When the liberating of human capacity operates as a socially creative force, art will not be a luxury, a stranger to the daily occupations of making a living. Making a living economically speaking will be at one with making a life that is worth living. And when the emotional force, the mystic force one might say, of communication, of the miracle of shared life and shared experience is spontaneously felt, the hardness and crudeness of contemporary life will be bathed in the light that never was on land or sea. ' When philosophy shall have co-operated with the course of events and made clear and coherent the meaning of the daily detail, science and emotion will interpenetrate, practice and imagination will embrace. Poetry and religious feeling will be the unforced flowers of life. To further this articulation and revelation of the meanings of the current course of events is the task and problem of philosophy in days of transition (John Dewey, 1920).¹

July 4, 2002: in the wake of the September 11, 2001 collapse of the World Trade Towers and the attack on the Pentagon by Al Qaeda hijackers my way of celebrating being an American is to have finished reading Gore Vidal's commentary, entitled Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace.² Post-9/11 inquiries by the US media fail to ask why the attacks against US symbols of capitalism and military empire happened. Somehow there is tacit agreement that to ask such a question is tantamount to being disloyal and un-American. But Gore Vidal in his work just cited does not neglect to seek an answer. He eloquently explains how we got to be so hated, yet he does not offer guidance as to how we might proceed to recover our old and beloved republic which had bordered on democracy. He invokes Giambattista Vico, who offered an embodied and culturally/historically embedded Italian philosophical alternative to the French Rationalism of Descartes that strove to be neither embodied or embedded. For Vico, a republic progresses from Chaos to Theocracy, then to Aristocracy, and finally on to Democracy. Regrettably, after a period of time, Democracy collapses because republics tend to become imperial and tyrannical. And, the cycle is repeated. Of Vico's four repeating cycles of cultural forms, Vidal suggests that the US is currently "a mildly chaotic imperial republic headed for the exit, no bad thing unless there is a serious outbreak of Chaos, in which case a new age of religion will be upon us."³ He remarks that:

Anyone who ever cared for our old Republic, no matter how flawed it always was with religious exuberance, cannot not prefer Chaos to the harsh rule of Theocrats. Today, one sees them at their savage worst in Israel and in certain Islamic countries, like Afghanistan, etc. Fortunately, thus far their social regimentation is still no match for the universal lust for consumer goods, that brave new world at the edge of democracy. As for Americans, we can still hold the fort against our very own praying mantises-for the most part, fundamentalist Christians abetted by a fierce, decadent capitalism in thrall to totalitarianism as proclaimed so saucily in the New York Times of June 18, 1997.⁴

Vidal suggests that the battle lines have been drawn between the Christian Right and media giants such as Disney. He mentions the political Right's horror at the callous abortion and subsequent death of a baby delivered in a toilet and disposed of in the trash by an eighteen year old woman during a high school prom. Upon entering the dance floor, she requested that the deejay play a song for her boyfriend by Metallica entitled "The Baby Is Dead." Vidal agrees that we might all be horrified at the indifference to life exemplified by the actions of these young adults who might have avoided pregnancy in the first place were condoms recommended rather than vilified as promoting illicit sex among the unmarried. But he thinks that Disney should get out its big guns and shoot down the Christian Right's encroachment on the First Amendment right of free speech. All well and good that Vidal constructively allocates responsibility for action to the industry whose business it is to create art and entertainment. Ditto for Vidal's suggestion in an open letter to the future President-elect (Al Gore) that he take the advice of President Kennedy to move the White House Oval Office into the Pentagon where he might slowly dismantle the wasteful and war mongering headquarters of the military-industrial complex. According to Vidal, President Kennedy admitted in his presence that, if attempted, a President would be able to do nothing else in the first four-year term of office, making re-election impossible.

Although I agree with Vidal's suggestions, he leaves us clueless as to how ordinary citizens might involve themselves in the struggle to re-capture the vibrancy of the old Republic. He does well in explaining how we got to be so hated but fails significantly in addressing how citizens might act so as to sustain a culture of democracy. For that we need to return to John Dewey, who was at Columbia University from 1910 until his retirement from teaching in 1930. During this time labor was active in America; the Socialist Party swelled to over 4 million and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) was organizing strikes, some of which at the Ludlow Colorado Mines resulted in bloody massacres of men, women, and children. But progressive politics soon ended with the emergence of patriotism following World War I.⁵

In a compilation of Dewey's writings, noted Dewey scholar John McDermott introduces Dewey's essay entitled "The Development of American Pragmatism" :

John Dewey once wrote "that we are no longer a colony of any European nation or of them all collectively. We are a new body and a new spirit in the world." In the present essay, Dewey gives a balanced account of the European origins as well as the originality of American philosophy, particularly as found in the work of William James. Dewey also denies that pragmatism is simply a philosophical version of the popular American mind, seeing it rather as a method for bringing intelligence to bear on the problems of moral and social life and as an antidote to the often "unreflective and brutal" individualism which pervades American life.⁶

Dewey's essay was originally published in French in 1922 and then in English in 1925. As rich and interesting as it is on the contributions of William James and European writers in establishing the distinctly American quality of philosophy in contrast with European examples, we find Dewey's own contribution to making philosophy distinctly American in Reconstruction in Philosophy . Through a sweeping analysis of the history of Western philosophy, this book distinguishes American philosophy from earlier forms, in particular from Plato's idealism of ancient Athens and the work of John Locke, Bishop Berkeley, and David Hume collectively known as British Empiricists.

Idealism and Empiricism are reactions to established hegemonic traditions. Dewey shows how his recovery and reconstruction of philosophy is a reaction to the social, political, and economic conditions of his own times. He argues that primitive humans who were hunter-gatherers did not have an abstract kind of philosophy. Rather our hunter-gatherer ancestors would tell stories while lying around the campfires. Once they had hunted, killed their animal, and prepared it for eating, they turned to their imaginations and embellished the nature and event of the hunt. (Present day cognitive psychologists would caution us on the veracity of these stories: cognitive science has shown that during the adrenaline rush of the hunt it would be near impossible to make mental note of the circumstances as portrayed in the imaginative fables). With the improvement in hunting abilities people multiplied in direct relation to the food supply; thus the incorporation of swelling hordes of scattered tribal people under the leadership of a few was needed. Dewey argues that this was achieved by telling stories that served to inculcate and organize people into larger groups that would grow as time progressed into the early religions. Religious teachings performed through ritual and passed on through beliefs organized people and established traditions. Pretty much all literary and visual art served to construct a people" cultural memory and thus in most cases secured allegiance to a sovereign leader.

Dewey argues that this was indeed the nature of life in ancient Greece. Multiple gods and goddesses were worshiped by people organized into classes of citizens and non-citizens (women and slaves belonging to the latter). Actual conditions of life in Greece, particularly in Athens, when classic European philosophy was formulated set up a sharp division between doing and knowing, which was generalized into a complete separation of theory and "practice." It reflected, at the time, the economic organization in which "useful" work was done for the most part by slaves, leaving free men relieved from labor and "free" on that account. That such a state of affairs is also pre-democratic is clear.⁷

Plato, disturbed by the superstitious adherence to beliefs that had been handed down through the aristocracy of Athens and other city-states, constructed his own philosophy in which Reason would and should reign over Tradition. Though to us the dual worldview of Plato sounds still very much like superstition, his division of reality into a natural one made of concrete material and sensuous substances however temporary, and a supernatural one made of the spiritual forms that were eternal repositories of the ideals that would inform the good life, provided a way of resolving conflict between the messy world of what is in the process of becoming and the neat, hierarchically organized and harmonious world that might be our ideal world. For Dewey, Plato subjugates or subordinates Experience to Reason. In Greece before Plato's time, there were competing and conflicting traditions of experience and their respective belief systems. Plato" goal was to unify through providing a hierarchy of forms, among them, the Good, Beauty, Truth, and Justice. These forms were eternal and provided humans with a justification and value for following a certain pattern and path in life. But as Nietzsche would point out later, such other-worldly justifications of the value of this world inevitably demean and depreciate the inherent value of life as it is.

Dewey points out shifts in the history of philosophy concerning what is dominant and what is subordinate. The Ancient Greeks set Reason above Experience. During the Middle Ages, Reason became something unruly and unyielding to the wisdom of Experience. In the 17^th century Descartes's French Rationalism attempted to create a happy split between matter and spirit, body and mind/soul in order to resolve the conflict between the Church hierarchy and the emerging world of scientific investigation. In the next era members of the British School of Empiricism attacked and criticized Rationalism and Reason unfettered by Experience. Dewey shows that the visionary prolegomena of Francis Bacon's modern experimental science, although not the actual legacy as it was worked out in practice, e.g., the subjugation and torturing of nature so that she might give up her secrets to men, set up expectations of a collaboration between Reason and Experience. Bacon's vision of modern science was one in which empirical investigation would become the method of choice in deciding questions of knowledge and belief.

In reconstructing philosophy, American-style, Dewey manages to effect this integration of reason and experience. Of key significance is his concept of "intelligence." "Intelligence" does not merely replace Plato's Reason but surpasses it in its integration with the traditionally oppositional concept of Experience. In Dewey's words,

It is a shorthand designation for great and ever-growing methods of observation, experiment and reflective reasoning which have in a very short time revolutionized the physical and, to a considerable degree, the physiological conditions of life, but which have not as yet worked out for application to what is itself distinctively and basically human . ⁸

I can explain Dewey's use of the notion of intelligence by summarizing his critique of the Empiricism of the British School of Associationism. Underpinning the British criticisms of French Rationalism is a notion of the individual as sacrosanct. The self and personality for Empiricists had to be self-reliant and independent from the monarchy. As such the individual could glean all knowledge from experience, in contrast to French Rationalism which claimed that knowledge was derived a priori through the faculty of Reason. At least the Brits were on the right track in pulling the plug on Reason, shifting the development of self, as they were, toward the realm of experience. But they did not go far enough. The individual was not yet thoroughly a physically embodied, historically embedded, and culturally emergent member of society through its numerous kinds of associations. Primarily knowledge derived from experience was to be analyzed into atomistic non-relational entities called sense-perceptions. Especially for Berkeley and Hume: individuals were nothing solid. But they were, as independent entities, indubitably free.

This metaphysical freedom is fanciful; it is freedom in the abstract only. Individuals do indeed make choices but they are not free to choose the historical grounds from which they must operate. As Sartre claimed, we are condemned to be free in the sense that we are required to make choices and select courses of action or inaction, but we do not make history just as we please. Dewey, as a thoroughly modern American philosopher, wants no part of such metaphysically conceived individuals. He prefers to understand the inherently social nature of individuals as getting their attributes by developing among relationships and forms of association, e.g., family, friendship, work, school, church, or state, all of which are collectively understood as comprising institutions that are shaped by social and historical forces. Human beings are not to be thought of as a dialectical relationship between individual and society; this is too abstract in its version as organic theory or Hegelian dialectics manifesting as a spiritual determination informing matter and the world. For Dewey,

We plunge into the heart of the matter, by asserting that these various theories suffer from a common defect. They are all committed to the logic of general notions under which specific situations are to be brought. What we want light upon is this or that group of individuals, this or that concrete human being, this or that special institution or social arrangement. We need guidance in dealing with particular perplexities in domestic life [Instead these theories] are general answers supposed to have a universal meaning that covers and dominates all particulars. Hence they do not assist inquiry. They close it. ⁹

Dewey argues that, under his reconstruction in philosophy, morality and politics become undifferentiated. Moral action is called for when in a specific situation a deficiency or evil is sensed. Using the methods of observation, hypothesis-making/theorizing, and experimenting, people will attempt to select what will move forward the growth and development of all affected by the specific deficit. Dewey claims that this is the sole guidance we need in acting morally. And it is a monumental improvement over the older principled systematic moralities, e.g., Utilitarianism, Deontological, and Virtue Ethics. Think how measurably things would improve were we all to make operational this kind of intelligence. Lively, developing institutions replace organizations of family, friendship, work, school, church, and state. Isn't this what America invented itself for? Dewey once wrote "I want to see this country American and that means the English tradition reduced to a strain along with others."¹⁰ He explained that

I quite agree with your orchestra idea, but upon condition we really get a symphony and not a lot of different instruments playing simultaneously. I never did care for the melting pot metaphor, but genuine assimilation to one another -not to Anglo-Saxondom-seems to be essential to an America. That each cultural section should maintain its distinctive literary and artistic traditions seems to me most desirable, but in order that it might have the more to contribute to others. The way to deal with hyphenism [German-American, Jewish-American, and so on] is to welcome it, but to welcome it in the sense of extracting from each people its special good, so that it shall surrender into a common fund of wisdom and experience what it especially has to contribute. All of these surrenders and contributions taken together create the national spirit of America. The dangerous thing is for each factor to isolate itself, to try to live off its past, and then to attempt to impose itself upon other elements, or, at least, to keep itself intact and thus refuse to accept what other cultures have to offer, so as thereby to be transmuted into authentic Americanism.¹¹

American Pragmatism, to which Dewey contributed, emphasizes that what we think and believe may stem from what we desire and do instead of the reverse. It also values free speech, not as a natural right but as a social good, and rejects absolutes in favor of experiments and experience. Distinguished scholar of American Studies Louis Menand insists that there is no one way that things must be (there are various ways of acting morally so as to grow and develop), and that together these ideas and their progeny, called pragmatism, are a home-grown method for splitting differences that launched the American Century.¹² It is incumbent upon us in these years following the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks to consider whether and how well Dewey's reconstruction offers us guidance. As thoughtful Americans, how may we act without having our intelligence dulled or our selves swept away in the current tide of patriotism?

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