John Dewey on the Horror of Making
his Poetry Public
This April's Fools interview is a preview for 'The Return of the Theorists: Dialogues with Great Thinkers in International Relations' (ed. Ned Lebow, Peer Schouten & Hidemi Suganami), now available at Palgrave.
TT Dear Mr. Dewey. Thank you so much for your
willingness to participate in this Talk. Theory
Talks is an open-access journal that contributes to International Relations
debates by publishing interviews with cutting-edge theorists. It is not often
that Theory Talks is able to overcome
space-time limitations and conduct a Talk with a departed theorist.
I am sorry—I think I have to interrupt you there…
TT Well, all right?
Yes, yes, the fact of the matter is that I am not a
theorist and refuse to be associated with that label! To purify theory out of
experience as some distinct realm, sirs, is to contribute to a fallacy that I
have dedicated my life to combat! I am afraid that this venture of yours, of
involving me in this Theory Talks, is
stillborn.
TT Dear Professor Dewey—with all due respect, we are
running ahead of matters here a little. The reason why we invited you is exactly
for you to expound your ideas—and reservations—regarding theory, practice, and
international relations. Would you be willing to bracket your concern for a
minute? We promise to get back to it.
Well my dear sirs—it is that you insist on a
dialogue—that restless, participative and dramatic form of inquiry that leads
to so much more insight than books—and that you have travelled from far by
means that utterly fascinate me, so I will give you the benefit of the doubt.
TT Thank you. And let us from the outset emphasize
that by interviewing you for Theory Talks, we don’t necessarily want to reduce
your contribution to thought to the practice of theorizing. Isn’t it also
correct you have written poetry?
Now I am baffled a second time! I have never publicly
attempted my hand at the noble art of the poetic!
TT It has to be said, Mr. Dewey, that the problem of
what is and isn’t public has perhaps shifted a bit since your passing away. That’s
something we’d like to discuss, too, but the fact of the matter is that what
you have consistently consigned to the trashcan of your office at Columbia
University has been just as meticulously recovered by ‘a janitor with a long
view’.
Oh heavens! You tell me I have been uncovered as a
versifier? What of my terrible scribbling has been uncovered you say?
TT Well, perhaps you recognize the one that starts
like:
I hardly
think I heard you call
Since
betwixt us was the wall
Of sounds
within, buzzings i' the ear
Roarings
i' the vein so closely near…
… ‘That I was captured in illusion/Of outward things
said clear…’ I well remember—a piece particularly deserving of oblivion. I
wrote that in the privacy of lonely office hours, thinking the world would have
the mercy not to allow a soul to lay its eyes on it!
TT We are sorry to say that besides this one, a total
of 101 poems has been recovered, and published in print—and you know, given
some advances in technology, circulation of text is highly accelerated, meaning
that one could very well say your poetry is part of the public domain.
So there I am, well half a decade after my death,
subject to the indirect effects of advances in technology interacting with the
associations I myself carelessly established between roses, summer days, and
all too promiscuous waste bins! Sirs, in the little time we have conversed, I
see the afterlife hasn’t brought me any good. Hades takes on a bleaker shade…
TT Well, in reality, the future has been good to you:
you are firmly canonised as one an authentic American intellectual, and stand firmly
on a pedestal in the galleries occupied by the notables of modern international
social thought. So why don’t we explore a little bit why that is, within the
specific domain of political theory? Theory
Talks actually poses the same first three questions to every interviewee,
followed by a number of questions specific to your thought. The first question
we always pose is: What, according to you, is the biggest challenge or central
debate in International Relations and what is your position vis-à-vis that
challenge/debate?
I think that while it must have been noted by other
interviewees that in fact this question is two separate questions—one about
real-world challenges and another about theoretical debates—I would be the last
to do so, and I am happy you mix concerns of theory and practice. I have always
fought against establishing such a fictional separation between seemingly distinct
domains of thought and practice. It is a dangerous fiction on top of it. The
same goes for International Relations—while I have not dedicated myself to the
study of the international as a discrete field of action, I do think that this domain
does not escape some of the general observations I have made regarding society
and its politics.
I hold that “modern society is many societies more or
less loosely connected” by all kinds of associations. As I explain in The Public and its Problems, a
fundamental challenge of modern times is that the largely technically mediated associations
that constitute societies have outstretched the social mechanisms that we had
historically developed on the human scale of the village to mitigate their
indirect effects on others. During my life, I witnessed the proliferation of
railway, telegraph, radio, steam-driven shipping, and car and weapon
industries—thoroughly extending the web of association and affectedness within
and across borders. This means action constantly reaches further. People close
by and in far-off places are suddenly confronted with situations that they have
to relate to but which are out of their control. This automatically makes them
part of interested publics, with a stake in the way these mechanisations work. Now
this perhaps seems abstract but consider: the spread of a new technology—I see
you both looking on some small device with a black mirrored screen nervously
every 5 minutes—automatically involves users as a ‘stakeholder’. Your actions
are mediated by them. You become affected by their design and
configuration—over which you have little control. In that regard, you are part
of a concerned public, but you have no way to influence the politics
constitutive of these technologies.
I would say the largest challenge is to amplify
participation and to institutionalize these fleeting publics. The proliferation
of technologies and institutions as conduits for international associations has
rendered publics around the globe more inchoate, while seemingly making it
easier than ever before to influence—for good or ill—large groups through the
manipulation of these global infrastructures of the public. We sowed
infrastructures, we reap fragilities and more diffusely affected publics: each
new technological expansion of the possibility to form associations leads to
concomitant insecurities.
TT How did you arrive where you currently are in your
thinking?
I have had the sheer luck or fortune to be engaged in
the occupation of thinking; and while I am quite regular at my meals, I think
that I may say that I would rather work, and perhaps even more, play, with
ideas and with thinking than eat. I was born in the wake of the Civil War, and
in times of a profound acceleration of technology as a vehicle of social,
economic, and political development. Perhaps, as in your own times, upheaval
and change was the status quo, stability a rare exception. My studies at Johns
Hopkins with people such as Peirce had tickled an intellectual curiosity as of
yet unsatisfied. I subsequently went to the University of Chicago for a decade
in which my commitment to pragmatist philosophy consolidated. Afterwards at
Columbia, and at the New School which I founded with people such as Charles A. Beard
and Thorsten Veblen, this approach translated into a number of books. In these I
applied my pragmatist convictions to such disparate issues as education, art,
faith, logic and indeed politics, the topic of your question. For me, these are
all interdependent aspects of society. This interdependence and inseparability
of the social fabric means that skewed economic or political interests will
reverberate throughout. But I am an optimist in that I also believe in the
fundamental possibility and promise of science and democracy to curb radical
change and reroute it into desirable directions for those affected. Good things
are also woven through the social and we should amplify those to lessen the
effects of negative associations.
TT What would a student require to become a specialist
in International Relations or to see the world in a global way?
A question dear to my heart. You might know that
throughout my entire life I have striven for transforming our understanding and
practice of education. Human progress is dependent on education, and as I have
learned during my travels to Russia, reform is not to be had by revolution but
by gradual education. Education is training in reflective thinking. The quality
of democracy depends on education.
Towards the end of my life I witnessed the creation of
the United Nations. This was a clear signal to me that “the relations between
nations are taking on the properties that constitute a public, and hence call
for some measure of political organization”. Having this forum implied that we
saw the end of the complete denial of political responsibility of how the
policies in one national unit affect another as we find in the doctrine of
sovereignty. That the end of this doctrine is within reach means that we
require global education which will ensure the rise of informed global publics
which can develop the tools required to respond to global challenges.
In a more substantive fashion, I would insist that
students hold on to the essential impossibility to separate out experience as
it unfolds over time. The divisions and preferences that have come to dominate
academic knowledge in its 20th century ‘maturing’ are for me a loss
of rooting of knowledge in experience.
TT We’re sorry, but isn’t the task of social sciences
to offer universal or at least objective analytical categories to make sense of
the muddle of real-world experience? What you seem to be proposing is the
opposite!
I align with Weber in lamenting the acceleration of
the differentiation of understanding in society. This has made it difficult for
your generations to address social, political and economic challenges head on
while avoiding getting lost in one of its details or facets. Isn’t the economic
and the political, constantly encroaching on everyday life? In the end, this
perhaps explains my insistence on democracy and schooling as the pivots of good
society: democracy to reconstruct and defend publics, and schooling to defend
individuals against (mis)understanding the world in ways that cannot be reduced
to their own lived experience. If students could only hold on to this holistic
perspective and eschew isolating subject matters from their social contexts.
TT Throughout your 70 years of active scholarship you
have written over a thousand articles and books. One commentator of your work
suggested that your body of writing is an “elaborate spider’s web, the
junctions and lineaments of which its engineer knows well and in and on which
he is able to move about with great facility. But for the outsider who seeks to
traverse or map that territory there is the constant danger of getting stuck.”
Many find your work difficult to navigate—what advice would you give the
reader?
Sirs why would anyone want to engage in a quest of
mapping all of my writings? You have to understand that thought always proceeds
in relations. A web, perhaps, yes. A spider’s web certainly not. A spider that
spins a web out of himself, produces a web that is orderly and elaborate, but
it is only a trap. That is the goal of pure reasoning, not mine. The scientific
method of inquiry is rather comparable to the operations of the bee who
collects material within and from the world, but attacks and modifies the
collected stuff in order to make it yield its hidden treasure. “Drop the
conception that knowledge is knowledge only when it is a disclosure and
definition of the properties of fixed and antecedent reality; interpret the aim
and test of knowing by what happens in the actual procedures of scientific
inquiry”. The occasion of thinking and writing is the experience of problems
and the need to clarify and resolve them. Everything depends on the problem,
the situations and the tools available. Inquiry does not rely on a priori
elements or fixed rules. I always attempted to start my work by understanding in
which problematic situations I aimed at intervening. Philosophy and academic,
but also public life, in my time was heading in wrong directions that called
upon me to initiate inquiry to resolve issues—in media res, as it were. When I
wrote Logic, I tried to rebut
dogmatic understandings. Now it appears that I am on the verge of becoming a
dogma myself. In a sense, the most tragic scenario would be if people develop a
“Deweyan” perspective or theory. Now I am curious, what problem brought you
actually to converse with me?
TT Well, we are here today because we have been asked
to contribute to an effort to collect the views of a number of different
theorists, who, like you, live in different space-time. Now that we are here,
could we ask you to tell us how you use the term ‘inquiry’? It is one of your core
concepts and in our conversation you already frequently referred to it. It is
often difficult to understand what you mean by this term and how it provides
direction and purpose for science…
It’s a simple one, provided you have not been
indoctrinated by logical positivists. You, me, all of us, frequently engage in
inquiry. There is little distinction between solving problems of everyday life
and the reasoning of the scientist or philosopher. Most often habit and routine
will give you satisfaction. Yet when these fail or give you unpleasant
experience, then reasoning begins. Without inquiry, sirs, most likely you
wouldn’t have been able to speak to me today! You will have to explain later
how you bended time and space and which technology allowed you to travel through
a black hole. But Albert was right, time travel is possible! Could we converse
today without Einstein’s fabulous inquiry that led him to the realization of
space-time? Until the promulgation of Einstein's restricted theory of
relativity, mass, time and motion were regarded as intrinsic properties of
ultimate fixed and independent substances. Einstein questioned this on the
basis of experimentation and an investigation of the problem of simultaneity,
that is, that from different reference frames there can never be agreement on
the simultaneity of events.
Reflection implies that something is believed in (or
disbelieved in), not on its own direct account, but through something else
which stands as witness, evidence, proof, voucher, warrant; that is, as ground
of belief. At one time, rain is actually felt or directly experienced without
any intermediary fact; at another time, we infer that it has rained from the
looks of the grass and trees, or that it is going to rain because of the
condition of the air or the state of the barometer. The fact that inquiry intervenes
in ever-shifting contexts demands us to restrain from eternal truths or absolutistic
logic. Someone believing in a truth such as “individualism”, has his program
determined for him in advance. It is then not a matter of finding out the
particular thing which needs to be done and the best way, and the
circumstances, of doing it. He knows in advance the sort of thing which must be
done, just as in ancient physical philosophy the thinker knew in advance what
must happen, so that all he had to do was to supply a logical framework of
definitions and classifications.
When I say that thinking and beliefs should be
experimental, not absolutistic, I have in mind a certain logic of method. Such
a logic firstly implies that the concepts, general principles, theories and
dialectical developments which are indispensable to any systematic knowledge are
shaped and tested as tools of inquiry. Secondly, policies and proposals for
social action have to be treated as working hypotheses. They have to be subject
to constant and well-equipped observations of the consequences they entail when
acted upon and subject to flexible revision. The social sciences are primarily
an apparatus for conducting such investigations.
TT Doesn’t such a form of reasoning mean we’ll just
muddle through without ever reaching certainty?
Absolutely correct! Arriving at one point is the
starting point of another. Life flowers and should be understood as such; experimental
reasoning is never complete. I can imagine the surprise you must feel at sudden
unforeseen events in international political relationships when you hold on to
fixed frames of how these relationships do and ought to look. That we will never
reach certainty does not imply to give up the quest of certainty, however. We
have to continuously improve on our tools of scientific inquiry…
TT Sorry to interrupt you here. Now it sounds as if
you have a sort of methods fetish. Do you imply that everything can be solved
by the right method and all that we have to do is to refine our methods? That’s
something that our colleagues running statistics and thinking that the problems
of international can be solved by algorithms argue as well.
It might be that mathematical reasoning has well
advanced since my departure, and that the importance granted to the economy and
economic thinking as the sole conditioning factor of political organisation has
only increased, but you haven’t fully grasped what I mean by ‘tools’. Tell your
stubbornly calculating colleagues that inquiry is embedded in a situation,
hence there cannot be a single method which would fix all kinds of problems.
Second, while I admire the skill of mathematicians, what I mean by tools goes
well beyond that. A tool can be a concept, a term, a theory, a proposal, a
course of action, anything that might matter to settle a particular situation.
A tool is however not a solution per se. It is a proposal. It must be tested
against the problematic material. It matters only in so far as it is part of a
practical activity aimed at resolving a problematic situation.
TT You emphasize that language is instrumental and reject
the idea of a private language. You also spent quite some energy to demolish
the "picture theory" of language. These arguments form the basis of
what we call today “constructivism”, yet they are mainly subscribed to the Philosophical
Investigations of the later Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Earhh, I am aware of this fellow. He is an analytical
philosopher, so develops his argument from a different background. I started to
work on the social and cultural aspects of language use from around 1916. I
don’t know whether Wittgenstein actually read my work when he set out to write
Philosophical Investigations, but you are quite right, there are obvious
parallels. I think my own term of “conjoint activity” expresses pretty much the
same, perhaps less eloquently, what Wittgenstein termed language games. I am
pleased to hear, however, that the instrumental view on language, that objects
get their meanings within a language in and by conjoint community of functional
use, has become firmly established in academia. I’d have reservations about the
term, ‘constructivism’. It might be useful since it reminds us of all the
construction work that the organization of politics and society entails. Indeed
I have frequently stressed that instrumentalist theory implies construction. If
constructivism doesn’t mean post-mortem studies of how something has been
constructed, but is directed towards production of better futures, I might be
fine with the term. But perhaps I would prefer ‘productivism’.
TT That is a plausible term, but we are afraid, the
history of science has settled on constructivism. And you are right, the tendencies
you warn us of are significantly present in our discipline.
Sirs, if you permit. I have to attend to other
obligations. I
wish you safe travels back. Make sure you pick up something from the gift shop
before you leave.
