text:
Vous pourrez modifier la taille du texte de cet ouvrage
Trained Capacities , livre ebook
University of South Carolina Press - Brian Jackson, Gregory Clark
The essays in this collection, written by sixteen scholars in rhetoric and communications studies, demonstrate American philosopher John Dewey's wide-ranging influence on rhetoric in an intellectual tradition that addresses the national culture's fundamental conflicts between self and society, freedom and responsibility, and individual advancement and the common good. Editors Brian Jackson and Gregory Clark propose that this influence is at work both in theoretical foundations, such as science, pragmatism, and religion, and in Dewey's debates with other public intellectuals, such as Jane Addams, Walter Lippmann, James Baldwin, and W. E. B. Du Bois.
Jackson and Clark seek to establish Dewey as an essential source for those engaged in teaching others how to compose timely, appropriate, useful, and eloquent responses to the diverse and often-contentious rhetorical situations that develop in a democratic culture. They contend that there is more at stake than instruction in traditional modes of public discourse because democratic culture encompasses a variety of situations, private or public, civic or professional, where people must cooperate in the work of advancing a common project. What prepares people to intervene constructively in such situations is instruction in those rhetorical practices of democratic interaction that is implicit throughout Dewey's work.
Dewey's writing provides a rich framework on which a distinctly American tradition of a democratic rhetorical practice can be built—a tradition that combines the most useful concepts of classical rhetoric with those of modern progressive civic engagement. Jackson and Clark believe Dewey's practice takes rhetoric beyond the traditional emphasis on political democracy to provide connections to rich veins of American thought such as individualism, liberalism, progressive education, collectivism, pragmatism, and postindustrial science and communication. They frame Dewey's voluminous work as constituting a modern expression of continuing education for the "trained capacities" required to participate in democratic culture. For Dewey human potential is best realized in the free flow of artful communication among the individuals who together constitute society.
The book concludes with an afterword by Gerard A. Hauser, College Professor of Distinction in the Department of Communication at the University of Colorado Boulder.
Calidad de experiencia
Gullibility
Critical Practice
Truth claim
Popular education
Objective test
Idealization
Practical reason
Reasonable person
Foundationalism
La Sagesse des foules
Publié par University of South Carolina Press
Date de parution 07 janvier 2014
Nombre de lectures 0
Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,3150€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.
TRAINED CAPACITIES
Studies in Rhetoric/Communication Thomas W. Benson, Series Editor
John Dewey, Rhetoric, and Democratic Practice
Brian Jackson and Gregory Clark
Afterword by Gerard A. Hauser
2014 University of South Carolina
Published by the University of South Carolina Press
www.sc.edu/uscpress
23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Trained capacities : John Dewey, rhetoric, and democratic practice / edited by
Brian Jackson and Gregory Clark.
pages cm.-(Studies in rhetoric/communication)
ISBN 978-1-61117-318-5 (hardbound : alk. paper)- ISBN 978-1-61117-319-2 (ebook)
1. Dewey, John, 1859-1952. 2. Rhetoric-Philosophy. 3. Democracy-Philosophy. I . Jackson, Brian, 1932- editor of compilation. II . Clark, Gregory, 1950- editor of compilation.
B 945. D 44 T 58 2014
191- DC 23
Series Editor s Preface
Introduction: John Dewey and the Rhetoric of Democratic Culture
Dewey and Democratic Practice-Science, Pragmatism, Religion
Dewey on Science, Deliberation, and the Sociology of Rhetoric
William Keith and Robert Danisch
John Dewey, Kenneth Burke, and the Role of Orientation in Rhetoric
Scott R. Stroud
Minister of Democracy: John Dewey, Religious Rhetoric, and the Great Community
Paul Stob
Dewey and His Interlocutors-Thomas Jefferson, Jane Addams, W. E. B. Du Bois, Walter Lippmann, James Baldwin
Dewey on Jefferson: Reiterating Democratic Faith in Times of War
Jeremy Engels
John Dewey and Jane Addams Debate War
Louise W. Knight
John Dewey, W. E. B. Du Bois, and a Rhetoric of Education
Keith Gilyard
Walter Lippmann, the Indispensable Opposition
Jean Goodwin
All safety is an illusion : John Dewey, James Baldwin, and the Democratic Practice of Public Critique
Walton Muyumba
Dewey as Teacher of Rhetoric
Rhetoric and Dewey s Experimental Pedagogy
Nathan Crick
The Art of the Inartistic, in Publics Digital or Otherwise
Brian Jackson, Meridith Reed, and Jeff Swift
Dewey s Progressive Pedagogy for Rhetorical Instruction: Teaching Argument in a Nonfoundational Framework
Donald C. Jones
Afterword: The Possibilities for Dewey amid the Angst of Paradigm Change
Gerard A. Hauser
In Trained Capacities , editors Brian Jackson and Gregory Clark have brought together a group of leading rhetorical scholars to consider the contexts of John Dewey s work as it contributes to rhetorical theory, rhetorical practice, and rhetorical education. The American philosopher John Dewey (1859-1952) has long been of interest to teachers of rhetoric and communication. The essays in Trained Capacities explore broad themes of Dewey s reflections on science, religion, pragmatism, war and peace, education, knowledge, theories of the public, and democratic practice.
A key feature of the book is found in essays exploring Dewey as compared with and in conversation with other thinkers on these themes-some of them his contemporaries, some not: Kenneth Burke, William Jennings Bryan, Randolph Bourne, Thomas Jefferson, Jane Addams, W. E. B. Du Bois, Walter Lippmann, and James Baldwin. The contributors also examine the reception and interpretation of Dewey by his successors and offer a balanced and informative introduction to recent scholarship on the work of John Dewey by rhetorical scholars.
We acknowledge our debt to those who authored the essays in this volume for their interesting and insightful work. We have learned much from them in the process of completing this project.
We also acknowledge the College of Humanities at Brigham Young University and express gratitude for the support and encouragement they have provided as the project moved along. We are grateful to the people at University of South Carolina Press and those involved in the production of this volume whose work has been both essential and encouraging.
John Dewey and the Rhetoric of Democratic Culture
Every once in a while, long-dead and oft-forgotten philosophers rise from their graves and walk their way into public conversations. Take John Dewey, for instance. In the spring of 2010 a group of concerned parents in a school district not far from where we both live gathered to oppose what they thought was a socialist education philosophy, expressed in the mission statement of the school district. They called it a poison agenda, one conceived by none other than John Dewey (Warnock).
Though he may be considered the patron saint of U.S. education, it is not every day-alas-that local school board meetings debate John Dewey s ideas. Even academic interest in Dewey comes and goes. It died out after World War II, rose again in the early 1990s, and then waned again. Once presidential candidate Barack Obama worked in the Senate to pass the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 to help a crippled economy, we began to hear strains of that perpetual national debate about the proper role of government in the United States, strains that summon Dewey s key ideas even if his name is not mentioned.
Dewey s post-Obama resurrection has been explained by the conservative political scientist Tiffany Jones Miller, who argues that Dewey did more than anyone to repackage progressive social theory in a way that obscured just how radically its principles departed from those of the American founding (Miller). Unlike the Founding Fathers, who argued for limited government and individual liberty against government encroachment, Dewey did indeed advocate an explicitly positive reading of the concept of freedom-as freedom to rather than freedom from. For him, freedom offers individuals opportunities to develop their own capacities, opportunities that are often provided most reliably by the democratic state. Consequently by asserting that Dewey s work represents a thoroughgoing reconstruction of the American way of living, primarily by means of the positive state, Miller identifies a political ideology that has been contested in the United States since the Progressive Era. Indeed to many-such as those who object to the idea that public schools might be enculturating the young into a social and political democracy, a phrase that used to hang in the halls of the school district offices just north of us-such a positive state looks precisely like the enemy.
But this is not a book about political theory, nor even about democracy. Rather it is a book about the essentially rhetorical way of life-one we are calling here democratic culture -that we believe Dewey imagined in his work. For us, democracy describes the kinds of human interaction that must follow when individuals or groups choose to, or discover that they must, treat each other as equals. This assumption, or presumption, of mutual equality renders interactions within a community of equals necessarily, though often not happily, cooperative. Democracy extends well beyond government systems to include the prior and fundamental work of ensuring that all adults are free to chime in, to join the conversation on how they should arrange their lives together, in the words of the philosopher Paul Woodruff (3). A democratic culture comprises the sum total of the values and attitudes as well as habits and behaviors that enable people to practice what amounts to responsible expression. Such a practice is inherently rhetorical, in the sense of requiring both assertion and response to be accountable to others with whom one is engaged.
Rhetorical practice is the kind of practice that Alasdair MacIntyre described in After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory as foundational to community and culture: By a practice I am going to mean any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and the goods involved, are systematically extended (187).
Persuasive communication is one of the most essential practices constituting democratic culture-one in which individuals are expected to express themselves constructively within a community and at the same time to judge rigorously the expressions of others on those same constructive criteria. When rhetorical practice enables people to solve particular problems or advance particular projects, they succeed in achieving what MacIntyre would consider external goods, such as material prosperity. But rhetorical practice also establishes, and emerges from, the goods internal to democratic practice, such as the values, attitudes, habits, and behaviors that serve as the normative forces behind practice.
It has become commonplace in rhetorical studies to say that a vibrant, progressive democratic culture-the kind MacIntyre imagined was necessary for achieving excellence -depends on rhetorical engagement by individuals, and by as many individuals as possible. Nearly a century before John Dewey s richest work on democratic culture, Alexis de Tocqueville addressed the engagement problem for American democracy in prescient language: When social conditions are equal, every man is apt to live apart, centered in himself and forgetful of the public. If the rulers of democratic nations were either to neglect to correct this fatal tendency or to encourage it from a notion that it weans men from political passions and thus wards off revolutions, they might eventually produce the evil they seek to avoid, and a time might come when the inordinate passions of a few men, aided by the unintelligible selfishness or the pusillanimity of the greater number, would ultimately compel society to pass through strange vicissitudes (2, 256).
There is no doubt that Americans have passed, and will continue from time to time to pass, through strange vicissitudes due to their own disengagement from civic rhetorical practice. Since Tocqueville, America s political narrative has provided citizens many reasons, moral or otherwise, to remain disengaged. Paul Woodruff argues that of all political arrangements, democracy faces human limitations most honestly because it balances distrust against distrust and casts a critical eye on its own imperfections (21). Impurity, in fact, is not a condition of democracy only but of the human scene generally (Woodruff 21).
Impure as it is, democratic culture has had few more enthusiastic advocates than John Dewey. His capacious mind was fixed intensely on that human scene as he imagined it at its best. He imagined a culture of common values and attitudes, of shared habits and behaviors, that would enable individuals to engage constructively, together, in the rhetorical work of improving the conditions of living together-he called it the task of creative democracy. Indeed he not only imagined that culture but also set out in his work both the content and the form of a civic education-curricular as well as extracurricular-that might prepare individuals to perpetuate and enrich it. That work seems almost to be a direct response to the plaintive call of Walt Whitman, a poet Dewey admired, for a moral and artistic community held together by a common skeleton (Whitman 10). Throughout his work Dewey imagines how that identity might be realized-how not only politics but also philosophy, aesthetics, and of course education might teach people ways of engaging rhetorically in the rocky collaborative project of democratic life together . What Dewey describes as a public comprises people who choose not only to tolerate each other but also to cooperate in generating collective progress from perpetual conflict, a project that relies on individual rhetorical practices of the democratic sort. From their experience of democratic culture, those people learn the essential elements of those practices and-returning to Whitman-to value them as matters of morality and even of art.
We intend in this collection of essays to accomplish two things. First, we want to explore how John Dewey s scholarship has influenced and can continue to influence the thinking of rhetoricians on the relationship between rhetoric and American democracy. Though Dewey was not actively engaged in the superdiscipline of communication, his work as a professional philosopher and public intellectual continues to serve as a well that rhetorical scholars draw from when they study rhetoric as the constitutive democratic practice. The essays that follow demonstrate Dewey s wide-ranging influence on rhetoric in an American intellectual tradition that addresses this national culture s fundamental conflicts between self and society, freedom and responsibility, individual advancement and the common good. We see this influence at work both in America s enduring abstractions (such as science, pragmatism, and religion) and in Dewey s interlocutors (such as Jane Addams or Walter Lippmann). Second, we want also to establish Dewey as an essential source for those engaged in the project of teaching others how to compose timely, appropriate, useful, and eloquent responses to the diverse and often contentious rhetorical situations that develop in a democratic culture. At stake here is not just instruction in traditional modes of public discourse because, by our definition, democratic culture encompasses a variety of situations, private or public, civic or professional, where people must cooperate more or less as equals in the work of advancing a common project. What prepares people to intervene constructively in such situations is instruction in those rhetorical practices of democratic interaction that we find at the center of Dewey s work.
We should mention one more intention: to make a collection that is itself a locus of collaboration among rhetoricians of various disciplines, particularly those scholars concentrated in English and communication studies who are united in their commitment to rhetoric. Though in his intellectual maturity he left Hegel behind, Dewey was infected, as William James wrote, with the Hegelian bacillus of reconciliation (in Westbrook 101), and we hope this collection of essays on his work might encourage a more thorough rapprochement of scholars who are concerned with these matters but find themselves divided, artificially, by disciplines, programs, and departments.
In this introduction we argue that Dewey s writing provides a rich framework upon which a distinctly American tradition of democratic rhetorical practice can be built-a tradition that combines the most useful concepts of classical rhetoric with those of modern progressive civic engagement. We say distinctly American because we believe Dewey takes us beyond our traditional emphasis on the democratic culture of classical Athens and provides connections to rich veins of American thought such as individualism, liberalism, progressive education, collectivism, pragmatism, and postindustrial science and communication. In this way his voluminous work is a modern and democratic expression of paideia or, if we can be forgiven for whimsy, paideweya (Jackson 183), expressing the interdependent elements of a civic education that is essential to the sustenance of a democratic culture. For Dewey, human potential is best realized in the free flow of artful communication among the individuals who together form a dynamic social organism. Because in America people are, at least in principle, more or less equal, each is responsible to be ever learning, ever growing, ever adapting to the problems that develop when diverse and divergent individuals must together construct and maintain their society. In his rendering (even though, again, he is a philosopher rather than a rhetorician), these practices of individual learning, growing, and adapting, as well as the contentious collaborative work that is their context, are essentially rhetorical.
DEWEY, DEMOCRATIC CULTURE, AND RHETORIC
Our point is that Dewey s work describes a democratic culture emerging from exchanges of symbolic means of inducing cooperation in others-Kenneth Burke s definition of rhetoric (43). That culture is democratic to the extent that it is, in Charles Tilly s terms, characterized by relationships that feature broad, equal, protected and mutually binding consultation (13-14) by citizens who are free to make their views known-to consult with each other or with representatives about how things should be (Dahl 37-38). Put perhaps more bluntly by Paul Woodruff, democracy engages its participants in two collaborative rhetorical projects at once: a positive effort that would engage everyone s good will on behalf of the state so that it could grow and defend itself against its enemies without worrying about internal divisions ; and its necessarily negative mirror image, to prevent the rise of tyrants and to ensure that money or aristocratic birth never conferred high privilege on anyone (31).
These are descriptions of a democratic state , and while democratic culture is most often imagined as a state, it need not be. Constituted of democratic interactions, democratic culture takes many social forms-professional as well as civic, private as well as public. There are many situations in which people must cooperate in their self-government and so find themselves-happily or not-engaged with others in work that, however individual one s motivation, is necessarily a common project. A healthy democratic culture would provide individuals with perspectives and practices that, even in the face of conflict, enable constructive communication with divergent others.
This is familiar ground: democracy is forged in political rhetoric, as Russell Hanson writes, through arguments over the desirability of particular institutions and practices (23). So democratic culture is rhetorical culture since democratic culture is created through rhetorical back-and-forthness. This has been discussed in rhetorical studies in recent years through a growing literature on deliberative democracy, inspired by Habermas and refined by a number of scholars interested in fleshing out the normative and descriptive dimensions of how citizens reason together through what Gerard Hauser calls vernacular exchanges in various public spheres (Hauser 74; see also Fontana, Nederman, and Remer). Deliberation springs from and creates democratic culture. The same can be said for public address, social movements, mass media, blogs, architecture, popular culture, Internet memes, commemorations, symbolic observances, and myriad other artifacts we may study.
RHETORIC AS TRAINED CAPACITIES
Dewey has been understood as a prime contributor to this conversation for some time now, though only in the last twenty years has his work received the sustained attention it deserves. In 1991 two engaging intellectual biographies were published-Robert Westbrook s John Dewey and American Democracy and Steven Rockefeller s John Dewey: Religious Faith and Democratic Humanism -just as Richard Rorty and other neopragmatists were beginning to make Dewey studies fashionable again after the post-World War II decline. For Rockefeller, Dewey s vision of democracy is a spiritual one, a craving for a unifying force to overcome those dualisms of modernity that oppress life, restrict growth, and obstruct social progress (2). Dewey, therefore, should be read as the prophet of a new spiritual attitude intended to clarify and realize the religious and moral values inherent in natural experience and democratic culture (Rockefeller 4, 22). Westbrook is more interested in seeing Dewey as the neglected articulator of a radical new liberalism, one in which, as was pointed out earlier, the business of democracy is the active development of its people- all its people. Dewey envisioned a common democratic culture suffusing schools, factories, political parties, and other institutions (Westbrook xvi), and he maintained a democratic faith amid withering criticism from all major points on the political spectrum.
Born in Burlington, Vermont, in 1859, the year Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species (as everyone takes pains to note), John Dewey grew up in an intellectual environment aflame with ideological conflicts first sparked by the Enlightenment, such as the interminable debate between science and faith. He grew up in a family of Congregationalists who practiced a brand of liberal but pious faith that Dewey abandoned by the mid-1890s. He earned a degree from the University of Vermont in 1879 and taught high school for a few years in Oil City, Pennsylvania, though apparently he could not control his students and his most memorable attribute was his overlong morning prayers (Westbrook 8). At Johns Hopkins University, the first American institution to offer graduate studies, he studied philosophy with George Sylvester Morris, a philosopher who, like Dewey, found in the works of G. W. F. Hegel, the German idealist, a unifying principle, a principle that satisfied what Dewey decades later called an intense emotional craving to unite the modern divisions of self from the world, of soul from body, of nature from God ( Later Works 5:153). In 1884 he followed Morris to the University of Michigan for his first academic post, and after a brief year at the University of Minnesota, he was head of the philosophy department at Michigan until 1894, when he transferred to the University of Chicago to head its philosophy department. In 1904 he moved to Columbia University, where he remained until he retired in 1930 with some of his best work still ahead of him (for example, Art as Experience, Liberalism and Social Action , and Experience and Education ).
As Nathan Crick points out, though Dewey gushed that of all affairs, communication is the most wonderful (Dewey, Later Works 1:134), he used the term rhetoric maybe once in his voluminous work (in an encomium of one of his students, Fred Newton Scott, a founding compositionist) and never seems to operate explicitly in the rhetorical tradition handed down by classicists with whom he would have been familiar (Crick, Democracy and Rhetoric , 9). Even more challenging for a project like ours, Dewey s own rhetorical style, then as much as now, underwhelms. After reading Experience and Nature , Oliver Wendell Holmes quipped that Dewey wrote as God would have spoken had He been inarticulate but keenly desirous to tell you how it was (in Westbrook xiii). One of Dewey s sharper critics, Lewis Mumford, thought that the great philosopher s prose was as depressing as a subway ride (in Westbrook 381). He was ever changing his mind about key terms such as instrumentalism, culture, experience ; nothing seemed to catch on.
His speaking style fared no better. Even Sidney Hook, who, as Alan Ryan writes, admired Dewey only slightly this side of idolatry, recognized his mentor s shortcomings (Ryan 38). Dewey, writes Hook, made no attempt to motivate or arouse the interest of his auditors, to relate problems to their own experiences, to use graphic, concrete illustrations in order to give point to abstruse positions, nor did he provoke a lively participation and response (Hook, Out of Step 82). The world-famous intellectual spoke in a husky monotone, and there were pauses and sometimes long lapses as he gazed out the window or above the heads of his audience (Hook, Out of Step 83). One of his students said that his first experience in Dewey s class left him with a shock of dullness and confusion (in Westbrook 378). Hours after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, one of the most dramatic moments in world history, Dewey gave a plodding lecture on philosophy and completely sidestepped the kairos for which his pragmatism should have been keenly suited (Danisch 1). When compared to the luminous prose of William James, sure, Dewey s rhetorical style falls short; yet he articulated over and over a clear progressive vision of democratic culture that put back-and-forth communication at the center of a way of life whose ultimate goal was the growth of every person, what Nathan Crick calls the arts of becoming essential to the democratic project-one in which individuals and their groups can hope to progress together.
Did Don Burks exaggerate, then, when he wrote in 1968 that perhaps no philosopher since Aristotle has more to offer the rhetorician than does John Dewey (Burks 126)? That depends on whether or not we can successfully integrate the different strands of his thinking into a rhetoric of democratic culture that yields both theoretical insights and practical strategies, especially for teaching young people. Rhetoric is a dynamis , a power to do things with language in collaboration with others. As we practice rhetoric, we learn how to interpret, analyze, invent, and perform in dynamic social relationships that call forth ever more innovative responses to recurring situations. Dewey believed that the ultimate Good is the growth of a person as he or she interacts in social situations, building social intelligence and social power through trained capacities of control ( Early Works 5:75). We believe that this idea of trained capacities is capacious enough to cover everything that makes rhetoric morally essential to democracy. Rhetoric, if we paraphrase Dewey, educates ; it enlarges and enlightens experience; it stimulates and enriches imagination; it creates responsibility for accuracy and vividness of statement and thought ( Middle Works 9:9). Rhetoric-both as theory and as practice-is necessary for our growth as human beings, and practicing it gives us trained capacities just as much perhaps as learning it in formal schooling.
This orientation to trained capacities leads us to go beyond the usual starting point for talking about Dewey and rhetoric: The Public and Its Problems , his most thorough statement of political philosophy (Westbrook 300). As important as that work is for rhetorical studies, we do not get a full view of Dewey s contribution unless we begin with his writings on ethics, which provide key underlying assumptions for his perspectives on education, aesthetics, and finally communication, which taken together express Dewey s paideia for democratic culture.
AN ETHICS OF DEMOCRATIC PRACTICE
Woven into Dewey s progressive vision of teaching, creating, and communicating is an ethics that guides the rhetorical practice of a democratic culture. Shaping this ethics are two moral principles learned from his mother, Lucina: the inestimable value of the individual and the spiritual longing and need to share a life with others. Absorbed from the evangelical pietism of his Congregationalist mother, these principles inspired Dewey long after he had abandoned the faith of his youth. For him, these principles were manifest as conflicting desires, for autonomy and communion, essentially-a conflict experienced as an inward laceration for a young, serious Vermont boy who, in his own words, had an intense emotional craving for their resolution ( Later Works 5:153). While an undergraduate student in a physiology course at the University of Vermont, Dewey read T. H. Huxley s Elements of Physiology and was struck with the conceptual power of organism as a governing metaphor for life as an interdependence and interrelated unity among parts ( Later Works 5:147). Indeed, in an early paper on the ethics of democracy, he wrote that citizens should not be isolated non-social atoms but part of a common will, possessed of unity of purpose and interest ( Early Works 1:231-32). So democracy becomes inherently an ethical conception because it holds as its highest ethical idea the active growth of each individual, wherein lies an infinite and universal possibility ( Early Works 1:240, 244, 246). Eventually he would abandon this Christo-Hegelian language, but the kernel remained.
As an account of human action, ethics, for Dewey, meant practice and action, conduct viewed not partially, but in connection with the end which it realizes ( Early Works 3:241, 242). If the end of action is the developed or satisfied self, then the end of social life is to create the conditions under which individuals may grow through interaction with others (300). Early in his thinking on ethics, he used the inelegant term function to describe the two sides of individuality : the relation between power of doing, on one side, and something to be done on the other (303). Individuals exercise their function in response to the needs of their surroundings, and their surroundings should be transformed, as a moral duty, to suit what becomes apparent as shared needs of individuals (313). A moral life, then, consists of constitutive adjustments that align the will of individuals with the ends and demands of the social situations in which individuals find themselves ( Middle Works 5:199). The satisfaction of the entire moral order is contingent on the power of each person to find personal purpose in action among and with others ( Early Works 3:321). Consequently individuals have a moral obligation to identify our happiness with the happiness of others, to find our good in their good, not just to seek their happiness as, upon the whole, the most effective way of securing our own ( Middle Works 5:268, italics in original). At some point during his tenure as chair of philosophy at the University of Michigan, Dewey came to believe-perhaps with the help of his wife Alice s liberalizing social consciousness-that democracy, rather than the church, was the best system for enabling people to enact for themselves this account of the full and fulfilled human who, through interaction, develops trained (that is, learned, habituated) capacities for engaging in democratic practice.
One can see easily how this ethics provided the groundwork for Dewey s particularly American blend of liberalism and socialist democracy (see Westbrook 430); less readily evident, however, is its connection to rhetoric. But it should be clear that the adaptations, transformations, and social adjustments that make this kind of individual growth possible can happen only through rhetorical exchange-its symbol-making, its reason-giving, its back-and-forthness (Dewey called it social give and take [ Later Writings 1:135]). Additionally we readily recognize rhetoric as the practice by which societies come to collective judgments, or what Dewey called the social intelligence we use to help us make changes necessary to remove roadblocks to growth ( Later Works 11:39). Christopher Lyle Johnstone connects social intelligence to the Aristotelian concept of phronesis , or the practical judgments that enable us to predict or anticipate consequences based upon insight into the tendencies of actions to bring about certain results (Johnstone 188). Intelligent choices are guided by open-minded and impartial inquiry and deliberation, the conclusions of which are regarded as tentative, flexible, and capable of modification (191). Johnstone concludes that if a contemporary art of rhetoric is to contribute to the quest for wisdom, theorists must formulate artistic principles that will aid in the generation of discourse capable of fostering the growth of moral selves. These principles derive from an understanding of how communication in its pragmatic functions contributes to the growth of persons, and in particular to the development of those features of selfhood that constitute practical intelligence (193). Rhetoric is, then, the primary agency of moral growth (193). We will have more to say about this conclusion when we examine communication as an expression of Dewey s ethics of democratic practice.
In Democracy and Rhetoric: John Dewey on the Arts of Becoming , Nathan Crick gives us a full account of Dewey s ontology of becoming -or, in other words, an ethics of rhetoric bound up in the historical, kairotic contingencies of situations that ultimately lead to new selves with broader capacities (77). Like Robert Danisch, Crick aligns Dewey with the Sophists in that he saw public life as an intellectual play, of sorts-a play of contingencies, discontinuities, challenges, crises, and transformations, all situated in specific historical moments that require creative practice. Rhetorical acts direct experience within problematic situations for which long-term happiness is contingent on an individual s ability to say what is most powerful, most fitting for the occasion, or at least to learn how to do so (22). Rhetoric has progressive value, writes Crick, when it can transform experience such that one emerges as a new self in a new world (25, 33). Rhetoric is what keeps the organism active and responsive to the needs of its constituent parts. For Dewey, the moral life is a continually reconstructed life, fueled and formed by our ability to act creatively in the new and serious situations which call out new vigor and lift [our lives] to higher levels (Dewey, Middle Works 5:540).
Those higher levels are reached only in democratic interactions with others. As Gregory Fernando Pappas explains in his John Dewey s Ethics , it is in those interactions, rather than a contemplative process of working downward from rules to situations, that Dewey locates the practice of a moral life (7-8). So Dewey s ethics prescribes an interpersonal enactment of, in Pappas s terms, the underlying moral commitments and visions and fortifications of the soul that empower and inspire a democratic way of living in the world (8-9). He describes Dewey s conception of individual moral development as a process of democratization that must, for every person, grow from within (10). That kind of growth occurs only in the context of what amount to rhetorical interactions-with the term rhetorical broadly defined to encompass a spectrum of communicative encounters that work toward the end of enabling common understanding and cooperation. This is how rhetoric sustains democratic culture.
In Dewey s own moralized words, as articulated in his Ethics , anything short of other-directed democratic practice is in fact immoral: If the vice of the criminal, and of the coarsely selfish man is to disturb the aims and the good of others; if the vice of the ordinary egoist, and of every man, upon his egoistic side, is to neglect the interests of others; the vice of the social leader, of the reformer, of the philanthropist and the specialist in every worthy cause of science, or art, or politics, is to seek ends which promote the social welfare in ways which fail to engage the active interest and cooperation of others ( Middle Works 5:276). At the foundation of Dewey s ethics, then, is the principle that any pursuit of the common end must involve intimately the freely cooperative activities of others. Though in practice it seems slow; it seems to postpone accomplishment indefinitely, the reality is that this cooperation must be the root principle of the morals of democracy (276). Much earlier in Ethics -a textbook, rather than a theoretical treatise, that he coauthored with James H. Tufts-Dewey defines that key term: Cooperation implies a common end. It means that each is interested in the success of all. This common end forms then a controlling rule of action, and the mutual interest means sympathy (46). Later in the work he returns to the concept of cooperation as a dialectical counterpoise to sociological applications of evolution (that is, the market use of the phrase survival of the fittest ), writing that finally, cooperation and sympathy prove stronger forces for progress than ruthless competition (477). Ruthless competition can take many material forms, but cooperation and sympathy emerge from communicative interactions among people who must treat each other more or less as equals, willing at the very least to settle disagreements symbolically through discourse. Without such ethical interactions, the democratic practice of rhetoric cannot achieve the public goods that make for a good life for all.
EDUCATION AND DEMOCRATIC PRACTICE
Dewey s assumptions about education follow from this essentially democratic conception of ethical action. For him, education should provide for each individual, in the words of Robert Westbrook, whatever is necessary to enable him to put his powers thoroughly at the service of society (93). This involves instruction that supports individual development toward the end of meaningful participation with others in all layers of social life. Essentially schooling should reflect and organize the fundamental principles of community life (Dewey, Early Writings 5:63). Education should foster habits of social imagination in its students, and Dewey suggested what he called a moral trinity of the school that reflected the desired outcomes of education at every level: 1) social intelligence , meaning the power of observing and comprehending social situations ; 2) social power , or trained capacities of control ; which ultimately lead to 3) social interest , or the desire to engage with others in the cooperative social enterprise (75). Dewey wanted teachers to develop an active, pragmatic social consciousness in their students that would move them from awareness of the social situation in which they found themselves to their own self-motivated practice as agents endowed with new capacities to respond to those situations. As he said elsewhere, adapting human powers to the needs of social situations was the supreme art of instruction (94). Again, while Dewey does not use the term to discuss this adaptive art, we recognize that what we call rhetoric is central to that enterprise.
However, this does not mean that Dewey considered schooling as primarily a preparation for citizenship in the sense of knowing something about the Old Yellow Documents (for example, the Constitution) and the voting process (see Later Works 9:164). Rather he argued that schools allegiance was to society, democratically conceived as a network of individuals living and working together with the potential for political activity as one of many cooperative social practices in which they find themselves together engaged (Jackson and Miller 104). Schooling would invite students into the fullness of sharing in the intellectual and spiritual resources of the community by which they would come to understand the culture behind what we would call their various rhetorical situations (Dewey, Middle Works 2:93). Writing in an era of dizzying industrial expansion and immigration, Dewey placed schooling, as the educational historian Lawrence Cremin writes, at the center of the struggle for a better life as an adjunct to politics (119, 88). By the time he wrote Democracy and Education in 1916, this vision had made Dewey the leading voice of progressive education in America.
It was a vision that had, and continues to have, its critics: in Sidney Hook s phrase, Dewey s conception of education for some is social, all too social (in Dewey, Middle Works 9:xxi). Indeed sometimes he seems to use the word social as often as grammatical articles, leaving his readers feeling an Ayn Randian kind of social claustrophobia. One early reviewer of Democracy and Education argued quite precisely in the Nation that in Dewey s world there is no room for any individual who wishes to lead his own life in the privacy of reflective self-consciousness (in Cremin 126). It is true that the vestiges of Hegel remaining in Dewey led him to adopt the attitude that the individual qua individual outside society was an abstraction (Hook in Dewey, Middle Works 9:xxi). But this too social stance on education sprang from his reasonable conviction that learning to think and to act is indeed a social affair, one enacted in the context of schooling as a collaboration among peers with a more experienced mentor. If the educational project of schools is conceived as providing ongoing individuals with opportunities for their continual reconstruction of experience, schooling should prompt students to analyze situations, make assumptions, and then experiment with some kind of consequent action-such as making an argument to others (Dewey, Middle Works 9:86). In democratic culture individual educational progress is not an end in itself but a means of rendering individuals contributors to the development of the larger societies to which they belong.
Students of rhetoric have long drawn on Dewey for support for teaching young people how to think, write, and speak effectively in the social situations in which they find themselves. Early in the twentieth century teachers of writing published articles in the English Journal using Deweyan language to argue that writing courses should teach writing in the context of democratic living (Gallagher 20). In the first half of that century, as David Russell has explained, this sort of language instruction in general education became a rallying point for reformers searching for a common denominator to weave together the disparate threads of an increasingly complex polity (Russell 136). Dewey s work was read in ways that offered teachers a sound alternative to the positivism of administrative progressives and the elitism of partisans for liberal culture (Russell 199). Though these Deweyan progressives did not prevail in the curricular debates, they did manage to articulate a vision of higher education that set improved communication at the center of a mission to heal the divisions in industrial democracy (Russell 200). Likewise speech and debate teachers early in the century leaned on Dewey to help them construct a political vision for teaching critical thinking and speaking. As William Keith notes, Dewey s apotheosis as public intellectual coincided with, and contributed to, advances in teaching systematic methods of discussion as a means of collaborative inquiry for civic ends.
Given all this, it is easy for us to locate Dewey s work at the center of an education that sees constructive rhetorical interaction, with both assertion and criticism as essentially cooperative acts, as the foundation for training people in the capacities of democratic practice. Just as Dewey rarely used the term rhetoric in his various discussions of education that we find fundamentally rhetorical, educators in rhetoric discuss education in light of what Stephen Fishman has called a tacit tradition that is fundamentally Deweyan (Fishman 315). Students imitate the back-and-forthness of public life when they write or speak in ways that assert or respond, when they do the work of criticism. As an obliterator of unnecessary dualisms, Dewey helps rhetoric teachers move beyond the impasses between expressivism and constructivism (Crick, Composition as Experience ), agency and subjectivity (Jones), individual and society, knowledge and playful indeterminacy (Flower, Long, and Higgins), production and criticism (Fishman and McCarthy), public and professional knowledge, even speech and writing. This last dualism has been particularly damaging to rhetoric teaching at the undergraduate level, since the conventional university curriculum tends to separate instruction in writing and instruction in speaking. Dewey s rendering of a democratic education breaks down those disciplinary differences and, indeed, denies disciplinarity itself as he proposes an education that enables individuals to advance their capacities to contribute the essentially cooperative and collaborative project of individuality operating in the common interest that is his structural concept of democracy (Westbrook 93).
In the late spring of 1901 Dewey traveled to the enclave of the Mormons, fast against the west face of the Rocky Mountains in a state that had been a state for a mere five years, to give a series of lectures on education at a new normal school, the Brigham Young Academy, in Provo, Utah. The tenth and last of those lectures was titled Some Elements of Character. Here Dewey explained that the kind of character that we wish formed by education [is] something more than moral passability, or even more than freedom from evil tendencies ( Later Works 17:336). Rather the kind of character he had in mind is a complicated thing that involves, finally and fundamentally, a capacity to act in cooperation with others in effective and influential ways (337). Democratic culture is made from people of such character. Dewey concluded that lecture, and the series, with this:
The three great factors in the formation of character are first good judgment, or the sense of the values of things about us; second the executive disposition, or tendency not to stop with intentions, but to be positive, self-assertive, and have a reasonable amount of aggressiveness in one s make-up. I think it was [Andrew] Jackson who said he had only contempt for the man who could not get angry. We do not want to cultivate the habit of getting angry; but there is a certain kind of assertiveness, of positive aggressiveness, in hanging to an idea and not being contented until we have made the effort to put it into execution which is necessary to character; and the third factor is that of delicate susceptibility of feelings which shall give poise to this executive tendency which in itself is likely to be a little hard and inconsiderate. (347)
What better description of the enactment of rhetoric-of what is required of the discourse of people who, sharing the status of political equals, can and must work together to determine the direction of their common life?
A RHETORICAL AESTHETICS
In this same lecture on schooling a democratic character, Dewey described the training of the feelings [as] one of the most important parts of the training of character, noting that feelings are the tune of our experiences and that seeing that the child has the proper kind of experience, and then letting him manage his feelings as he naturally will is an essential element of a democratic education ( Later Works 17:346). Dewey closed this series of lectures by exhorting his audience of apprentice teachers to see to it, with him, that our schools really become homes for the training and building up of men and women who are both noble and beautiful in the make-up of their own personalities (347). Individuals enact that nobility and beauty aesthetically, in Dewey s expansive sense of that term. Art is often seen as something transcendent, separated from experience and entombed in New York museums or appreciated mostly by a cultural elite. Dewey s approach to aesthetic theory is to see art as a result and reflection of normal experience and in fact to see daily living, as Michel de Certeau has also imagined, as artful practice.
In Art as Experience , Dewey describes living as an ongoing project of composition. Simply stated, conscious life is constituted of experience, but that experience must be made meaningful. Dewey locates experience in the interaction of the live creature and environing conditions, an interaction that, as it generates conditions of resistance and conflict, is given shape by emotions and ideas so that conscious intent emerges ( Later Works 10:42). We experience many things that are neither memorable nor meaningful. But when thoughts and feelings combine to give what we experience both form and meaning-a beginning, an end, and a significance-we recognize ourselves as living. Dewey s project in Art as Experience is to redefine the aesthetic, and indeed art itself, as the method by which individuals of democratic character-the creators of democratic culture-live their lives. Here is how Dewey describes this art of living: [A]rt, in its form, unites the very same relation of doing and undergoing, outgoing and incoming energy, that makes an experience to be an experience. Because of elimination of all that does not contribute to mutual organization of the factors of both action and reception into one another, and because of selection of just the aspects and traits that contribute to their interpenetration of each other, the product is a work of aesthetic art (54). Fundamentally important to that process is the attitude-indeed the identity-that an artist must assume: The artist embodies in himself the attitude of the perceiver while he works (55). In other words, artful living is other-directed, from the first moments of cognitive invention to the act itself.
Dewey did not, of course, have what we call rhetoric in mind when he wrote this. Nevertheless this transactional model of experience seems to us like the essential rhetorical act: to make one s experience accessible and meaningful to/for someone else. For Dewey, this transaction is the essential aesthetic act as well. It is an act of rendering an inchoate flow of events understandable, meaningful, and thus usable. That which distinguishes an experience as esthetic, he writes, is conversion of resistance and tensions, of excitations that in themselves are temptations to diversion, into a movement toward an inclusive and fulfilling close ( Later Works 10:62). This conversion, as every storyteller and orator and arguer readily knows, is what is required to communicate in ways that wield the powers of affect, of persuasion, of demonstration. Uniquely, Dewey concludes that aesthetic experience is constitutive of democratic practice: Works of art that are not remote from common life, that are widely enjoyed in a community, are signs of a unified collective life. But they are also marvelous aids in the creation of such a life. The remaking of the material of experience in the act of expression is not an isolated event confined to the artist and to a person here and there who happens to enjoy the work. In the degree in which art exercises its office, it is also a remaking of the experience of the community in the direction of greater order and unity (87).
That last point-remaking the experience of the community in the direction of greater order and unity-describes concisely the primary project of a democratic culture, even if a phrase such as greater order and unity perhaps provokes more questions than it answers. The aesthetic-democratic project he imagines progresses through the communicative actions of individuals, actions that are at once aesthetic in their form and rhetorical in their function. Dewey s aesthetics renders art and rhetoric the communicative warp and weft of democratic life. We make sense of our aesthetic experience through communication. Ultimately art is expressive in a far more meaningful way than simply spewing forth a narcissistic self-expression comprehensive (or enjoyable) to no one but the artist ( Later Works 10:68). Rather for Dewey an expression constitutes an experience for those it addresses just as much as it does for the artist (91). Art is transactional. It does not simply state a concept; it enables an encounter with concept, a habitation of it (110). His vision of democratic culture involves the sharing of experiences, of ideas and feelings, of abstract principles and intensely social practices. Because objects of art are expressive, they communicate, he writes. The meaning-making work they do lives only in communication when it operates in the experience of others. This description of the communicative capacity of art is also an instructive description of the power of rhetoric. In the end, Dewey declares, works of art are the only media of complete and unhindered communication between man and man that can occur in a world full of gulfs and walls that limit community of experience (110). Given all this, it seems that as we engage in the rhetorical and aesthetic work of carefully composing individual experience to render it accessible to others-in a manner that surprises or delights or provokes or inspires-we engage in the kind of ethical practice that democratic culture requires.
A profound and historical tension can be conceived between rhetoric and aesthetics. We have two books from Aristotle presenting separate subjects: a rhetoric and a poetics. It is also common to trace this tension back to the Enlightenment and the advance of logic and the new science, when it seemed to some that using eloquence or any kind of art to stir the passions was either dangerous, deceptive, or beside the point. Rhetoric has also been separated from aesthetics by the assumption that rhetoric s principle manifestation is in deliberative rather than poetic discourse. Yet in Rhetoric and Poetics in Antiquity , Jeffrey Walker shows how in the classical world poetic discourse was just as rhetorical (deliberative, argumentative) as an assembly speech because it made arguments-however implied-about the values, beliefs, and traditions that served as a cultural foundation for political life. Combining with Kenneth Burke s scholarship (that is, in Counter-Statement and other works), this argument expands the realm of the rhetorical to take into consideration artifacts traditionally ignored by rhetoricians such as novels, paintings, architecture, or films that represent the artifacts of rhetorical aesthetics.
Dewey delivered Art as Experience as a series of lectures at Harvard University in 1931 at a time when his creative energy was focused on discovering the religious quality of experience (Rockefeller 494). Though Dewey had long abandoned the reformed pieties of his youth, he saw in spirituality an ecology of feeling, an emotional vitality, that he believed was essential for a good life-a good social life, that is. As supernatural experience creates sacred space and renews life in those whom we say have been born again, so art suffuses life with the wonder of the new, as Dewey writes in Experience and Nature , making the world a different place in which to live ( Later Works 1:270, 272). Any activity that leads to further consummatory experiences or refresh[es] and enlarge[s] the spirit should be considered art (274). With all this emphasis on experience, Dewey moves aesthetics into the realm of rhetoric by situating artful communication properly in its experiential conditions, in Westbrook s words, rather than leaving it at the level of product (Westbrook 390).
The phrase experiential conditions resonates with rhetoricians who view communication not only as addressed but situated . In Democracy and Rhetoric , Nathan Crick, fixing Dewey s sentiments within the Emersonian tradition of eloquence (133), argues that though aesthetics and rhetoric share a common telos for consummatory experience, rhetoric goes further by seeking in the audience a common identification that extends beyond the immediate qualitative moment and results in action (Crick 141). Dewey wants to see democratic culture cultivated by aesthetic acts that not only please but also commit audiences and publics to new ways of living through ever-expanding capacities for communicating effectively. Crick writes that for Dewey, rhetoric embodies the spirit of movement that leads us into a contingent future with a new understanding and a shared hope (186). This hope, we suggest, is an orienting attitude and capacity for democratic practice through artful communication.
Rhetoric and aesthetics come together for Dewey in the consummatory experience of communication itself. As Scott Stroud points out, Dewey shows how even ordinary communication becomes artful when subjective orientation is taken into account (Stroud 165). What Stroud means is that communication goes beyond the mere pragmatic when participants orient themselves toward an experience and attend to a situation by focusing on what they value in that situation (165). Language for Dewey is not only the essence of consciousness but also the instrumental and consummatory tool of all meaningful relationships (Dewey, Later Works 1:147, 144). Communication gets things done in the world; it is also an end in itself, immediately valuable, as Stroud puts it, for instantiating harmony and coordination with others (Stroud 168). In Experience and Nature , which Sidney Hook called Dewey s most suggestive and most difficult work (in Dewey, Later Works 1:vii), Dewey argues that the coordinated transaction of discourse leads to imaginative identification, the sharing and merging of individuals, and finally concerted consensus of action ( Later Works 1:145). Obviously it is central to democratic culture, and it can be improved through criticism and teaching.
For Dewey, ethical action takes the form of interpersonal interaction of a certain sort: it engages others-in capacity if not in achievement-as equals; it proceeds upon an educated understanding of principled and practical shared knowledge and need; and it does so by putting individual powers, in Robert Westbrook s terms, thoroughly at the service of society (93) as when what an individual can offer to others is made accessible to them in the form a shareable aesthetic experience. These are the rhetorical elements of democratic communication as John Dewey envisioned them.
As a pragmatist, Dewey invites us to work to improve communication-surely a necessary trained capacity of control -in a technically advanced democratic state whose problems require the wisdom that comes from effective discourse. Democracy endures by choices, and choices are wise or intelligent when they are guided by open-minded and impartial inquiry and deliberation (Johnstone 191). As a foundational principle of democratic culture, according to Woodruff, the wisdom of ordinary people guides the ship of state between the aristocratic overreach of expert opinion and the rash actions of the mob (Woodruff 154). But democratic life was simpler for Demosthenes than for the modern citizen. In 1927 Walter Lippmann, Dewey s colleague at the New Republic , wrote The Phantom Public , a sequel to his earlier work Public Opinion and an eloquent critique of the dubious virtue of citizen wisdom in a technocratic age. Instead of making good citizens, the citizen wisdom model of democracy creates a mass of amateur executives, stumbling about the public talking such nonsense about politics because they lack the requisite knowledge to deal with modern problems (Lippmann 148, 150).
In his response to Lippmann, written in The Public and Its Problems , Dewey acknowledged democracy s flaws (for example, large and heterogeneous republic, indifference of its citizens, power of special interest, polarizing effect of parties, countless diversions, and the complexities of technology). His democratic faith rests in our power to refine the tools of communication in order to create what he calls, vaguely, the great community ( Later Works 2:323-24). The great community will be achieved when an organized, articulate Public comes into being through the highest and most difficult kind of inquiry and a subtle, delicate, vivid and responsive art of communication (350). In one of the most quoted parts of The Public and Its Problems , Dewey writes that the essential need for improving the methods and conditions of debate, discussion and persuasion is the problem of the public (365). Effective deliberation creates a flow of social intelligence through the direct give and take of citizens-or in Dewey s more nostalgic mood, neighbors -willing to engage each other in a sustained swap of symbols (371).
This thesis has long been appealing to students of rhetoric engaged in the task of articulating the relationship between rhetoric and democratic culture. In 1968, in the journal Western Speech , Don Burks showed how Dewey s theory of communication leads us to see social consciousness and intelligence as products of effective discourse rather than a self-subsistent reality (122). Likewise Johnstone in 1983 wrote what we believe to be the first comprehensive treatment of Dewey s theory of communication as a synthesis of ethics, practical wisdom, and eloquence. It could be said further that Dewey s essays, especially The Public and Its Problems , are, or at least should be considered, the founding documents for what has been called public sphere theory or publics theory in rhetorical studies (see, for starters, Goodnight; Asen and Brouwer; Stob).
The public sphere entry on Wikipedia puts the German critical theorist J rgen Habermas at the center of public sphere theory, but Dewey predates him and, as other rhetoricians have noted, adds useful correctives to Habermas s overemphasis on pseudo-Enlightenment rationality functioning in a single, monolithic bourgeois public sphere. Rather, as Gerard Hauser notes in Vernacular Voices , Dewey argues that reasonableness is revealed and refined in the very act of communication. A rhetorical model of publics is discourse based and replaces the norm of critical rationality with the rhetorical norm of reasonableness settled through local dialogue (Hauser 61). Robert Asen, building on a trend begun by Nancy Fraser and Hauser, shows how Dewey calls for enhancing the coordination of the multiple publics and permeable borders of dynamic democratic practice (Asen 179). Paul Stob provides a postmortem dialogue between Kenneth Burke and Dewey to lead us back to language and the possibilities of language as the central concern for problem-solving and community-building (Stob 228-29). In a complicated world, language will serve this problem-solving role best when science (or technology) and communication can be reconciled and together put in the service of public life. In Pragmatism, Democracy, and the Necessity of Rhetoric , Robert Danisch makes this case strongly by showing how Dewey s philosophy of communication essentially invents contemporary American rhetorics in its search for a refined art of communication in a postindustrial democratic culture (Danisch 63).
Dewey s conception of communication, finally, is founded upon his ethics, supplied with materials by his concept of democratic education, and enacted in exchanges of aesthetically expressed experiences that interlocutors can share. This democratic kind of communication begins with individuals-individuals whose clear sense of self is at once distinct and generous, confident and teachable, assertive and attentive. Those individuals proceed to communicate as a project that encompasses both teaching and learning, helping and being helped, self-realization and community building-a project in which each composes what Dewey calls an integrated individuality ( Later Works 5:122). He concluded his New Republic series on Individualism, Old and New in 1930-as the economy of the United States ground to a halt and the collective life of almost all Americans sank-with this extended metaphor: To gain an integrated individuality, each of us needs to cultivate his own garden. But there is no fence about this garden: it is no sharply marked off enclosure. Our garden is the world, in the angle at which it touches our own manner of being (122-23). That manner of being must be enacted, inherently, in our communication.
As teachers, critics, historians, and scholars of rhetoric, we are delighted to present this collaboration in order to confirm John Dewey s place as a productive source of our enduring traditions, our paideia , constituted in democratic practice, embedded in culture, and informed by his democratic faith -an obviously and unashamedly idealistic faith-that we can create a freer and more humane experience in which all share and to which all contribute ( Later Works 14:230). Our ability to do so is contingent on how well we use rhetoric to enhance our collective power of social agency through research, criticism, and teaching ( Early Works 5:78). Perhaps there is no better way to describe what rhetoric, as techne and paideia , has to offer than the prospect of trained capacities , or as Dewey wrote in 1895, the volitional command of one s own powers as a social agent ( Early Works 5:225). In the spirit of the great progressive educator, we learn by doing the things our capacities fit us for as scholars, critics, and teachers.
At its best, rhetorical criticism instructs those who read it. Our critical sense and methods of discriminating judgment must keep pace with the immense outchurn of rhetorical messages, recently accelerated by the self-publishing capabilities of the Web in a global message ecology ( Later Works 2:337). As investigators and artists with a particularly useful expertise, rhetoricians have a unique role to play in democracy if they choose to so orient their work ( Later Works 2:365). In light of this calling, it is instructive to perform a little harmless vandalism to one of Dewey s most powerful statements, substituting rhetoric for his term philosophy : Rhetoric becomes meaningful when it ceases to be a device for dealing with the problems of [rhetoricians] and becomes a method, cultivated by [rhetoricians], for dealing with the problems of [everyone] ( Middle Works 10:46). Rhetoricians can develop a trained capacity to see their historical and critical work as a labor of inquiry meant to improve democratic culture. We must imagine ourselves as public intellectuals and cultural workers more than we do now, and we should work to make our scholarship appealing to broader audiences.
Finally, in the spirit of Dewey s faith in the educative power of democratic practice ( Later Works 14:229), we must embrace our roles as teachers of trained capacities such as invention, argument, style, storytelling, collaboration, figurative reasoning, debate, multimodality, arrangement, and contingent thinking. While scholars and teachers of rhetoric reproduce themselves through graduate programs in English and communication studies, we often neglect cultivating sleeper cells of rhetors in business, government, and the sciences through rigorous undergraduate teaching across the curriculum. Arguably one of the most important courses a student takes in college is either a speech or a writing class, and as James Aune has argued, these courses are our base of operations for teaching young people how to make and support claims (in Zarefsky 32). Dewey contended that students develop effective habits of action as they learn to be plastic -to modify actions on the basis of the results of prior experiences ( Middle Works 9:49). The more experiences we give students to inhabit and respond to rhetorical situations, the better they will develop the trained capacities necessary for social power. We must tend to the undergraduate curriculum with rigor and Deweyan vision.
Democratic culture is sloppy. Dewey knew that. The anecdote we opened this introduction with seems to illustrate the challenges we face in our public interactions. In district meetings, in newspapers and Web sites, and on television, a handful of angry parents in a relatively remote corner of this republic associated that simple school district slogan about enculturating students in democracy to Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, and to John Dewey. These kinds of arguments challenge us as we exercise democratic faith in the deliberative process of the polis. Yet since democratic culture is constituted through rhetorical practice, it is not too far-fetched to suggest that we cannot only interpret the world rhetorically but also make it better through rhetoric.
THIS COLLECTION REPRESENTS an attempt to articulate how Dewey helps us understand how democratic culture is constituted through rhetorical practice in the context of the United States. We have divided the book into three parts: Dewey and Democratic Practice, Dewey and His Interlocutors, and Dewey as Teacher of Rhetoric. In Part I the contributors explain how Dewey s work on science, philosophy, and religion provide the architectonic assumptions of democratic practice. William Keith and Robert Danisch combine Dewey s notions of deliberation with his broad-based understanding of science as the ordinary process of human inquiry. They argue that by uniting science and deliberation, Dewey provides a sociology of rhetoric that amounts to a set of recommendations for developing a democracy in which specific forms of communication guide decision and judgment. Scott Stroud provides a reconstructive account of pragmatist rhetoric by showing us how Kenneth Burke s scholarship on orientation complements Dewey s implied rhetorical framework, all in the service of articulating what pragmatism offers rhetorical studies. Though early in his professional life Dewey forsook the religious tradition he was raised in, Paul Stob argues that Dewey constructed his own unique brand of religious rhetoric that somehow separated religious symbols from their more problematic tendencies in order to integrate them into the discursive fabric of a pluralistic, democratic, cooperative culture.
Part II puts Dewey into dialogue-both analogically and literally-with five interlocutors on issues related to democratic culture. Jeremy Engels sees Thomas Jefferson-rather than Ralph Waldo Emerson, as Cornel West suggests-as the primary interlocutor for Dewey s rhetoric of democratic culture. Dewey turned to the historical Jefferson to articulate the moral dimensions of controversy during public crisis. In similar fashion, Dewey s dialogues with his contemporary Jane Addams, the Chicago reformer, led him to develop a more nuanced, pragmatic approach to public deliberation, as Louise Knight explains. Knight and Engels both show us how war challenges democratic culture and rhetorical practice, and Dewey was prominent in debates on the subject during both world wars of the twentieth century. Keith Gilyard presents W. E. B. Du Bois as one of Dewey s interlocutors who worked, with Dewey, to establish a rhetoric of education capacious enough to include the interests of underprivileged social groups such as African Americans. Dewey and Du Bois worked closely together as progressives engaged in social justice for all races, but Dewey did not fully grasp, as Du Bois did, that the educational system he so lauded had been racially constructed.
Two other figures conclude the section on Dewey s interlocutors: Walter Lippmann and James Baldwin. As explained above, Dewey worked with Lippmann at the New Republic in the post-World War I heyday of American realism when social psychologists were publishing research studies on the mass stupidity of democracy s agents (see Westbrook 280-86). As Jean Goodwin explains, Walter Lippmann, unjustly constructed as an enemy of democracy, actually complemented Dewey s understanding of deliberation with a realist s perspective that emphasized debate over deliberation, casting citizens as competent outsiders who sit in judgment of whom to trust more than what to trust. Walton Muyumba proposes an essential connection between James Baldwin s radical cultural criticism and Dewey s claim that the enterprise of democracy is always essentially radical. Cultural critics such as Baldwin work rhetorically to form the public spheres in which radical democracy is engineered.
In Part III the contributors explore various aspects of John Dewey s influence on teaching rhetoric in our day. Each essay argues that Dewey provides useful propositions for teaching students how to develop skills as arguers and inquirers. By connecting Dewey s teaching philosophy to a sophistical tradition in language arts, Nathan Crick shows how Dewey lays groundwork for experimental pedagogy in the teaching of rhetoric. Crick argues that Deweyan experimentalist pedagogy complements, even corrects, the approach taken by critical pedagogues who teach rhetoric in the tradition of the Sophists without fully exploring the laboratory aspect of invention in rhetoric. Brian Jackson, Meridith Reed, and Jeff Swift use Dewey s concept of public inquiry to understand how Aristotle s distinction between artistic and inartistic proof is unproductive when trying to teach students how to write arguments supported by grounded evidence, especially in light of how blogs have changed the way sources are used in political argument. Donald Jones challenges the traditional taxonomies we use to teach argument to undergraduates, arguing for a more inductive approach that leads students through their own experiences to develop an understanding of the way arguments work. In his afterword Gerard Hauser describes how contemporary political forces challenge us to lean even more forcefully on Dewey s notion of experience as a rhetorical response to democracy s challenges.
Asen, Robert. The Multiple Mr. Dewey. Argumentation and Advocacy 39 (Winter 2003): 174-88.
Asen, Robert, and Daniel C. Brouwer. Counterpublics and the State . New York: State University of New York Press, 2001.
Burke, Kenneth. A Rhetoric of Motives . Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969.
Burks, Don M. John Dewey and Rhetorical Theory. Western Speech 32.2 (1968): 118-26.
Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life . Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.
Cremin, Lawrence A. The Transformation of the School . New York: Vintage, 1961.
Crick, Nathan. Democracy and Rhetoric: John Dewey on the Arts of Becoming . Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2010.
---. John Dewey on Creative Expression and the Origins of Mind. College Composition and Communication 55.2 (2003): 254-75.
Dahl, Robert A. On Democracy . New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000.
Danisch, Robert. Pragmatism, Democracy, and the Necessity of Rhetoric . Columbia: Uni-versity of South Carolina Press, 2007.
Dewey, John. The Early Works, 1882-1892 . 5 vols. Ed. Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969-72.
---. The Later Works, 1925-1953 . 17 vols. Ed. Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1981-91.
---. The Middle Works, 1899-1924 . 15 vols. Ed. Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1976-83.
Fishman, Stephen M. Explicating Our Tacit Tradition: John Dewey and Composition Studies. College Composition and Communication 44.3 (1993): 315-30.
Fishman, Stephen M., and Lucille McCarthy. John Dewey and the Challenge of Classroom Practice . New York: Teachers College, 1998.
Flower, Linda, Elenore Long, and Lorainne Higgins. Learning to Rival . New York: Routledge, 2000.
Fontana, Bendetto, Cary J. Nederman, and Gary Remer, eds. Talking Democracy . University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004.
Gallagher, Chris W. Radical Departures . Urbana, Ill.: National Council of Teachers of English, 2002.
Goodnight, Thomas G. The Personal, Technical, and Public Spheres of Argument. Journal of the American Forensic Association 18.4 (1982): 214-27.
Hanson, Russell L. The Democratic Imagination in America . Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985.
Hauser, Gerard. Vernacular Voices . Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999.
Hook, Sidney. Out of Step . New York: Carroll and Graf, 1988.
Jackson, Brian. Cultivating Paideweyan Pedagogy: Rhetoric Education in English and Communication Studies. Rhetoric Society Quarterly 37.2 (2007): 181-201.
Jackson, Brian, and Thomas P. Miller. The Progressive Education Movement: A Case Study in Coalition Politics. In Active Voices: Composing a Rhetoric for Social Movements , ed. Sharon McKenzie Stevens and Patricia M. Malesh, 93-113. New York: State University of New York Press, 2009.
Johnstone, Christopher Lyle. Dewey, Ethics, and Rhetoric: Toward a Contemporary Conception of Practical Wisdom. Philosophy Rhetoric 16.3 (1983): 185-207.
Jones, Donald C. Beyond the Postmodern Impasse of Agency. JAC 16.2 (1996): 81-102.
Keith, William M. Democracy as Discussion . Lanham, Md.: Lexington, 2007.
Lippmann, Walter. The Phantom Public . New York: Macmillan, 1927.
MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory . London: Duckworth, 1987.
Miller, Tiffany Jones. John Dewey and the Philosophical Refounding of America. National Review Online , accessed December 31, 2009; Web (accessed December 13, 2010) http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2424305/posts
Pappas, Gregory Fernando. John Dewey s Ethics: Democracy as Experience . Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008.
Rockefeller, Steven C. John Dewey: Religious Faith and Democratic Humanism . New York: Columbia University Press, 1991.
Russell, David R. Writing in the Academic Disciplines . 2nd ed. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2002.
Ryan, Alan. John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism . New York: W. W. Norton, 1995.
Stob, Paul. Kenneth Burke, John Dewey, and the Pursuit of the Public. Philosophy Rhetoric 38.3 (2005): 226-45.
Stroud, Scott R. John Dewey and the Question of Artful Communication. Philosophy Rhetoric 41.2 (2008): 153-247.
Tilly, Charles. Democracy . New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America . Vol. 2. New York: Vintage, 1990.
Warnock, Caleb. Concerned Parents Decry Socialism at Alpine District Meeting. Daily Herald [Utah County, UT], March 10, 2010; Web (accessed October 3, 2010).
Westbrook, Robert B. John Dewey and American Democracy . Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991.
Whitman, Walt. Democratic Vistas: The Original Edition in Facsimile . Ed. Ed Folsom. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2010.
Woodruff, Paul. First Democracy . New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Zarefsky, David. Institutional and Social Goals for Rhetoric. Rhetoric Society Quarterly 34.3 (2004): 27-38.
John Dewey s career-long exposition of and commitment to democratic culture still commands praise and admiration. Contemporary philosophers, social theorists, historians, and others committed to pragmatism still commend Dewey s faith in the democratic experience. Richard Rorty, Cornel West, and Robert Westbrook, to name just a few, all explain Dewey s towering importance in American intellectual history by way of his political activism and social theorizing about democracy. At the same time, however, Dewey s commitment to the importance of science seems to have become outdated. Rorty suggests that the main difference between first-generation pragmatism and contemporary pragmatism is that recent philosophers and social theorists have all read Thomas Kuhn and thus dismiss Dewey s apparently risible belief in positivism and scientific thinking (95). Thus Dewey s philosophy of science has been sundered from his larger theory of democratic culture. This, we argue, is a mistake. It is a mistake in terms of intellectual history and in terms of the usefulness of Deweyan social theory for contemporary democratic life.
Dewey s philosophy of democracy was participatory through and through. It required an involved community of inquirers capable of reflective thought regarding pressing problems and collective action aimed to improve difficult conditions. At the same time scientific thinking, for Dewey, was a refinement of the ordinary procedures for reflexive and practical problem solving by a community. There was no difference in kind between scientific thinking and ordinary popular problem solving. The difference was a matter of subject and formal procedure. This essay demonstrates the close affinity between Dewey s commitment to discussion as an engine of participatory democracy and his understanding of and faith in science as a central instrument in contemporary democratic culture. We argue that Dewey s belief in science is the other side of the same coin on which his belief in deliberation and discussion is inscribed. This represents a heretical interpretation of Dewey, given neopragmatism s present preoccupations.
Such a reading of Dewey is made possible by, and is alert to, issues within the rhetorical tradition. Our analysis of the relationship between Deweyan deliberation and philosophy of science, instead of seeing them as opposites, reveals the manner in which rhetorical communication shapes, improves, and constitutes democratic culture. By this we mean that within Dewey s outline of deliberative participation one finds a commitment to particular forms of rhetorical practice and particular social structures that make those forms of rhetorical practice possible. In addition within Dewey s philosophy of science one finds the rejection of traditional realist epistemologies and a rhetoric of science capable of outlining both how communicative acts are constitutive of scientific practices and the manner of incorporating scientific knowledge into public decision-making. Both of these considerations produce what we call a sociology of rhetoric . As such, we claim that the best way to understand Dewey s twin commitments to science and deliberation is in the light of his attempt to create a social democracy in which specific kinds of rhetorical practices become possible and useful. The search for a social democracy amounts to a search for the practical and intellectual conditions in which appropriate and timely communicative acts can guide public deliberation, and where public deliberation simultaneously considers both ends/values and means/technologies/knowledge.
Dewey does not offer a rhetorical pedagogy, a way of practicing rhetoric. Instead he offers a sociology of rhetoric-a systemic account of the theoretical and normative ways in which social structures, institutions, and forms of individual agency are both guided by and constituted by communicative practices. Rhetoric s traditional concern with specific interactions (as typified by a focus on speeches) is displaced by a structural account of what makes such interaction possible and meaningful. Dewey s sociology of rhetoric amounts to a set of recommendations for developing a democracy in which specific forms of communication guide decision and judgment. These forms are largely modeled on science. In other words, science is critically important in this sociology of rhetoric, and Dewey provides us with a way of understanding science as a form of rhetorical practice uniquely fit to American democratic culture. Only in the light of specific practical and intellectual conditions can scientific thinking be thought of as rhetorical practice that makes democracy possible. We aim to show, therefore, just how Dewey endorses a rhetorical way of life built on his twin commitments to science and deliberation. This provides the ground for a uniquely American democratic rhetoric, and Dewey is a key resource for articulating and endorsing such a rhetoric.
This essay first explains what a sociology of rhetoric is, why Dewey ought to be thought of as offering such a theoretical concept, and what the payoff of such an idea might be. Second, we explain the link between science and deliberation and show how the two preoccupations parallel and reinforce one another. This work is carried out in light of the rhetorical perspective outlined in the first part. Third, we explain the kind of rhetoric of science that can be gleaned from Dewey s work and show how it is different from other, more traditional versions of a rhetoric of science. Furthermore we argue that this rhetoric of science is a uniquely pragmatist contribution to democratic theory. Finally we argue that Dewey grounds a particularly American orientation to rhetorical practice, one that emphasizes and makes possible a specific set of practices different in kind from other orientations to rhetoric. The aim of this essay is to reconsider Dewey s preoccupation with science from the perspective of rhetorical theory. By such a move we hope to show how our own democratic society can still be enriched and improved by using the resources of pragmatism, but only if those resources are married to the rhetorical tradition.
A SOCIOLOGY OF RHETORIC
Among American liberal intellectuals, Dewey is perhaps the most important advocate of participatory democracy. We might loosely describe this as the belief that democracy calls upon men and women to build communities in which opportunities and resources are available to every person to realize their full potential through participation in political and social life. Dewey s belief in participation rested on a faith in the capacity of human beings for intelligent judgment and action if proper conditions are furnished (Dewey, Later Works 227). The stipulation of proper conditions is an essential feature, then, of participatory democracy, and Dewey spent considerable time concerned with these conditions, especially in The Public and Its Problems . His philosophy of education, in some way, could be read as an attempt to formulate such conditions in a formal school setting. In this essay we argue that one way to understand Dewey s search for the conditions within which participatory democracy is likely to flourish is to read him as explicating a sociology of rhetoric. In many ways a sociology of rhetoric is deeply important to the development of a democratic culture and can reveal much about the constitutive features of particular democracies.
What, then, do we mean by a sociology of rhetoric? This is not Dewey s phrase, nor is it a phrase used by any other pragmatist. We are using it to highlight a feature of Dewey s work and to theorize the manner in which Dewey s work is useful for advancing both the rhetorical tradition and contemporary democratic theory. A sociology of rhetoric attempts to understand and explain how, on the one hand, social structures are products of specific communicative acts and how, on the other hand, those social structures affect human attitudes, actions, and beliefs by conditioning the kinds of communicative practices available to us as agents within larger groups. It is a way of exploring the role of communication in constructing, maintaining, and altering social organization, and a way of showing how social organization conditions the possibilities of human agency. This phrase is designed to synthesize several strands of Dewey s legacy. First, Chicago pragmatism was intimately related to critical work in the development of American sociology. Second, Dewey s often-cryptic comments on communication hint at how important Dewey thought communicative practices were to democratic and social life. Third, participatory democracy, for Dewey, often required deliberation, discussion, or some form of face-to-face interaction designed to solve pressing problems. These three strands of Dewey s legacy offer some insight into how he saw the relationship between structure and agency, a relationship that has, for an enduring period, been central to sociology. The phrase sociology of rhetoric is meant to highlight the ways in which such a relationship is managed by communication and to suggest that rhetorical practice gets conditioned in important ways by social structures. A sociology of rhetoric concerns the practical, intellectual, and social conditions within which communicative practices become possible.
Both Dewey s work and our argument are prescriptive and descriptive. Every democratic society presumes and instantiates a sociology of rhetoric. By that we mean that every democracy has a set of social structures that are maintained by specific communicative practices and that recommend the cultivation of specific rhetorical habits for the maintenance of that democratic society. We might, for example, describe a classical Athenian sociology of rhetoric, in which specific forms of speech acts were made possible and privileged by the intellectual, practical, and social conditions of that moment in time. Many historians of rhetoric and rhetorical theorists have labored to show how rhetoric was made possible at this unique moment in history and how rhetoric guided political deliberation. But classical Athenian rhetoric was particularly fit for that place and that moment, and not necessarily for ours or for Dewey s. The prescriptive argument is that if we alter the social structures of a democratic society, we alter the kinds of rhetorical practice available and acceptable in that society. Such acts of alteration require transformative rhetorical practices. If we wish to improve our democratic culture, we must assess the sociology of rhetoric that conditions and organizes communicative practices within that culture. Dewey had both of these tasks in mind within his consideration of social democracy.
When Dewey arrived in Chicago to the unrest of the Pullman strike, he was alerted to the actual, practical machinations of democratic culture. This both sparked an ongoing social and political activism and drove his more speculative, philosophical projects. In other words, Dewey saw firsthand the conditions of the operative sociology of rhetoric in Chicago and then sought to articulate a different but still potentially achievable sociology of rhetoric that could improve decision-making and incorporate a greater number of citizens into the life-affirming participatory process. This is how one ought to read Dewey s proclamations about communication. On the one hand, they were descriptions of what he witnessed as central experiences within his democratic culture. On the other hand, they were prescriptions for how to improve the conditions for communication within American democracy with the hope that those improvements would ultimately have positive consequences for both individual citizens and the well-being of the state. Take, for example, his statements about communication in Democracy and Education: Men live in a 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 . . . Communication is a process of sharing experience till it becomes common possession. It modifies the disposition of both the parties that partake in it (4, 9). Here is a general description of the coordination of social action and the sharing of experience. But it also states, at the same time, an ideal.
The famous proclamations from The Public and Its Problems are similarly both descriptive and normative: 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 on freeing and perfecting the process of inquiry (208). Thus The Public and Its Problems is an attempt to outline the practical and intellectual conditions for community-based inquiry, both descriptively and normatively, as a method of channeling communicative practices for the benefit of democratic society. The details of this particular sociology of rhetoric will be described in the next section. At its core, however, lie two methods of inquiry: inquiry that requires deliberation and discussion; and inquiry based on the methods of scientific thinking. These two prescriptions would improve American democratic culture, or so Dewey thought. It may be useful to consider what this sociology of rhetoric is not. It is not a commitment to the centrality of public address (as an Athenian sociology of rhetoric might be). It is not an agonistic model of rhetoric-it seeks the cooperation necessary for community-based inquiry, upon the model of scientific work. It is also not a mediated rhetoric of symbols, icons, or images-it seeks the face-to-face in an effort to leverage the knowledge of each participant in a deliberation. In other words, Dewey prescribes a unique sociology of rhetoric.
The Public and Its Problems centers on a vision of a great community, a community whose success would rely on the perfecting of 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 (155). Accordingly, Deweyan pragmatism seeks methods of communication that would allow individuals in a democracy to participate in decision-making and realize the interconnectedness of the community to which they belong. Dewey, therefore, suggests a sociology of rhetoric that makes communion and cooperation possible and desirable. As we show in the next section, the details of such a sociology of rhetoric are related to Dewey s view of scientific work. In any case, democracy and community are tied together for Dewey by the belief that a specific version of communication as rhetoric is the primary means by which individuals become self-actualized and politics becomes a melioristic instrument of change: The highest and most difficult kind of inquiry and a subtle, delicate, vivid, and responsive art of communication must take possession of the physical machinery of transmission and circulation and breathe life into it. . . . Democracy will come into its own, for democracy is the 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 communication ( Public and Its Problems 184).
This is no doubt one of Dewey s most famous proclamations about communication. It is an endorsement and a prescription, as is all of The Public and Its Problems , of a sociology of rhetoric that conditions a specific form of communication (communal inquiry, discussion) and is brought into being by specific rhetorical acts (art, moving communication oriented to communion and cooperation).
Rhetorical practices do not happen in a vacuum but instead are made possible by a particular context. The challenge posed by Dewey is to account for what kinds of rhetorical practice exist within specific political cultures and what kinds we want to exist in our political culture. Where are we, and where should we go? Dewey s desire was to establish a sociology of rhetoric that made deliberation, discussion, communal inquiry, and cooperation possible, and he thought the possibility of it already existed, waiting to be actualized and universalized. Such a sociology of rhetoric would facilitate the growth of the individual citizens of the political culture and leverage the knowledge of all of the members of a political culture in order to improve decision-making. In scientific work and scientific thinking, Dewey saw a concrete model of this kind of sociology of rhetoric at work, and that is why science lies so close to the heart of deliberation in a Deweyan democratic culture.
SCIENCE AND DELIBERATION
The approach we advocate here finds the essence of rhetoric in the ground rather than the figure . The rhetoric we see all around us-in print and electronic media, in conversation, in governance-is the figure, and for the most part the rhetorical tradition has attempted to indicate how to manage this discourse and its effects; the handbook tradition, writ large, attempts to train people to create it. Rhetorical theories have generally focused on explanations of what language and people are like such that language could influence people. We think that Dewey teaches us that important explanations are to be found in the sociological conditions that make possible the idea that one can create psychological influence through language. As a theoretical move, this is a historicized parallel to Kant s transcendentalism, though instead of asking, What are the ultimate logical conditions for the possibility of X?, Dewey invites us to ask, What are the social conditions for the possibility of a certain kind of discourse? As an analysis it is parallel to Charles Taylor s concept of the social imaginary, a linked set of concepts about personhood, identity, agency, relationships, social action, and governance that undergird any moral order. Taylor tries to show that social and cultural changes in the north Atlantic states are explained by the specific evolution of an underlying social imaginary. Dewey is somewhat more radical than this: he approaches his analysis with a robust normative framework: How should we imagine the possibilities of our relationship to others? What would it take to create a society in which those possibilities were realized?
In this section we examine the way in which Dewey s account of thinking prefigures an account of both science and deliberation. We first look at his conception of thinking as a problem-solving practice, then show how the private act of thinking is modeled on the social practice of deliberation, and finally explain why Dewey s obsession with education is a peculiarly American response to the normative dimension of Dewey s sociology of rhetoric.
While one might initially agree with Steve Fuller that the title How We Think is indeed presumptuous (12), with Dewey seeming to speak for the human race, closer inspection reveals that Dewey is engaged in a normative project. 1 Notwithstanding his elision of the normative/descriptive distinction in his reconstruction of thinking, this is the best window into Dewey s larger theory. We will not claim that Dewey is giving (as he sometimes suggests) an account of the actual practice or micropractice of science; a large literature shows that to be a heterogeneous collection of practices indeed. Rather, Dewey wants to ask and answer a more systemic question: What is scientific thinking as a social practice, independently of whether it is embodied in laboratory science or governance?
His argument proceeds in several steps. First, he needs to detach thinking proper from merely having thoughts ; thinking is characterized by acceptance or rejection of something as reasonably probable or improbable ( How We Think 4). Dewey makes three important moves here. First, people do not just passively have beliefs but perform the action of accepting or rejecting; consistent with pragmatism, thinking and believing are both doings. Second, what they accept or reject is something, a placeholder for a state of affairs, not merely a mental entity, making it more difficult to get a wedge in between rational thought and the way the world is (a difficult problem for the logical tradition that takes logical relations as prior to referential ones). Third, he eschews true for reasonably probable. As we will see, this is not a Bayesian or subjective probability but a recognition of the essentially defeasible nature of human reasoning in real life, so to speak.
His next moves are the ones that set the form for the rest of his analysis. Dewey wants to answer the questions, Why do people think, and why do they care about their beliefs? His answer is twofold. On the one hand, commitments are related to each other, so that a change in one commitment requires revisions of others; even modest and local consistency will create pressure for belief revision (G rdenfors 1-20). 2 On the other hand, this is a matter not of logical consistency but of the ability to act at all: thinking is a precondition to action. As a pragmatist, Dewey is committed to the idea that actions are not purely impulsive or purely routine ( How We Think 14) but rather are predicated on the basis of the absent and the future ; predating Burke s invention of the negative, Dewey points out that action as reasoned choice cannot be simply a response to current conditions (perceptual or otherwise) but must include nonpresent states of affairs (some in the past) and some conception of possible/desired futures (which he calls systematized foresight [15]). Now the more famous aspects of this book can come into focus. Dewey s examples for thinking include the following ( taken, almost verbatim, from the class papers of students [68]):
1. A case of practical deliberation: Will the streetcar or subway get me to my destination more quickly?
2. Reflection on an observation: What is the function of the pole that projects from the ferryboat?
3. Reflection and experiment: Why are soap bubbles sucked inside an inverted tumbler?
The difference in behavior between hot and cold tumblers provides the answer.
Dewey then writes that these cases form a series, in that they begin with an immediate problem (How can I get to my appointment on time?) and progress to subtler notions of problems (Why is there a pole sticking out the front of the ferry? What mechanism pulls the soap bubbles into the glass?). The mechanisms of reflective thinking (or logic, for that matter) are in service of the solution to problems, because problems, directly or indirectly , are the occasions for action. Action must follow the perception of a need for it; that perception, as well as the possibilities for action it implies, is the product of a systematic reflective process. Unfortunately for Dewey, almost any way of putting this point misstates it, by making it seem as if there is a linear or sequential relationship between problems, thoughts, and actions. We would do better to think of it as a complex ecology, a densely interconnected system in which the connections are complicated and dense enough that any purely sequential description is an arbitrary one, which may serve a particular purpose but is not the only true description of that part of the system: one can legitimately reconstruct relations between problems, thinking, and action by starting with any of them.
So thinking, for Dewey, is a form of life, a set of practices involving multiple, overlapping language games, in Wittgenstein s words, the language and the actions into which it is woven (5e). It is neither simply an interior psychological process nor an abstractly logical one; thinking begins and ends in the texture of lived experience. So what, then, is the relationship between thinking, science, and deliberation?
For a committed Deweyan, epistemology and democracy turn out to be two sides of a coin: every instance of knowing (directly or indirectly) implies a relationship to others (which may be democratic or authoritarian), and every relationship is implicated in knowledge by way of action, thinking, and problem solving. Science, properly understood, is a democratic enterprise, and democracy is a scientific one. Before going on, we need to distinguish between epistemology, science 1 , and science 2 . Epistemology is the theory of knowledge, and Dewey, in his account of reflective thinking, offers a pragmatist epistemology (albeit with some violence to more traditional notions of what constitutes knowledge). We would call science 1, then, the professional practices of those who pursue knowledge, not so much for its own sake but as a professional occupation: scientists, whether laboratory or field scientists in the natural sciences or even social scientists. Here Fuller would be quite right: Dewey s account of reflective thinking, especially taken as a simple sequence, would be a poor description of what goes on in science, of what scientists do.
However, Dewey s account is a better one for understanding science 2 , which is the term we will use for the cultural understanding of a variety of practices having a strong family resemblance to the professional science and its epistemology. When Dewey talks about science, he is usually talking about science 2 . Dewey s inclination, throughout his writings, to refer to a variety of institutions and practices as scientific is really a measure of how scientific 2 he thinks they are: do they constitute a reflective, systematic practice of responding, individually or corporately, to perceived problems? Physicists are scientists, not historians, but both physics and history are scientific 2 , in that they provide ways of systematically thinking through problems. In addition it will always be the case that both science 1 and science 2 are team sports in the sense that one could not do them alone.
Dewey s latent Hegelianism is evident in his view that reflection is fundamentally a property of groups of people, properly organized-which means properly communicating. Dewey wants to understand reasoning, writ large, at the cultural level. At the end of Dewey s Logic he says, [The] failure to institute a logic based inclusively and exclusively upon the operations of inquiry has enormous cultural consequences. . . . Since scientific methods imply exhibit free intelligence operating in the best manner available at a given time, the cultural waste, confusion, and distortion that results [ sic ] from the failure to use these methods, in all fields in connection with all problems, is incalculable. These considerations reinforce the claim of logical theory, as the theory inquiry, to assume and to hold a position of primary human importance (535).
Deliberation, therefore, is the term we want to apply to logic, reflection, or science 2 when we are speaking of a group rather than an individual. While a person reflects on a situation, a group deliberates. So the democratic moment grows out of the social requirements of reasoned thought. In the introduction to an argumentation textbook in the 1930s, Dewey comments, The security of democratic ideals depends on the intelligent use of the method of combined and unified honest effort to come to consciousness of the nature of social and political problems and their causes ( Argumentation and Public Discussion vii.).
I may reflect on my problems, but we must reflect on our problems, or both the description of the problem and the consideration of solutions will be morally and descriptively inadequate. Dewey seems to have been quite justified, from his point of view, in thinking that the method is the same, and scientific 2 , in both cases: a solitary thinker s reflection allows her to see the connections between actions, inferences, outcomes, and goals, while a group s deliberations allow them to see the connections between their actions, inferences, outcomes, and goals. His use of consciousness in that passage is striking, and it connects to the story he wants to tell in The Public and Its Problems , in which he tries to dislodge the persistent realism that made Lippmann so despondent about the possibilities of democracy in a technocratic society. Lippmann s epistemology required him to think that there were real problems, and causes for them, out there and that only trained scientists could figure out what they were. Since Dewey thought that what constitutes a problem, what constitutes a cause, and what constitutes a desired goal are ecologically interdependent, the real social problem or cause will be the outcome of a deliberation in which we decide the best way to understand how they are related to one another. To the extent that we require the evolving joint consciousness to follow a pattern of reasoned inference, then, the deliberative process is scientific 2 , without needing to be science 1 . In fact, turning it over to scientists 1 would be doubly unproductive: for the result to be a truly joint and deliberative one requires the participation of (in principle) all those who perceive themselves to be affected by it. The validity of a solution is necessarily relative to a complex negotiation about what the relevant values are, and if everyone has not had a chance to think through and contribute to the values, it is not a valid solution for those who have not. This is why deliberation produces better decisions, even though from a realist point of view it does not.
Realist: The lake is not cleaned up.
Pragmatist: The lake is cleaner, through a process that balances the interests of everyone involved, taking account of costs and tradeoffs.
Here is where vulgar pragmatism and philosophical pragmatism meet up: the pragmatist solution is the more likely one to be implemented in a democracy because it is democratically a better decision. It also results in a cleaner lake.
What might be peculiarly American about this account is the way in which, as a social imaginary, it positions people democratically. It does so in two senses, equality and engagement. The dreaded Platonic objection to democracy is that it is rule by the ignorant, and certainly in Dewey s vision (which as a social imaginary is abstracted from specific governmental setups), everyone s input is treated as equal. While it is true that in some parts of the reflective process expertise matters (scientists know more than I do about why and how the lake is polluted), in other parts, relative to values and interests, we should all be treated as equal (what trade-off in lost jobs should we accept for a marginally cleaner lake?). And of course the value commitments that people bring to a deliberation are not fixed: the values, their interpretation, and their application may all change as a result of the interactions. This is exactly the reason, from a democratic point of view, that deliberative engagement should be as universal as possible; not only do we owe it to people to give them a voice, however small, in the deliberation, but we would be foolish to think that technocrats could not lead us in a wrong direction- wrong in hindsight for not taking a sufficiently broad sense of our values into account. 3
Why Education Matters
We claimed earlier that Dewey s sociology of rhetoric was a distinctly American one, and we would like to gesture at the kind of case we could make for it. Dewey believed in a version of the American experiment that was much more radical than that of the Founding Fathers: he believed in radical democracy, that everyone was capable of participating and in fact had a moral duty to do so. In the by-now-familiar way this is simultaneously a descriptive and normative claim. Yet while all are created equal, all are not equal-or are they? Let us look briefly at a somewhat parallel problem about status and difference and the American solution to it.
In Common Courtesy: In Which Miss Manners Solves the Problem That Baffled Mr. Jefferson , Judith Martin takes on a quintessentially American problem: what should American etiquette be? European etiquette (as amply proved by Norbert Elias) served explicitly to mark the differences between social classes, and these differences came with a heavy normative burden; the contempt of the English or French gentry for peasants or shopkeepers is strikingly similar to Plato s dismissal of hoi polloi-by nature they are not capable of anything better. If America was to be a democratic country, we would have to have democratic manners, ones that did not distinguish between class but somehow set up a new form of relations, of communication, between farmers, landowners, businessmen, and so on. Jefferson s solution was to distinguish people only by gender and nothing more; instead of lining up by rank, all men would be together as would all women, and they would proceed p le-m le , pell-mell, with no order at all. Martin claims that this represents no solution at all and in particular does not address the underlying function of etiquette, which is [to] admit the possibility that people might be separated by basic, deeply held, genuinely irreconcilable differences-philosophical, religious or political. Thus the effort to trivialize etiquette, as being a barrier to the happy mingling of souls, actually trivializes the intellectual, emotional and spiritual by characterizing the difference between one person s and another s as no more than a simple misunderstanding, easily solved by frank exchanges (12).
The correct American solution, she believes, lies not in pretending that everybody is equal in the sense of being the same but in deserving the right to differ with dignity, not just equal opportunity, but being considered just as good as anyone else (Martin 54). We have not all come to understand each other in a way that leads to agreement or unity, but to live in an equality that respects our differences, in capacity, experience, and commitments. This radical egalitarianism has been discussed in various ways since the founding of the republic, but it is Dewey who builds it into his social imaginary in a deeply philosophical way. The operative word is good, as in worthy of engagement, in a public sense. Clearly not everybody brings the same skills, knowledge, and ability to the table when they engage. But that does not mean they do not have a stake in the larger conversation and a right to be a part of it.
Dewey had to believe in the democratic (scientific 2 , deliberative) capacity of everybody to participate: not just the right by virtue of being human but potentially the ability. A follower of Dewey, Harrison Elliott asserted this with surprising directness. Elliott defined the goal of democracy this way: The aim of true democracy is to secure the active participation of every individual up to the limit of his capacity in the conduct of all his social, vocational, and political affairs . . . [including] the immature child, the moron, and even the criminal (Elliott 11).
The key term here is capacity. It is not that everybody automatically is a good deliberator by virtue of being human; it is a capacity that must be developed through education. Until we have tried to educate everyone in the right way , we will not see the kind of deliberative practices that would realize democracy in its fullest form. In essence, in the American context, then, the empirical commitment follows from the moral one, and for Dewey, the great experiment is an educational one: can we design a system that will educate students for democracy? Our novel claim is that as a rhetorical education, this would involve not the typical materials from the handbook tradition but rather a full appreciation of rhetorical democracy as a mode of daily living, of constituting relationships. Rhetoric would be not a set of skills, in the usual sense, but a deeply lived appreciation of the consummatory moment, the fullness of engaging another in a democratic mode. According to Dewey s pedagogy, as exemplified in his work at the Chicago Laboratory School, learning is a mode of social engagement for any subject matter. Whether students are learning geography or history or chemistry, he places them in projects where they have to solve problems together (a pedagogy we have rediscovered as collaborative learning ). Once again we see that knowledge and deliberation are two sides of a coin. To come to know or understand a subject matter is at the same moment to gain skill in developing relationships and communication skills that allow for solving problems and decision-making. In classroom group work, students should be introduced, in microcosm, to the picture of human relations that Dewey wished to see activated throughout society.
The professional mode of science 1 thus has to be understood in the context of science 2 and the deliberative communication that is at the heart of democratic life. Of course there are deep historical reasons for seeing science as the instantiation of the perfect democracy of the intellect. But contemporary philosophy of science and of science, technology, and society (STS) have instead insisted that science either has no social dimension (philosophy) or is reducible to merely its social dimension.
A DEWEYAN RHETORIC OF SCIENCE 1 / SCIENCE 2
Richard Rorty is right to point to the enormous influence of Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend on the manner in which social theory now understands scientific practice. The rhetoric-of-science project has certainly tapped into the work of people such as Kuhn and Feyerabend in order to make a set of arguments about scientific practice. At the core of these arguments lies a critique of realist epistemology tied to the assertion that scientific work is available for interpretation in a similar manner to other kinds of texts. We have no objection to these basic insights, but Dewey s interest ran the opposite direction: he was interested in the effects of scientific thinking on social and political affairs. In our view, the practical effect of his continued ambiguity about the meaning of science was to bring science 1 and science 2 into productive tension and concord with each other.
Dewey certainly advanced his own critique of realist epistemologies throughout his career and thus could be read as a key contributor to work in what might be called social epistemology. One could also find resources within Dewey s work to support some of the basic theoretical insights of the rhetoric-of-science project regarding interpretation and epistemology. Particularly in The Quest for Certainty Dewey dismantles realist epistemology and prefigures some of the arguments made by Kuhn, Feyerabend, and others. However, this is not the only way in which Dewey s work can be linked to the rhetoric-of-science project. In The Problems of Men (1946) Dewey laments philosophy s mistaken concern with the foundations or conditions of scientific knowledge. Instead he claims that philosophy ought to be concerned with the actual and potential consequences of scientific knowledge ( Problems of Men 7). This amounts to the claim that we should not focus just on epistemology or hermeneutics but also on the effects of scientific claims and commitments. Accordingly, Dewey juxtaposes wisdom and knowledge: philosophy is wholly that part of the historic tradition called the search for wisdom-namely, search for the ends and values that give direction to our collective human activities ; and the method of science provides the means for conducting this search (11). Here, as in the above section, Dewey does not use science to describe the formal procedures of physicists conducting experiments. Instead he means something similar to the reflective, scientific thinking described above. According to Dewey, two recent advances in science 1 , Heisenberg s Uncertainty Principle and Einstein s Theory of Relativity, demonstrate the impossibility of the quest for epistemic or scientific 1 certainty and the role that practical activity plays in scientific understanding. These advances indicated that knowledge no longer referred to the changeless attributes of natural substances. Instead the focus of scientific 1 inquiry was on the deliberate institution of a definite and specified course of change in an object. More specifically, the method of physical inquiry is to introduce some change in order to see what other change ensues; the correlation between these changes, when measured by a series of operations, constitutes the definite and desired objects of knowledge ( Quest for Certainty 84).
Long before Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature , Dewey rejected the conception of an independent observer able to represent findings in an objective manner and replaced that view of scientific work with a more action-oriented view. The change in the method of scientific work, implied by Heisenberg and Einstein, recommended a complete reversal in the traditional relationship between knowledge and action. To cling to traditional assumptions about the mind and the organs of knowing is to ignore the fact that science advances by adopting instruments and doings of directed practice, and the knowledge thus gained becomes a means of the development of arts which bring nature still further into actual and potential service of human purposes and valuations ( Quest for Certainty 85). Science 1 is a method of acting with and on objects, according to Dewey. This extends his view of deliberation and scientific thinking, and it adds an attention to questions about the rhetorical practices of science 2 .
The major implication of Dewey s argument is that knowing is itself a mode of practical action and is the way of interaction by which other natural interactions become subject to direction. In other words, the experimental method is a way of operating upon and with the things of
Listening to the Logos
Vonnegut and Hemingway
Prisoners of Conscience
Speaking Hermeneutically
Rhetorics and Technologies
Reason's Dark Champions