the context of disaster, the appli-cation of the moral concept of blame is entrenched within technical and forensic inquiries into causality. Ultimately, adopting a vital materialist approach to disaster allows us to look closely at responsibility without having it hinge upon a reductive technical cause.

A recent study conducted by the University of New Hampshire found that a significant number of Gulf Coast residents who were directly affected by the oil spill in some economic capacity indicated changed views about

216 D. P. RICHARDS

major environmental issues. Explaining the study, Dr. Lawrence Hamilton, professor of sociology at the university, claims that

If disasters teach any lessons, then experience with the Gulf oil spill might be expected to alter opinions about the need for environmental protection. About one-fourth of our respondents said that as a result of the spill, their views on other environmental issues such as global warming or protect-ing wildlife had changed […] This proportion rose to 35 percent among those most affected economically by the spill. People reporting changed views also expressed greater concern about sea level rise due to climate change, more support for a moratorium on deepwater drilling, and were more likely to favor alternative energy rather than increased oil explora-tion. (Wright 2012)

Out of the midst of unfortunate events comes the changing of minds on important political and ecological issues. A group of individuals who had material experience with the oil in some capacity—with many having direct contact with oil substance—were led to engage in some form of inquiry and rethink their views and, if it comes to it, actions at the polls.

However, when looking deeper into the comparisons between responses from individuals in Louisiana and those in Florida, we see that the larger political forces at work—the very same forces Dewey cri-tiques—are restricting publics’ ability to articulate their long-term inter-ests. Participants were asked if they were in favor of a moratorium on offshore drilling, which would then lead to an increased use in alter-native energies. Participants in Louisiana, though more extremely affected by the spill than their Florida counterparts, were less likely to favor a moratorium. The reason why becomes clear when looking at the amount of state income deriving from offshore drilling. Louisiana, and its open laws on offshore deepwater oil drilling, benefit somewhere in the neighborhood of 65 billion dollars per year from the oil industry. Florida, on the other hand, “actively opposed offshore drilling, which is currently banned in state waters” (Wright 2012). In explaining why coastal Louisiana residents were still generally pro-deepwater drilling, Dr. Hamilton continues:

The pattern of responses from coastal Louisiana, where many more peo-ple reported effects from the spill, extreme weather, or threats from cli-mate-related sea-level rise—but fewer supported a deepwater moratorium, alternative energy, or resource conservation—reflects socioeconomic


development around oil and gas. Specialization has been channeled partly by physical characteristics of the Louisiana coastline itself. (Wright 2012)

Without engaging in reductiveness, the differences in state viewpoints can be explained by two general patterns: the actual geography of the coasts (Florida coasts are more conducive to other industries, such as tourism) and the larger corporate and governmental benefits in Louisiana derived from the high-risk processes of deepwater drilling. The short-term gain, long-term risk approach enacted by the Louisiana state gov-ernment is precisely the conditions of debate, discussion, and persuasion that stifle the publics’ abilities to articulate their own needs, desires, and protections. For those individuals who changed their mind about larger environmental concerns because of the very real, very deep impact of the spill on their lives, there is not an avenue to promote an ethos of alterna-tive energy in a political context where the state’s budget and the func-tioning of its citizens rely on the ethos of its opposite. For Lippmann, the problem was that the “public” did not own a rational capability to enact change; for Dewey, the “public” does have this capability, it’s just that they are restricted by conditions that are out of their control.

So, what to do? BP, a corporation who works very closely with the Louisiana state government, has a lengthy record of producing deadly technical failures and heavily impacting American families; it is woven into the narrative of their existence as a corporation in America. Rather than feed into the boycotts and protests that seem to happen every decade or so toward BP, it behooves rhetoricians and communication researchers to provide a different framework for the public to both understand and act on the events that transpired in April 2010. It begins, in a way, with the realization that the blowout and spill are not just on BP’s dime and that it did not just begin in April of 2010. The roots that brought us to where we are today—still polishing oil off Florida pan-handle rocks—penetrates deep into a culture dominated by politically influential, affluent corporations, stifled citizens, and a government who is generally content to look the other way. Spills are not catastrophes so much as symptoms of the publics affected by them unable to articulate their needs in the larger scope of the closely knit ties between the federal and state governments and the oil industry. Until the fundamental con-ditions are changed, until the public refuses to abide by the belief that the 4.9 million barrels of oil dispersed throughout the Gulf water was the result of corporate greed, oil spills will happen and the corporations

218 D. P. RICHARDS

and stakeholders primarily involved in the event will continue to exist (read: thrive). A head will roll, and we as a culture will move on, inte-grating the event into our psyche but not pronounced enough to alter our everyday actions.

Much like the Deepwater Horizon example, which was a rig that pro-duced oil to fund the state of Louisiana but then also manufactured a risk for the Gulf of Mexico ecosystem, a certain amount of scientific liter-acy or rhetorical prudence is necessary. An attunement to material causal-ity, to how our actions and others’ actions are impacting our well-being and those of others, and how our interaction with technology and sci-ence is building society, is the key component life in such a society. John Dewey knew this. According to Hickman (1990), “Dewey repeatedly emphasized his view that failure of artifacts to do their work is not nec-essarily due to the lack of productive skill on the part of the artist, but may be due to the lack of such skill on the part of the person who is confronted with and called upon to take account of produced artifacts” (Pragmatic Technology 67). It is important to keep in mind here that for Dewey an artist was both a factory line worker and a sculptor. We, as cit-izens in a world risk society (Beck 1999), are those who are asked to take account of produced artifacts, to have a prudence and ethics about our consumption and/or use of any given technological artifact. While my example is of citizens who consume oil, Dewey, as explained by Hickman (1990), uses a different example:

Productive skill is required on the parts of the mining engineer and smelter in order to effect the transformation of natural materials such as ores into artifacts that possess intrinsic as well as extrinsic meanings. Productive skill is required on the parts of individuals going about their quotidian busi-ness in order to effect the transformation of the raw and immediate mate-rials of focus and context, enjoyment and routine use, into an experience that exhibits enlarged meaning and significance. And productive skill is required of those who appreciate and use art objects in order to effect the transformation and appropriation of those objects into sources of renewed delight and refined insight. (67)

Far from merely generously doling out the blame of the oil spill to all those involved, to all those who have every pumped gas, Hickman’s read-ing of Dewey is contending that the failure of artifacts—say, an oil rig—is a failure of collective inquiry, a failure on behalf of society to create the proper conditions of debate and access of risk for all those impacted:


“One of the principle causes of failure of inquiry is neglect of the recip-rocal connections among means and ends” (Hickman 1990, 67). The conditions for properly assessing risk and for properly attuning oneself to the material reality of industrial progress were just as faulty, in Dewey’s view, as the hydraulic liquid switch deep within the blowout preventer. Dewey’s material approach to communication and to our relating to objects echoes Coole and Frost’s (2010) new materialist insistence that attunement with the everydayness of materiality, with the artifacts that shape our existence, offers a productive reorientation to the world.

conclusion

When disasters happen, we clearly require frames inclusive of both human and nonhuman agents. The media-driven bloodlust for a singu-lar moral failure, while temporarily satiating, does little in the realm of long-term prevention or mitigation. Reading Bennett and Dewey (and perhaps pragmatism more broadly, as well) side by side brings us payoff three-fold. First, it highlights their shared concern for altering in rela-tively radical ways the conditions and structures of communication, and also highlights how they can mutually supplement each other. Dewey provides for Bennett’s political ecology an ethic of action to supplement her already expansive criteria for participation. In tandem, Bennett works to expand what has agency (to help supplement Dewey) and Dewey works toward moving this vision toward action (to help supplement Bennett). Read together in light of the rhetorics of disaster, Bennett and Dewey can work to help us in avoiding the same sins over and over by being less reductive in blame, more inclusive in the agents involved, but also more incisive and intelligent about the political actions required.

Second, Bennett’s reliance on Dewey hints at a new sense of what I might call posthuman pragmatism (and what Hickman’s frames as pragmatism as post-postmodernism). More work into this sense would be quite productive, not only because it might help address divides between analytical and continental philosophy as well as realist and anti- realist stances, but also because it provides a new frame for synthesizing Dewey’s naturalistic writings with his more political ones. And thirdly, reading Bennett and Dewey together helps paint a clearer, more realistic picture of a political ethic—particularly for but not just related to disas-ters—for new materialists, who are leaving our humanist ethics behind potentially at great risk.

220 D. P. RICHARDS

I hope the arguments constructed above do not lose significance or clarity in their dual nature. My overarching argument is that Bennett can be construed as doing pragmatist work in her rethinking of publics and then using this more expansive vision of publics to change the condi-tions of debate around our global and local risk cultures. The parallel argument being made is that Dewey’s attention to the roles of nonhu-mans in generating and affecting publics has been overlooked and, given recent philosophical trends, should be rediscovered and uncovered to further the role or pragmatist theory in contemporary political discus-sions, which are increasingly inclusive of materiality and technology. In this sense Bennett is both an overlooked pragmatist while simultaneously helping surface an overlooked part of pragmatism.

If, as Richard Bernstein so confidently states in his essay “The Pragmatic Century” (2006), the ideas of pragmatism have dominated twentieth-century thought, and as Hickman so boldly predicts that Dewey awaits us in the epoch of post-postmodernism, then it is my belief that pragmatism has the legs to continue the same trend into the twen-ty-first century as well. Positioning Bennett as a pragmatist opens the door for further cross-movement analysis between the American pragma-tists and contemporary new materialists and posthumanists that will help achieve this. Bennett is an overlooked pragmatist, yes, but also Dewey’s inclusion of nonhumans in his publics is also an overlooked aspect of his thinking. For as Dewey himself asks in Experience and Nature, “Since we ‘call’ things by their names, why should they not answer?” (181). And I might add the following amendment: Since we call things by their names, why should they not help us do better?

references

Beck, Ulrich. 1999. World Risk Society. Malden, MA: Blackwell.Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham:

Duke University Press.Bernstein, Richard J. 1983. Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science,

Hermeneutics, and Praxis. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.———. 2006. “The Pragmatic Century.” In The Pragmatic Century:

Conversations with Richard J. Bernstein, edited by Sheila Greeve Davaney and Warren G. Frisina, 1–14. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.

Cohen, Morris Raphael. 1940. “Some Difficulties in Dewey’s Anthropocentric Naturalism.” The Philosophical Review 49 (2): 196–228.


Coole, Diana. 2010. “The Inertia of Matter and the Generativity of Flesh.” In New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, edited by Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, 92–115. Durham: Duke University Press.

Coole, Diana, and Samantha Frost. 2010. New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics. Durham: Duke University Press.

Danisch, Robert. 2010. “Political Rhetoric in a World Risk Society.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 40 (2): 172–192.

De Landa, Manuel. 1997. A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History. Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books.

Dewey, John. 1958 [1925]. Experience and Nature. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, Inc.

———. 2005 [1934]. Art as Experience. New York: Perigee.———. 1954. The Public and Its Problems. Athens, OH: Swallow Press.Gröndahl, Mika, Haeyoun Park, Graham Roberts, and Archie Tse. 2010.

“Investigating the Cause of the Deepwater Horizon Blowout.” New York Times, last modified June 21.

“Gulf Spill Trial: ‘Recklessness’ at BP, U.S. Says.” Associated Press, USA Today, last modified February 25, 2013.

Hickman, Larry A. 1990. John Dewey’s Pragmatic Technology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

———. 2007. Pragmatism as Post-Postmodernism: Lessons from John Dewey. New York: Fordham University Press.

Hildebrand, David L. 2003. Beyond Realism and Antirealism: John Dewey and the Neopragmatists. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press.

Latour, Bruno. 1992. “Where Are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts.” In Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change, edited by Wiebe E. Bijker and John Law, 225–258. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

———. 2004. “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern.” Critical Inquiry 70: 225–248.

Lippmann, Walter. 1922. Public Opinion. New York: W. W. Norton.Merleau Ponty, Maurice. 1981. The Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by

Colin Smith. New York: Routledge.Richards, Daniel P. 2017. “Reconstituting Causality: Accident Reports as

Posthuman Documentation.” In Topic-Driven Environmental Rhetoric, edited by Derek G. Ross, 149–167. New York: Routledge.

Schwartzman, Roy, Derek G. Ross, and David M. Berube. 2011. “Rhetoric and Risk.” POROI 7 (1). https://doi.org/10.13008/2151-2957.1087.

Spinoza, Baruch. [1677] 1995. Ethics: Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, and Selected Letters. Translated by Samuel Shirley. Indianapolis: Hackett.

Turkle, Sherry. 2007. Evocative Objects: Things We Think With. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

http://dx.doi.org/10.13008/2151-2957.1087

222 D. P. RICHARDS

Wright, Lori. 2012. “Gulf Coast Residents Say BP Oil Spill Changed Their Environmental Views, UNH Research Finds.” UNH Today, last modified April 19.

223© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 R. Danisch (ed.), Recovering Overlooked Pragmatists in Communication, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14343-5

index

AAddams, Jane, 3, 7, 15, 17, 57, 60,

62, 63, 76, 177–192Adjustment, 41, 108–110, 112,

118–125Agency, 62, 86, 100, 112, 113, 122,

125, 132, 152, 198, 200–203, 205–208, 210, 213–215, 219

Ambedkar, Bhimrao, 3, 15, 17, 79–102

Aristotle, 16, 21, 24, 26, 27, 33, 37, 169, 173, 174

BBennett, Jane, 3, 17, 197–215, 219,

220Brandom, Robert, 2, 6, 7, 11, 17Burke, Kenneth, 26, 34, 36, 59, 60,

115, 116, 162, 164, 171

CCaste system, 80, 86–90, 93, 96, 99,

101

Chicago School, 27, 130, 132Chinese Renaissance, 54, 56Cicero, 12, 16, 31, 34, 37–39, 44Citizenship, 3, 8, 16, 62, 154Columbia University, 25–27, 54, 81Communication practices, 2, 3, 7, 8,

11, 158Community, 2, 3, 6, 7, 10, 12–14, 16,

18–21, 57, 64, 90, 93, 133, 158, 173, 178, 179, 186, 187, 189, 190, 193

Comparative rhetoric, 76, 191Conjoint action, 208–211Contingency, 2, 6, 7, 11, 16, 42, 57Cooperation, 19, 32, 45, 111, 166,

180, 182, 183Critical consciousness, 65Culture, 24, 25, 27–29, 31, 32,

36–40, 42, 44–46, 54, 59, 71, 76, 111, 114, 117, 121, 130, 141, 142, 145, 148, 150, 151, 160, 166, 168, 183, 184, 186, 197, 198, 208, 217, 218, 220

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14343-5

224 INDEX

DDarwin, Charles, 42, 57, 58, 207, 208Deepwater Horizon, 198, 205, 206,

211–214, 218Deliberation, 3, 10, 13, 19, 65, 157–

159, 161, 162, 173, 174, 214Democracy, 3, 6–9, 14, 15, 17, 20,

29, 56, 57, 62, 64, 79, 83, 85, 89, 90, 92, 93, 96, 99, 100, 108–110, 116, 124, 125, 132, 133, 152, 158, 168, 188, 192, 207, 209, 211

Democracy and Education, 18, 83, 84, 88, 90, 92, 93, 100, 187

Democratic culture, 2–4, 7–9, 11, 13–18, 20, 21, 46, 64, 129, 158

Democratic education, 144Descartes, Rene, 2, 5, 58Dewey, Alice, 15, 17, 130, 132, 137,

139, 140, 143–151Dewey, John, 2, 3, 5–8, 11, 13, 15,

17, 23, 26, 27, 30, 32, 33, 54, 56, 57, 64, 72, 80–84, 88, 89, 91, 93, 96, 99, 100, 108–110, 118, 125, 129–133, 136, 138–140, 143–151, 157, 180, 197, 207, 218

EEllison, Ralph, 17, 105–108, 110–

125, 161Epistemology, 2, 4–9, 11, 13, 16, 18,

39, 99, 158, 160, 201Experience, 2, 4, 6, 10, 13, 16, 18,

27, 28, 30–32, 36, 39–41, 43, 45, 56–58, 62, 63, 66, 68, 81, 84, 92, 93, 101, 105, 107, 109, 111–117, 121–124, 130–132, 134–136, 139, 141–147, 149–154, 157–159, 162, 164–166, 168, 170–172, 178–182, 184,

186–189, 191–193, 199, 208, 210, 216, 218, 220

Experiential education, 140, 149, 153

HHabit, 8, 20, 29, 30, 71, 74, 82, 84,

93, 95, 96, 101, 109, 110, 112, 133, 134, 142, 151, 185, 186

Hinduism, 81, 86, 95, 96, 99Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 7, 161, 163,

181How We Think, 19, 136, 147Hull House, 7, 60, 63, 177–179,

182–192Hu Shi, 3, 17, 53, 56, 59, 66, 68, 76,

141

IIsocrates, 12–14, 16, 21, 34

JJames, William, 2, 3, 5–8, 11, 17, 26,

34, 142, 145, 150, 158, 159, 161, 164, 165, 167–169, 188, 199

KKing Jr., Martin Luther, 97

LLaboratory School, 130, 132–137,

139–142, 145, 149, 151–153Latour, Bruno, 198–201, 203Lippmann, Walter, 208, 214, 217Listening, 13, 177–180, 182–184,

186–192, 211

INDEX 225

MMarxism, 39, 43Materialism, 39, 198–200, 207, 211McKeon, Richard, 17, 23–46, 57, 59,

62, 63Mead, George Herbert, 130, 173Meliorism, 97, 108–110, 158Moral psychology, 162, 169, 170

OOrientation, 3, 11, 15, 17, 35, 42, 43,

96, 100, 101, 109, 110, 112–116, 118, 122–124, 163, 166, 167, 171, 172

PPedagogy, 15, 21, 131, 133, 136, 152,

179, 186–190, 192Peirce, C.S., 37, 41, 161Persuasion, 12, 19, 79, 80, 157, 159,

180, 182, 184, 208, 214, 217Philosophical pragmatism, 1–9, 11,

15, 16, 18, 21, 40, 57Plato, 2, 12–14, 26, 31, 93, 167, 173Pluralism/Plurality, 1, 2, 6, 7, 11, 16,

24, 27, 29, 34, 37–39, 42, 43, 46, 57, 59, 63, 76, 79, 105, 116, 117, 168, 170

Political philosophy, 81Posthuman, 197, 199, 200, 208, 210,

219Protagoras, 60, 68The Public and Its Problems, 18, 19,

32, 125, 133, 153, 157, 208, 212Public listening, 184Publics, 32, 38, 158, 197–199,

206–211, 216, 217, 220

QQuintilian, 12

RReconstructive rhetoric, 80, 85, 96Reflective morality, 84, 96, 101Rhetorical listening, 183, 184,

189–191Rhetorical practice, 2, 10, 11, 15, 17,

19, 57, 61, 62, 87, 97, 99, 129, 179, 181, 182

Rhetorical pragmatism, 1–5, 7–11, 15, 17, 19, 21, 46, 56, 62, 181

Roman Republic, 37, 38Rorty, Richard, 2, 7, 11, 17, 20, 23,

28, 41, 45, 46, 170

SScientific spirit, 64, 65, 75Semantics, 25, 28, 38–42, 45Settlement house, 179, 188Skepticism, 41, 68–70, 72, 73Social democracy, 57, 61, 182,

185–187Social interaction, 2, 8, 11, 16, 57Socrates, 11, 12, 167Sophists, 10, 11, 16, 60, 65Spinoza, 26, 200–202, 207Symbolic action, 115

TTerministic screen, 36

UUnited Nations Educational, Scientific,

and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), 27–29, 36–38

University of Chicago, 24, 27, 28, 36, 132, 135, 136, 139, 145, 153

WWestbrook, Robert, 4, 5, 132

Documents

Recovering Overlooked Pragmatists in Communication: Extending the Living Conversation about Pragmatism and Rhetoric