York: Columbia University Press, November, 2008)
of his religious, ethical and political reflections in a radically different direction. To say “radically different” seems a bit cavalier. After all, in the past two decades the field of Dewey scholarship has increased. Several influential monographs have been written by Cornel West, Robert Westbrook, James Kloppenberg, Alan Ryan, John Patrick Diggins, and Steven Rockefeller, making the field a crowded one. Yet, even in these important contributions, Dewey is consistently understood as a child of the Enlightenment regarding his appreciation for scientific inquiry. Despite his consistent rejection of philosophical and theological certainties, his outlook seems inescapably wedded to a progressive view of experience. Indeed, all of these thinkers are united by a singular worry: Dewey’s conception of inquiry is based on an ontology that orients human beings to the world in such a way that denies the fragility of life that a thorough-going experimentalism demands. While there is much to recommend in the work of these scholars, their view of Dewey is at best overdrawn and at worst simply mistaken.
corresponding ideas of contingency and uncertainty on Dewey’s notion of inquiry. By focusing on this influence, I show that for Dewey, our cognitive abilities are both stimulated and potentially frustrated by contingency, and this beginning point guides even as it humbles the significance of human existence. While he retains the humanistic and political hopes of the Enlightenment, those hopes are cautiously advanced and defended given the contingent background from which they follow. The result, as Dewey explains in his 1910 essay, “The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy,” is that Darwin “introduced a mode of thinking that in the end was bound to transform the logic of knowledge, and hence the treatment of morals, politics, and religion.” To follow this line of inquiry, as this book does, is to encounter The Undiscovered Dewey.
for Darwin is located, on the one hand, and interpret and distill its epistemological and normative importance in guiding human life, on the other. I trace the way in which the former—as articulated through the themes of inquiry and contingency—informs and appropriately directs the latter as revealed in Dewey’s engagement with religious, moral and democratic commitments. As such, the book unfolds across stretches of his writings, while holding in view and exploring the different dimensions of the connection between inquiry and contingency.
goals, and organizing structure for the book. The text is divided into two primary parts. In Part One—“From Certainty to Contingency”—chapters 1-2, I analyze the importance of contingency in Dewey’s philosophy of action, and the precise relationship between that account and what he says about inquiry. This requires that we turn our attention, as intellectual historians, to the ascendancy of Darwin’s notion of evolution within the context of nineteenth-century liberal Protestantism with which Dewey is often allied. The project attempts to understand better than we do how each—that is, liberal Protestants and Dewey—appropriates Darwin’s vision of evolution. What emerges is a startling and critical distinction, the result of which orients the reader differently to the foundations of Dewey’s philosophy. While his liberal Protestant counterparts exploit evolution as a story about progress, Dewey argues that inquiry proceeds from and does not presume to overcome the uncertainty that characterizes human action. The result is that Dewey separates the meaningfulness of inquiry from a larger metaphysical story about human development, while simultaneously opening our commitments to reflective re- evaluation and public contestability in the context of our on-going social practices. There is a guiding insight at work in this account to which scholars have paid little or no attention, but which this project uncovers for readers: Dewey's account of inquiry attempts a transformation in the modern self-understanding that at once encourages a Promethean intervention in managing our social and natural environments, but which constrains action by highlighting its intimate relationship to uncertainty. That the Enlightenment gave birth to Dewey's outlook cannot be denied, but it is a vision that, in his hands, has reached maturity.
philosophical than historical. I explore and explicate the relationship between inquiry—now understood as preceding from a more contingent foundation—and Dewey’s religious, moral and political philosophy. As I argue, Dewey does not seek to abandon religious commitments as many scholars have thought, but to re-describe their place within the context of democracy. He is thus sensitive to modern pluralism, especially the absence of a dominant theological frame of reference that would otherwise guide the substantive content of our lives individually and collectively. Moreover, his reliance on inquiry is attentive to the presence of moral conflict, and although inquiry seeks to achieve resolution among conflicting moral claims, Dewey acknowledges that the result of reflection may reveal the incommensurability of values. In its political context, his position provides us with a way to manage the relationship among experts and the larger public so that power does not lapse into domination. These discrete, but connected accounts revolve around the centrality of the reflective and contestable character of inquiry. Indeed, they are seen, in this study, as emerging from a mature vision of human enlightenment—an account that demands intervention on our part and cautions humility at every turn.
Black and White
relationship between popular governance and the role of cultural, intellectual, and political excellence. Herein lies the research question: Does the tradition of American democratic thought possess the resources to resist this claim?
Jefferson as well), and then finding articulation in African American intellectuals such as W. E. B. DuBois, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin there is a consistent attempt to articulate what this relationship ought to look like in the context of democracy. At the core of these thinkers' view of democracy is a belief in freedom as self-realization, emphasis on critical examination of the forces that govern and direct one’s life, and rejection of a presumptive deference to authority. These themes figure prominently in the writings of all these thinkers and indicate that democracy’s appreciation for intellectual and cultural excellence must always be grounded in a relationship of consultation. Consultation is the road to democratic excellence, not its obstacle.
among African American intellectuals precisely because their argument, I suspect, is an analogical derivative of their resistance to racial hierarchy. On their view, precisely because knowledge and its production is a resource in the context of decision-making, to restrict it to the domain of a few or bar others from access that would otherwise aid them, is to engage in a form of domination. Even DuBois’ supposed vanguard politics comes to look strikingly different if my suspicions are accurate. back to first page>>> |
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| Melvin L. Rogers Assistant Professor of Politics University of Virginia |
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