John Dewey & his Relevance - Richard J. Bernstein

John Dewey was born on October 20th 1859 in Burlington Vermont in a small New England town and this was the same year that Charles Darwin published the Origin of Species in many ways his life in Vermont a New England state was quite sheltered but he experienced something that became fundamental to his democratic outlook this was a time when many American small towns were self governed where the town meeting was still a very vital institution the town meeting was a place where all citizens in the community could come together to democratically discuss and decide political issues of common concern long before Joey was born Thomas Jefferson was worried about whether the spirit of deliberation and citizen participation that he took to be so vital for Republican democracy would flourish in America he argued this is Jefferson that local Ward's local councils what he called little Republic's are essential in order to keep real democracy a an active participation allotted and Dewey knew which Everson meant because he directly experienced this experiment in citizen participation he never forgot the lessons that he'd learned when he was growing up do we always stressed the every day democratic practices of ordinary people ma cracy for Dewey was primarily an ethical way of living when he was 80 years old he reflected on his own early experience and he wrote the following I quote him democracy is a way of personal life controlled not merely by a faith in human nature in general but by a faith in the capacity of human beings for intelligent judgment and action if proper conditions are furnish still quoting John Dewey as you can see I have been accused he said more than once and from apposed quarters of a of an undue utopian faith in the possibilities of intelligence and in education as a correlate of intelligence but he's wrote at all events I did not invade ventas faith I acquired it for my surroundings as far as those surroundings were animated by a democratic spirit for what is faith in democracy he but are in the role of consultation of conference of persuasion of discussion in the formulation of public opinion which in the long run is self-corrective accept a faith in the capacity of the intelligence of the common man to respond with common sense to the free play of facts and ideas which are secured by effective guarantees of free inquiry free assembly and free communication close quote now there's a great deal a lot packed into this statement and to understand the richness of what Dewey is say I think we need to consider how do we became a philosopher and certainly a leading social thinker of his time Dewey went to college at the University of Vermont but it was still unsure of what career to pursue and he actually taught high school secondary school for a brief period after college and during the period after the civil war in the United States our civil war the professional this discipline that we now call philosophy barely existed as an institutional setting we had fine colleges but in the 19th century no research universities there was discussion of philosophical issues but mainly by members of the clergy and informal groups of educated people but after the Civil War after the period of the 1860s there was a tremendous burst of creative activity philosophical activity and because of the outstanding influence of a number of German emigrate that had come to the United States with serious intellectual interest there was a great interest in clumped in Hegel the first journal in America and still the one of the oldest continuous publishing journals the Journal of specular philosophy was founded by WT Harris in 1870 1867 Harris eventually became a one of the leaders in the cabinet on on the United States government in education so he became a public figure but that journal was intended to further the discussion of German idealism in America and when John Dewey was contemplating pursuing a philosophical career as a young man in his 20s he wrote to Harris and he asked for advice and because Harris was encouraging do we decide to pursue graduate study Korea in philosophy at what was one of the first graduate research centers in the United States at Johns Hopkins University and do we came there under the influence of a teacher by the name of Jesus Morris who was a committed he galleon and in his autobiographical sketch that do rewrote in the 1930s he speaks of the subjective reasons for the original appeal to him of Hegel and he tells us in addition to the philosophical reasons that it's applied a demand for unification which was to quote him an immense emotional craving and overcoming he felt of divisions and separations it was really the dis dynamic historical organic thinking of Hegel that Dewey was attracted to found so attractive Dewey T was his own words drifted away from Hegel and Darwin and the new biological thinking he soon became a great source of inspiration but there was something else going on in the young John Dewey like the German young Hegelians and the young called Marx Dewey was a rustle young again he thought that philosophy had been excessively shaped by a contemplative theoretical perspective and that attended to neglect praxis the young John Dewey might will have written Marx's famous thesis that the Philosopher's have only interpreted the world in various ways and the point is to change and in a way that became a guiding it wasn't that he'd learned it directly from Oxley experiencing the same thing and it became a kind of dieting concern of his to integrate theory and practice he wanted have developed a philosophical perspective that was genuinely relevant to the real problems of human beings and this concern with practices was encouraged and deepened when he moved to the University of Chicago in 1894 Chicago at that time was a radically different place from the Burlington of Dewey's youth it was a city in which all the problems of Lizzie fair capitalism and the influx of waves of new immigrants were manifest even exaggerated and do it was as much a part of the academic life of the university as he was of the city life he was a close associate of Jane Addams who founded whole-house a neighborhood center that was intended to be a place of gathering in education for working-class immigrants so in addition to his academic courses at the University of Chicago Dewey mingled with and taught these immigrant workers its in Chicago the Dewey began developing his distinctive philosophic orientation and was in the process of becoming one of America's leading progressive social reformers when Dewey was invited to the University of Chicago he was offered a position as chairman of the philosophy of psychology and of Education and the fact that he was deeply involved with these different areas tells us something about the fluidity of intellectual life at this time the heart and Fire divisions so characteristic of academic disciplines today simply did not exist and it was there and then that do we founded the famous and still existing laboratory school at the University of Chicago the laboratory school was just what his name implied it was intended to be a school an elementary school that was experimental where new ideas and practices of Education were imagined and experimentally tested education especially the education of the young was so important for doing because he firmly believed that the school is the place where the critical habits and practices required for democratic citizenship could be cultivated do we oppose to extremes that he took to be stifled an extreme of formalism that emphasized imposing knowledge on passive children but it was just as opposed to a sentimentalism that idolized children and and lacked direct enrichment of the child's new immature experience he forced him a democratic educational philosophy that stressed learning by doing but learning was not merely a passive but we would involve the activity of children and the aim was to inform and enrich these kinds of activities to cultivate as he would like to put it the intelligent critical conduct and a cooperative spirit do we always thought that his educational ideas were integral to his general philosophical as I've suggested do we object to an excessive emphasis on philosophy as mere contemplation or pure theory much of modern philosophy he felt was caught up in dealing with artificial problems histological issues but he sometimes called the problems of philosophers which he contrasted with the problems of men that became the title of one of his books and he coined the phrase The Spectator theory of knowledge and argued that too much of the philosophical tradition had been obsessed with ocular metaphors as if knowing was simply a type of passive see physical or mental and like his fellow pragmatist he really sought to bring about a sea change in philosophy one that focuses attention on the agents on the individual agents perspective and our social normative practices the ways in which we are continually involved in experimental transactions he challenged both atomistic empiricism and intellectualist rationalism he argued that many philosophers had distorted our lived experience experience is not merely subjective nor is it simply a mode of knowledge experiences do we thought about it has both the temporal and spatial span it involves a dynamic transaction between the organism and its environment experience can be and this is way always urged experimental and funded enriched within rich meeting experience as he conceived of it is continuous with the rest of nature he objected to what he called the quest for certainty which he took to be intimately related to a quest for security an escape from the unexpected contingencies and problems of every delay day life he thought that philosophers have been so preoccupied with problems of knowledge that they distorted the very character variety and richness of human experience including aesthetic and religious dimensions of experience he argued that many philosophers described experience in a completely artificial manner as if experience were merely subjective on the contrary experience involves constant active transactions with the world it's dynamic and changing it involves suffering in and activity it has a dynamic temporal and spatial dimension and he developed an idea of inquiry was concerned with problem-solving what do we was working out is what he called a reconstruction of philosophy not its destruction or its deconstruction and he argued that the great lesson of Darwin was to teach us that human beings are part of nature and always involved with nature there is no ontological gap no sharp break between man and the world between experience in nature and Dewey was in the process of developing a robust evolutionary naturalism and evolutionary naturalism that stresses the emergent continuity between you and beings and the rest of nature he opposed all forms of scientism materialism reductionism and what has been called by one philosopher Bald naturalism where many philosophers claim that they were sharp and fixed epistemological and metaphysical dichotomies between mind and body between the physical and the mental between reason and emotion do we argue there or is there are only dynamic changing functional distinguishes he was suspicious of the ways in which philosophers tend to reify or to eternal eyes reason and introduced a shop dichotomy between reason and emotions he preferred to speak about intelligence rather than reason because intelligence he thought about it consists in a dynamic set of skills and practices which include imagination deliberation and reflection philosophy by itself does not solve concrete problems but it has a vital function he believed and I believe in providing an orientation and guidance in dealing with the conflicts and problems of everyday life he characterized his philosophical orientation as experimentalism and he felt that in the modern world there had been a cultural lag where thinkers had failed to learn the great lessons of the experimental sciences that opened us to a more dynamic and flexible way of thinking about morals and politics inquiry as he conceived of it is a process not primarily an end result a set of social practices in which there is always creative activity and experimentation he not only questioned the quest for certainty but also found Falah word for loss of physical call foundationalism the idea that there are some basic incorrigible truths that can serve as a foundation or building blocks for all knowledge inquiry in any field science ethics politics does not have absolute beginnings or endings it is he argued like many of the best pragmatist a self-corrective activity that can call into question any claim although not all at once of course inquiry functions against the background of experience and pre judgments that we take for granted and do not question but in the cause of inquiry we may question even this background knowledge our norms and our values of themselves rooted in social practices that can be revised do we shares with the other pragmatic thinkers a commitment to fallibilism and fallibilism is not just a variety of skepticism or relativism as a fallibilist do we emphasize the role of the community of inquiries as a core of appeal for testing and refining hypotheses all validate claims in any domain need to be submitted to public open discussion and free inquiry and Dewey's understand of the proper role of philosophy is not that it is some type of super science or some esoteric discipline that there is a special reality that is accessible only to philosophy philosophy he once said has more to do with meaning than with truth he did not move the truths are unimportant for philosophy and it was certainly skeptical of any attempt to draw a fixed distinction between philosophy and the sciences philosophy must be always open to what it can learn from new developments in the Arts and Sciences but an essential function of philosophy is quitting and in my opinion that the term pragmatism associated with thinkers like doing in others has tens at least in the popular press at imagination tends to under emphasize this which do we took the be the most vital aspect of it it's that it has a function to be more imaginative and to criticize what is actually taking place but critique is not merely negative it must imagine we project ideals that can effectively guide us in our ethical and political lives it must critique must always be sensitive to the disparity between our ideal aspirations and the actual state of affairs and it must focus its attention on the practical ways of social reform that will confront real social injustice and it must always be rooted in the concrete context if it is to be effective he wrote criticism is not a matter of formal treatises or published articles or taking up important matters for consideration in a serious way it occurs whenever a moment is devoted to looking to see what sort of value is really present and whether instead of accepting a value object wholeheartedly being wrapped by it we raise even a shadow of a question about its worth or modify our sense of it by even passing estimate of its probable future by the turn of the 20th century and through its early decades do we became really America's leading progressive public intellectual do it was not a charismatic figure he was as a matter of fact a very dull lecturer and there are even stories about students falling asleep during his lectures his prose was frequently wooly and extremely diffuse so it wasn't his brilliant rhetoric that caught the imagination and spoke to so many people in the Academy and outside the Academy in so many fields of knowledge and he had this ability as well to speak to common citizens it was much more the force of his ideas Purdue we had a gift and a power to articulate a vision and an orientation that I think spoke profoundly to his public audience he in my opinion expressed what is best not what's worst in the American dish from Jefferson to Emerson to Whitman to William James a deep belief in the potentialities of democracy and of human beliefs human beings a steadfast democratic faith in the capacity of ordinary people to develop the type of intelligence to participate in shaping their lives he consistently rejected the extremes of despair and pessimism and naive optimism but he did believe that with creative intelligence with the courage and hard work we can ameliorate social and justices and enrich human experience and we can make life more meaningful he advocated and practice a form of eminent critique a former critique rooted in concrete situations that would make us short be aware of the disparity between ideals and ends in views and the deficiencies of existing realities he was skeptical of the idea of total revolution maratha he was a champion of what he called radical reform and he always insists on the continuity of means and ends means and ends interpenetrate and we can only achieve Democratic end as he believed by Democratic means and for all his rootedness in the American tradition he was a cosmopolitan thinker he traveled throughout the world from Russia to Japan to China to Turkey to Mexico he actually spent two years in the teams of the 20th century teaching in China and wherever he went they were despite his lack of charisma eager audiences to listen to this philosopher I think what's so impressive about Dewey is he practiced what he preached he not only continued to produce waiting philosophical books but he was committed it was a committed social activist there is scarcely a progressive institution founded during his life in the United States that he did not help to support them ranging from the creation of my own institution the New School for Social Research to the American Civil Liberties Union and when he felt that civil liberties of some individual were being violated even when he had radical disagreements with the ideas that would be expressed he publicly protested he was scandalized and what are the first Americans to be scandalized by the Soviet purges in the early 1930s when Trotsky was exiled in Mexico Dewey was asked to chair a commission of inquiry about the charges brought Trotsky and his son and although he received threats to his life and was vilified by the official Communist Party members and sympathizers he interrupted his intellectual work this is in his 70s he's to become except the work as chair of the Commission of Inquiry that ultimately exonerated Trotsky of the crimes that Stalin had trumped up against and after this is so typical of doing he chaired the commission that exonerated Trotsky he nevertheless engaged in a sharp debate intellectual debate that was published with Trotsky about the meaning of democracy frequently as thinkers grow older they tend to become more conservative but do we actually became more radical especially during the years of the Great Depression he attacked what he called the old individualism and the outdated liberalism that had become a defense of the status quo Dewey was brutally realistic about the way in which a corporate business mentality was corrupting where he felt the democratic practices and he identified himself even for time with democratic socialism and called for correcting the economic abuses of unfettered capitalism now I have sketched this portrait of the life and work of John Dewey not just because I want to inform you about it but because I want to address directly when I take to be his contemporary relevance and I want to stress seven points his pragmatic fallibilism contingency and tragedy genuine pluralism responding to calm pragmatic realism rooted cosmopolitanism and democracy as a passionate social commitment so the first issue pragmatic fallibilism Dewey was a thoroughgoing fallibilist and fallibilism I think as I suggested is not simply a technical philosophical doctrine about the character of knowledge and inquiry as do we understood it it involves and requires a complex set of skills habits and virtues there is no validity claim nothing I claim in the realm that is immune from criticism modification and critique fallibilist are critical of the quest for absolute certainty and the belief in incorrigible foundations and it's because we're finite fallible human beings it's important to cultivate those public spaces and communities in which they can be free and open discussion of all relevant issues inquiry as I've indicated for Dewey and for the other pragmatic thinkers it's a self corrective process we can never achieve a kind of absolute knowledge we can never be absolutely certain of our claims fallibilist orientation this is why it's very demanding requires a willingness to listen to really listen to different and opposing views with the kind of hermeneutics sensitivity and a generosity in which we make a serious attempt you know to find enter understand what strikes us as alien and strange taking fallibilism serious incorporating it into our lives is extremely demanding and furthermore fallibilism is compatible with a strong commitment to the ideals that we cherish do we knew that there's something about human beings in which there is ad craving for absolutes for simple dichotomies for rigid certainties especially in times of perceived crisis but this temptation the simple dichotomies and and absolutes understood as unquestioned is he deeply believed and I believe to to be resisted because it can have devastating consequences in many places in the world today this pragmatic fallibilism is under severe threat but I believe that knew his message for us today he is to passionately commit ourselves to the defense and institutionalism of this kind of fallibilism and here I want to make it clear I'm not making a distinction between East and West because I think I actually wrote a book on the abuse of the term evil because I felt that in my own country and particularly in the Iraqi intervention in war that the mentality of was taking place was a simplistic dichotomy in which we were the good ones and they the others were evil I think when you think of such terms it's always politically and ethically dangerous the second point I want to talk about which i think is relevant to us today it's contingency traditionally many philosophers have been primarily concerned with that which is eternal and necessary or presumably eternal and necessary a classic understanding of philosophy has been the philosopher aspires to a God's eye point of view to view the world subspecies aterna tatars do a course rejected this conception of philosophy but one of his deepest reasons is that philosophy tended to neglect the real contingency unpredictability uncertainty that we confront every day in the world and it claimed that contingency is an inescapable generic feature of human experience but if we take contingency seriously as it then we must be realistic about how it's double edged because we live in a contingent universe there is always the real opportunity to ameliorate concrete and justices and the evils we confront but contingency also means that we cannot escape from the possibility of tragic consequences I believe that doing contract to what I take to be a popular image of him had a profound sense of the tragic sense of life any experienced personal tragedy in his own life in the death of two of his children he knew that there are always inevitable disappointments that we face in human nature and conduct he wrote when the future arrives with with its inevitable disappointments as well as its fulfilment and with new sources of trouble failure loses something of its fatality and suffering yields fruits of instruction mud bitterness humility is more demanded at moments of triumph than those of failure for humility is not Kaddish self-deprecation it is a sense of our slight inability even with our best intelligence and effort to command events a sense of our dependence upon forces that go their own way without a wish or plan that's doing it can be extremely difficult to live with contingency and insecurity we are always tempted I think by all sorts of ways to ignore or to escape it but do we called for a realistic confrontation with contingency and ingenuine practical and theoretical humility about the importance and limitations of facing these contingencies with honest intelligence pluralism a third point I want to stress as being relevant for us pluralism is a term that has taken on many different meanings today and until the 20th century it's not a term that played a significant role in philosophy it was who M James was one of the first to dignify the term were entitled one of his last books a pluralistic universe today pluralism is sometimes used to designate that different religious ethnic cultural groups have in commensal interest and values sometimes pluralism is even used as a name for a self-defeating relativism but this is not what the pluralism meant for Dewey and for James both recognize that individuals and groups can have different perspectives on the world and different values and norms that they take to be fundamental they were skeptical of any kind of a historical universalism and although there are irreducible plural perspectives and ways of life do we categorically reject it the very idea of closed horizon closed perspectives there is always the possibility of imaginatively transcending our own perspectives our own prejudices and engaging in communication and dialogue of those who are really different from us pluralism means doing justice to differences to what some thinkers have called the other nests of the other but at the same time it is seeking and that's an achievement that's something that is given what we may share income cominis is not a metaphysical given it's an achievement that is extremely fragile and open to being contested but the recognition of pluralistic perspectives and ways of life is a condition for a healthy Democratic Society and it's because of this irreducible dynamic and changing pluralism that dialogue and deliberation are so important for a thriving Democratic community Dewey might well have endorsed a very famous characterization by William James of radical pluralism when James wrote the following it is curious how little countenance radical pluralism has ever had for philosophers whether materialistically or spiritually minded philosophers have always aimed at cleaning up the litter with which the world is apparently filled they have substituted economical and orderly conceptions for the first sensible tag dangled and whether they are morally elevated or intellectually neat they were at any rate always aesthetically pure and definite and aimed and ascribing to the world something clean and intellectual in a way of structure as compared with all these rationalizing pictures the pluralistic empiricism which I profess and which I think in this respect do each shared office but a sorry appearance its turbid its muddled a gothic sort of affair but that's the way life is pluralistic empiricism is a turbid muddle traffic sort of affair because it's true to our lived experience the fourth point the challenge of in response to conflict plurality as do we understand means that there will always be real complex both in moral life and in political life uncertainty and conflict ought altima traits of experience and despite do his own emphasis on the attempt adjudicate and reconcile conflicts he never believed that complex can be completely eliminated on the contrary they are what initiate moral and political reflection when we face conflicting situations but we don't really know what should be done where they can even seem to be incremental differences of course conflicts can is do we well know can for frequently culminate in war and destruction and violence if we are realistic there's always the danger the conflicts will become violent but this is not the only perspective on conflict conflict in a Democratic Society for do we can play a creative role there is a productive form of agonistic debate everything depends on how we respond to complex we have to learn to live without what nietzsche called metaphysical comfort and to think as Hannah Arendt once phrased it without banisters and once again we can see why do we emphasizes the character the habits the virtue is required for intelligent action what do we oppose is unthinking and uncritical responses to conflict responses where we rely on ritualistic responses cliches and uninformed past habits and convictions and unfortunately I think that is all too current in our contemporary world the fifth point pragmatic realism pragmatism is a word that has become entrenched in our everyday vocabulary one can scarcely pick up a newspaper especially in the United States without coming across the world pick any issue of the New York Times and you'll see the term pragmatic and what is it typically mean it's typically taken to mean some sort of practical compromise or a decision that focuses more on getting something done or accomplished but there's an enormous disparity between this popular notion of pragmatism and what I think was fundamental for doing pragmatism without ideals and ends in view is blind and ideals without a sense of how they can be concretely realized is empty and sentiment Dewey emphasizes what Aristotle also emphasized in a very different context the centrality of phronesis of practical know-how or practical intelligence or practical wisdom in ethics and politics and what's distinctive about this kind of practical judgment is that it must be flexible it must mediate between critical ends in view and the novel situations that we confront as Gregory Pappas's here for this conference is forcefully argued in his recent book on Dewey's ethics Dewey's understanding of ethics and politics cuts across standard modern classifications in philosophy of date ology virtual Essex and consequentialism we must attend to always to the concreteness and the complexity of experience and depending on our actual choices and conflicts we confront and an understanding of the consequences or acts our obligations to our fellow human beings or the virtues to be cultivated may emerge as our dominant concern judgment good judgment always involves selection and discrimination judgments do we wrote do not occur in isolation but in connection with the solution of a problem the clearing a way of something obscure and perplexing and the resolution of a difficulty in short of units of reflective activity judgments need to be relevant to an issue as well as correct judging is an act of selecting and weighing and bearing of acts and suggestions as they present themselves as well as deciding whether the alleged facts are really facts and whether the ideas used is a sound idea or merely a fancy if we take seriously what do we means about the role of judgment or Bernice's in our practical lives then it becomes clear that ethics is not as Aristotle stated long ago a science that elaborates fixed principles but much more like an ought to be nurtured and once again we can see why education was so essential for Dewey's democratic vision because the type of reflection and deliberation required for ethical and political life is not something we can learn from books it doesn't consist of following well laid out rules or abstract universal principles nor is a an isolated individualistic activity it is socially formed and it requires that our development of critical habits to prepare us for unexpected contingencies for practical judgments this is one more reason well I think that Dewey is so relevant today because with the world speeding up as it has with unexpected contingencies with new kinds of changes that you can only function if you have flexible critical habits or one kernel only function with those the six point what I like to call do his rooted cosmopolitan Dewey was a rooted cosmopolitan and as I've already suggested he took what he took to be the American heritage seriously and strongly identify what he took to be the best in American tradition is represented by Jefferson Emison where women and his fellow pragmatist William James he was committed to the idea of an open universe where human beings can intelligent and respond to the complex and helped to shape them although never fully in control and he took this to be an ideal deeply rooted in the best of the American experience at the same time Dewey remained a shop critic of the deficiencies the failures the brutalities of American society he was never never probiem in the public and its problems he spoke about the search for of great community and he distinguishes the social idea of democracy from political democracy as its system of government of course they are interrelated and the idea of democracy remains barren and empty a unless it is concrete established in human everyday relationships but the idea of democracy is not bound to territorial restrictions he wrote the idea of democracy in its wider and fuller idea that can be exemplified in the state even at his best to be realized it cannot be e to be realized it must affect all modes of human Association today the problems of globalization especially our economic independence have become extremely acute so acute it's in your papers today and what are the most pressing and difficult problems that we confront is not only how to think now to Institute oh dude I mean dealing with these issues but how to institute a global democratic practices it's not even clear that we have a clear picture of what this means how are we to do justice to a democratic cosmopolitan aspirations and at the same time we vitalize local communal life I raise this as a question because I don't know the answer to it but I believe it's the most vital question that we face in a kind of it the interconnected political world that we live in today and I have little doubt that of doing or alive today he would consider this to consider one of our most urgent and complex problems how in some ways not just to be economically independent so that factors and people making decisions have nothing to do with us can daily affect our lives but how to bring all this on to some type of global democratic control finally the point I want to mention is democracy involves the kind of passionate commitment talk about democracy today has become cheapened and cliched democracy is one of those terms the can and has taken on almost any meaning in simply for meaning just free elections even if they are thoroughly corrupt to unregulated free-market economy even if it has devastating consequences our notion of democracy and talk about democracy has become extremely thin but Dewey who returned over and over again for old for almost 60 years - rethinking the meaning and practice of democracy sought to thicken it and our understanding of democracy democracy as I indicated already was primarily an ethical way of everyday life the way we treat people the way we talked in the workshop in our family etc and do we sort to break the crust of Convention and to encourage responsible experimentation in all phases of life and it was sharply critical of all those aspects of modernity that tend to hollow out our experience to make it superficial he was motivated actually by a strong aesthetic ideal I think this is frequently neglected how much he was influenced people think of pragmatism practical as being practical as being antithetical to the aesthetic but though it was motivated by a very strong aesthetic ideal of enriching the consumer phases of experience of making our experiences more vital with greater emotional integrity and he believed that this is an ideal that ought to encompass all human beings not just a special class he wrote that the moral prophets of humanity have always been the poet's art has been the means of keeping a lie the sense of purposes that outrun evidence and of meanings that transcend indurated and it's another quotation from doing but no we're doing a new that democracy as he envisioned takes work hard work and constantly democracy is under threat of becoming Hollow and meaningless and this is why do we encourage us to be passionately committed to furthering democratic practices creative democracy is always a task before us one of my favorite kinds of quotations from doing it involves new struggles for social injustice and vigilance and radical democracy which was through his own term is not a static ideal it is a never-ending dynamic process and I believe he believed and I believe it's always threatened by inertia and the difference democracy is that form of life that we have to amend always recreate in imaginative ways so what then in sum is irrelevance of doing for us today I believe that we must try to do in our own time and for our future what do we try to do and sometimes to be honest failed to do for his time there are always new contingencies new conflicts and new problems to be confronted I think it just would violate the spirit and a letter of his experimentalism to think that we could turn to him or to his writings for solutions to our problems they are our problems and there are new problems but I also firmly believe that where do we articulate it in his pragmatic fallibilism and realism his sense of radical contingency his rooted cosmopolitan and his unwavering commitment to democracy in a democratic faith is under very serious threat today all over the world we're witnessing the emergence of new forms of violent fanaticism pluralism instead of being a source of enrichment frequently degenerates into violent conflict sound bites and catchy slogan earring frequently have greater persuasive power that intelligent reflection economic globalization shapes our lives in every part of the world in unpredictable ways but will global democracy still seems to be a remote utopian idea because there are so many ominous threats to this principle pragmatic Democratic vision that duly articulated and practice that I believe he is still vitally relevant for us today as a source of inspiration and guidance thank you you

Channel: Philosophy Overdose

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Keywords: Philosophy, History of Philosophy, John Dewey, Pragmatism, American Pragmatism, Democracy, Epistemology, Fallibilism, Naturalism, Certainty, Anti-Foundationalism, Theory of Knowledge, Modern Philosophy, Relativism, Ethics, Pluralism, Psychology, William James, Political, Democratic Socialism, American Philosophy, Contingency, Empiricism

Id: oLEC_hCFng8

Length: 57min 15sec (3435 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 12 2018