Pragmatism and Birkenstocks at Camp Dewey

“How many pragmatists does it take to change a light bulb?” asked one philosopher at the beginning of last month’s conference on “John Dewey and American Democracy.” No one knew, but aJI agreed that if the revival of American pragmatism was going to succeed, it needed a joke. And it was up to the 17 philosophers, historians, sociologists, and political theorists who gathered high in the Adirondacks near Jay, New York, to come up with a punch line.

They had come not to bury Dewey but to argue with him, to puzzle out the extent to which he could inspire would-be public intellectuals, much in the way Marx and Hegel had earlier generations. Respect rather than reverence dominated the sessions, as Dewey was praised for his role in founding the ACLU and trying to establish an independent third party, but was criticized severely for supporting World War I and failing to speak out against American imperialism and racism. Many of the participants were New Lefties turned academics— Rochester history professor Robert Westbrook, Princeton’s Cornel West, Indiana historian Casey Blake—who wanted to enlist Dewey for their cause. Bloodied by the fractious p.c. and multiculturalist hysteria, they were looking to Dewey for help, for a guide past the dogmatism of far left and right.

The meeting’s central text was Westbrook’s superb new biography, which argues that Dewey was much more than a prolific philosopher who wrote on everything from educational reform and aesthetics to politics and metaphysics. Westbrook shows that Dewey was first and foremost a radical Yankee with a profound faith in participatory democracy. It was with that image in mind that the group spent three days arguing about his relevance.

“Intellectuals are tired of running into a dead end because of our Marxist jargon,” confided Westbrook. “With Dewey we can smuggle our radical views into the conversation without getting stopped by knee-jerk anti-Marxists. We have seen the problems of importing Continental theory, and people are interested in a radical figure in the American grain who has grappled with the issues of democracy and realized that going all the way left or right doesn’t work.”

American pragmatism is experiencing something of a renaissance. The movement, founded in the late 19th century by Charles Peirce and William James, insists that ideas be judged by their consequences, and that philosophers discard the self-image as privileged observers they have held since Plato. When traditional philosophers ask, “What is the nature of truth?” pragmatists respond, “Why do you care?” -they think of ideas as tools for changing the world rather than contemplating it.

For intellectuals just getting over their postmodern-theory hangover, the pragmatists are the perfect hair of the dog. They talk about power and knowledge without excess French baggage, are unabashedly moral and political in their analysis, and are open to the insights of disciplines from sociology to literature. As Richard Rorty, philosophy’s current bete noir and the person most responsible for the renewed interest in pragmatism, once put it, “James and Dewey were not only waiting at the end of the dialectical road which analytic philosophy traveled, but are waiting at the end of the road which … Foucault and Deleuze are currently traveling.”

Of the American pragmatists’ it was Dewey who did the most to shift philosophy’s attention from the problems of philosophers to the problems of men; a demand for relevance that, after many years of neglect, has again become a significant voice in the academy. Radical participatory democracy was the ideal Dewey used as a critical standard in all his endeavors. Blake, whose book Beloved Community considers such public thinkers as Randolph Bourne and Lewis Mumford, says, “Dewey is concerned with history and everyday experience, and therefore provides a way for us to reenter the debate with other citizens that theory-mad intellectuals have isolated themselves from.”

Jay’s hardly in the thick of things: With Mount Marcy jutting out from behind clouds and frequent jaunts to swim at a nearby gorge, the weekend felt an awful lot like summer camp for philosophers. Families were invited, so arguments about Adorno’s critical theory and Dwight Macdonald’s response to the Holocaust took place against the din of screaming infants and pick-up baseball. Birkenstocks, baggy khaki shorts, and T-shirts were the attire of choice, although West, professor of religion and co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America, stuck to bis dark, preacherly, three-piece suit, starched white shirt, and tie. “Informality is a state of mind,” be gently chided someone who suggested be loosen up.

Camp Dewey’s format was similarly casual, each session beginning with brief remarks by Westbrook, West, and Rorty and then left to follow its own course. The discussions, held around two long oak tables, were blissfully free of the pomposity that mars most academic conferences. No papers, no scholars “receiving” questions from the floor-only unconstrained argument.

One mountain over, in Keene, there had once been a summer camp for intellectuals, run by Scottish independent scholar Thomas Davidson. In the 1890s, Davidson presided over the Glenmore School of the Cultural Sciences at his farm, to bring “men together who really and in all earnestness desire to comprehend the world, in order that they may better it, and who are ready to consider all questions without prejudice or respect for current and conventional opinions or authority …. To disseminate in every way, by teaching, lecturing, printing, and especially by living, intellectual and moral truth, and to put a period to living by mere conventionality and un-comprehended dogma.”

Nineteenth-century multiculturalism never had it so good as at Glenmore: In the summer of 1892, students could choose from classes with Dewey on English political thought, Josiah Royce on ethics, Rabbi Max Margolis on Jewish literature from Scripture to Talmud, lbn .A.bi Suleiman on the Koran, and Davidson himself on Aristotle and Aeschylus. A block of IO lectures cost $3, single lectures were 50 cents. When not in the Adirondacks, Davidson practiced his democratic philosophy by giving free classes at the Lower East Side’s progressive Educational Alliance, where he discovered the young Morris Cohen, who went on to become City College’s philosophical guru and mentor to Sidney Hook, Irving Howe, and many others of the New York Intellectuals.

In an essay on Davidson, William James described the eccentric Scot as “a kind of Socrates, a devotee of truth and lover of youth, ready to sit up to any hour, and drink beer and talk with anyone, lavish of learning and counsel, a contagious example of how lightly and humanly a burden of erudition might be borne upon a pair of shoulders.”

On a late afternoon field trip to Keene to visit Dewey’s rustic log cabin, a few philosophers shuffled around the dimly lit study and adjacent porch examining his desk, speculating about which books he wrote there. A sign by the door, hastily scribbled in magic marker and hung with a rusty nail, announced “John Dewey slept here.” “I don’t know when,” exclaimed one overworked professor pondering Dewey’s staggering output.

“Who turned you on to Dewey?” was the standard pick-up line over cocktails on the first evening. In the philosophical version of a twelve-step group, the mingling intellectuals described their first encounter with the old man. “Dewey saved me from analytic philosophy and taught me it was OK to write about rap,” said Richard Schusterman, an American who spent three years in Israeli army intelligence and got philosophy degrees from Tel Aviv and Oxford before coming to Temple University. Maria Pia Lara Zavala, chair of the philosophy department at Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana Iztapalapa in Mexico City and author of a new book on German philosopher Jurgen Habermas and social democracy, believes Dewey might have even more relevance outside the U.S. “In Latin America we are at the crossroads, and as we attempt to build a theory of democracy Dewey is an example of an intellectual who was a moral guide rather than just an ideologue or sloganeer.”

Although the session’s conversation lurched from topic to topic-How would Dewey’s aesthetics deal with pop culture? What are the ecological implications of his metaphysics? Did he have a sufficient sense of the tragic?-it invariably returned to the question of whether America’s intellectuals have anything of philosophical value to say to its citizens. “It is our responsibility to analyze his romantic notion of organic self-realization—but once in the public sphere you just have to let Dewey and Calvin Klein duke it out,” suggested George Schulman, a political theorist at the New School for Social Research.

When it came time to discuss multiculturalism, the current fascination of academic debate, the group (which like American philosophy itself was predominantly white and male) agreed Dewey had a lot to say: “He wants us to concentrate not so much on common roots,” suggested philosopher William Sullivan, coauthor of Habits of the Heart and The Good Society, “as on what our common project might be in the future.” Conversation took a decisively pragmatic turn when everybody agreed that Dewey would think something was deeply wrong with a bunch of intellectuals sitting in the woods arguing about theories of multiculturalism when there are entire generations of children who cannot read.

Rorty, a self-described “Cold War Liberal,” closed the conference on a somber note with his contention that there is no necessary connection between philosophy and politics. “Philosophy is just not the right place to look for responses to mad tyrants, or Nietzschean bully-boys, or complacent, heartless Thatcherites and Reaganites.” Instead, the most important question is what kind of community we want to belong to the kind of pragmatic question you probably don’t need philosophers to help answer. “Some people’s vision of the future, like Heidegger’s and Shirley Maclaine’s, have cult followings, and others just don’t,” Rorty shrugged. “It’s not really a question of philosophical depth.”

So how many pragmatists does it take to change a light bulb? Change it yourself.