My thoughts on how the world works

Perhaps I should have called this posting America’s own philosophers – forgotten and abandoned – because that is really what it is about. But I studied the existentialists first, and then the American Pragmatists – so that is the context I put them in.

Americans have been against any kind of theorizing for a long time, preferring to think of themselves as practical people. This is in direct contradiction to their beginnings, when the founding fathers were well-acquainted with the ideas of the European Enlightenment – and America was seen as its first great hope. This brilliant start did not last long – and was finally destroyed by the American Civil War. And even later, for the entire Western World, by WWI – followed quickly by WWII.

The American Pragmatists were a counter-current to America’s long decline which began at that time. Eventually, in the middle of the 20th Century, they were forgotten entirely.  This is another part of the American Tragedy, because they were brilliant thinkers, and very much a part of the American Tradition.

The Existentialists, by contrast, had much less to say – but were enthusiastically adopted by the French, who after WWII badly needed something to bolster their national prestige. The Americans, who won the war, were content to give the French a philosophical victory – without even realizing it.

America has had its thinkers, but they have been ignored – and John Dewey is a case in point. I once heard a good educator described as “Someone who had a bad case of John Dewey – but got over it.” On other words, he realized that America had rejected Dewey, and so he did too.

This is tragic. Dewey understood us well, and we could have learned from him. The following is from the book Classical American Philosophy, page 334, in a section called The Reconstruction of Culture.

Dewey’s social and political writings focus on the task of creating a genuinely democratic society, a society in which individualism and community flourish. Individual and community, the private and the public, do not stand in necessary opposition; instead, they require each other, and any opposition between them marks not a metaphysical fact but a historical social problem that demands conceptual and political reconstruction.

This reconstructions is needed, Dewey argues, because rapid cultural change has submerged the individual by overturning traditional loyalties and attachments that constitute the basis of real individuality. This reconstruction has been paralyzed by traditional conceptions of individuality as something “ready-made” and in need only of being unrestricted, and so serves laissez-faire economic policies and traditional political liberalism.

These traditional conceptions, blind to their own historical relativity and the developmental character of individuality, once may have served the goals of individuality, liberty, and intelligence, but now, under new conditions, effectively hinder the realization of these goals as they have actual meaning in these new conditions.

I had trouble reading this – because I lack the mental tools, or concepts, to grasp it. Part of me said “This does not compute.” But when I forced myself to look at it carefully, I marveled at how well he understood the situation – especially when he says “rapid cultural change has submerged the individual.”

He did not appreciate the effect of technology (and indirectly, science) on creating this rapid social change. He did, however, remain loyal to democracy, which we have, in effect, abandoned.