North to Boston

I'm heading up to Boston next week for the annual gathering of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy. 

I'll chair the William James Society's session, commencing with a few reflections on the legacy of my mentor John Lachs.

The next day I'll comment on two papers (and unofficially on two others if the opportunity presents itself).

Yesterday I made headway on some of those comments. Here's a snippet of what I think I'm going to say. 

Layla Mayorga, Fordham University
"The Right to Flourish: A Pragmatic Inquiry into DACA Policy"

I thank Layla Mayorga for re-shining a light on the DACA situation, which has been lately eclipsed by so much else on the crowded and multiply-perplexing global stage. The Dreamers’ plight now threatens to become the plight of us all in the U.S. and, indeed, in so many countries that have claimed democratic status: denied an opportunity to flourish as fully-enfranchised and respected members of a functional democratic society. Too many of our compatriots and neighbors are tilting not merely to the right, but so far to the reactionary right and so xenophobically hostile to the very idea of immigration, so distant from Emma Lazarus’s solicitous democratic ethos, welcoming everyone from everywhere “yearning to breathe free,” that they’ve effectively disavowed any commitment to our founding declarations of principle and aspiration.

And too many of us who’ve sympathized with the Dreamers have let ourselves become distracted from their fate, so evidently entwined with our own. We need to refocus on this issue.

We’re in the same boat, documented or not. We must revitalize our commitment to universal human rights, dignity, and respect. And we must do it urgently. Now. A “pragmatist view of democracy” will insist on nothing less than what Dewey called a “reweaving of the social fabric” that recognizes and celebrates every significant stitch and strand. A new book by Marie Arano, LatinoLand: A Portrait of America’s Largest and Least Understood Minority, “aims to show that Latinos are as essential to the fabric of America as everyone else is.” Nyer And let’s be frank: many or most legal but “undocumented” DACA candidates are more essential, they make a far greater positive contribution, than many or most of those who would disavow and deport them. They do in fact “contribute to Social Security and Medicare,” and more broadly to the general zeitgeist of the nation. They are part of it. They are not interlopers or invaders, let alone the scurrilous slanders so ignorantly trumpeted and repeated by America Firsters.

Also inseparable from that fabric lately, alas, is political polarization. “Barack Obama was one of many Presidents who thought there might be a glimmer of hope for a broad bipartisan immigration deal—and he held out a solution for the Dreamers in search of it. But the deal never happened. Instead, Obama enacted a temporary executive fix, one that is still being fought over in the courts now, a decade later. As for the fate of the Dreamers, it says everything that they aren’t even part of the current negotiations. The politics have moved on.” NYer Feb1

Politics notwithstanding, the philosophy remains firmly sewn. That’s what we’ve got to come back to, to hang onto, to keep on pushing. As Dewey said so eloquently in The School and Society: “What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that must the community want for all of its children. Any other ideal for our schools is narrow and unlovely; acted upon, it destroys our democracy.”

One of our problems these days is that the best and wisest are drowned out by the worst and loudest, the “robber bands” who wear the funny red hats and dream of a past that never was...
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Naoko Saito, Kyoto University
"Pragmatism and Philosophy as a Way of Life: Deweyan Growth in the Age of Jiko-Keihatsu"

I thank Professor Saito for introducing me to Jiko-Keihatsu, which at first glance–doubtless superficial–sounds a lot like “how to succeed in business” without really growing (in the Deweyan sense of growth as the deepening and expanding of our democratic “heritage of values” in ever-more-inclusive habits of community and patterns of education).

Or maybe that’s second glance. The first phrase that occurred to me, when pondering the initial definition of Jiko-Keihatsu as “self-development (or self-enlightenment),” was auto-didacticism. That signifies something I do reflexively associate with real growth in the Deweyan sense. Auto-didacts may lack formal schooling in a particular field of study or domain of discourse, but they do attest the intrinsic appeal of education as a foundational democratic touchstone. Their example promotes the idea of growth implicitly and often passionately. They find curiosity its own reward. They value knowledge for its own sake, for theirs, and for its contributions to the common weal.

If you’ve ever had the good fortune of teaching a non-traditional student or retiree who returned to university voluntarily and enthusiastically because they’d independently discovered the joy of philosophy (or some other discipline) and had recovered (or never lost) the love of learning, you’ll know what I mean. Their hunger to study and thus to grow has no ulterior agenda, is not rooted in anxiety or fear or “panicked perfectionism,” it is simply a genuine desire to assimilate the object of their interest and become, in the process, larger of character, spirit, and sensibility.

Auto-didacts generally possess a temperamental and motivational affinity, I think, to the Deweyan emphasis on learning to learn and go on learning, and to the Deweyan view of “life itself” as just such a perpetual program of self-directed education.

The qualifying phrase “in the business model” immediately raises a flag for me, I confess, since growth in the business world is invariably identified with bottom lines and projected short-term earnings, the business cycle, the repudiation of limits to macroeconomic growth, disregard of long-term interests like environmental sustainability, etc. Those are ulterior motives for growth, as I understand the Deweyan mindset, albeit ubiquitous and inescapable in our culture.

I confess a bias when it comes to such language: I am instantly reminded of that Monty Python caricature of business culture in The Meaning of Life, the “Very Big Corporation of America,” the “urgent realization of just how much there is still left to own,” the failure of souls to develop because of our “ability to be distracted from spiritual matters by everyday trivia,” etc.

That said, I’m prepared to be challenged on this bias. Perhaps a Deweyan should be more receptive to business models, less contemptuous of “the business of America,” more open to the convergence of pragmatism and commerce.

And yet, Dewey said things like: “As long as politics is the shadow of big business, the attenuation of the shadow will not change the substance.” And, “Nothing is more tragic than failure to discover one’s true business in life.”

And in light of Hanamura’s critique of the conflation of happiness and meaning with success or failure, WIlliam James famously said something to H.G. Wells about “our national disease” you’d expect a Deweyan to cheer: “the moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess Success. That—with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word success—is our national disease”--Letters, 9.11.06

But perhaps that’s enough about that.

Human existence is of course universally natural for all, if for any at all. Dewey’s right about that. I don’t personally find Heidegger’s Dasein a helpful elaboration of our experience either as natural humans or as responsible citizens, or a useful perspective on what it would mean to achieve an appropriately integrated social system–let alone a “great community” of mutual respect –particularly in view of his failure to distance himself and philosophy generally from German colonial imperialism and its atrocities. He compared the Allies’ refusal to sanction his return to the post-war classroom to Hitler’s worst crimes. I’d leave him out of this conversation...

And so on, and so on.

Maybe we can talk about this a bit in class today, and tonight. A trial run up the flagpole, as it were, and a glimpse (for any students who care) at the sort of thing academics do at conferences. 

I do hope I'll have time to get out of the hotel and see a bit of Boston too. And I hope it's warmer there than it's been, I see it snowed in MA on the first day of Spring.