Experience as philosophy: on the work of John J. McDermott 9780823226382, 9780823258963

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EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY

EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY On the Work of John J. McDermott

a> Edited by

JAMES CAMPBELL and

RICHARD E. HART

NEW YORK 2006

Copyright © 2006 Fordham University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored

in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means— electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Experience as philosophy : on the work of John J. McDermott / edited by James Campbell and Richard E. Hart.—ist ed. p. cm.— (American philosophy series) “Complete bibliography of the writings of John J. McDermott”—P. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-8232-2638-2 (alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8232-2638-7 (alk. paper)

1. McDermott, John J. john Joseph), 1932—. 2. Experience. 3. Philosophy, American. 4. United States—Civilization—2oth century. I. Campbell, James, 1948— II. Hart, Richard E., 1949B945.M4544E97 2006

191—dc22 2006029537 Printed in the United States of America

08 07 06 54321 First edition

Contents

Contributors vii Introduction by the Editors 1

Experience 12 Philosophy 30

1 Locality in American Culture and the American William J. Gavin

2 The Pragmatic Scholar and the History of American James Campbell

3 Living Creatively, While Terminal 58 Jacquelyn Ann K. Kegley

4 The “Bite” of the Existential “Moment” 84 Michael W. Allen

5 McDermott’s Processive-Relational Personalism:

Optimism? No! Hope? Perhaps! 116 Eugene Fontinell

6 Landscape and Personscape in Urban Aesthetics 140 Richard E. Hart

7 What Does It Mean to Have an Ethics? 162 Paul B. Thompson

8 No Eros, No Buds: Teaching as Nectaring 178 Arthur Lothstein

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v1 CONTENTS 9 The Necessity of a Cultural Pedagogy 211 John Ryder Afterword: You Are Really Able 237

Notes 273 Complete Bibliography of the Writings of John J. McDermott 293

Index 317

Contributors

ED Michael W. Allen studied William James with John J. McDermott at Texas A&M University, where he did graduate work before receiving his Ph.D. from Southern Illinois University. Allen’s publications include “William James, Camus, and McDermott” (2003) in Streams of William James, and he has made presentations at the annual meetings of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy. James Campbell is Distinguished University Professor at the University of Toledo. He has been a Fulbright Lecturer at the University of Innsbruck (1990-91) and at the University of Munich (2003-4). He is editor of Selected Writings of James Hayden Tufts (1992) and author of The Community Reconstructs: The Meaning of Pragmatic Social Thought (1992), Understanding John Dewey: Nature and Cooperative Intelligence (1995), and Recovering Benjamin Franklin: An Exploration of a Life of Science and Service (1999).

Eugene Fontinell is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Queens College, City University of New York, where he taught from 1961 to 1991. There he was a long-time colleague of John J. McDermott and served as chair of the Department of Philosophy and the Academic Senate.

He was also associate editor of Cross Currents. His books include Toward a Reconstruction of Religion: A Philosophical Probe (1970) and

Self, God, and Immortality: A Jamesian Investigation (1986; 2d ed., 2000).

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Vi1t CONTRIBUTORS William Gavin has been Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southern Maine for thirty-seven years. He is author, coauthor, or edi-

tor of six books and more than one hundred articles and reviews, many of them dealing with American philosophy. His books include William James and the Reinstatement of the Vague (1992) and Cutting the Body Loose: Historical, Biological, and Personal Approaches to Death and Dying (1995). He is editor of In Dewey’s Wake: Unfinished Work of Pragmatic Reconstruction (2003).

Richard E. Hart is Cyrus H. Holley Professor of Applied Ethics and Professor of Philosophy at Bloomfield College in New Jersey. He is editor of Ethics and the Environment (1992) and is coeditor, with Douglas Anderson, of Philosophy in Experience: American Philosophy in Transition (1997) and, with Victorino Tejera, of Plato’s Dialogues: The Dialogical Approach (1997). Hart has published and lectured on the work of such American figures as John Dewey, Susanne Langer, Justus Buchler, and John Steinbeck. He serves on the editorial boards of Metaphilosophy, the Steinbeck Review, and the Pluralist.

Jacquelyn Ann K. Kegley is Professor of Philosophy and chair of the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at California State University, Bakersfield. She was named the CSU Outstanding Profes-

sor in 1988 and received the CSU Wang Award for Distinguished Teaching, Research, and Service in 2000. She is the author of Genuine Individuals and Communities: A Roycean Public Philosophy (1997) and

has published on a wide range of topics, including technology and philosophy of science, bioethics and genetics, and health care. Kegley

has made contributions to studies on the work of Alfred North Whitehead and of American philosophers Charles Hartshorne, Richard Rorty, and Paul Weiss. She received the 2006 Herbert W. Schnei-

der Award, from the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy, for career-long contributions to American philosophy.

Arthur S. Lothstein is Professor of Philosophy and former chair of the Department of Philosophy at the C. W. Post Campus of Long

CONTRIBUTORS 1x Island University, where he has taught for forty years. He has also taught part-time at New York University, the New School, Stony Brook University of the State University of New York, and Queens College of the City University of New York. He has received awards for teaching excellence from Long Island University and New York University. Lothstein is editor of All We Are Saying: The Philosophy of the New Left (1971) and author of a number of essays on John Dewey. He is author of The Emersonian Teacher and is coeditor of New Morn-

ing: Emerson for the Twenty-first Century (forthcoming), a collection of essays.

John Ryder is Professor of Philosophy and director of International Programs, State University of New York. He is coeditor, with Armen T. Marsoobian, of The Blackwell Guide to American Philosophy (2004); with Emil Visnovsky, of Pragmatism and Values; and, with Krystyna Wilkoszewska, of Deconstruction and Reconstruction (2004).

Ryder is cofounder and cochair of the Central European Pragmatist Forum and president of the Alliance of Universities for Democracy. Paul B. Thompson holds the W. K. Kellogg Chair of Agricultural, Food, and Community Ethics at Michigan State University. He has published widely on practical ethics, especially on issues in agriculture, environment, and emerging technology. He did coursework with John J. McDermott at Stony Brook University of the State University of New York, where he earned his Ph.D. in 1980, During the period 1981-97, Thompson and McDermott were colleagues at Texas A&M University. Thompson is coeditor, with Thomas C. Hilde, of The Agrarian Roots of Pragmatism (2000), which is dedicated to McDermott.

INTRODUCTION

a>) 1

if n his volume Some Problems of Philosophy, William James wrote that by his day academic philosophy had developed a bad reputation, even within intellectual society. The problem, as he saw it, was threefold. In the eyes of its potential audience, “philosophy makes no theoretic progress, and shows no practical applications”; it is “dogmatic, and pretends to settle things by pure reason”; and it is “out of

touch with real life, for which it substitutes abstractions. The real world is various, tangled, painful. Philosophers almost without exception have treated it as noble, simple, and perfect.”! As James saw it, philosophy had become the private domain of professional philosophers—specialized and certified and comfortably ensconced in academe—but with little to say to the average person about the central problems of living. Philosophy, of course, need not be like this; and when it is functioning anywhere near its potential for enriching the human journey, philosophy is neither impractical nor dogmatic nor abstract. It is not the private intellectual pastime of an academic elite. Philosophy is simply the result of humans thinking together about the tough questions of living. As James once did, some professional philosophers still do break out of their technical sub-disciplines of epistemology and metaphysics and speak to their fellow humans about the meaning of the everyday. Although the isolating pressures that result from philosophy’s academic place within higher education seem to make it ever more difficult, these philosophers resist the pressures to speak

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2 INTRODUCTION only to each other, and they address society’s larger audience about

the “big issues.” One such figure is John J. McDermott, whose thought is the focus of the essays in this volume. McDermott comes out of the long and rich American philosophical tradition, a tradition that has always refused to understand itself

as the sort of elitist intellectual endeavor that James condemned. Rather, it sees the aim of philosophical inquiry to be the interpretation of the open meanings of the American experience for those who are living their lives within it. The American philosophical tradition has taken the particular context of our novel experience at face value and not tried to reformulate it to satisfy the assumptions of inherited doctrines. It is faithful to the life that we all know— “various, tangled, painful”—not to any “noble, simple, and perfect”’ caricature. At the same time that the meaning of experience in this perspective is open

and growing, there is the recognition that any answers that we develop might serve as a resource to others. Philosophers in the Ameri-

can tradition have always been teachers, although not always “professors.” Through what they have seen as the sacred task of pedagogy, they have traditionally attempted to address the difficulties of

the life of the community. They have celebrated the values of the American experience and they have asked the necessary critical questions to make it better. Thus, the goal of American philosophy has never been one of personal performance or the edification of an intellectual elite, but rather cultural renewal and transformation. McDer-

mott has devoted his academic life to advancing this renewal and transformation. It is possible to point to a number of figures central to the American tradition whose works were fundamental to McDermott’s philosophic growth. One is Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82), who called upon us to fashion lives that celebrate our experience. Another is William James (1842-1910), who emphasized the possibilities of individu-

ality and the resultant pluralism of our shared life. A third is Josiah Royce (1855-1916), for whom the communal process of the interpretation of our past and future gives meaning to individual existence. Still

INTRODUCTION 3 another is John Dewey (1859-1952), whose sensitivities to the misdirection of our lives by educational, political, and religious institutions

grounded his philosophical practice in a critical stance toward our society. There are also such figures as Charles Sanders Peirce (1839— 1914), Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947), George Santayana (1863— 1952), and George Herbert Mead (1863-1931), whose explorations of the complexities of inquiry and science, of aesthetics and the self, also inform McDermott’s thought. The American philosophical tradition has numerous markers that

are present in various ways in its prominent figures. These markers also resonate with our understanding of our contemporary situation and help direct our efforts to ameliorate it. One of these markers is that philosophy is not an exclusively cerebral endeavor. The wisdom that philosophy seeks is a full experiential matter, incorporating intellectual and affective aspects. Philosophy is practiced by humans whose embodiment is the focus of their joys and sufferings. Their bodies are the reason for their finitude and disconnection, for their deaths and sometimes their suicides. At the same time, their bodies are the means of their connections and celebrations. When provided with physical and spiritual nourishment—with challenging and aesthetic interactions with people and the ordinary objects of daily experience—these bodies and their spirits will flourish. Philosophizing must thus start with an understanding of humans that includes these fuller selves. It cannot function exclusively as a mental endeavor. Arsumentation, justification, and proof have an important role to play in the American philosophical tradition, of course; but in isolation

they are too intellectual. They must be combined with other approaches that exhibit and enact, rather than simply assert, their message.

Another marker of the American philosophical tradition is that the self is not a given substantial entity. Rather, the self is relational, with a kind of loyalty to its natural place. One aspect of this natural place

is its physical context. Here the philosopher must understand the connections of the self to its home within nature, its particular relation to farm or city, to water or mountains. Another aspect of this

4 INTRODUCTION natural place is our social context. The self is related to any number of others—those no longer living, known and unknown contemporaries, and those as yet unborn—who make up the self’s larger community. The self is capable of cherishing its natural place, but it is also capable of severing its roots. Through the transformational power of conversion, the self can select a new place and form new geographical or social relations. Yet another marker of the American philosophical tradition is that it rejects all pretense of having ultimate explanations. While such explanations are perhaps psychologically comforting, this value has no scientific or logical merit. Rather than accepting either a prior or a future time of perfection, the American philosophical tradition understands the human journey as a personal project within which adequate explanations must be created and meanings developed. As we navigate the processes of daily living, we are called upon to decipher the many signs that surround our actions, and as we share our lives with our fellows, we are similarly called upon to interact with their meanings. Moreover, our attempts to formulate an adequate understanding of existence take place in real time, without the benefit of guarantees or the privilege of a second chance. These markers—a challenge to hyper-intellectualism, a recognition of the relational self, and a call for personal explanations—continue to be found in more recent members of the American philosophical tradition. A handful comes easily to mind: Susanne K. Langer, Justus Buchler, Stanley Cavell, Richard Rorty, and John J. McDermott. The first four of these thinkers have all been the subject of organized critical examination, and, with this volume, McDermott’s thought will begin to be the subject of careful study as well.

2

John Joseph McDermott was born in New York City on 5 January 1932. He graduated cum laude from St. Francis College in Brooklyn, in January 1953. His graduate study in philosophy was at Fordham University, where he received his M.A. in 1954 and his Ph.D. “with

INTRODUCTION 5 Great Distinction” in 1959. His doctoral dissertation, written for Robert C. Pollock, was entitled “Experience is Pedagogical: The Gen-

esis and Essence of the American Nineteenth-Century Notion of Experience. ”

During the academic year 1953-54, McDermott taught Latin and English in high school. He returned to St. Francis College to teach philosophy and English from 1954 to 1957 and then moved on to Queens College/CUNY, where he taught until 1977. In that year, he took up the position of Head of the Department of Philosophy and Humanities at Texas A&M University, where he later was named Dis-

tinguished Professor of Philosophy and Humanities, and in 1986, Abell Professor of Liberal Arts. In 1981, he was also named a professor

in the Department of Humanities and Medicine at Texas A&M University College of Medicine. McDermott has offered major philosophical addresses throughout North America, as well as in Europe and Asia. His many honors include the E. Harris Harbison National Award for Gifted Teaching from the Danforth Foundation (1970); LL.D., honoris causa, from the

University of Hartford for his contributions to higher education (1970); the presidency of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy (1977-80); membership on the National Board of Officers of the American Philosophical Association (1979-82); and on the Board of Trustees of the National Faculty of the Humanities, Arts and Sciences. He serves, or has served, on the editorial boards of half

a dozen academic journals and has reviewed manuscripts for over two dozen university presses. McDermott’s first publication, on the philosophy of Martin Buber, appeared in 1958. In the decades since, he has established himself as

one of the most prolific and catholic authors writing on American philosophy and culture. As the bibliography at the end of this volume witnesses, his ideas have appeared in virtually every conceivable for-

mat: scholarly essays and book chapters, forewords and introductions, interviews, editorials and letters to the editor, and even poetry. This corpus of diverse and powerful works is unduplicated in today’s

6 INTRODUCTION world of professional philosophy. McDermott’s essays have been fre-

quently anthologized; he has gathered a number of them, often in revised or expanded form, into three volumes: The Culture of Experience: Philosophical Essays in the American Grain (1976), Streams of Experience: Reflections on the History and Philosophy of American Culture (1986), and The Drama of Possibility: John J. McDermott’s Philosophy

of Experience (2007). These collections distill his overall output of thoroughly original reflections on the nature and meaning of experience, especially in the American context. The scope and diversity of McDermott’s interests include virtually

every major dimension of philosophy and culture, including ethics, aesthetics, social philosophy, philosophy of education, and the history of philosophy. He has written on many of the major figures in American philosophy, from Emerson and Whitman, through James, Royce and Dewey, to Langer and C. I. Lewis. The themes that he has discussed cover a broad spectrum of topics—ranging from community to curricular reform, urban aesthetics to terminal illness, and teaching to the nature and quality of human experience. These diverse and powerful writings must be recognized as among the most significant in the recent history of American philosophy and they call for our response to their probings, explications, and critiques.

In addition to his own writing, McDermott is renowned as a champion of the ideas of other philosophers. In under a decade, he produced a monumental trio of editions of the writings of James, Royce, and Dewey. These collections—The Writings of William James: A Comprehensive Edition (1967), The Basic Writings of Josiah Royce (1969), and The Philosophy of John Dewey (1973)—have deservedly won him international acclaim. Long regarded as the world’s leading

scholar of James, McDermott has solidified his position by serving as a co-founder and advisory editor of the nineteen-volume Harvard edition of The Works of William James and as the general editor of the recently completed, twelve-volume, University Press of Virginia edition of The Correspondence of William James. In addition, for the broader philosophical audience he edited A Cultural Introduction to Philosophy, From Antiquity to Descartes (1985).

INTRODUCTION / 3

The essays contained in this volume represent an important contribution to the ongoing conversation of American philosophy. The authors of these essays engage McDermott in a multi-layered discussion of the meaning of human existence and of his own understanding of it. The arrangement of the essays is deliberate and proceeds from the

general to the specific. The first two situate McDermott’s thought broadly within two contexts: American culture and experience and the historical evolution of American philosophy. In this way, these essays help to orient the reader to the overall sweep and expansiveness of McDermott’s contributions. The seven remaining essays explore the specific contributions that he has made to various domains of philosophy and teaching, demonstrating convincingly the potential of his brand of philosophizing for more than narrow analysis. These domains include medical ethics, existential thought, community, religion, aesthetics, ethics, the art of teaching, and the importance of a cultural pedagogy. In his essay, “Locality in American Culture and the American Experience,’ William J. Gavin carefully highlights McDermott’s longstanding celebration of experience as simply that which is had, which we naturally undergo, and which is essential to our being and reflection. Prior to being articulated or intellectualized, experience is our sole guide and teacher. Gavin further reflects on how previous philos-

ophers and schools have conceived of and explained experience, thereby offering a variety of paradigms. To this, McDermott adds what he calls the “American angle of vision,’ a new way of understanding experience and culture. In exploring this angle, Gavin shows how McDermott points to a tension between the quotidian and the historical, while at the same time demonstrating his faith in the experience of experience, the overriding importance of contexts, and the notion, in line with William Carlos Williams, that “locality is the only universal.”

James Campbell’s essay, “The Pragmatic Scholar and the History of American Philosophy,” considers McDermott’s ongoing critical

8 INTRODUCTION commentary on the history of American philosophy. After some general introduction, he narrows the focus to McDermott’s illuminating discussions of Royce, Dewey, and especially James. He continues with some questions concerning the figures in American philosophy about

whom McDermott has chosen not to write, the stories he has not told. Campbell concludes that McDermott’s commentaries on Amer-

ican philosophy were never intended to be a complete historical guidebook. Rather, as a pragmatic scholar, he has used the history of American philosophy as a powerful tool for guiding his reflections on the present and the future. In “Living Creatively, While Terminal,’ Jacquelyn Kegley addresses crucial questions about McDermott’s contributions to the philosophy of medicine. She analyzes his concept of “creative living” and his understanding of terminality as a central aspect of human life. She critically examines what for him is ultimately the “personal”’ question of whether life is worth living, and she argues that he is perhaps too individualistic in his approach and too focused on the technological liabilities of modern medicine. Kegley applauds, however, McDermott’s message of the sacred character of time, the centrality of creative living, and the joys of an aesthetic life. Michael W. Allen probes the existential strand in McDermott’s approach to American philosophy in his essay, “The ‘Bite’ of the Existential ‘Moment.’” He reflects imaginatively on McDermott’s great regard for figures like Buber, Camus, Sartre, and Kafka, and details the deep influences they have exercised on the development of his thought. Allen further examines how for McDermott the existentialists’ view of tragic existence is linked with Deweyan social meliorism. His overall message is that McDermott’s lifelong dialogue with existentialist thought has afforded him original and creative ways of linking such thought to various aspects of the American tradition. Eugene Fontinell offers “McDermott’s Processive-Relational Personalism: Optimism? No! Hope? Perhaps!” to draw attention to the relational webbing that McDermott has diagnosed in various aspects of the human journey. He elaborates on the metaphysics (or center of vision) that he sees pervading all of McDermott’s work; in the

INTRODUCTION 9 process, he explores McDermott’s understanding of community and religion, as well as of belief and faith, salvation and the sacred. Fontinell concludes with a discussion of suicide, terminality, and the importance of the journey of living; in short, with what might be called McDermott’s version of Personalism. In “Landscape and Personscape in Urban Aesthetics,” Richard E. Hart demonstrates McDermott’s departure from the traditional formulation of problems and issues in aesthetics. Rather than focusing exclusively on fine arts and museums, McDermott confronts the aesthetic character of ordinary experience and emphasizes aesthetic “‘set-

tings’ or “fields” while probing the multifarious affective life of humans. For McDermott, furthermore, instances of modern art have taught us the importance of relations, contexts, and the aesthetic celebration of the ordinary. Hart argues for the influence of James and Dewey on McDermott’s mature aesthetic vision and concludes with an analysis of his pioneering work in the area of “urban aesthetics.” In “What Does It Mean to Have an Ethics?’ Paul B. Thompson questions whether McDermott has formulated an ethics in the course of his writings. While he admits that there is in McDermott’s work no explicit ethics in the manner of a Kant or a Mill, Thompson contends that much of his work is dedicated to moral philosophy; that for him philosophy is an enterprise preoccupied with moral concerns. In this regard, McDermott’s philosophy can be interpreted as deeply ethical in its social and educational orientation. Such a move, how-

ever, causes him, and Thompson, to puzzle over some of what is

wrong with recent academic philosophy and the ethics it has produced. Arthur Lothstein was a student of McDermott over forty years ago at Queens College/CUNY. In his essay, “No Eros, No Buds: Teaching as Nectaring,”’ he reflects on McDermott’s extraordinary character as a teacher, and later as a friend and intellectual guide. He writes admiringly of McDermott’s inimitable pedagogy, the influences that helped shape him as a teacher, and the remarkable, nearly unbeliev-

able, impact his teaching has had on generations of students and teachers at all levels. In effect, Lothstein gives eloquent and powerful

10 INTRODUCTION voice to what thousands of McDermott’s students know simply as “the McDermott experience.” In the final essay in the collection, “The Necessity of a Cultural Pedagogy,’ John Ryder contends that themes of education and pedagogy have been central to all of McDermott’s work, dating back to his earliest writings. For McDermott, such themes must always be treated in the context of democratic society in which the nature, goals, and practices of education are crucial to the realization of greater degrees of democracy and individual fulfillment. Ryder examines McDermott’s commitment to a version of meliorism, offers critiques of contemporary educational policy directions, argues for the necessity of both social and cultural context in the philosophy of education, and concludes with an elaboration of a McDermott-inspired contemporary cultural pedagogy that he considers the most appropriate pedagogical alternative for our times. The specific topics of these essays cover the broad sweep of McDermott’s work, yet each author attempts to reach beyond his or her particular theme to explore the broader significance of the topic to the human issues that McDermott is discussing. While the various au-

thors are clearly appreciative of the broad message of his thought, they are also eager to question and prod and often to disagree. They make it clear that McDermott has not offered the final word on any of these central themes—a point that he would readily concede— about his own thought and all others’. The conversation will have to continue. In his response to these essays, which in turn carries on the conversation, McDermott addresses the authors’ questions, clarifies some of his ideas, and offers some new insights. In the interest of conserving space, we have used parenthetical references for McDermott’s major publications and keyed the other references to his work to the complete bibliography of his writings that appears at the end of this volume. Thus, CE will appear parenthetically in the text for The Culture of Experience, JD for The Philosophy of John Dewey, JR for The Basic Writings of Josiah Royce, SE for Streams of Experience, and WJ for The Writings of William James.’ Similarly, in the notes, the title of a particular essay, for example, will

INTRODUCTION 11 appear: “ ‘Nature Nostalgia and the City: An American Dilemma,’ 1972a. This indicates that the full publication information is to be found under that entry in the bibliography. This volume offers a beginning of a careful consideration of John

J. McDermott’s contribution to contemporary philosophy in the American grain. Others will surely follow. We believe that any serious

student of American arts and letters—of America’s philosophy and history and culture—must at some point address his work and consider his importance as a philosopher and cultural critic. Of course, those who disagree with James and who prefer that their philosophers live in a world of “abstractions” will fail to recognize the importance of McDermott’s work and thereby fail to benefit from it. They will remain, however, happy with their abstractions, sadly “out of touch with real life.” JAMES CAMPBELL

RICHARD E. HART

ONE

LOCALITY IN AMERICAN CULTURE AND THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE William J. Gavin

Introduction: Experience and Culture

N | ever one to choose the “thin” over the “thick’’ when it comes to matters of context, John McDermott takes “experience” to mean “nothing less than what we do and what is done to us, as well as the ‘way in which these transactions proceed.” (CE ix). While this approach does exist elsewhere, in the American tradition it is of primary concern. He attempts to develop an “aesthetic sensibility,” re-

vealing “how we and others feel our situation and feel about our situation.” (CE xiii). As for culture, McDermott is fond of quoting James’s phrase that “[rJeal culture lives by sympathies and admirations, not by dislikes and disdains: under all misleading wrappings it

pounces unerringly upon the human core.” (CE frontispiece). He strives to impress upon his readers the importance of a “cultural pedagogy, by which he means “‘the common source of our personal expectations, sensibilities, and evaluations” (SE 184).

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WILLIAM J. GAVIN 13 McDermott takes seriously Dewey’s request that we learn to approach experience with intellectual piety, that experience “had” is more primordial, more rich than experience cognized, or worse, experience articulated. In a series of different texts he constantly worries about a Jamesian “vicious intellectualism,”! which could result from wrapping these experiences up in language and distorting them in the

process of doing so. In actuality, the entire issue of experience and culture is best delineated in terms of “the experience of experience” versus “the articulation of experience.” This is the framework offered by McDermott in his monograph entitled, “The American Angle of Vision” and in “An American Notion of Experience.’ It is adapted from his 1959 Ph.D. dissertation, “Experience is Pedagogical: The Genesis and Essence of the American Nineteenth-Century Notion of Experience.” There he tells us that the development of the notion of experience in American thought can be analyzed on three levels. The first has to do with the “experience of experience” that is characteristic of seventeenth, eigh-

teenth and early nineteenth century America... . [T]his giving birth to a culture and a nation out of the primitive structures of a virgin land yields much that is essential to an understanding of the later American temperament. The second level of analysis is that which has to do with the American self-consciousness of the role of experience in the development of her own history and cultural attitudes. [One exam-

ple here is Frederick Jackson Turner, who] affirmed .. . [the frontier’s] novelty in the American context and indicated the significance of this experience for the development of American democracy and American culture. ... The third level of analysis has to do with the philosophical ex-

plication of the notion of experience, as it came to the fore in nineteenth century America.’

Let us flesh out the position offered here in some detail. The American Angle of Vision

McDermott argues that America developed over and against the sixteenth-century European reformulations of experience. Instead of

14 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY structure, order, and unity, experience, process, and plurality emerged in America as the leading metaphors. The claim made here for uniqueness is not an absolute one. Indeed, the traditional debate

over “brand new’ versus “totally old” is misplaced. Rather, one should grant that similarities exist and then proceed to analyze those happenings that show themselves to be new to the human situation as a whole. In this way, two things are accomplished. First, what is different about America is located. Second, what is new that might also be seminal for contemporary or future situations is analyzed. There are, in other words, two levels of proceeding here; ascertaining the original characteristics of a culture and then employing these as instance-models to be used in a manner that relatively transcends their historical origins. Elsewhere, he argues that “although it is unquestionably necessary to understand the intentions and conclusions of the historical thinker in the irreducible fabric of his or her cultural setting, it does not follow that one cannot appropriate that wisdom as a way, a Tao, for a cultural setting far different, far removed.’ What is of fundamental importance that is new in America is a shift in the mode of inquiry. In “The American Angle of Vision,” McDermott quotes approvingly the historian Daniel Boorstin, who says that “the most fertile novelty of the New World was not its climate, its plants, or its minerals, but its new concept of knowledge.’ In Boorstin’s opinion, what was wanted was a philosophy of the unexpected; possibilities loomed everywhere, and novelty was diffuse, not exclusive in nature. There was no special class of knowers, and

no truth for truth’s sake in America. Experience was available to everyone everywhere; all ideas were to be tried out in the marketplace.

There was no sharp distinction between “is” and “ought”; the reasons people gave for their actions were less important than the actions themselves. Progress, identified with growth and expansion, was seen as self-evident. To learn and to act became one, and in America it took effort to avoid novelty. While applauding Boorstin’s description of how matters proceeded at the pre-theoretical level in America, McDermott chastises him for failing to see how this “reflective primitivism”’ was caught and preserved in our own original philosophers, for example, Peirce, James, Royce, and Dewey.°®

WILLIAM J. GAVIN 15 McDermott believes that significant progress can be made toward seeing the connection between how Americans underwent their experience, how it became theorized in philosophy by looking at three different paradigms or revolutions, and how these were reacted to differently in Europe and in America. These three are the cartographic revolution in 1507, the Protestant revolution in 1517, and the Copernican revolution in 1543. Regarding the first of these, McDermott relies heavily on a fascinating thesis by Edmundo O’Gorman: America was not discovered in 1492; it was invented in 1507. O’Gorman’s thesis revolves around the ability of a map maker to see a “duck” where others had seen previously only a “rabbit.” Prior to the drawing of the Cosmographiae Introductio, Columbus was seen as having sailed and landed on an island, or a part of Asia; only with the new map did America appear as a fourth continent. In this case, the theory or mapping of America gave rise to the “fact” of America. “Relative to the very framework of the world, in geographical terms, man had to abandon his belief as to its insularity and was forced to see his previously privileged insularum Domini extended on through the sea, and after Magellan, even turning round upon itself.”” The very meaning of the term “world” changed; it no longer meant a limited space in the universe assigned by God to man or woman. World was no

longer given, but something of our making, “a vast inexhaustible quarry of cosmic matter.”® What will be important for McDermott is the coupling of the loss of the closed world with the wending toward

the west in America, that is, of the “inseparability of growth from horizon.”?

The second revolution, the religious one, “raised the ominous question as to whether any single version [of the biblical deposit] could ever again .. . hope to be solely responsible for . .. working [it] out.” It created confusion and a positive sense of vagueness. Part of that creative uncertainty concerned the Puritan errand into the wilderness, where “they became more intrigued with what they found than what they brought.” This can be read either as a fall from grace on their part or as an important instance of the role that a new environment plays in affecting old doctrine. Here, as elsewhere, McDer-

mott opts for the importance of “context,” that is, for “the

16 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY fundamental inseparability of ‘meaning offered’ from the setting in which it is to be evaluated.””!

McDermott admits that the Copernican revolution is a broader context than either of the first two revolutions already mentioned, but insists that it is nonetheless relevant and revealing. The Aristotelian/Ptolemaic universe was self-contained and cyclic. When this view was broken and the earth became a planet, “America then symbolized not an aberration or an overly-optimistic vision, but rather a genuine alternative.” In a sense, the Copernican revolution was radically humanizing, for it forced one to assume responsibility for at least some level of the meaning of the universe. McDermott is aware of the danger here, that is, having rejected claims to objectivity and certainty as false and illusory, “how long can a culture structure its inner life and its responses to the major questions on what seems to be an ad hoc metaphysics?”’!! In spite of the danger, he rejects the European response to the loss of these three paradigms, namely, a reassertion of the quest for certainty on the part of Descartes, Locke, and others, and opts instead for the American experience, which “showed that tentativeness, rather than a fall from grace, could become the framework for the optimum realization of growth.” McDermott maintains that in America “the affection for context as the determinant for doc-

trine yields in the long run an explicit acknowledgment of the primacy of time as the source of intelligibility. Over against the doctrine of obsolescence in which the history of man waits patiently for a paradisiacal Deus ex machina, the American temper points to a temporal-

ized eschatology in which Spirit manifests itself generation by generation and all counts to the end.” Going further, at a meta-theoretical level, McDermott suggests that American culture may be able to offer something to the next century by serving as a model. “Just as Greek culture was the medium through which emerged the philosophical metaphor that played such a decisive role in the formation of European culture, so, too, it may be that American culture is the medium through which will emerge the philosophical metaphor utilized in the formation of the new geo-political man.”

WILLIAM J. GAVIN 17 This affirmation of the importance of context carries with it the realization that “we cannot nostalgically return to the alleged “Golden Age’ of American philosophy”? while still on the other hand asserting that it has something positive to offer when applied to new contexts. Said differently in regarding the spiritual pilgrimage undergone

by the American people in their formative years, was it merely an external march or does it have a more symbolic dimension? This gives rise to a restatement of the essential problematic in an uncertain universe: “In effect, given the American context, an underlying doctrine of an open nature and an anthropomorphic view of historical destiny can generate either a bold, ongoing symbolization of man’s humaniz-

ing his environment, or a self-deceiving, polyanna version of the world in which the major dimensions of human life are lived vicariously.”” McDermott suggests that steps toward the better side of this dilemma may be taken by nurturing and preserving a new attitude toward knowledge that developed in America—a “culture epistemology’ that he calls “reflective primitivism” or “the experience of experience.” “In the American seventeenth century, philosophy was all but non-existent; yet reflection was intense and self-conscious, primarily as a response to a pressing and omnipresent collective experience of a situation that was novel at every turn.’ While there was no philosophy proper, there was a realization of ‘the dominance of... ‘experience’ over any conceptual anticipation of ‘how things should be.’”’ In short, the “stage was set for a long series of interactions between theoretical structures and a primitive yet malleable environment.” This emphasis upon the press of the environment became the characteristic feature of the American temperament. “Pragmatism, so often regarded as the typically American philosophical product, is but a pale reflection of an ingrained attitude of affirming the supremacy of experience over thought.’ In this experience of experience, “nature” and “time” have new meanings. Nature is seen primarily as space and as subject, at least partly, to the human being’s fabrication. Time is seen as option and not as a measure of a repetitive, cyclic condition.

18 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY The point at issue is that the reflective primitivism so deeply imbedded within the culture is primarily an attitude, which more than any other version of Western culture forces theoretical statements to respond more to the language of events than to its own mode of discourse. [The American] tradition was faced with an ever-shifting scene, characterized by widespread geographical, political and spiritual upheavals. These crises were built into the very continuity of the culture, and it was thereby fitting that basic and even primitive categories of understanding were transformed. The meaning of the reflective experience is to point precisely to the fact that such a transformation has its basis in the willingness of the culture, over a sustained period of time, to listen to the informing character of experience. '°

McDermott sees this faith in the experience of experience developing first into the notion of experience, probably in the works of histo-

rians like Frederick Jackson Turner, who made America selfconscious of the notion of “frontier” and its centrality in American self-understanding, and finally “with Dewey to the ‘method of experience.’”” He worries, however, about the slippage possible in moving from the experience of experience to the “articulation” of experience. ‘The question .. . is whether the articulation of these deeply felt cultural traditions maintains the richness and immediacy of the original

responses. We must constantly remember that philosophy is not self-contained; reflection should be located within the wider context of experience. Here “the problematic assumes the primary role, re-

served elsewhere for the ineffable, the Good, or the language of being.”’'” Or as Dewey put it in his critique that philosophy had become too reified and needed to be recovered, “Philosophy recovers itself when it ceases to be a device for dealing with the problems of philosophers and becomes a method, cultivated by philosophers, for dealing with the problems of men.’’!* Proposing experience as experimental as opposed to just “blunt,” McDermott enthusiastically tells the reader: “[e]xperience as sociological environment trumps philosophical thought at every turn.”””

WILLIAM J. GAVIN 19 But the very difficulty of putting this point into words only serves to remind us of the very real problem of language. In naming “experience’ as “sociological environment,” one perhaps runs the risk of replacing one candidate for certainty with yet another—this time with sociology. Going further, could it be even more difficult than McDermott admits to regain “the experience of experience” once articulation has taken place? One can recall here that for William James, one of McDermott’s favorite philosophers, it is extremely difficult to recover “pure experience’ once language has come upon the scene. This led James to say: As long as one continues talking, intellectualism remains in undisturbed possession of the field. The return to life can’t come about

by talking. It is an act; to make you return to life, I must set an example for your imitation, I must... deafen you to talk or to the importance of talk... . Or I must point, point to the mere that of life, and you by inner sympathy must fill out the what for yourselves.”°

Of course, the irony is that neither James nor McDermott did stop talking—and we are all the richer for this. Still, it would be interesting to hear his latest thoughts on this conundrum.

At the close of “The American Angle of Vision,” McDermott warns of two dangers that will occur if we persist in separating the method of analysis from the basic learning of the culture. First, the analysis will get caught up in the language of self-sustenance, using the same terminology for both criticism and for description. It will become insulated, only rarely making contact with the wider culture.

Second, such a separation of thought and action will result in the downplaying of the obligation to reconstruct experience, settling instead for pallid reflections of it. McDermott’s summary statement is a powerful one: From the Puritans to Dewey, one is offered a series of efforts, alternating in stresses and varying in success, to account for man’s most profound difficulties and concerns within the context of or-

dinary experience. In that tradition, all-embracing systematic

20 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY truth, whether it be theological, philosophical or political, was consistently submitted to the broadly based canons of a constantly shifting collective experience. Inevitably these doctrinal stances were broken under the pressure of having to support a more than simply theoretical posture. But there developed a highly sensitive feeling for the riches of experience as a way of reconstructing doc-

trine rather than as a malleable resource awaiting clarification. The doctrine of an open nature and the perpetual return to the invigoration of frontier language provide a sense of renewal and local horizon which serves to constantly galvanize energies.”!

In short, McDermott has developed a persuasive argument for the importance of paying attention to how one’s own experience is “had,” using the American context as a prime example. Such an argument, however, must be self-reflexive in nature. That is, it must be-

ware of replacing that to which it is trying to allude. Otherwise, it becomes guilty of the very “vicious intellectualism” that it decries.

A second danger is equally clear; McDermott’s argument constantly upholds the importance of “context.” As such, and as selfreflexive, it must be aware of how and when the context changes in a radical sense. We turn to this second issue in the next section.

Contexts: Pastoral, Urban, Global

McDermott attempts to refute Turner’s declaration that the context of the frontier has closed by redefining “the problematic.” The context has not been closed off; rather, it has changed in two fundamentally important ways. It has become urban and it has become global. In essays like “Nature Nostalgia and the City: An American Dilemma” and “Space, Time and Touch: Philosophical Dimensions of Urban Consciousness,” he chastises us for living at second hand, as Emerson might say, that is, for interacting with extensions of our own nostalgic ego in true Pygmalion fashion. As he puts it “American urban [wo]man has been seduced by nature. By this I mean that at the deepest level of his consciousness urban [wo]man functions on behalf of nature metaphors, nature expectancies, and a nostalgia for

WILLIAM J. GAVIN 21 an experience of nature which neither [s]he nor [her|his forbearers actually underwent” (CE 180). The results of this are doubly detrimental. First, we fail to perceive accurately how the original experience was had or undergone, substituting a pale romanticism for what was originally an open yet hardly benign experience. Second, we fail to appreciate the urban environment on its own terms. “On the one hand, we lament the city as being without nature. On the other hand, the nature we have in mind in such a lamentation and about which we are nostalgic is stripped of its most forbidding qualities, loneliness, unpredictability, and the terrors of the uninhabitable” (CE 192). The originality of the Puritans’ experience must be given its due; for them if the kingdom of heaven were to come it would come upon the land,

as the new Jerusalem. But pastoral space is not urban space, and urban time differs significantly from country time. An overly naive romanticizing of the pastoral has led to a failure to articulate urban experience in aesthetic terms; it has led to the conviction that the city

is a trap. In contrast, McDermott hopes that rehabilitation can replace relocation as we strive to articulate the change of context. Urban space for McDermott is vertical, not horizontal; it is more intense. Urban dwellers use nodal points as resting points as they travel throughout the day—kiosks, playgrounds, fruit stands, restaurants,

and so forth. “Urban space is not found space but chosen space, managed space, especially in the creation of a multiplicity of spaces within space. ... Urban space as vertical space is radically pluralized on a single site” (CE 213). Similarly, urban time is thin time, hoarded, intense; pastoral time is fat time, rolling along at an annual pace or

longer. “Urban time is clock time, jagged, self-announcing time, bearing in on us from a variety of mediated sources. .. . The rapid

pace of urban time radically transforms the experience of our bodies...” (CE 223). We need, in short, to restore continuity between the aesthetic and the everyday, and the everyday is now undeniably urban. ““We should be warned that nature nostalgia detaches us from the urban present and promulgates condescension, disinterest, and eventually hostility. For better or worse, American [wo]man is now

22 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY urban [wo]|man, or at the least megapolitan [wo]man. Nature nostalgia, no matter how subtle, does not serve [her|him well. It is time for a turning and a celebrating of the dazzling experiences we have but do not witness for all to share. The city is now our home; in the most traditional and profound sense of the word, it is our land” (CE 199).

A second rejection of Turner’s conclusion suggests that he was wrong because the journey is not over, in some fundamental sense. “California is the end of the trek and the end of the American physical journey. California is America turned back on itself, introverted and bewildered, for open space, horizontal and accessible, no longer stretches before us. [But vjisually, California announces China... . In a word, California announces a new world, a global world, a world in which the trek has doubled back on itself.’’?? Reminding us that “long before it became either fashionable or necessary, Dewey was involved globally” (SE 117), McDermott sets about indicating what the bequest of classical philosophy might be to the twenty-first century. These gifts are verbalized in slightly differing ways in various places in the McDermott corpus. In “Philosophical Prospects” they are: (1) pluralism as a positive and non-lamentable characteristic of the human condition; (2) provincialism, admittedly “wise” provin-

cialism; (3) the realization that for every step forward there is one sideward, if not backward, in terms of implications or relations; and (4) the realization that there is no ultimate meaning or finality, but only the possibility of some healing or amelioration for our human situation.”> In “Classical American Philosophy: A Reflective Bequest

to the Twenty-First Century,” these gifts are listed as “pluralism, a positive form of provincialism, tolerance, meliorism, a pragmatic epistemology and ethics, the necessity of mediation, and a skepticism about any form of ultimate salvation external to the human effort” (SE 96). In “Transiency and Amelioration” he refers to them as: (1) pluralism; (2) provincialism; (3) interrelatedness; (4) transience, as a form of life that can be celebrated; and (5) anti-eschatology as constructive (SE 73-74). In sum, McDermott reminds us to pay strict attention to when the context changes, so as not to let our philosophy degenerate into mere

WILLIAM J. GAVIN 23 antiquarianism. He does a remarkable job of delineating in some detail how the context has changed in two extra-ordinary ways: urban and global.The last section of this paper will deal with difficulties encountered in delineating changes in context, ending up with situations that refuse to be viewed as “‘problematic” at all. Issues, Problems, Crises

There are a series of places where McDermott seems to go beyond or transgress the textual boundaries of even American philosophy and to return again and again to the rich “quasi-chaos”’ of experience, vague, ambiguous, and even threatening as the latter may sometimes be. Perhaps he could comment on whether or not this is actually the case. Consider, for example, the following points.

First, it is worth keeping in mind that McDermott does not call himself a pragmatist. In “Trumping Cynicism with Imagination,” an interview with Michael Malone in A Parliament of Minds, he says, “I don't use the term pragmatist for myself. I mean, I’m basically a guy who’s interested in diagnosis of experiences, so I’m just as much into Camus as I am into Dewey.”™ Elsewhere, he goes so far as to say that classical American philosophy is itself something of a misnomer, insofar as it is simply termed “pragmatism.” “The classical American philosophers are more correctly understood as philosophers of experience, that is, diagnosers of the flow of experience. They keep their eye on the irreducibly problematic character of our life in the world, and they attempt to float ideas which are assuaging and temporarily resolving” (SE 128). While giving credit to the American thinkers for taking seriously the press of experience, McDermott is leery of confining this within the borders of a single methodology, for example, pragmatism. He prefers instead to speak of the pragmatism of James,

the pragmatism of Royce, the pragmatism of Dewey, and others. There is a “pragmatic upshot” to all this, and once again it has to do with experience, as opposed to linguistic or conceptual formulations

of the latter. Here, McDermott is keeping faith with “the spirit of William James,” and especially with James’s fear that experience will be somehow “left behind” for some methodology.

24 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY Second, while constantly emphasizing the importance of transactions, McDermott also begins in various places to problematicize those transitions. Thus, in “Life is in the Transitions,” having shown that for James “alienation is the inability to make relations,’ McDermott goes on to describe in some detail how relations turn sour in our experience. He speaks of “relation starvation,” “relation saturation,’ and “relation seduction” (CE 104-6). In “Experience Grows by

Its Edges,” “relation amputation” and “relation repression” are added to the list of impoverished experiences. “‘Relation starvation”

is here defined as “the incarnation of the a priori. All that happens has happened, for us, before.” “Relation amputation has to do with being strung out because of cutting off relationships prematurely, out of fright or habit.” “Relation saturation” describes the fate of people who collect new experiences like hash marks on the grip of a pistol; it “describes the fate of a person who eats without tasting.” “Relation seduction” describes those for whom experiences become locally fanatic because of a visionary goal or are pharmacologically induced. “Relation repression” refers to events such as the one that befell the

young Franz Kafka, who was seized by his dominating father and locked outside the home for the night because he was being irritating.

“This event, repressed and never worked out, did him ‘inner harm.’”’> In instances like these McDermott builds on his mentors, highlighting the continuity of relations in experience and also showing how things can go awry. McDermott’s most powerful statements along these lines are contained in his Patrick Romanell Lecture, “‘IIl-

at-Ease: The Natural Travail of Ontological Disconnectedness.” There he tells the reader: ... 1 believe that the being of being is to be disconnected, ontologically adrift, casting a net here, a hook there and all the while confusing a strategy with a solution. ... 1 am aware that this can be read as a telling departure from the radically empirical, pragmatic metaphysics of James and Dewey. Certainly it would appall those who hold to the conservative metaphysics of Peirce. And, yes, it is Camus who is speaking here, the Camus who ... tells us that for him suicide is the “one truly serious philosophical problem.””®

WILLIAM J. GAVIN 25 Later on in this same essay, McDermott tells the reader, ““[t]he nat-

ural rhythm for being in the world is more akin to a roller coaster than to a hammock. At the very least, we should watch for what is behind our back, whether it be bacterial, viral, or cyclonic.””’ In passages like these then, McDermott continues to allow for the importance of Deweyan transactions and Jamesian transitions, but wants us to realize both the difficulties and the dangers involved.

There is a third area where McDermott seems not only to problematize the transactions, but also to wonder aloud whether they still exist as a possibility. Thus, in “Threadbare Crape: Reflections on the American Strand,” he charges that “we have turned in on ourselves.

... Of late, I carry with me, resonant of many others among us, a lamentable dubiety about whether, in fact, we are still able to tap that eros of community that has served us so well for the past three centuries.”?® In “Transiency and Amelioration” he charges that “America is experiencing a pervasive erosion in its belief in the myth of progress” (SE 64). And again, “America is guilty of a failure of nerve and has lost sight of the specific meaning for itself, of the Shakespearean

maxim, ‘to thine own self be true.’ ... America has begun to back and fill’ (SE 67). Finally, in “America: The Loneliness of the Quest,” he tells us that “[f]or a number of reasons, America may be finished” (SE 87). Standing over and against these texts, sometimes in the very

same article, are McDermott’s assertions that “the nectar is in the journey, that it ain't over till the fat lady sings, that one needs to exercise a Jamesian “‘will to believe,” and so forth.” But now the options, while still forced, seem less equal in nature, and McDermott has more and more difficulty convincing both himself and the reader that both are still readily available or even still “‘live.” Hence, more pessimism sets in. This becomes still more evident in the fourth “problematic” area, death—and dying. McDermott has long believed that “we should experience our own lives in the context of being permanently afflicted, that is, of being terminal” (SE 164). While it is true that we all suffer from the “disease” of finitude, this fact “. .. is the most repressed and denied of all facts in the human condition” (SE 157). His “solution,”

26 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY not an unexpected one, is to celebrate the temporal and the quality of the journey. Once again, the nectar seems to be in the journey. But in some texts, the nectar seems to be in danger of turning sour. McDermott sees hubris as “a name for our refusal to face our own finitude, the immanence of your death and my death” (SE 95). However, in “Why Bother? Is Life Worth Living?” he suggests that, ironically, “only a response of refusal to accept the righteous character of the inevitability of death can make it possible for life to be worth living.” This is Camus speaking, though McDermott spells out what he terms “the problematic” in Deweyan terminology. “Following John Dewey, we live only at this time and at no other time... .”*° But now for McDermott the journey is viewed as laced with suffering, and he tells the reader: “I try as hard as I can to believe that the nectar is in the journey and not in its final destination. I stand with T. S. Eliot, who warns that ‘For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.’ . . . For what it is worth, and that, too, is a perilous question, I now believe, shakily, insecurely and barely, that life is worth living!’’*! Here, James’s “will to believe” has become extremely prob-

lematized; hopefully for the author himself, it has not weakened to the extent that it is no longer viable. The proof of the pudding is still in the eating, or the acting, but it has become harder to act than it seems to be in the classical American tradition. McDermott once said that “Dewey’s Experience and Nature is all about death!’’*? This way of “reading against the grain” once again shows clearly where he is willing to go beyond the tradition. While the transactional philosophy offered by Dewey is still operative, it can be viewed “from the other side,” so to speak, that is, one wherein the participle “dying” rather than “living” assumes center stage. All this,

however, is but a prelude to McDermott’s assertion that not everything in life can be cast in terms of a problem or “problematic situa-

tion.” “In Irish family parlance,” he says, “a distinction is made between problem and trouble. The former can be managed, by patching, punting, or the steadfast waiting it out as time erodes the difficulty in question. Trouble, however, is a very different matter. It is the name given to the century-long intransigence within the embattled

WILLIAM J. GAVIN 27 factions of Northern Ireland. The meaning of trouble is that one is at wit’s end. Trying is possible and spiritually helpful but seemingly nothing can be done for alleviation.”’ Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, he tells the reader that William and Henry James, and even Garth, had only problems, whereas Robinson and Alice had trouble and were constantly in trouble.» In several of the instances mentioned above we can see the situation changing or metaphorizing even as McDermott writes. In some instances, the difficulty does not seem insurmountable, though perhaps requiring hard labor on our part. Thus, the inclusion of Camus within the fold or canopy does not seem radical until one realizes that perhaps, just perhaps, there is nothing one can do about one’s “situation” except rebel against it, even though this is doomed to failure in advance, as Camus suggested in “the myth of Sisyphus.” Here, if there is “possibility,” there may not be actual hope. Here, even if there is hope, the grounds for such hope seem to be almost non-exis-

tent. One wonders what McDermott has in mind here, for he has surely exasperated and problematized the contextual situation as the latter is offered up by classical American philosophy in general. The possibility that the trek is over initially sounds like it might be reclaimed on an urban or a global level. But, in the last three instances delineated above, “‘all that is solid melts into air.” Here, McDermott forges “ahead,” or perhaps “aside” or “aback,” striving, with some considerable success, to avoid Samuel Beckett’s suggestion that “there is nothing to be done, except to give oneself the illusion that one is doing something.’’** John Dewey can be viewed as a storyteller who was constantly telling us how we got from there to here, that is, from

the Greeks to the seventeenth century, from a pre-Darwinian to a post-Darwinian context. But here the storyteller McDermott has become a “wounded storyteller.” In his book, The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness and Ethics, Arthur W. Frank applauds William James’s fear of his own ambition to “settle” the Universe’s hash. “To settle the Universe’s hash is to place oneself outside the vulnerability and

contingency that being in the Universe involves.” For Frank, ‘‘[s]ooner or later, everyone is a wounded storyteller,” their wounds,

28 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY in a sense, acting as a source of power. “As wounded, people may be cared for, but as storytellers, they care for others. The ill, and those who suffer, can also be healers.’’** Here, the “problem” is that we don’t have a problem. In other words, it may well be that, as Dewey noted, ‘‘a problem well put is half-solved,” but here McDermott is suggesting that sometimes, at least sometimes, we don’t undergo or “have”’ our experience in a problematic or “uniquely qualified” manner.*” He sounds here like he is calling for a reaffirmation of this rather “tragic” situation, and it would be interesting to hear whether he believes it has been unduly repressed. Conclusion?

McDermott’s “turn” to the poem “Roots/Edges’’*® seems to parallel the trek undertaken by Nietzsche; it involves the realization that one cannot confront the dangers of an Apollonian view of reality from an Apollonian “perch” or standpoint. Nietzsche, in “An Attempt at Self

Criticism,” tells the reader that he went about things in the wrong manner in The Birth of Tragedy by giving away the victory to science in advance. He “starts over’ —perhaps eternal recurrence—in Thus Spake Zarathustra, which is billed as a tragedy. There may or may not be room for the tragic in Dewey,* but there surely is in McDermott.*° Like the poet William Carlos Williams, whose work In the American Grain he admires and uses as a subtitle for one of his books, The Culture of Experience, McDermott realizes that “the locality is the only

universal.” Williams himself got this insight from Dewey, from a small piece that he (Dewey) wrote for The Dial.’ It emerges clearly in Williams’s poem, Paterson, which is best seen as a collage or a montage, perhaps one that doesn’t quite add up, but that nevertheless contains a strong sense of beauty. As Williams put it, concerning his “failure” to achieve a final synthesis, in a letter to Marianne Moore: If the vaunted purpose of my poem seems to fall apart in the end—it’s rather frequent that one has to admit an essential failure. At times there is no other way to assert the truth than by stating our failure to achieve it. If I did not achieve a language I

WILLIAM J. GAVIN 29 at least stated what I would not say. I would not melt myself into the great universal sea (of love) with all its shapes and colors.”

McDermott’s version of this is to admit that “[t]here’s no canopy of explanation. We ain’t going anyplace else, you see?”’* At the very beginning of this presentation, it was stated that perhaps the most profitable way to portray the relationship between experience and culture was in terms of “the experience of experience” versus “the articulation of experience.” But this relationship is a complex and difficult one, for the very articulation is itself the problem, at least potentially. McDermott holds that “[o]ne bequest of America to the new world is to be weary of all bequests, even those noble in intention, for it is the quality of experience as actually undergone by the culture that proves decisive for viability and a creative future.’ American culture, complex, pluralistic, and transient as it is, is one that pointed beyond itself back toward the richness and intensity of primary experience long enough for such an outlook to gain a momentum of its own. Or at least it once, perhaps, functioned in this manner. This task, exciting and noble as it may have been, might now be about to enter a new level of danger and difficulty. For McDermott has warned that “the contribution of America to the future of world culture is no longer dependent on whether America itself can institutionalize its own best wisdom” (SE 60). If this is so, then we must be doubly cautious not to let any given description of experience replace that to which it should be calling attention. If America can no longer “walk the walk,” the “talk” becomes something more than simply idle chatter. The language begins to function as distracting rather

than directive, as an entertaining portrait of an antiquarian past rather than an anticipation of, and an Emersonian inspiration toward, the future. Given this context and this danger, perhaps the best compliment one can give to McDermott is to say that in his particular corpus articulation is constantly held up for criticism, that the universal is indeed in the particular, and that things or events do add up somewhat,

but not at all in an overly Hegelian manner. The nectar, for the reader, has indeed been in the journey, tattered and frail as that sometimes might have been.

TWO

THE PRAGMATIC SCHOLAR AND THE HISTORY OF AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY James Campbell

ED

[° the autobiographical statement that John McDermott provided for his first published essay in 1958, he describes himself in

part as being “currently engaged in investigating American philosophical thought of the last century.”’! Unlike most souls who spend

their lives wandering from one ultimately unsatisfying idol to another, McDermott can still say over forty years later that he is drawing sustenance from his journey through the history of American thought. We, of course, would want to add that his role has proven to be far more significant than readers of this modest self-introduction might have anticipated. During those forty-some years, John McDermott has played a primary role in the great renascence of in-

terest in the history of American philosophical thought, and as other essays in this volume also demonstrate, he has contributed and continues to contribute to the advancement of that tradition in numerous areas. {30 3

JAMES CAMPBELL 31 1

McDermott’s work on the history of American philosophy has fo-

cused upon the “classical” period that offered us the writings of Charles Sanders Peirce (who was born in 1839), William James, Josiah

Royce, John Dewey, George Herbert Mead, and George Santayana (who died in 1952). While he does not limit himself to these years or figures, McDermott believes that there is something extraordinary about the classical period. As he writes: “classical American philosophy resembles a many-colored mosaic, something like a wall painting by Marc Chagall. The strident differences in their philosophical views are held together by their constant refraction of the American scene,

often enthusiastic, often critical, but distinctively American in their pluralism, meliorism and temporalism.”? As this and many other passages indicate, McDermott’s presentation of the history of American philosophy emphasizes both that it can be understood well only when interpreted through a grounding within American culture and that it cannot be understood at all if it is viewed as being too narrowly ‘Pragmatic.’ We can consider these themes in sequence. McDermott’s approach to the history of American philosophy has not been through the thin veneer of academic lectures and recitations in the early colleges. Rather, he enters the flow of American philosophical thought through the experience of the Puritans. McDermott is, further, not so much interested in a cold examination of the intricacies of Puritan doctrines as he is in understanding how these doctrines informed the Puritans’ lives. He is especially concerned to understand how the Puritans interpreted the events, sufferings, and challenges of their experience in America, and how they fashioned meaning for their existence in the New World. Of particular interest in McDermott’s inquiries is the role of the group in the Puritan errand, the workings of “the congregational insight of a covenanted community” to address “the forbidding rigors of the wilderness.”’ He writes:

It soon became clear... that the wilderness existed, but it was spatially external and it lay to the immediate west, rather than

32 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY festering within the breasts of Puritan men and women. ... A dialectic soon set up between the systematic loneliness of the frontier and a developing sense of possibility, to be realized over the next hill, across the next river, atop the next mountain. The experience of the inner wilderness of the depraved Calvinist soul gave way to the potential fertility of the American settler, always on the move, perennially restless, while searching for the signs of salvation, on, in, of and about the land.

This odyssey of the Puritans became an American odyssey, McDermott believes, leaving ““a permanent deposit on the American soul.’ My own pre-classical starting point is elsewhere, with the attempts of Benjamin Franklin to put the discoveries of human reason to work in bettering the lives of his fellows. Other commentators begin with the struggle of America’s native population to avoid extermination, with the strivings of the kidnapped children of Africa to overcome the horrors of enslavement, or with the efforts of women to claim a status equal to men. The important point in these, and in the many other starting points, is that they all represent attempts to formulate philosophically meaningful lives. All of them are thus representative of the pragmatic core of the evolving American culture that must be part of its philosophy. All of them contributed to the grounding of American philosophy in what McDermott calls “the steadfast belief in the finite, transitory, and malleable character of the human journey and the accompanying habit of being chary about extra-experiential resolutions of our problems” (SE 97). To recognize this, however, is not to suggest that the American philosophical tradition is “‘Pragmatic” in any narrow sense. The history of American philosophy is not the history of Pragmatism. It is not to be reduced to the question of how truth “works.” As McDermott puts it, the American tradition does not demonstrate a narrow, “Pragmatic,” approach to philosophy, but “this tradition, however novel its attempted resolutions, has as its concern no less than the full spectrum of problems that have bedeviled the West from its outset.”* Such reductive interpretations might seem acceptable to those, especially but not exclusively Europeans, who have no real understanding of the grounding of American philosophy. McDermott

JAMES CAMPBELL 33 here points to “the long-standing condescension of European thinkers to American thought, an activity often given lamentable support by American intellectuals, who ignore the warning of Emerson and would rather court the whited sepulchers of the past than pay attention to new wisdom.” He maintains, on the contrary, that without some sense of the multiple, pragmatic roots of pre-classical philoso-

phy in America, we are likely to place an overemphasis upon the problems of knowledge and methodology, upon technical and narrowly philosophical issues, and to neglect the broader intellectual issues in psychology, religion, metaphysics, aesthetics, and education

that have played such a powerful role in the history of American thought and society. Moreover, McDermott writes that “Pragmatism was never intended to be a full-blown philosophical system.”’ Rather, it was designed “as a way of clearing the philosophical world of the claims of ‘foundationalism,’ by which many philosophers claimed to arrive at apodictic certitude, never to be questioned or to be challenged.”’ It may be, of course, that in our contemporary world the terms “Pragmatism” and “pragmatism” are themselves unsalvageable. McDermott suggests that they have been “‘sullied beyond redemption, * and he does not call himself a Pragmatist.° At the same time, all of his own work is deeply and incurably pragmatic. A consideration of McDermott’s writings on the history of American philosophy also indicates two clear methodological emphases. The first has to do with the importance of making available the most accurate texts possible—in his words, “‘to present and clarify the tex-

tual tradition’—and then putting the ideas and perspectives that these texts contain to work in contemporary American life. Rather than just preserving the American philosophical tradition, McDermott writes that we need “‘to utilize the insights of that tradition in an effort to confront the significant problems of our time” (CE 100; cf. SE 229). McDermott has long contributed to both aspects of this emphasis. His interest in supplying accurate texts—a task at which he has labored throughout his career—has never been an interest in the texts for their own sake, however important it is to get them right. It has always been, rather, an interest in improving our historical tools

34 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY so that they can help us to understand and engage the complexities of our present situation. The second methodological emphasis that can be drawn from McDermott’s presentation of the history of American philosophy is the ongoing need to recognize that it is not just a story of ideas, but of people. He writes that we must “dig beneath the bland commentaries on the American philosophers and proceed to study their lives in depth” (JD xv) and demonstrates in his writing the importance of biographical study to philosophical work. As he writes in appreciation of one intellectual biography, “[e]very major thinker, especially a philosopher, needs and deserves an initiating study, one that ties

life and work together in a coherent, chronological narrative.’ Within this biographical consideration, moreover, is the importance of the dramatic centers in life. We ought to be concerned not just with dates and locales of philosophers’ careers, with the names of their teachers and the sequence of their published works, but with the role that these and other facts played in the philosophers’ ongoing lives. McDermott focuses, for example, not on the fact that Royce at some point married and had children, but rather on the sorrow at the heart of his family. He does this because Royce’s family situation was a major element in the environment within which he attempted to understand human existence. Similarly, McDermott’s frequent allusions to James’s depressive crises are not lurid glances at some Jamesian flaw, but attempts to demonstrate the fundamental flimsiness at the core of James’s sense of being. So too we find in McDermott’s consideration of Dewey’s rejection of his mother’s intrusive salvation not simply a “cause” of his own atheism, but a source of his desire to open religious practice to the problems of social life. This emphasis on exploring the dramatic centers in life is combined with the earlier themes of grounding our inquiries in the prac-

tical aspects of the broad American experience in McDermott’s consideration of Emerson. The life of Emerson, he writes, was “riven throughout with illness and premature deaths, culminating in the destruction by fire of his home” (JD xv). These deaths—of his father when he was eight, of his wife Ellen after two years of marriage, of his

JAMES CAMPBELL 35 son Waldo at age five—and other personal tragedies force us to abandon any simple interpretation of Emerson as optimist. As McDermott writes, “his writings should be read as a continuing struggle to render the richest possible version of our situation” as we face “the intracta-

ble problem of evil.’’* In addition, for McDermott, Emerson has broad and deep roots in the American intellectual tradition, and his cosmopolitan religious leanings and democratic temper raise him above the numerous shadowy figures who often crowd accounts of the pre-classical period of American philosophy. McDermott’s Emerson, in other words, is a dramatic figure whose message of openness and democracy could inspire a philosophical revolution. As he writes: The central theme of Emerson’s life and work is that of possibility.

In an anticipation of the attitude of Martin Buber, Emerson believes that “we are really able,” that is, we and the world are con-

tinuous in an affective and nutritional way. . . . Emerson’s persistent stress on human possibility is fed from two sources: his

extraordinary confidence in the latent powers of the individual soul when related to the symbolic riches of nature and his belief that the comparatively unarticulated history of American experience could act as a vast resource for the energizing of novel and creative spiritual energy. (SE 30)

This sense of possibility, when opened up to include “the often denigrated ‘common’ person,” provided a philosophical foundation for the personal exploration of the meaning of existence. Emerson “‘be-

lieved that ordinary experience was epiphanic if we but open ourselves to its virtually infinite messages.”’? Emerson’s sun shines today

also as it has in the past; it shines upon us just as upon others. We need no external salvation if we but recognize our potentialities and, as McDermott writes, “transform the obviousness of our situation by a resolute penetration of the liberating symbolism present in our own experience” (SE 31).

McDermott also discusses the impact of Emerson’s revolution on the developing American philosophical tradition. While he admits that Emerson “did not write a systematic work in philosophy,” McDermott maintains that he “unquestionably bequeathed an impor-

tant philosophical vision and countless philosophical pieces.”

36 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY Emerson’s legacy was the effect of his writings on others; in this regard, McDermott asserts that “Emerson wrought more in the lives of the classical American philosophers than written evidence can sustain” (SE 42)." In explicating this point, McDermott suggests such aspects as the following: Emerson’s generalized approach to inquiry is clearly a foreshadowing of that found subsequently in James, Dewey, and Royce.

. .. Emerson also anticipated the doctrine of “radical empiricism,” which is central to the philosophy of James and Dewey....

Emerson did affirm the primary importance of relations over things and he did hold to an aggressive doctrine of implication. Further, his metaphors were more allied to the language of continuity than to that of totality or finality. Finally, Emerson shared that modern assumption which began with Kant and is found repeated in James and Dewey—namely, that the known is, in some way, a function of the knower. (SE 32)

We shall see some of Emerson’s impact as we proceed through McDermott’s considerations of Royce, James, and Dewey. What should also emerge as we proceed is a sense of McDermott as an Emersonian figure who, by the power of his presentations, can inspire readers to seek the possibilities within their own experience.

2

We can begin with Josiah Royce, whose creative work, McDermott notes, “shows an unusual range of genre: literary essays, geographical essays, popular and rigorously technical philosophy essays, theological treatises, formal papers in logic and mathematics—even a novel” (JR 2). Royce’s philosophical work is, as McDermott recognizes, both of great importance and underappreciated in most accounts of American philosophy. His speculations as to the causes of this neglect are several, all centering around Royce’s style of writing.'? He points out a number of times that much of Royce’s philosophical work, until late in his life, was “ponderous and bloated.” !* McDermott rejects the simple suggestion that there is something “foreign” or “Teutonic”

JAMES CAMPBELL 37 about Royce’s work. He maintains on the contrary that, while Royce was deeply committed to European romanticism and especially to German Idealism, he was “the philosopher most profoundly and explicitly influenced by his American experience” (JR 41; cf. 225). It seems more likely to McDermott that the heaviness in Royce’s philosophic writing resulted from the sort of project in which he thought he was engaged. The philosophical enterprise, as Royce seems to have understood it, entailed the overwhelming of opponents with waves of interlocking arguments. Royce was “voluble to a fault and seemingly

knew everything and then some,’'* McDermott writes; he quotes John Jay Chapman’s claim that Royce was “the John L. Sullivan of philosophy ... ready for all comers” (JR 7). This style of philosophy by tsunami, that Royce adopted early on as his philosophical method, led to a reluctance on the part of later potential readers to study his works as styles of philosophizing changed. While McDermott reports that Royce was reticent about discussing personal details (cf. JR 4, 29), he finds in the story of Royce’s life the

key to understanding his philosophical quest. Born and raised in frontier California, the only son in an intensely evangelical family that had followed the gold, but not too well, Royce grew up lost and uneasy. He was educated into the highest ranks of Euro-American intellectual life—at the University of California, Leipzig, Gottingen, and Johns Hopkins—and, after a brief sojourn back in Berkeley, he taught philosophy for over thirty years at Harvard. In spite of his academic success, however, Royce lived with feelings of intellectual inferiority

and as an outsider throughout his days in Cambridge, in what McDermott calls “deep spiritual exile.”!> This sense of exile was, moreover, just one layer of Royce’s troubles. As McDermott writes, Royce

“hid from view his own considerable mental anguish and the tragic lives of some of his children” (JD xv). These misfortunes included a rocky marriage, severe mental problems within the family, among them his own bouts with depression and the dementia that crippled his son Christopher, ongoing economic constraints, and so on.!° Moreover, Royce saw his own personal suffering as representative of the suffering of others. Still, McDermott detects “however subtle, a

38 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY buoyancy in Royce, despite his burdens.” Because Royce believed that

all of this suffering somehow had to have meaning and strove “to unravel the framework which enables error and evil to perdure,” he survived. As McDermott continues, Royce’s “extraordinary accomplishments reflect an inner strength and a capacity for nutrition, otherwise he would have withered.”’!” Eventually, this striving flowered

in Royce’s paeans to the community. Earlier, however, he had attempted to construct an intellectual solution by using the philosophical tools of logic and metaphysics that he wielded so well to display what he saw as the root of our human unease.

Royce’s method here was that of Idealism: to disarm uncomfortable particulars by finding their meaning within the larger system. As McDermott writes, for Royce “single ideas were but fragments unless they were grasped as part of an infinite system.’’'* Thus, for example, is intellectual error redeemed. “Holding that we cannot ascribe error to any judgment, unless it be compared to an Absolute Truth,” McDermott writes, “Royce sees error as a torso, a fragment of the seamless garment of Truth.” He continues: the existence of error as a particular, empirical antifact is able to be so judged if, and only if, a total fabric exists in which all of the possibilities extant are known, by someone, somewhere, somehow, somewhen. This latter capacity must exist because we do come to know about counterfactuals. Thus, from a single miscreant event, claim, or judgment, we can conclude to a wider, all em-

bracing whole which gives credibility to our decision on the veritability of the particular in question.

Evil is redeemed in a similar fashion. As McDermott writes, “Royce attempts the same strategy .. . to turn the very existence of particular evil into a proof for the existence of Absolute Good. For Royce, the acknowledgment that an act is morally evil is a sign that it is being overcome on behalf of a good will.’’’? In neither case, however, does McDermott believe that Royce’s Idealistic solution ultimately succeeds. Moreover, he believes that Royce eventually came to see that his difficulties required not purely intellectual recontexting, but experiential renewal. The problem at the core of Royce’s being, and of

JAMES CAMPBELL 39 ours, is not to be cured by finding some philosophical resolution of error and evil. Rather, it is to be cured, as Royce slowly came to recog-

nize, by understanding and combating human isolation. Individuals must be part of a life of shared memories and hopes; isolation is to be overcome by a life of community, loyalty, and interpretation. While McDermott may be suggesting that Royce’s early philosophical work is of lesser importance, he is not suggesting that Royce made a sudden shift toward social philosophy late in his life. Royce’s work had always contained, McDermott writes, a social philosophy “laced with homilies and a plea for tolerance and the willingness to develop

a community.” What was different after his conversion was that Royce merged what McDermott calls his “parallel strategies” of writing about logic and metaphysics and about community in his 1913

masterpiece, The Problem of Christianity. In this work, he uses Peirce’s triadic doctrine of signs—“converted by Royce into a method of interpretation,’ McDermott notes—to construct a philosophically erounded doctrine of mediation. In this volume, “Royce finally gives way in his fealty to the language of Absolute Idealism and begins to

speak more of the ‘community,’ in process, than of the Absolute.” Rising out of an appreciation of a wholesome provincialism, Royce’s understanding of community emphasizes the ways in which humans interpret within and among groups to ameliorate conflicting senses of mission. He thus calls upon us, McDermott writes, “to enter into a form of interpretation so that our jealously guarded turf, beliefs, commitments and assertions are at the very least, subject to the viewpoint of another, distant, although concerned participant.’ In the course of this inexhaustible process of interpretation, the Great Community will emerge.

We can hope to attain such community, however, only if we and our fellows demonstrate loyalty to the goal of community in our lives. As McDermott writes, for both Royce and himself “loyalty is an irre-

ducibly crucial human virtue in our daily lives and in our effort to sustain a polis worthy of our deepest needs and yearnings.” Few of us, of course, demonstrate such loyalty to sustaining our communities. What we see as our private sorrows incline us toward isolation,

40 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY and our thin sense of social place inclines us further toward doctrinaire fixes. McDermott continues: The most notorious single obstacle to the building of a great and beloved community, according to Royce, is the existence of the detached individual. That person who lacks loyalty and concern is fair game for seduction by those nefarious movements which seek to wreck the community on behalf of some political, social or religious ideology, all of them self-aggrandizing.

When the loyalty of these detached individuals is diverted by such “a predatory cause”’ that is “oppressive to our freedoms and loyalties,’””! and loyal ultimately only to itself, then the Great Community is lost. Only when our loyalty is to the cause of the broader community, and finally to loyalty itself, can it contribute to the resolution of Royce’s, and our, troubles. McDermott indicates two sorts of difficulties that he sees with our

attempts to follow Royce. At one end, there is the nonparticipation of the many individuals who resist the pull of the community, preferring the detachment of individual freedom to a life of shared burdens. McDermott points to the “deep and stressful conflict between the pull of loyalty and the personal desire for autonomy” that we will ever need to overcome. At the opposite end is our difficulty in knowing in advance that our cause is not a predatory one that will cut us off from external nutrition and ultimately destroy our potential for any higher loyalty. McDermott does not say if he thinks it is possible to recognize predatory causes before one is ensnared. While he points to Royce’s call for a communal pedagogy that would foster this higher loyalty, he points as well to “the depressing and dubious advantage”’ of hindsight held “‘by those of us who are children of the Holocaust and the genocide of Rwanda, to mention only two of this century's commit-

ments to a cause gone profoundly and violently awry.” In both of these difficulties, McDermott suggests that the problem is ultimately not Royce’s, but ours; his recognition of “[t]he paradox at the heart of any declamation of loyalty’? is the starting point of any attempt to overcome the problem of human isolation.

JAMES CAMPBELL 41 3

In 1962, McDermott wrote that “[t]he neglect of William James, subtle in that many speak glowingly of him but few take his thought seriously, is one of the great misfortunes of the contemporary American philosophical scene.’’? A few years later, I purchased McDermott’s recently published Modern Library edition of James, the dust jacket of which described James as “‘a timeless writer” and ““America’s most original philosopher.” I must confess that I was at the time an undereraduate strongly influenced by my department’s cripplingly narrow conception of the mission of philosophy, and that on first reading I found little in James that connected with my sense of that mission. I can remember even today the impression that this volume contained an unseemly large selection of the works of such a minor figure and that my $3.95 had probably been wasted. The fact that McDermott

went on to claim that the golden age of American philosophy was “inconceivable without James as an originating force” (WJ xxiii) hardly increased my appreciation of this volume or of this McDermott fellow. I have happily changed my mind on both of these points. Far more important than my conversion, of course, is the general fact that James is no longer so sadly neglected; this is in large part because of the efforts of McDermott.

McDermott writes that “James’s thought is the vestibule to the thought and values of the twentieth century” (SE 108). Among the breakthroughs to which James provides entry, McDermott lists “the directions of modern physics, psychoanalysis and depth psychology, modern art, and the emphasis on relations rather than on objects or substances.” And, perhaps most important of all, is the point that “James is a process philosopher, by which we mean that he assesses the journey, the flow, to be more important than the outcome or the

product.’ In the course of this journey, McDermott continues, James “involves us in the three great mooring points of human experience: self-consciousness, national culture and cosmic setting” (WJ xxiii). Overall, James was “one of America’s finest philosophers and writers, a person who stood four-square at the center of Euro-American thought for some fifty years.” Yet, at the same time, James “wrote

42 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY for reflective people, no matter their occupation or persuasion. As such, James is the thinker who most appeals to the average person seeking wisdom and depth in his or her own, personal experiences.”’° McDermott’s presentations of the ideas of specific philosophers rely, as we have seen, on personal materials. ““The biographical details of the life of a major thinker,” he writes, are “always of some assistance in enabling us to grasp the issues, the responses, and the omissions found in the work. In the case of William James, the details are of paramount importance, for his life and his work were entwined in an unusually intimate way.’?° The details are, of course, familiar to anyone who has read one of McDermott’s pieces on James; he was a neurasthenic, with myriad symptoms some of which were surely

hypochondriacal. James’s focus upon his own personal condition presents a lifelong record of minor imbalances and discomforts, with occasional moments of extraordinary vigor and triumph and others of abject collapse. McDermott frequently points in particular to what he calls “the crisis texts” from the years 1868 to 18707’ as an indication of the lowest point of James’s existence. He describes the impact of James’s vastation—“ That shape am I, | felt, potentially” (WJ 6)—not as crushing, however, but as liberating. McDermott writes that this experience “pressed upon him the need to generate, de novo, a promethean self worthy of the hidden but repressed possibilities of consciousness that all of us harbor but fail to energize.’’**

“With James,’ McDermott writes, “the philosophical enterprise begins anew, for if one is imbued with his viewpoint, nothing is seen

in quite the same way again” (WJ xv). In particular, James understood what it meant to live in the shadow of Copernicus, in a universe without a center in which humans had to affirm their “centrality and

dignity by the humanizing of all entities and events, including the cosmos itself.” McDermott continues that James “knew from the first, that if human life were to maintain itself in its most significant and creative aspects, it would have to build itself into the apparently limitless and awesome dimensions of space.’ Thus, James, whose tentative and open-ended mode of thinking “provided such a scandal to

tradition philosophy” can offer us “a plausible and fruitful point of

JAMES CAMPBELL 43 departure’ in our search for a workable contemporary cosmology (WJ xlviti—xlix; cf. SE 54). James recognized, as McDermott continues, that our existence makes possible only “intelligibility without a principle of total meaning, and the experience of continuity without the knowledge of finality” (WJ xlviui; cf. xx). Further, for James:

Reality is not given, final, and complete to the human mind. Rather, it is “congenial” to our understanding and our principles of organization. Reality is not permanently opaque and unintelligible, as philosophical nihilism contends. To the contrary, the

human mind and reality enter into a relationship in which the “powers” of human imagination and the “energies” of human activity act as a constituting source for meaning. Such meaning is never complete, for the “inmost nature of reality” is only “congenial” to our powers and, therefore, never fully explicated.

The roots of this “never-ending pluralism,’ McDermott writes, are two-fold. On the one hand, “nature itself is subject to multiple per-

mutations that violate its own history,” and on the other, “each human perspective is precisely that, a perspective, and cannot be ex-

actly dovetailed with the perspectives of other human beings.””° Moreover, this pluralism does not represent “a temporary fall from grace.” For James, McDermott writes, pluralism is not “a waiting

game, a temporary aberration until the archons of clarity— theological, scientific, or ideological—can rescue us from confusion.”

Pluralism is rather “the irreducible characteristic of not only the human presence but also of the evolutionary and developmental character of reality” (SE 112). McDermott continues that “by grounding intelligibility without recourse to a principle of total explanation and by affirming the continuity of experience without leaning on eschatology or on the knowledge of finality,” James is able “to avoid cynicism and agnosticism in religious, scientific, ethical, and psychological areas of inquiry.’ Rounding out McDermott’s general presentation of James is the point that James is not an optimist. “Faith is not belief in something about which we are certain,’ McDermott writes. ‘Rather, belief for James was an energizing, a probe, a sally forth with risk acknowledged.””*° Life for James is, he continues, “a series of

4 4 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY grapplings, context by context, more or less resolving, more or less enriching” (CE 111).

James attempted to develop this general vision into a philosophical perspective, and in the face of the more familiar positions of his day

that McDermott lists as “monism, dualism, panpsychism, associationism, phenomenalism, empiricism, and idealism,” he slowly fashioned his own. This new philosophy—radical empiricism—was to be

true to experience in its fullness. Experience is, for McDermott, “definitely the most important single concern” in James’s philosophy.*! James’s humans live in a construct that McDermott describes as follows: “Reality is a network of concatenatedly related objects or things, rendered as such by human conceptual decision, in keeping with the possibilities and limitations structured by nature on its terms and historically rendered by previous human activity.” McDermott continues: Human experience is an aware flow within the activities of reality at large, which in turn is also in process, unfinished, and broken

into by novelties relative to the patterns already set up. For the most part we live our lives focally, that is, within a familiar range of experiences rendered clear to us by our conceptual systems or simply accepted by habituation. Ideally this focus opens outward, reaching toward a fringe of experiences, often vague and inarticulate but subtly continuous and profoundly meaningful. Religious experience, unusual psychic experiences, aesthetic experiences, drug experiences, psychophysical breakthroughs as in Yoga, and the range of allegedly neurotic and psychotic experiences are potentially rich possibilities at the fringe. (CE 106-7)

Avoiding the usual philosophical fetishes of “simplicity and clearness, James’s concentration upon the importance of the fringe as the outward range of our experience yields an overall picture that McDermott characterizes as “a version of experience whose width and novelty is unrivaled in the history of Western philosophy.’ McDermott attempts on various occasions to bring some order to James’s sprawling philosophical canvas by focusing readers’ attention

upon specific themes like pluralism, tychism, temporalism, radical

JAMES CAMPBELL 45 empiricism, pragmatism, consequential ethics, and the moral equivalent of war;*? however, the continuity among these themes is so strong that the various headings are not that important. The essential point

that McDermott makes repeatedly is that there is much more to James than what might appear in a narrow presentation of the author

of Pragmatism. To speak of James as a Pragmatist—or any other ‘“-ist’”—is “inadequate,” McDermott writes at one point. “He was a genius of his own kind, who gave to philosophy, largely by virtue of his personal qualities, a perspective and a context wholly novel in implication.” In a similar fashion, he rejects a slightly broader version of this attempt to box James in: Unfortunately, James has been approached, in the main, from primarily two vantage points: his doctrine of the “Will to Believe” and his “Pragmatism.” While both of these concerns in James are

intriguing and carry important philosophical implications, they are subject to grave distortions if seen apart from his insight into the meaning of relations as formulated in his psychology and metaphysics. (WJ xv—xvi)

With regard to the former claim about belief, McDermott writes that

[belief for James is a wedge into the tissue of experience, for the purpose of liberating dimensions otherwise closed to the agnostic standpoint” (WJ xxx; cf. xlii). With regard to the latter claim about pragmatism, McDermott indicates that “although a [P]ragmatic epistemology is an important strand in James’s philosophy, it does not occupy the center of his vision.” At the center of James’s vision—his “most important philosophical contention”—is his analysis of “the status of relations and the philosophical implications of that conten-

tion, which he subsequently referred to as radical empiricism.’’*4 Looking out from this relational core, Pragmatism is most accurately understood as “a methodological application of his radical empiricism” (CE 102; cf. WJ xl).

McDermott thus argues that, for James, the pragmatic individual who lives mostly by belief rather than by knowledge engenders truths upon reality in the course of living. The role of such truths remains,

46 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY however, secondary to that of relations. “Radical empiricism,” McDermott writes, “involves an acceptance of a far wider range of continuous and experienced relationships than that usually associated with the normal confines of the human self” (CE 115). He continues that in this metaphysics James “offered both the first and the most explicit statement that the most fundamental characteristic of reality is not substance, essence or thing but a relational manifold.’’*> McDermott describes the import of this relational metaphysics as twofold: “first, ...in our experience at large we are given continuity but not Unity; and second, this continuity is due to our affective or feeling grasp of the relationships which set up all of our activities, conceptual as well as perceptual” (CE 103). Emphasizing James’s point that relations are experienced just as much as the relata, McDermott notes that experience is recognized to be “a tissue of continuous transition, in which the human organism is never wholly other from the relations that intend or lead from the world of objects.”” Immersed in this continuity, McDermott notes further, “it is never necessary or warranted to posit as ‘a generalized conclusion’ that there be an external principle of accountability, be it God, the Absolute Mind, or some eternal law of Nature.” On the contrary, “the human self, as it were, is on its own for its own creation within the flow of experience” (SE 50; cf. 109). Moreover, one aspect of this creation is the role that James’s radical empiricism might play “in the development of contemporary social thought and cultural anthropology.’ This focus upon relations enables McDermott to redress what he feels is an excessively individualistic emphasis in interpretations of James. Many have presented James, he writes, “‘as the paragon of a

philosophical version of the mythic American claim to rugged individualism . . .”” While James is admittedly “an unabashed and indefatigable champion of sheer individuality” (SE 44-45), attempting “to sustain, on empirical grounds, his belief in the self as Promethean, as self-making rather than as a playing out of inheritance or the influence of social context,’’*” still McDermott maintains that we can draw from James components of a significant social philosophy that

JAMES CAMPBELL 47 he implied, if perhaps never recognized. “James’s version of the indi-

vidual has much to teach us about a doctrine of community, especially as it is worked out in the fabric of American life’ (SE 45). One aspect to which McDermott points is the sociality of James’s Pragmatic epistemology. James “assumes a fundamental social matrix in his epistemology,” he writes, “for the [P]ragmatic method has to do with consequences, testing, and experimentation as subject to verifying in a world of experience other than one we simply think about.” James was “adamantly opposed to evaluating ideas relative only to other ideas, professing that ideas carry their weight as applied to ac-

tual situations, many of them inevitably social.” Another strand of his social philosophy is to be found in his fundamental insights into social psychology that later inspired such individuals as Dewey and Mead (CE 101).

Of course, McDermott is unwilling to overstress the social side of James’s thought. Although he highlighted the importance of relations, he writes that “James failed to focus on the fact that my own self-consciousness comes into being inseparable from how I am consciously ‘had’ by others.” Thus, while James correctly stressed “the creative, interested, and assertive character of the human organism,” he failed to recognize “the formative power of the social situation, which, despite our Promethean protestations, conditions all of our versions of what we are doing, including and especially those we con-

tend to be distinctively independent of such influence’ (SE 53). Thinkers like Dewey and Mead were correct to assert that humans ‘are creatures formed in the cauldron of the other...” On the other hand, McDermott continues, those who focus too narrowly on the social aspects of human existence “‘fail to stress what James knew all too well, that the active self is hydra-headed and brimming with sensorial capacities, each of them capable of rendering distinctively personal even the most obvious of commonness.” Thus, McDermott seems to settle uncomfortably upon the dual claim that while it is right to maintain that “‘[t]he self is a social construct,” James is also right when he maintains that “the personally idiosyncratic seeker of relations ... puts a distinctive cast on the world” (SE 57).

48 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY Despite McDermott’s high regard for James, he offers criticisms, both fundamental and broad, of his ideas. For one example, although McDermott rejects Ralph Barton Perry’s claim that James is unable or unwilling to engage in the serious work of scholarship,** he is not hesitant to criticize James’s reconstructions of the thought of other philosophers. “As in most philosophical controversies, the protagonist rarely states the opponents’ positions accurately or in full,’ McDermott writes. “James is no exception; his polemic often renders other views in a simplistic manner or out of context.”” McDermott suggests that these simplified presentations may be due to the fact that James had, to our contemporary eyes, only a spotty knowledge of the history of philosophy. As one example of this weakness, McDermott points to “an outrageous cameo version of Kant, whom he refers to as a ‘mere curio,’ and whose bequest is judged to be neither original nor indispensable.’ At the other intellectual extreme, McDermott criticizes James’s overly generous, perhaps democratic, approach to the work of other thinkers. He remarks, for example, on “James’s propensity to take seriously, in public terms, virtually everyone he has read . . . no originating philosopher ever read so much or took so seriously the views and objections of his peers.’ Continuing on in this vein, McDermott notes that “James’s justly praised tolerance of other thinkers and his catholicity of interest often do him a

disservice. He is notorious at failing to sort out the thinker and thoughts that have staying power from those he just happens upon.” As a result of this openness, readers of James are often drawn away from the mainstream of Western philosophy; while this is not necessarily a problem in itself, it can deprive readers of the familiar bench-

marks that might make James easier to understand. McDermott laments further James’s failure to engage, other than briefly, the legacy of Emerson. “It is unfortunate that James never undertook a systematic study of Emerson,” he writes, “especially one directed to his

notions of experience, relations, and symbol. James would have found Emerson far more congenial and helpful than many of the other thinkers he chose to examine. More than James cared to admit, Emerson was his master.’”*°

JAMES CAMPBELL 49 McDermott also offers more serious criticisms of James. Some of these are related to the limitations of his social philosophy that we have considered. For example, McDermott complains that James was, in spite of his heightened awareness of individuality and possibilities, at times blind to the difficulties in the lives of others. “James was genial but self-centered and abysmally ignorant of massive social inequalities,” he writes, noting such flaws as “his cavalier approach to the Civil War, the Irish question, suffragettes, or his romanticization of the San Francisco earthquake.” Similarly, James seemed to have

little recognition of “the enormous importance of the abolition movement and of the end of slavery in the United States.” In a related criticism, McDermott notes that despite James’s usual recognition of the potential that lies within each of us, at times he forgets his own

‘stress on the capacity of human beings to draw on energies and powers, hidden but accessible to the creative life.”*! McDermott further echoes Dewey’s criticism of “The Moral Equivalent of War” that James did not understand that the vast majority of the populace had no need for tougher lives.*? While he admits that “James had a deeper sense of the idiosyncratic dimensions of personal life,’ McDermott

maintains that Dewey’s thought demonstrated “‘a more profound awareness of the irreducibly social matrix of all of our activities, and his sense of social and political issues was far more sophisticated than that of James.” All in all, however, McDermott is keen to defend the

message of James that he sees as essential to human flourishing: “avoid a life lived by formulas, by definitions, and seek instead the fringe, the novel, the unspoken, the secret and the hidden recesses of being, which speak only to those who know how to listen.’’ 4

McDermott writes that Dewey, not James, is “our most important thinker.’ With regard to the former aspect of this claim, he notes that Dewey was “a quintessential American, in a way that was not characteristic of William James, who was a Europhile and did not understand America as a society .. .” With regard to the latter aspect, he writes that “Dewey, more than any other thinker had a marvelous

50 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY capacity to wed technical thought and fundamental philosophical speculation to the everyday affairs, happenstances and crises of the human odyssey.’** Not coincidentally for McDermott, Dewey is the philosopher who best grasps the importance of Emerson. He writes that among the classic American philosophers only Dewey, “‘proletarian by birth and style... was able to convert the genius and language of Emerson to the new setting” (SE 43; cf. JD 24). To present Dewey

as Emersonian and as our premier thinker in the way that McDermott does re-opens the question of whether American philosophy in general, and Dewey in particular, suffer from optimism. McDermott’s response is straightforward: “American philosophy of the nineteenth century is often said to lack a sense of the tragic. This charge is addressed particularly at the thought of John Dewey, so often typed for its overall optimism, its confidence in the potentialities of men, and its leaning toward an ameliorative future.”” McDer-

mott accepts the possibility of an element of Emersonian compensation, but he denies that Dewey or the others “are naive about the meaning of suffering and tragedy” (JD xv). In Dewey’s case, McDermott specifically points to such difficulties as the death of two young children, his bitter departure from Chicago, and his wife’s personal problems (cf. JD xvi—xx). Dewey, McDermott writes, comes out of “the puritan Yankee tra-

dition by which nature is refractory and speaks directly to us, for better or for worse.”*° It is this sense of Dewey’s balance that he wishes to impress upon us. Rejecting the assumption of optimism, McDermott continues that Dewey recognized “‘the irreducible presence of loss and suffering in all events” and lived ever with “‘an experiential shadow” that accompanies all our human efforts to create meaningful lives (JD xix). It is because of Dewey’s ability to recognize “the tension between the ‘precarious’ and the ‘stable’”’ that he was so extraordinarily successful at integrating “‘the experience of loss and setback with that of growth” (JD xvi). In a similar fashion,

McDermott writes that because Dewey’s “metaphysics of transiency’ is able to admit “that nothing will go totally right in either the short or the long run,” he is able to recognize “that all problems

JAMES CAMPBELL 51 are malleable and functionally, although not ultimately, resolute...” (SE 118). In such a world, it should be obvious that there is no ultimate salvation nor need there be despair. Dewey’s vision is of human existence played out in “the absence of closure, of ultimate certitude, and of transcendent meaning. In short, there is no immortality. Yet, equivalently, make no mistake, we do not have nihilism.”’*° Thus can McDermott maintain that Dewey was “a religious man” in spite of his thorough rejections of denomination and dogma. Deweys understanding of living gave him “a secular liturgy” that grew out of his “enormous sensibility for the rhythms of nature and for the human transaction with nature.’’*” His aesthetic faithfulness to experience as it comes requires him to reject what McDermott describes as “the deleterious effects of a long-standing philosophical tra-

dition which divides the experience of reality into higher and lower orders of experience, thus emptying out the complex content of our actual situation” (SE 213). In its most extreme form, this bifurcation results in the isolation of individuals from the flow of events in their lives. “This isolation prevents the making of relations and prevents recoveries and consequently growth,’ McDermott writes. Moreover, whereas “[p]eriodic alienation enhances the rhythm of our transactions with nature and the world of experience, . . . isolation drops us out and away from the very leads and implications which the flow of experience harbors for our needs.’ When experience is carefully attended to, on the other hand, we recognize how it “‘teems with relational leads, inferences, implications, comparisons, retrospections, directions, warnings, and so on” (SE 215-16). In addition to this appreciation of Dewey's metaphysical perspec-

tive, McDermott also points favorably to his acute vision of social intelligence. He writes that unlike James,** who “has a tendency to flirt with the transcendent,” Dewey faces the human condition at dead reckoning... if and only if we do not count on the presence of specific providence to rescue us, can we be ethical, for if and only if we have no salvific future can

we be truly responsible for our acts. Our social hope is that human beings will build a world, valuate, sustain, nourish and defend the nutritive needs of human life, because and only because,

52 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY such activity reveals its significance in the lineaments, texture and

quality of its obviousness .. . the task of philosophy is to map the terrain in which the irreducible problematic character of our situation shows itself, and shows itself happily vulnerable to the fortuitous intrusions of “creative intelligence.”

For Dewey, this social vision is, as we have seen, at the core of religious life. McDermott points, for example, to “Dewey’s awareness of the human needs fulfilled by traditional religious faith and his effort to account for that need within the province of the activities of the community’ (JD 696). He locates this social vision in Dewey’s admitted Hegelian deposit that left him with “an abiding awareness of the social and institutional context in all of his thinking’’*° and separated him in significant measure from James and Peirce. While he is unwilling to overemphasize this separation, given Dewey’s adoption of the cooperative inquiry that is at the heart of Peirce’s method and his focus upon the issues of human meaning that motivated James, McDermott’s stress upon Dewey’s sense of social and institutional context enables him to emphasize one aspect of Dewey’s thought that has no parallel in either James or Peirce: education. McDermott writes that both Dewey’s sense of metaphysical balance and his vision of social inquiry into the problems of human living contribute to his understanding of the nature and possibilities of education. With regard to the latter point, McDermott writes of the community’s responsibility to recognize “the educability of all persons, each to the full realization of the limits of their capacities” if we ever hope to advance, and he calls this responsibility “a primary obligation of the community. .. .” With regard to the former point of metaphysical balance, McDermott indicates how Dewey elucidates “the extraordinary potentialities of the ordinary, if we would learn how to diagnose the rhythm of our own experiences” and how he reintegrates “high art and culture” with our everyday experience so that the everyday is enlightened and not disparaged. In this way, McDermott continues, Dewey attempts to overcome “the humdrum, the habitual, the routine’’*! without repudiating what Emerson called the “common” and the “low.”

JAMES CAMPBELL 53 McDermott writes that “[n]ever has a philosopher devoted himself so practically, so assiduously, and yet so reflectively to the problems of education as John Dewey” (JD 421). He continues that from the point of view of the student, Dewey sees pedagogy as “‘the twin effort to integrate the directions of experience with the total needs of the person and to cultivate the ability of an individual to generate new potentialities in his experiencing and to make new relationships so as to foster patterns of growth” (JD xxv). From the community point of view, McDermott discusses Dewey’s view of the public schools as “the linch-pin of a democratic society.”’ In these schools, McDermott con-

tinues, “the teachers must be intellectually alert, experientially informed, and dramatically capable of transacting with children, or mutatis mutandis, with adults.” They must also be ever aware of those forces of society that see only danger in free inquiry. “The forces op-

posed to free inquiry and the building of a democratic society have to be confronted with equivalent political power,’ McDermott writes, and it is here that he locates Dewey’s belief that “teachers must organize and participate directly in the political process for the good of the students, the schools, the commonweal, and the future of American democracy.” To recall again Dewey’s non-optimistic meliorism, McDermott indicates his belief that Dewey would be neither surprised nor discouraged by our limited educational progress—or perhaps even by the charge that he “ruined” our schools—when he notes that Dewey “believed always that the political and sociological structures were more determinant of institutional life than were philosophical ideas, no matter how perceptive” (SE 220). As might be expected from this account, McDermott’s criticisms of Dewey are few. One is that Dewey seems to have been immune to the pull of mystery and had no interest in discussing the sort of cosmological questions that in James, for example, led to speculation about the “more.” As McDermott writes, “Dewey was always wary of such speculation, especially in its religious formulation, and despite the extremely wide range of his philosophical interests, never addressed that area of human experience in much detail.’’* Further,

54 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY McDermott occasionally questioned Dewey’s political wisdom, especially in the late 1980s. He writes, for example, that Dewey was “con-

vinced, as few before or since, that education, if structured in genuinely democratic ways, could overcome even the most oppressive and debilitating of regimes” (SE 125; cf. 105). To McDermott, such

faith seems to indicate that Dewey “underestimated the capacity of the corporate world to operate, hydra-headed, in areas that Dewey took to be the vanguard of liberation—higher education and labor unions.” A third, contemporary criticism of Dewey seems to be in part a retraction of McDermott’s earlier view that Dewey’s melioristic stance should not be viewed as optimism. “Dewey had an enormous trust in rationality, good will, and the distribution of intelligence,” he

writes. “Unfortunately, he had an undeveloped doctrine of evil, the demonic, and the capacity of human beings en masse to commit heinous crimes against other human beings.”** Yet, in balancing these latter two criticisms, McDermott also points at about the same time to Dewey's recognition of the limitations upon education and to his assertions that we are seriously mistaken if we think that “stentorian rhetoric and plea-bargaining for equity” will be enough, and more broadly to his recognition that “good intentions and affectionate rhetoric on behalf of the American Lumpenproletariat’ would never be sufficient to effect “the transformation of American society...” Thus, in the two latter cases—political wisdom and optimism—the import of McDermott’s criticisms of Dewey still remains in process, as apparently does his own position.** In spite of these criticisms,

however, his claim that Dewey is “our most important thinker” holds. McDermott offers as further evidence the admission that “I can think of no person other than John Dewey to whom I would rather turn for wisdom as to the amelioration of our present plight and as a beacon of intelligence for our future.’’>’

5

During the course of this exploration of McDermott’s commentaries on the history of American philosophy, I have tried to indicate their

JAMES CAMPBELL 55 great value and to raise some questions that remain unresolved in them. In this final section, I wish to explore briefly what does not appear in McDermott’s writings to see if my inductive speculations reveal his intentions. His overall picture presents the history of Amer-

ican philosophy primarily through a consideration of three figures from its classical period—Royce, James, and Dewey—with preludes

from the Puritans and Emerson and occasional hints at his evaluations of later philosophical developments in such figures as C. I. Lewis, Susanne Langer, and Richard Rorty.°* Writers who loom large

in other presentations of this history—Chauncey Wright, George Herbert Mead, Alfred North Whitehead, George Santayana, and especially Charles Sanders Peirce—are not significant figures in the picture that McDermott offers us.

There are a number of interpretations possible. One is that this picture accurately reflects McDermott’s understanding of the history of American philosophy, which flourished primarily in the thought of three pre-eminent thinkers and now has apparently moved into a kind of preservation phase. I doubt that this interpretation reflects McDermott’s view. A more plausible interpretation is that McDermott’s commentaries were never intended to constitute a history of American philosophy along the lines of the volumes of Schneider, Blau, or Flower and Murphey.*’ Rather, his commentaries reflect his

understanding of moments that he finds of value in the ongoing American philosophical journey. When McDermott concentrates upon some figures and themes, his intention is thus not to disparage others. He intends, rather, to present those figures and themes that enable him to advance his larger agenda. This agenda, as I understand it, is the pragmatic application of the fruit of this philosophical tradition to contemporary life. In other words, McDermott is offering us through these philosophical commentaries a defense of possibility and hope in the face of our ultimate extinction, a justification of efforts to ameliorate the lives of the weak and unfortunate by those of us who are at present somewhat better off, and an inspiration to others to advance a similar agenda. As he writes, “the future .. . hangs in the balance, awaiting the outcome of our deliberate, willing, and

56 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY intelligent efforts to remediate, to heal, and to blunt and shunt those destructive forces which seem inevitably to accompany our journey” (SE 96-97). In the course of arguing for these points, not all of the figures in the American tradition will be of assistance. Even a philosopher as powerful as Peirce—a post-Deweyan figure who reigns supreme in our current professionalized, academic world—has little to offer McDermott and thus plays a modest role in his commentaries. It seems then that McDermott has not attempted to tell the “whole story’ in his commentaries on the history of American philosophy. Perhaps it is even delusional to still think that the “whole story’— that we recognize as ever-more-pluralistic as we gain further recogni-

tion of the innumerable attempts of Americans of every possible stripe to grapple with the mysteries of existence—can be adequately told from any one person’s perspective. In any case, I do not believe that we should expect from McDermott A History of American Philosophy in the future. My reasons for this claim are related to the fact that in writing such a History, the task is pre-defined as the thorough exploration of the various figures and topics that constitute this tradition. While I have no blanket complaints about the work that McDermott has done, nor any doubt that he could expand this work into a magnificent History if he wanted to, I believe that his mission as a pragmatic scholar takes him in another direction. For McDermott, demonstrating the thoroughness necessary to write a History is, like demonstrating consistency for Emerson, of far less importance than nurturing the insights that can be found in any point in experience. To nurture these insights requires both effort—thoroughness— and inspiration; even some themes that might appear “‘obvious”’ ones for McDermott to address have not yet inspired him and thus have not assumed large roles in his commentaries. I offer just two examples, one negative and one positive. For the former, I point to the long-dominant analytic tradition about which he has written surprisingly little, even though his work has indirectly provided a powerful alternative. Similarly, there is surprisingly little in his work about the

now-eclipsed naturalist movement, a movement with which he would seem to have philosophically so much in common. Perhaps

JAMES CAMPBELL 57 some day either or both of these themes will emerge in the flow of his work. Perhaps not. What McDermott has attempted to do in his commentaries on the

history of American philosophy is to awaken us to the drama and value of life by sharing with us stories from our collective philosophical past that have powerfully influenced him. His work leaves room for others who have been influenced differently to address different

aspects of the history of American philosophy, and maybe, in true pluralistic fashion, McDermott believes that those stories are not for him to tell. Others, with different experiences as the children of different problems, must take up the story of America’s analytic tradition, and the story of Morris Cohen, Sidney Hook, John Herman Randall, Justus Buchler, and the other contributors to American Naturalism. Similarly, it may be for others still to tell the stories of James Edwin Creighton, Mary Whiton Calkins, and Brand Blanshard. McDermott is surely not failing us here by not being universal. He is not becoming an individual “detached” from the community of inquirers. No doubt, he awaits these stories with what he calls “affectionate curiosity’®° to see what insights each thinker might nurture for us; however, no one individual can tell all the stories. Perhaps the approach of the pragmatic scholar is the only one possible for an individual like McDermott, for whom, as he frequently writes, “life is in the transitions” and “the nectar is in the journey.” His commentaries on the history of American philosophy are not designed to constitute a guidebook to the land of American philosophy. His commentaries are, rather, extended interactions with some of the high points that he has found in the history of American philosophy that he hopes we can use to make our journeys more fulfilling. Just as Emerson told the young scholars, preachers, and anyone else who would listen, so does John McDermott tell us that experience is more important that dogma. He further tells us, as a pragmatic scholar, that

the history of American philosophy is a powerful opening to the future.

THREE

LIVING CREATIVELY, WHILE TERMINAL Jacquelyn Ann K. Kegley

T he question of suicide has vexed humankind perhaps from its

beginning. Today in the United States the issue has become a troubling public and legal one, focused on the validity, legality, and acceptability of physician-assisted suicide. This focus, however, is much too narrow. The issue of suicide is a deeply philosophical question. It embodies a number of questions every human person ought to address. Key among these is the central question, “What constitutes quality living?’ Related to this question are other equally important queries. “What is dying?” “What is suffering?’ “What is freedom of choice?” “What makes me who I am?” Also, there are issues of the aims and methods of contemporary technological medicine. Throughout his philosophical career, John McDermott has confronted these issues and has done so, I believe, in a most illuminating and creative way. His focus is such that he embraces creative living for all and challenges each of us to make this possible for ourselves and for others. Using his concept of “creative living,” he also provides 1 58 5

JACQUELYN ANN K. KEGLEY 59 us with a substantial critique of the modern American experience, including the contemporary medical scene. In what follows, I shall discuss McDermott’s understanding of terminality as a central aspect of human life. I will probe into his critique

of the many forms of isolation and alienation to be overcome in human life and his insight into these as forms of “death.” McDermott does answer the question, “Is life worth living?” in the affirmative, but he argues that it can only be a personal question, namely, “is my

life worth living?” In probing this question, however, McDermott urges each of us to see time as sacred, and experience as pedagogical, and creative living as a conscious and risk-filled choice. In my own critique of McDermott’s work, I argue that his focus is too individualistic, and thus he neglects forms of alienation and possible conditions for creative living. I also argue that his critique of contemporary medicine is too narrowly focused on its technological liabilities, and thus his critique of medicine is weakened accordingly.

Is Life Worth Living? A Personal Question

The question of the worth of living is, for John McDermott, a very personal one. He tells us that he has confronted this question with a very heavy and agonized heart. Like James, Dewey, and Royce, he be-

lieves the journey of life to be one whose texture is “suffering.” He tells us that in listening to the voice of life he hears “for the most part, the voice of unrequited suffering.” Further in looking at human life, he sees “no hope for any resolution of anything humanly important”! McDermott often cites the case of a young, athletic, former pilot who was severely burned in an accident that killed his father. This young

man had demanded to be allowed to die, but he was denied this choice through the aggressive efforts of doctors, his mother, and several lawyers. He had chosen not to go on living, but was “seized and forced to reconsider.” He did go on with “mixed feelings” about the reprieve and took the name “Dax”’ to indicate that he believed he was now a different person than before, going on and hoping to find an affirmative answer to the question of the worth of living. In a similar

60 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY vein to Dax, McDermott writes, “I now believe, shakily, insecurely, and barely, that life is worth living.’ For McDermott, “terminality” and death are part of the very fabric of life itself. He writes, “The first, foremost, and permanent ontological fact of our human situation is that we were born to live but sure to die.”* Yet much of human effort is devoted to repressing the fact that “we are all terminal.” This fact of the inevitability of our death is the “most repressed and denied of all facts in the human condition” (SE 157). Humans are fascinated with obituaries, says McDermott, because somehow this announcement of another’s death seems

to lessen the possibility of ours. Further, we imbue instances of human terminality with a sense of causes and forces outside of our control. There is cancer, war, acts of God and nature. Death becomes an unnatural event and, in medicine, an enemy to be fought. Western culture cannot accept death as an essential aspect of our human life. McDermott’s assessment of our culture’s attitude toward death is, in my judgment, correct and fits well with my own studies and teachings on death and dying. In a fascinating article entitled, “The Pornography of Death,” Geoffrey Gorer writes, “In the twentieth century,

however, there seems to have been an unremarked shift in prudery; whereas copulation has become more and more “mentionable,’ particularly in Anglo-Saxon societies, death has become more and more ‘unmentionable’ as a natural process.’ In fact, Ernest Becker won the Pulitzer Prize for his book, The Denial of Death. In that book, he describes in some detail various psychological mechanisms used by contemporary persons to suppress the thought of death.° Finally, there is

in contemporary medical care an interesting phenomenon called “The Ritual Drama of Mutual Pretense.” This is the common situation when “patient and staff both know the patient is dying but pretend otherwise.’ It is not surprising, then, in this cultural context that suicide becomes an affront and Western civilization expounds the negative and naive notion that an act of suicide is an act of insanity and something to be condemned. This is not so for McDermott. Like Camus, McDermott believes that suicide often is “an act of moral courage.’” In

JACQUELYN ANN K. KEGLEY 61 the decision to commit suicide, I announce to myself my own death. I seize the time, the place, and the means. Arranging my own death brings out two salient points. First, it is a free act. Perhaps, says McDermott, it is my only free act. The act of suicide represents a “rejection of dehumanizing determinism while simultaneously signalizing an existential choice, a true act of human freedom” (SE 161). It is a freeing act in another sense; it also raises the question of choosing to live. The act of suicide demands a diagnosis of “what it is to “do’ living.” Thus, in The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus argues that suicide raises the key question, namely, “can I live with what I know and only with that?” In McDermott’s view, confronting the inevitability of my own death helps me regain my own individuality. This is the case because I can avoid the temptation of investing in a meaning that transcends my own unique life. I willingly set aside the deception of an abstraction, the notion of personal immortality. This opens up the possibility of an unrepressed life that can sing its own song. To question the worth of living is really, in McDermott’s view, a more fundamental query. The question is, ““Can we experience ourselves as terminal and yet live creative, probing lives which, nonetheless, ask for no guarantees and for no ultimate significance to be attributed to our endeavors?’ McDermott believes that to live this way is the only way one can live a distinctively human life. Making the choice to live creatively changes our fundamental expectations, and thus our perceptions of time, growth, history, and experience. We chose life as a journey, and we come to believe that the quality of the journey is what counts. Time becomes sacred and space becomes meaningful as we build ourselves into it and convert it into our space. We chose to live the life of a “live creature.” McDermott’s view on suicide sets a new tone for discussions of suicide. Traditionally, suicide is seen as an affront against God or against society and often is, in fact, seen to be the result of depression or psychological difficulties. Moreover, physician-assisted suicide is usually discussed in terms of rights, namely, the liberty rights of selfdetermination and well-being. McDermott’s approach, although it

62 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY also emphasizes freedom, stresses the question of creative living and conditions that make this possible. The focus here is on “why do we want to prolong life?’’ In my later discussion, I will suggest that we seek “prolongevity” for at least four reasons. We want to accumulate more experience, we want more opportunity for new achievements and roles, we seek to prolong relationships with significant others, and we want to increase the complexity and depth of our social net-

works. These things are related in part to McDermott’s notion of “creative living.” It is to this concept that we now turn.

Living Aesthetically: Its Definition and Its Difficulties

To be a “live creature,” for McDermott, is to adopt the “aesthetic pedagogy of John Dewey.” Taking on this kind of life means “living on the edge” and being ever alert to the nuances of experience, to have our senses operating at full power as exemplified in the everalert nostrils of a fine animal. “To be aesthetically alive is to be touched when we touch, and to allow each of our experiences to bathe us, penetrating our affective response and transforming all that

we have experienced, no matter how distant from our present consciousness. To live aesthetically is a demanding task requiring active effort on our part as well as effort by others. First, each person must gain the capacity for growth and the ability to convert one’s environment into sources of personal nutrition. This capacity has not only to be culti-

vated by us, but also it must be taught and encouraged by others. That is one reason why Dewey was so concerned about the school environment, and John McDermott argues for “tactility” as a key need for children today. “To learn to read with the hands as well as with the eyes is a marvelous melding of mind and body, concept and percept” (SE 178). Schools must facilitate in children the capacity for srowth and aesthetic living. Thus, McDermott also supports the vision of Maria Montessori, with her notion of a “prepared environment.” Like Maria, he is convinced that children can teach themselves and become active learners and molders of their experience so long

JACQUELYN ANN K. KEGLEY 63 as goals and directives are made clear, materials are utilized, and the environment is prepared. The classroom must be structured as a minlature ecosystem. “We could encourage children to begin, from their beginning, to participate in and slowly develop on their own terms an environment which is aesthetically alive, pedagogically responsive, and ecologically responsible” (SE 179).

In fact, strong effort is required to live aesthetically precisely because our culture not only does not foster our capacity for such living, but also because contemporary life is full of conditions that work against such living and that actually diminish our experiences. Dewey and McDermott both write extensively about these forces, which they label as “deaesthetization.” Deaesthetization is the shrinking in the affective dimension of each person’s local environment. Of course, impoverishment of the human environment has occurred throughout human history, with conditions of poverty, prejudice, and violence; these conditions remain today. However, Dewey and McDermott remind us that there are also many more subtle forms of shrinking and of dehumanization. One of these is the abiding and notorious lure of the humdrum, the routine that lulls us into patterns of autonomic response. The rhythms and nuances of everyday experience become submerged in a bland environment, and we are rendered insensitive to variety or intimacies. Dewey writes, “There is experience, but so slack and discursive that it is not an experience. Needless to say, such experiences are anaesthetic.”

Throughout his philosophical writings, John McDermott worked to bring to consciousness the many factors in our contemporary cul-

ture contributing to the deadening of human experience. One of these is the increasingly technological and artificial context of much of our human activity. We have become, in a real sense, “packaged”’ into an artificial environment that is increasingly discontinuous with our natural environment. Humans spend much of their lives in the artificial, technologically mediated environments of work, education, home, and even play (for example, the marvelously equipped, sterile

fitness centers in which many spend endless hours). We live and move in our own technological cocoon, the automobile, oblivious to

64 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY our natural surroundings and steering a powerful and largely unintelligible container.'° And now, this container also increasingly provides, through cell phone, computer, and fax our technological contact with the world and other individuals. A host of powerful communication tools, appliances, and sophisticated packaging remove us even further from contact with the natural environment as well as from our fellow humans. Even our buildings are becoming containers encouraging us

to the “indoor life,” wherein we spend a great portion of our time working, sleeping, and playing. Their designs rarely address human needs nor do they encourage human contact and co-participation in activities.|!

Further, argues McDermott, American culture seems to contain a systematic desire to dilute or remove the sensuousness from our daily environment. In contrast to the natural environment, with its colors, lushness, vitality, texture, and myriad shapes and sounds, is the steril-

ity and dreariness of institutional settings. Our vehicles of public transportation, for example, are notoriously uncomfortable and uninteresting. Our daily lives, in McDermott’s view, have lost their sense of rhythm, of horizons, of variety. He writes: “. . . in our daily lives we seem to settle for ‘new’ or ‘clean’ or ‘convenient’ as sufficient evi-

dence of quality. This attitude has generated a sameness as witnessed

by domestic housing, especially projects, roads, building facades, shopping centers, motels, and utensils” (CE 168). Although McDermott is discussing the aesthetic qualities of experience itself, it seems appropriate also to note that the monuments of aesthetic and natural

beauty, although present, often are commercialized or removed in some sense from the ordinary lives of people. The monuments of aesthetic quality that do exist are places to be visited and not places in which ordinary people dwell and live. The places of natural beauty are places visited on “harried vacations’ and often in our technological cocoons called “recreation vehicles.”” Further, people are often too busy with activities to stop and smell the flowers. Finally, attempts

to add the aesthetic or the natural to our experiences often are, in themselves, artificial and contrived. To understand this, one needs

JACQUELYN ANN K. KEGLEY 65 only to visit Las Vegas, with its artificial tributes to great monuments and places of the world and its veneer of “endless night.” Drawing on the philosophy of William James, McDermott points to another aspect of contemporary American culture that leads to the diminishing of human experience and lives, namely, the way in which that experience is deprived of its sense of relatedness. James often spoke of “alienation” as a critical problem for American culture. He defined alienation as “the inability to make relations’ (CE 105). For

James, there are a number of ways in which alienation can occur. Among these are relation starvation, relation saturation, and relation seduction. Relation starvation occurs with the increasing narrowness of a person whose focus becomes concave. The tendency is to dupli-

cate experiences or to slot them, even if they are different, into already articulated and accepted categories. What occurs is the absence of novelty or, in fact, an inability to be open to new experiences, “‘an

increasing incapacity to make anything of the little novelty which does break through” (CE 108). Relation saturation occurs with the temptation of sheer novelty. Rather than savoring and seeking those novelties that can nourish and enrich our lives and experiences, we move from novelty to novelty. Quantity has become the criterion and not the genuine experience of novelty. It is my judgment that, in fact, much of the entertainment provided today tends to foster one or the other of these conditions. James also discussed a third kind of alienation, namely, a phenomenon he identifies as “relation seduction.” This occurs when we leap over the working relationships in our experiences to be seduced by the promise of radical novelty and often are then cut off from a return to ordinary experience. McDermott gives us concrete examples

of such a seduction. “Extreme hallucinogenic experiences or the mind bathing of religious cults are instances in point, for despite their acknowledged intensity and possible illumination, they often sever us from the remaining range of our life-enhancing relationships” (CE 109-10).

A major result of the diminishing of human experience promoted

by conditions in contemporary culture is the disproportionate

66 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY amount of psychological stress leading to experiences of deep-seated listlessness and boredom. McDermott writes, ““My contention is that

this situation has resulted in many persons experiencing a deepseated listlessness, and experiential anomie, masked by using a jazzed-

up contemporary idiom and the vicarious identification with the worlds portrayed by contemporary film and television, especially sports’ (CE 169). Other scholars identify a “pathology of boredom” that cripples or enervates the human organism. Their description fits well with James’s analysis of alienation. If man is restricted to one extreme, subjected exclusively to the excitement of the large scale, without the contrast of relief of the minuscule, it is easily conceivable that the human organism might atrophy. Human sensibility, which may be seriously blunted by monotonous overstimulation, may also be blunted if it is exercised exclusively in an environment of calculated and automatically controlled physical comfort. Our faculties function best and are best maintained at peak sharpness when effort is required of them. Monotony of any kind—dull or intense—is debilitating.”

Stress is given lip service by contemporary medicine, but its embedded Cartesian dualism’ and neglect of the bodily and affective dimensions of the person leave it in a weakened condition to effectively deal with the problems of stress and boredom affecting contem-

porary human beings. McDermott is also concerned about the inability of modern medicine to deal with the pathology of boredom,

and he relates this failure also in part to the alienation of self from body that is fostered in our contemporary American culture. Ironically, one remedy sought by many to stress and boredom is increased

physical exercise, but the real problem is deeper. McDermott describes the situation as follows. “[T]he environment in which we live is less and less receptive to our bodies and, further, . .. the nutrition which proceeds from affective simulation brought on by aesthetic dif-

ferentiation and rooted in the affective responses of our body has shrunk, especially in proportion to the range of experiences available to our intellect’ (CE 169). Recent studies bemoan the increasing obe-

sity of Americans, their increased interaction on the Internet, and

JACQUELYN ANN K. KEGLEY 67 their emphasis on computer-related gaming, which adds to the basically intellectual and sedentary contemporary lifestyle. Though many today are obsessed with the body, it is for the control and conquering of it, rather than living creatively with one’s bodily existence. Alienation from Body: A Threat to Creative Living

A major threat to living aesthetically is the alienation from our embodied selves. McDermott, like the classic American philosophers, James, Peirce, Royce, and Dewey, argues against the traditional Western bias for a dualistic interpretation of person.'* Human persons are embodied beings and the body grounds human experience, thought, and creative powers. Michael Polanyi states the case for the signifi-

cance of body for human experience, “Our body is the ultimate in-

strument of all our external knowledge, whether intellectual or practical. In all our waking moments we are relying on our awareness

of contacts of our body with things outside for attending to these things. Our own body is the only thing in the world which we normally never experience as an object, but experience always in terms of the world to which we are attending from our body.” Body is the primordial incarnation of personhood in the world. I realize much of my person through my body. First, body is that aspect of my person that is most “public” and “shareable,” and thus it plays a significant role in my self-identity and meaning, both socially

and personally. The history and aesthetic of bodily cosmetic and adornment illustrates this fact in a telling manner. Indeed, bodily adornment adds to the aesthetic dimensions of experience both for self and others.

Unfortunately, social pressure often imposes on human beings a dominant image of body and of bodily adornment. This results not only in the diminishment of human experience, but also in personal alienation from one’s body. This alienation in turn leads to psychological/social illnesses such as bulimia or anorexia. These disorders, contrary to much medical belief, are really profound cultural disorders,'® founded in a culture that equates slenderness with competence, self-control, and intelligence.!”

68 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY Body does play a crucial role in our self-identity. This is evidenced in cases where radical bodily changes occur—whether this is severe weight loss or gain, radical anatomical changes such as a sex-change operation, or unusual facial or other physical appearance alterations. These changes usually signal to the person and to others that a “new

person” has emerged. This is also the case with radical changes in neurophysiology such as Alzheimer’s Disease or severe damage to the brain. Alienation from one’s own body occurs in these cases and also in cases of severe illness and accident. Our body is part of our identity and functionality in the world.

As the incarnation of person, the body serves a primary locus of our unique capacity to act in the world, to exercise our intentions, and to demonstrate our freedom. The ability to move, whether by foot, horseback, automobile, or flight, fascinates humans because it allows various kinds of freedoms.!* Our body allows us to act in the world and to engage in our social roles, including our roles as productive members of society. Thus, illness that weakens this functioning of our body is perceived as a threat to the whole person. Physician Silberman describes this situation when he writes, “Sickness .. . shatters the web of assumptions on which our lives are based. We take it for granted that our arms, legs, feet and other organs will respond to

our commands. When they do not... we discover how much our sense of self is bound up with our body.’ Because of the prevalence

of a Cartesian dualism in medicine and our culture, this aspect of illness is neglected in medical treatment, or the betrayal of body to self is further exaggerated. Rather than helping enrich the environment and conditions for functioning, the human context is further diminished. Thus, the suffering in illness is deepened through the alienation of self from body, and often also alienation from others through “perceived disability.” It is arguable, in fact, that, like illness, disability is a social construction.” There is a new “disability perspective,” or social model of disability, “that attributes the dysfunctions of people with physical, sensory, and cognitive impairments to their being situated in environments that are built and organized in ways hostile to them rather

JACQUELYN ANN K. KEGLEY 69 than to their biological conditions.”’?! McDermott has addressed disability in a similar manner.”? Two aspects of this perspective are im-

portant. First, the stress is on making available the prerequisite conditions for creative living. Second, disability needs to be sufficiently disconnected from illness and pain and de-medicalized. Persons with

paradigmatic disabilities, for example, paraplegia, blindness, and deafness, neither require nor are improved by medical treatment.” Rather, and again, conditions for functionality need to be explored and provided. These insights are important to a discussion of suicide and dying because disability is usually addressed as a medical problem rather than as a conditional or perspectival one. More will be said on this issue later in this chapter, but it is clear that alienation from one’s bodily self is an endemic problem for contemporary culture. Such alienation hinders our self-development and freedom. Thus, it is through our body that we exhibit our human creativity, thereby

enriching our environment and life and enabling us to engage in more creative living. We do this in various ways, for example, dance, song, various forms of visual arts, athletics, cooking, and crafts. It is unfortunate that so much of this creative expression has been commercially exploited and perhaps imposed in a series of “cultural models.” Each person needs to be encouraged to let their life exhibit itself creatively via their own singular modes of expression. The body is also the seat of our sensory encounters with the world, thus allowing the savoring of the many flavors, smells, sights, sounds, and tactile impressions of experience. John McDermott has been especially concerned about the alienation of our bodies from the immediate surroundings and has decried the way in which the education of the bodily senses has been ignored. He writes, “I think that it can be said that we witnessed a steady loss in the role of our hands in the

penetration and shaping of the world. Small children, as a case in point, are taught the intricacies of set theory and logic and the staggering speculative reach of modern science, but their bodies are still exercised exclusively under the traditional and time-honored ritual of sports and gymnastics. We rarely teach them to sculpt, to mime, or

/ O EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY to experience technology tactilely through the spectrum of touch available to them, ranging over the variety of metals and plastics. Nor have we articulated adequately to ourselves a sense of taste and discrimination relative to our technological environment” (CE 167).

The human body is also the locus of pain and pleasure, and this aspect of the body is often the focus of medicine. Yet, there is good evidence that Western medicine and culture in general has little understanding of the varied and deep dimensions of pain and the relationships between physical pain and its psychological and social dimensions. Further, the contemporary medical community is only now beginning to understand how to deal adequately even with the depth of physical pain. This new knowledge, in fact, has come partly from the hospice movement, and much about pain has been gleaned

from the experience of the Oregon medical and pharmacological community in dealing with the new law on physician-assisted suicide.

Finally, as Eastern thought has argued, the body has its own inner resources of healing for the self. Thus, the new field of psychoneuroimmunology has discovered some salient facts. First, the immunolog-

ical, neurological, and psychological human systems are highly interactive. Second, all three systems are involved in defending and adapting and learning from experience and important information

transfer.** Third, beliefs, positive emotions, and attitudes about mind/body can play a key role in “constructive living” and in “healing.’ Eastern medicine has been aware of this for centuries, and Western medicine has much to learn from this tradition.” McDermott is acutely aware of alienation from the bodily self as it manifests itself in contemporary culture. However, his analysis could probe deeper in terms of the prevalence of Cartesian dualism in many aspects of contemporary thought and life. Indeed, as indicated earlier, contemporary Western medicine is infected with a Cartesian dualistic

understanding of the human person and thus it views the human body only as an object to be studied and acted upon. Drew Leder, for example, has argued persuasively that the Cartesian body is a dead

body, or an inanimate body, a machine to be mastered and controlled. He sees the situation in Western medicine as follows, “At the

JACQUELYN ANN K. KEGLEY 71 core of modern medicine is the Cartesian revelation: the living body can be treated as essentially no different from a machine.”*° Such a view

of the body is reductive of the person and ignores aspects of the self, such as beliefs, fears, worldviews, and emotions, which do play a profound role in disease and response to treatment and in dealing with the dying process. More will be said about these issues shortly as we turn to a critique of our contemporary Western healing professions. Aesthetic, quality living is difficult in light of a reductive view of the human person that reduces the body to a mere material object, a

machine to be controlled and manipulated and generally ignored until it complains in some way. Further, such assumptions about the body are prevalent not only in medicine, but also in much social and natural scientific thought. The present trend toward genetic reductionism and determinism is a good illustrative case of this fact. Such dualistic assumptions also are pervasive in much religious thought, and the human body is considered as either a source of sinful action

or a mere temporary shelter for a more important and permanent soul. However, to denigrate or neglect the human body is to shrink the rich dimensions of human experience. To live creatively and aes-

thetically, one must counter and overcome the alienation of body from one’s person and experience.

Inadequate Healing and Diagnoses

Alienation from body and from self, as indicated above, infects contemporary medicine. John McDermott has been concerned, as have I, to critique the inadequacies of medicine and especially the way in which it alienates persons from their bodies and lives and thus sets a debilitating context for dealing with dying and death. His focus, however, has been on technological alienation, while mine has been on the implications of a dualistic perspective in medicine. In his article, “The Stethoscope as Talisman: Medical Technology and Loneliness,” McDermott informs us that he seeks to explore the “vast landscape of the relationship between medical technology, medical care, human dignity, and our deep fear of death.”

J 2 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY A major theme of that article is the emergence of patient distance as a result of new medical technology. Routine medical examinations today are highly technological, involving various tests, including genetic tests, and monitoring devices such as CAT scans and nuclear magnetic resonators. In all these cases the body is “read” as an object, and the flood of data overwhelms both patient and doctor. There is no “hands-on,” and the patient is left, says McDermott, with a vacant sense, one that tells us “that our symptoms are only rhetoric and have no embodiment, our embodiment.”’”® A telling example of the alienation produced by medical technology is the statement by a young father made upon the occasion of the birth of his “miracle baby,” born after a long and complicated series of new reproductive technological interventions. He said, “I felt somehow that this baby was none of my doing, but rather that of all the experts in white coats with their miracle drugs and techniques.” However, I believe that the alienation and distancing that occurs in medicine is not only due to technology and its use. Medicine, like many other fields of human endeavor, is hindered in its healing of persons by its unexamined adoption of a view of the human self that reduces the self to a cognitive knower only tenuously related to a mechanical, material body. Our bodies are seen as isolated objects disconnected from our minds and consciousness and generally from the rest of the world at large. The body is an object to be studied, mastered,

and controlled. Completely absent is the notion of self as a complex

phenomenon, never rightfully reduced to any one of its many aspects—physical, sensory, emotional, motivational, cognitive, imaginative, or even spiritual. Also absent is a view of self as process, as it is constantly engaged in action, growth, change, and self-redefinition and as interactions occur with various aspects of the environment, with other persons, with other species, and with nature. McDermott

uses the notion of a “protean man.” He describes this kind of self as follows, “Protean man is an actualizer more than a recognizer, a formulator more than a spectator’ (CE 163). Contemporary medicine ignores the human person as an actor and rather focuses on the person as a bodily object.

JACQUELYN ANN K. KEGLEY 73 As a result, contemporary medicine operates with a truncated view of the human self and a very inadequate view of illness. When medi-

cine moved to its Cartesian notion of a dualistic self and a view of the body as machine-like and inanimate, the basis for classification of disease, in fact, shifted from a basis in the symptoms experienced by a living patient to a basis in the organic lesions found in corpses. The experience of illness came to be viewed not as important, but as epiphenomenal.” This reductive notion of illness ignores aspects of the self such as beliefs, fears, and worldviews, which usually do play a

profound role in disease and in the response to treatment. There is evidence that attitudes and beliefs play an important role in health and healing. Stress studies, for example, indicate that a key factor is

the amount of control a person believes that she or he has over stress.°° Placebo and other studies tell us that positive emotions and feelings as well as beliefs play a role in facilitating healing.*! Norman Cousins highlighted this when he wrote about the beneficial aspects of laughter on his own serious illness, including effects on pain and the immune system. He also was clear that he never assumed a single causal focus. “Laughter was just a metaphor for the entire range of positive emotions. ... I never regarded the positive emotions, however, as a substitute for scientific treatment. I saw them as providing an auspicious environment for medical care.” More important, perhaps, is the fact that contemporary medicine ignores the self as actor, an intentional self with purposes, goals, values, and plans of action. In a provocative analysis of “suffering,” Mary Rawlinson interprets illness and its consequent suffering in terms of “four orders of meaning,” or “horizons of value.”’*? Illness can cause frustration and disruption of a subject’s values and purposes in each of these areas. Thus, in the realm of embodied action, where the body represents our “system of access to the world” and the background and means for gestures, words, mobility, and behavioral actions, there can be disruption between our bodily capacities and our possibilities of action.” The second area that illness disturbs is that of the “theater of intersubjective life.”” Here, there is disruption of the roles with which the

]4 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY self has identified and which have a key function in self-identity or of the roles in which a person is cast.** Illness causes a deep disruption of one’s normal roles and relationships and thus profoundly impacts the self. Further, in illness, the subject-actor has to take on a role alien to free intentionality, namely, the “sick role,” that involves passivity and dependency. To heal is to overcome this disruption in the theater of intersubjective life by restoring, as much as possible, the capacity for social life.

The third area of a person’s life affected by illness is called “‘the arena of will.” This arena has three dimensions. The first is a person’s life plan and/or life narrative through which the self weaves a life history, tying together past, present, future, promises, obligations, values, desires, and goals. The second dimension is work and mastery, the ability of the self to make things, to have achievements, and so forth. The final dimension is that of the moral self, the self who has principles, and through those principles has integrity. One has consistency of action and lives in accord with one’s principles. Illness can disrupt any of these three areas. Thus, disease or accident can make it difficult to incorporate one’s dysfunctional state within one’s life history. Becoming a paraplegic is such a case. Illness and/or disability can prevent further achievement or accomplishment of goals. However, if the right conditions are provided for functionality, this need not be the case, and new achievements can be made. Thus, the impressionistic painter who loved colors thought that his life was ended when his lost his color vision. However, he discovered painting in black and white.* Death, of course, is seen as the ultimate closing off of possibilities. This is the tragedy of early loss of life. Seeking new achievements is, as indicated earlier, one of the desires embedded in the desire for prolongevity. More attention needs to be paid in the dying process to allowing a sense of achieving new roles and values. I believe that emphasis on the person as a narrative and on telling one’s story could be very important in this context. I have, in another context, stressed the notion of self as a narrative, Peirce’s notion of man as a sign, and Royce’s concept of self as a potentially endless interpretative process.

JACQUELYN ANN K. KEGLEY 75 Peirce writes, “No son of Adam has ever fully manifested what there was in him.”*” I believe that this is the same notion of self that Alfred

North Whitehead had in mind when he claimed that all philosophy was a footnote to Plato. As endless interpretation of Plato’s works and ideas proceeds, so does his achievements. Who I am or was as a person is an open-ended matter; it is a matter of time, context, and his-

tory. The dying process could be much enriched by the concept expressed by Joseph Margolis when he wrote, “Once admitted] that persons are texts, have or are histories themselves|,| it becomes quite impossible to fix the ontological or intentional closure of their careers and natures—even after their physical death.”** Finally, being a patient with limited freedom and perceived as passive makes one especially vulnerable to a rupture between the ability to act and the recognition of the moral principles that one finds binding. Much of the difficulty of dying and of choices while dying lies in

this area. Again, we should pay attention to the conditions necessary for creative living even when terminal or ill. Rawlinson names a fourth area of suffering as the “‘spiritual.”” Rup-

ture occurs here between the patient’s present condition and his or her image of the whole of life and its meaning. A crisis of faith often occurs in dealing with severe illness or a crippling accident. This can be so even for those who do not believe in meaning beyond this present life and experience. Healing calls for some kind of reconciliation for the patient in all four areas. However, medicine is ill-equipped to deal with any of these alienations. Indeed, it assumes them to be unimportant and ignores them. Related to Rawlinson’s analysis of suffering is another profound failure of medicine. This is that it ignores the person’s story and its relevance to the healing process. This important aspect of person has already been briefly discussed above. Josiah Royce and others have argued that the person is his or her story, his or her life-project, and to ignore this is to degrade the person and to trespass on individual autonomy. Respecting autonomy is more than just lip service to informed consent, although an expanded understanding of informed consent is also important because it helps guarantee the right to make

76 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY important medical and life decisions. Unfortunately, medicine, as we have seen, focuses on the facts about the body-machine and, today, more and more on the facts revealed by technology’s marvels. In addition, physicians and medicine need to listen to the narrative of the illness from the patient’s point of view. Some have asserted that these aspects of the patient’s story should be seen as significant contributions to understanding the illness.°? In fact, however, medicine and medical education have tended to devalue the voice of the patient. Elliot Mishler, in his analysis of med-

ical interviews between patient and physician, reports that in the standard interviews, the voice of medicine predominates. The physician treats the voice of the patient as not medically relevant and thus it is quickly suppressed in the interview.” Further, the physician abstracts from the individual patient’s narrative a syndromic case, basing it on his/her knowledge of other cases and of the physiological and pathological processes of the body.*! Thus, the patient becomes objectified and rationalized, and the person’s lived experience and personal meaning of the illness are ignored. McDermott urges that physicians traverse the distance that has developed in contemporary medicine between doctor and patient. The important technological tool for a physician, says McDermott, is a chair. Use it to sit down, no matter how brief the time, and to enter the personal space of the patient. He sees medicine today as a Kafkaesque world where “we telephone and the recipient picks it up, but there is no one on the other end. We reach out but do not touch and are not touched.” This alienated and non-aesthetic context makes dying and choices about dying extremely difficult. It is to this subject we now turn. Death and Dying in an Alienated Environment

Questions of choosing to die have been in the public mind in recent years due to a number of factors, including well-published legal cases such as those of Karen Quinlan (1976), Nancy Cruzan (1990), Elizabeth Bouvia (1986), and the Baby Doe cases. Another prominent fac-

tor was the passage in Oregon of Proposition 16 that allowed

JACQUELYN ANN K. KEGLEY 77 physician-assisted suicide under a set of conditions. This act and the argument over its constitutionality in the Supreme Court have contributed to a general public consciousness about the right to die. In addition, there were the controversial acts of Dr. Kervorkian who lent assistance to persons seeking to die in a state where such an act was considered illegal.

John McDermott has been concerned about issues of death and dying throughout his career. This is not surprising given his arguments for the presence of terminality in all life and for suicide as a morally courageous act of the free individual. His most extended published writing on these issues seems to be the 1985 essay, “The Stethoscope as Talisman: Medical Technology and Loneliness.” The central theme of this article, as indicated earlier, is the impact of technology on medical practice. Concerning the issues of the right to die, McDermott writes, “Our next theme addresses those patients who either wish to die or should die, as in some neo-natal cases, yet because of the advance and availability of technology are encouraged and even

forced to live.’ It is in this context that McDermott introduces the case of Donald Dax Cowart, known in medical circles as the Galveston burn victim. This young man’s whole body was severely burned. His joints were melted, he was blind, and his face was grotesque. He faced months of very painful treatment. He insisted that he be allowed to go home so as to die with dignity. He was interviewed by a psychiatrist to determine whether he was “of sound mind,” and in the taped interview we see someone who is lucid and intelligent and well able to argue his case for his right to die. However, his case was denied and he was forced to endure treatment. Later, his argument was accepted, and at that point he chose to continue to live and accept treatment, believing that he had been morally and legally vindicated. Dax’s case is interesting from a number of points of view, none of which are further explored by McDermott. It is, first of all, a case of the

right to refuse treatment. However, this right is usually accorded to those considered terminally ill. This right was established in 1976 with

78 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY the Karen Quinlan case. That case established the right of the termi-

nally ill (or their surrogates) to refuse particularly “burdensome” treatment. However, honoring this right becomes more troublesome legally when the person is not considered terminal. A well-known case in this regard is that of Elizabeth Bouvia. Suffering from the debilitating effects of multiple sclerosis, Elizabeth checked into a California hospital and requested that she not be treated. The hospital brought the case to court and her request was denied. A more recent case seems more related to that of Donald Cowart. This case (McKay v. Bergstedt) occurred in Nevada in 1990. It concerned two young and severely injured quadriplegics on ventilators. The decision in the case specified that “competent” adults refusing treatment must be examined by two non-attending physicians to determine whether they are mentally competent, understand the prognosis and options for treatment, and are free of coercion or pressure in making the decision. If these conditions apply, then the right to refuse treatment must be honored. In recent years, the right of competent persons to refuse treatment has been generally upheld. McDermott notes one of the key aspects of this right, namely, the emphasis on “sound mind.” As discussed earlier in this essay, our cultural attitude toward death leads our society to consider those “choosing” to die to be of “unsound mind.” Thus, a psychiatrist was consulted in Dax’s case, and depression is usually cited as the reason why anyone would chose physician-assisted suicide or euthanasia. This concern is also reflected in the careful procedural safeguards in the Oregon law.

Patients must make a request in writing and repeat that request fifteen days later. They must be determined to be “rational and competent” and “their judgment must not be clouded by clinical depres-

sion. It should be clear at this point that much work needs to be done in our cultural context to bring people to understand, as does McDermott, that terminality is part of living. McDermott is correct in his assertion that technology does play a key role in forcing treatment and enabling people to hang on to life. The Dax case is set in this context. Indeed, there is a technological imperative operative in medical cases, as elsewhere. That imperative

JACQUELYN ANN K. KEGLEY 79 is, “if technology is available, you must use it.” In the medical situation, it is also very difficult to discontinue treatment once it is begun. More-

over, because technological support such as ventilators and artificial nutrition are routine procedures, the situation and decision-making becomes complex. Refusing treatment is one matter. Discontinuing

treatment is another. Not initiating treatment is still a third issue. Thus, in discussions of euthanasia, there are the supposed distinctions between active and passive euthanasia and acts of omission and commission. Technology does play a key role in a number of situations in forcing people to live. However, I do not believe that technology was the key factor in the Dax case. The technology here, unlike respirators, was not maintaining Dax’s life, although if no treatment were given, death would even-

tually have occurred. Rather, a key factor in this case was Dax’s mother, who believed that only God could take a life and who wanted

her son to live. Often, physicians and medical staff give primary decision-making power to relatives rather than to patients. This is done for several reasons. One is concern for the impact of the death on the relatives. Another is concern for legal suit. A third is the philosophical belief that persons who are severely ill cannot make truly informed decisions. A fourth factor is the belief that life must be preserved and fought for. McDermott’s individualistic approach to the quality of life and experience and his focus on experiential conditions leads him to a neglect of the personal, relational environment of persons. More will be said on this shortly. Finally, as I have already arsued, McDermott’s emphasis on technological alienation in medicine leads to a neglect of the philosophical biases of contemporary medicine. That this charge is partly true can be verified by examining several

of the other cases discussed by McDermott. The second case is of a girl born with lumbar meningomyelocele, hydrocephalus, and deformities of the legs. The parents refused further treatment for the child, but the hospital took legal recourse and began a series of ag-

gressive surgical treatments. Complications of the treatments included severe brain damage. The parents also incurred the hostility of the hospital staff. The baby came home, but died at ten months of

80 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY age. Again, hospital and police authorities expressed suspicion of the

parents because the authorities seemed to believe that the baby’s death was the result of the parents’ delay in seeking treatment for pneumonia. In addition, the mother had to take on extra work to pay off the heavy medical debt. Her husband and other children felt

neglected, and the children developed behavioral disorders. The mother was also hospitalized for severe depression. The parents deplored the senseless and destructive suffering of the baby and the whole family caused by court-ordered treatment of the child. They doubted that they or their living children would ever fully recover from the experience.** Many similar cases exist in the medical literature where treatment of an infant has been forced on parents. There also is much evidence that these kinds of cases impact heavily on the significant others of the infants in question. This is revealed, for example, in studies done in the United Kingdom to follow up a decision by the medical community to engage routinely in aggressive treatment for spina bifida. These revealed high rates of divorce and marital discord in the families of the infants and a series of behavioral and psychological problems among siblings. Other studies reveal similar results. At the end of her classic study of dying children and their well siblings, anthropologist Myra Bluebond-Langer writes, “The well-siblings of terminally ill children live in houses of chronic sorrow. * In his analysis, McDermott focuses on the quality of life for the child, and this certainly is an important fact. The death for the individual is, of course, a key event, but it is usually not just the individual who is impacted and who should be considered. Persons are social beings and live and act in social contexts. One must address these contexts as well as the question of aesthetic and quality living for the individual. McDermott, of course, seems to recognize this when he argues for establishing the proper educative context for children and the proper functional context for the disabled. This concern is also implied in his critical analysis of the role of technology in enfeebling life experiences in the medical world and in contemporary culture in general. It is unfortunate that he does not probe

in depth the assumptions and philosophical biases of those in the

JACQUELYN ANN K. KEGLEY 81 medical world nor address the role others often play in forcing individuals to live when they might have chosen to die. These factors are present in two other cases he discusses of “the making of a decision involving the life of a helpless child.’**° A second case concerns a child with a rare disease with very uncertain prognosis. This child is forced to live, against the wishes of the parents, because the physician desires to prove the worth of his own pharmacological discovery. Again, the bias of contemporary medicine toward science, research, and experimental study is the operating factor here. The third case concerns the

desire of a mother and grandmother to keep alive an infant against medical advice. The apparent motive is additional food stamps.*’ Here, the context is a deeply social and cultural one. Medical decision-making and informed consent have to be seen in a broader social and relational context. As I have argued elsewhere, this requires persons willing to undertake a mediating and interpretative role. This role allows various viewpoints to be represented in the decision-making, and hidden social, cultural, religious, scientific, and other biases to be revealed.*® Decisions about dying and physicianassisted suicide are not just about rights of individuals to make life or death decisions, although this is clearly a factor. These decisions concern aesthetic and quality living in a broader sense, that is, to include the four dimensions of life discussed earlier: embodied action, intersubjective life, the area of will and life plan and achievement, and the realm of universal harmony. To capture this perspective, I turn to those cases discussed by McDermott under the heading, “Living—No Matter What.’ Lillian T, a victim of encephalitis lethargica, finds that she hardly has any control of her bodily movements and thus must “plan all her motions in advance, with great precision.” Her living quarters “resembled the control room for the Apollo launchings . . . all paths and trajectories pre-computed and compared, contingency plans and ‘fail-safes’ prepared in advance.” In other words, much of Miss T’s life is dependent on conscious taking-care and elaborate calculation.*° A second case is that of a soldier wounded with a bullet to the brain. This man, Zaset-

sky, makes a heroic effort to retrieve his faculties. A journal of his

82 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY recovery of only 3,000 words takes twenty-five years to write, and learning to be a shoemaker takes years of painstaking effort. These individuals chose to live and function against great odds. The central question concerns the reasons for this effort. McDermott does not probe these. Rather, he argues that these extreme ver-

sions of living in the world “are intensive role models for our untapped capacities and sensibilities.”*! I heartily agree, yet what other lessons can these cases teach us about dealing with life, death, and dying? McDermott does address the question at the end of his article. He gives us three conditions needed for pursuing life. The first

is to recognize that “human beings are transient and ultimately terminal” and thus to live as if “each moment has a sacred ring to it.” The second is to avoid literal-mindedness and to seek to have a distinctively personal quality color all our activities. Finally, McDermott advises us to “widen the frame of relations. Pursue as many roots, boughs, and rivulets as possible.”’** The last condition, the relational one, I believe, focuses on seeking Jamesian connections in experience itself and thus savoring fully all that experience has to offer. This is very important, and the emphasis is one that is distinctively McDermott. However, equally important, in my view, are relationships with

other persons. These relationships are crucial to my own selfdevelopment and to the enriching of my own experience. Independence of self is crucial, as McDermott would stress, but connections with others need not diminish this and, in fact, as I have argued elsewhere, enhance that very individual flourishing.** In answering the question of why persons persist in life against all

odds, I return to the concept of “prolongevity” in its ideal form. ‘“Prolongevity” means seeking to live longer so that one’s days are significant and therefore “count.” Four goals are part of this search. The first is to accumulate more and deeper social, psychological, and biological experience. This certainly is one goal that McDermott advocates. The second goal is to find opportunities for new jobs, new roles, and new status. This is the action aspect of the person, the protean person that McDermott cites. The last two goals concern relationships with others. These are to prolong relations with others and

JACQUELYN ANN K. KEGLEY 83 to increase the complexity of social networks. The latter may include,

for many, a connection with some deeper foundation of existence within or above ordinary experience. This aspect of that goal McDermott would deny as having validity.

Unfortunately, for many human beings the fact of the matter is that their social, psychological, and biological experience is filled with pain, limitations, and lack of personal control. Rather than opportunities for new achievements, there are no jobs, roles, or status. In our

society, this is often the case for the young and the old.°° It may be increasingly so for persons of all ages. Rather than increased or significant relations with others, many persons are alone and isolated. An interesting aspect of this is the significant role that pets can play for the homeless, the sick, and the aged in providing some relationship. Finally, rather than finding more complex social networks, many believe that they are a burden to others. All of us need to work to provide conditions for aesthetic, quality living for all; thus, these facts need to be seriously addressed and overcome. For the dying, the hospice movement has done much to provide quality conditions for those who have reached the terminality present in all our lives.* Although I wish that he had probed deeper the many issues of death and dying, I applaud John McDermott for his singing for the joys of aesthetic living. He has argued cogently that we must seek the full use of all our capacities for experience. He has spoken eloquently for the need to add a genuinely personal quality to our living and dying. McDermott reflects on an experience with a dying man who wanted a special cigar, a Puerto Rican cigar. With some effort, he brings the cigars and observes the joyful expression of the man. This man, he says, taught him the meaning of personal authenticity. The cigars evoked for the man many rich memories of Puerto Rico. “Only those cigars were authentic, existential, freighted with experienced relations.”’*” I close this reflection on the philosophy of John McDermott with the words of Octavio Paz, “Each of us dies the death he is looking for, the death he has made for himself. Death, like life, is not transferable.”

FOUR

THE “‘BITE’” OF THE “EXISTENTIAL MOMENT Michael W. Allen

a> The first, foremost, and permanent ontological fact of our human situation is that we were born to live but sure to die. —John J. McDermott, “Why Bother: Is Life Worth Living?”

} or those who still read the literature of existentialism, the movement is as alive today as it was in 1943 on the eve of the publication of Being and Nothingness. Sartre’s text was an intellectual call to arms during the darkest days of the twentieth century, a tank to pro-

tect France and the world from the forces of totalitarianism. It was difficult to escape the conclusion that there was something terribly right, if not unsettling, about his philosophy of existentialism and about those capable of living up to it. The story of one encounter with existentialism can be told through the career of a man who does not call himself an “existentialist,” has devoted no single text to a study of the subject, and whose name is instead synonymous with the phrase, “renaissance of American philosophy”: John J. McDermott. But still the label seems to stick. Every page of his writing is attentive to what he calls “our task,” namely, “to think deeply about the most quixotic of all cosmic events, namely, the utterly transient yet powerful existence of a human life’ (SE 27). In addition, some of his deep-

est influences are existentialists. Of the thinkers under which his | 84 }

MICHAEL W. ALLEN 85 ‘generation came to consciousness,’ McDermott mentions Nietzsche, Camus, Sartre, and Kafka (SE 68). Finally, recent work explicitly

adopts the viewpoint of Camus. When called to think deeply about the intellectual life of John McDermott, I believe we would do well to celebrate his lifelong dialogue with existentialist thought. McDermott announced his prolific career with an article on Mar-

tin Buber, advanced it through an extended middle period that focused on pragmatism, and now offers us a view that integrates crucial elements of both pragmatism and existentialism. Such a fusion is capable of avoiding the harshest critiques exchanged between the two

traditions. The two-fold tendency is to distinguish too sharply between tragic experience and environmental metaphysics, on the one hand, and on the other, between personal courage and social problem-solving. One traditional view of the relationship between pragmatism and existentialism, for example, is that the latter emphasizes the tragic or irrational side of life in a way utterly foreign to pragmatism, specifically with regard to Dewey. In this vein, Elmer Duncan

recounts the story of a man who survived an atomic blast in Japan during the Second World War: ... he stepped out of what was left of his house in all the desolation around him. He said that what he remembered most was a maddened red horse that ran past him. It was only later that he thought—-red? Horses aren’t red. And then he realized that what had happened was that the searing heat of the bomb had actually burned all the hair and the flesh off the poor animal... . This is what I was trying ... to get at when I said that there is a sense in which Dewey did not believe in the existence of evil. This is what I meant when I said that “the things that troubled Camus could hardly be termed social problems awaiting the successful application of the scientific method.”!

In addition, Peter Augustine Lawler objects that ““Dewey’s Darwinian account of experience rejects radically the existentialist tendency to

celebrate the irrational and to desublimate the purely spontaneous, impulsive, and vital.” The Deweyan ideal, in Lawler’s view, is rather the “severe rational self-control of the scientist.”* Another traditional

86 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY view of the relationship, one that portrays such rationality in a favorable light, is that pragmatism provides the concrete logic of problemsolving that eludes existentialist thought. Sidney Hook claims The pragmatist answers that a genuine problem is always a specific difficulty of a concrete and/or theoretical nature in a finite context... . The existentialist maintains that the world is absurd because he cannot find an answer to the so-called problem of the existence of the world. The pragmatist says it is absurd to say that the world is absurd. Only human beings can be absurd. The truly absurd thing about the existentialist is that he does not understand the necessity of being clear about the criterion of what constitutes a problem.?

Although not exhaustive of every dimension of his thought, the center of McDermott’s philosophy can be seen as a reconstruction of the boundaries that traditionally separate pragmatism and existentialism. From the side of pragmatism, his thought takes seriously the notions of situation and meliorism, while his existentialist sensibility stresses tragedy and courage. As a result, McDermott’s philosophy is characterized by two core concepts, what I will call “situational tragedy” and “courageous meliorism.’”’ McDermott does not use these terms himself, but rather ones such as “‘ill-at-ease,” “ontological disconnectedness,” and “loneliness.” My terms are not meant to replace his, but to be used as tools to examine certain elements of his philosophy. It is worth mentioning that my emphasis upon the two themes just mentioned is meant to reflect McDermott’s affinity for the erotic, affective, and aesthetic dimensions of existentialist thought, found primarily in its literary works, over the turgid rhetoric of Being. In addition, there is more than one account to be given of the influence of existentialism on McDermott’s philosophy. My emphasis here is

upon Camus, although it might have been upon Gabriel Marcel or Martin Buber. Finally, owing to the diversity of my intended audience, my aim has been above all to introduce. My intent is that what follows requires little acquaintance with the details of existentialism, pragmatism, or McDermott’s philosophy.

MICHAEL W. ALLEN 87 Situational Tragedy and Courageous Meliorism

There are several excellent comparisons of pragmatist and existential-

ist thought, but I believe that the fusion of the two approaches in McDermott’s thought makes his philosophy truly novel.* As a consequence, McDermott’s philosophy doesn’t recognize the inability suggested by Duncan, namely that a Deweyan, situational metaphysics cannot deal adequately with tragedy. Rather, McDermott’s situational approach to tragedy locates the notion of tragic experience championed by existentialists, specifically that having to do with death and dying, within the wider social and environmental forces that form an essential element of pragmatism.

Understanding death as an affair of nature and the environment doesn’t deprive it of its tragic dimension, and neither does the personal significance of death obviate the fact that death is also a function of the rhythms of nature. Of Marcus Aurelius, for example, McDermott claims that his “appeal to the cycle of nature, which gives human explanation for the existence of the human organism . . . does

not remove the bite from the fact that we are born to live and destined to die” (SE 167). Moreover, the pragmatist metaphysics that forms an essential element of McDermott’s articulation of the experiences of death and dying, far from depriving the latter of existential

significance, actually draws out even more fully the dimension of tragedy surrounding such processes. It is in the process of dying that we must come steadily and inexorably to terms with how it is that death can be a welcome necessity for the environment and yet at the same time be utterly, existentially, foreboding for each individual. Our death is not the most important thing, speaking in environmental terms, but it is perhaps the most important for each one of us. My term, “situational tragedy,” describes a “situation which, in its most profound sense, does not work,” to use McDermott’s words, one in which failure and misfortune are necessary traits.° The presence of genuine tragedy means that the situation cannot be improved indefinitely, that is, it cannot ever “work” completely. This is the bittersweet end to Camus’s masterful novel, The Plague, where, despite the

88 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY best efforts of Dr. Rieux, the infection “never dies or disappears for good” and, at the appropriate moment, will “rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city.’ A second consequence of the fusion of pragmatism and existentialism in McDermott’s philosophy is that he can also reject Hook’s notion that the question of the meaning of one’s life within a precarious universe cannot be a well-articulated problem. Accordingly, McDermott’s view integrates the social meliorism that is a hallmark of prag-

matism with the profoundly personal, existential energies that he believes are required to achieve it. McDermott maintains that there are two requirements for “successful amelioration.” These are the ‘abandonment of fixed positions, ideological cant and a priori judgments” and a “need for sophistication as to how institutions deflect, co-opt, and dilute change, all the while praising its presence” (SE 104-5). Both involve the notion of existential authenticity. The first is of chief concern here and is in fact better developed by McDermott than the second. He claims that the first requirement “can be brought about only by what Jewish tradition calls a teshuvah, a full turning, a change of heart’ (SE 104-5). Camus indicates the courage that such

a turn or change requires when he claims that I must find out ‘whether I can live with what I know and with that alone.” For McDermott, significant social change depends in large part upon the personal struggle to live without ultimate appeal, excuse, or exemption. Meliorism is therefore anything but a passionless, impersonal, mechanical doctrine. Its presence is wrung soulfully out of a situation, often through extraordinary human effort. This means that meliorism takes place on a personal as well as social level. How do we change the social situation? Begin by admitting the following, I need you, I am not perfect, and the solutions we find together for today will not work, perhaps even harm us, tomorrow. The Nietzschean version of what I have called McDermott’s notion

of courageous meliorism is to resist the temptation for revenge, which is the “will’s ill will against time and its ‘it was.’’’* Can we rec-

ognize our temporality and yet remain elevated, not taking our revenge out on those we encounter in time and even on time itself? The

MICHAEL W. ALLEN 89 orientation away from “fixed positions,” to use McDermott’s term, is another point of intersection between pragmatism and existentialism. In this vein, Heidegger notes that “the deepest aversion to time does not consist of the mere degradation of the earthly. For Nietzsche, the most profound revenge consists of that reflection which posits eternal Ideals as the absolute, compared with which the temporal must degrade itself to actual non-being.’”

To sum up a bit at this point, the reconstruction of perceived boundaries between pragmatism and existentialism in McDermott’s view yields at least the following consequences: There is a tragic limit to what meliorism can accomplish. Tragedy is not purely internal or subjective, but exists as part of a situation, which can be improved at least in its aspects. Courage is required in order to undergo a change of heart, which in turn is required for social change. But courage is not afraid to view itself as part of the problem, and this requires a struggle with self-deception. The existential authenticity required to overcome self-deception is not the duty of lonely individuals, but rather of society as a whole. Finally, there can be a “problem of the existence of the world,” as Hook puts it. McDermott’s philosophy integrates existential crisis with the logic of problem-solving. The next section considers the notion of courageous meliorism with respect to some thinkers, who have come to be known as existentialists, in an effort to situate McDermott’s philosophy within that movement. Next, an understanding of what I take to be his disagreements with Sartre, whose name is still synonymous with “existentialism, is presented in the subsequent section. The penultimate section seeks to provide a more detailed account of the influence of Camus on McDermott’s interpretation of James and Dewey. Finally, I return briefly to the concept of situational tragedy and raise a final criticism of McDermott’s view.

Courageous Meliorism in the Landscape of Existentialism

McDermott’s notion that meliorism always requires a change of heart provides a way to compare his thought with that of existentialism. It

90 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY is appropriate for this task to discuss works from his favorite course to teach, Philosophy and Literature. One prominent version of the course begins with Sophocles’ Oedipus the King and ends with JeanPaul Sartre’s play, The Flies, the latter’s version of the final chapter of Aeschylus’ Orestia. Serving as bookends for the remainder of the course, one point that a comparison of the texts illustrates is the transition from the centrality of fate to freedom in Western culture. The tragedy of Oedipus is that he accomplishes less the more he struggles against the complex and intractable nexus of forces that grips his life. Similarly, the Orestia imbues the cycle of violence it portrays with cosmic significance: Orestes kills his mother, Clytemnestra, in retribution for killing his father, Agamemnon, who began the cycle by sacrificing their daughter, Iphigeneia, to the gods. But Sartre’s version rejects the notion that human acts are a function of an underlying cosmos, or order. In stark contrast, Sartre’s Orestes thunderously pro-

claims his autonomy from any ultimate judgment and therefore claims sole authorship of his acts. He will not be ruled by fate or judged by Athena for what he regards as his own free choice to commit murder, “you understand that my crime is wholly mine; I claim it as my own, for all to know.”’! Sartre’s The Flies is a protest against National Socialism and the horrors of the Holocaust, and one no less profound in this essential respect than Camus’s The Plague, another text included in McDer-

mott’s course in Philosophy and Literature. But Sartre’s character casts a lonely shadow in the Greek square, and the consequences Orestes draws from his freedom are conspicuously negative and individu-

alistic in character. If God does not exist, then “everything is permitted,” in the words of Ivan of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, which is yet a third text from another version of McDermott’s course. No ultimate judgment is passed because no one is

qualified to rule over me or the acts I freely choose. But Camus breathes a radically different conclusion into his Dr. Rieux. The freedom to generate novelty always entails the capacity as well to annihi-

late all roots of subsequent growth. It is on the latter point that I

MICHAEL W. ALLEN 91 believe Camus differs most from Sartre for McDermott. What is lack-

ing in Sartre is certainly not the spirit of protest, or even ultimately that of solidarity, but rather the unflagging attitude of meliorism that Camus develops in The Plague. McDermott concludes that Sartre’s early view is characterized by “philosophical nihilism” (CE 74). In contrast, as his name suggests, Rieux is the one whose act of courage, his Nietzschean “laughter” (rieur), captures the truly social significance of freedom.

Although Camus is typically called an “existentialist,” it is worth noting that he renounced the term and thereby disassociated himself as strongly from Sartre as did Heidegger, saying of the former, “Sartre is an existentialist, and the only book of ideas I have published, The Myth of Sisyphus, was directed against the so-called existentialist philosophers.”'! The Plague is a turning point in Camus’s writing be-

cause the heroism of Dr. Rieux implies a clear commitment to meliorism, not simply the asocial, directionless expression of freedom found in the early Sartre. The message of Camus’s best-known earlier

work, The Stranger, is perhaps more conservative by comparison. Meursault’s accomplishment is primarily his refusal to break down in

front of the priest who visits him in his cell. The meaning he attributes to his act of murder is similar to that of Sartre’s Orestes and is therefore purchased at the expense of genuine remorse and compassion. When first confronted with the task of assessing his life and rela-

tions with others, Meursault displays what I believe McDermott would call “geometric thinking”: Pd passed my life in a certain way, and I might have passed it in a different way, if I'd felt like it. Pd acted thus, and I hadn’t acted otherwise; I hadn’t done x, whereas I had done y or z. And what did that mean? That, all the time, I’d been waiting for this present moment, for that dawn, tomorrow’s or another day’s, which was to justify me. Nothing, nothing had the least importance, and I know quite well why.”

Meursault’s first attempt at self-reflection ends in aimless introspection. In such moments, the protagonist of The Stranger might have

92 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY been drawn from the pages of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, where human relations are shown to threaten and usurp rather than to en-

rich and nourish. “Hell is other people,” is the infamous line from Sartre’s play, No Exit.'° I will discuss Meursault’s second and success-

ful effort at self-reflection later in order to provide an illustration of what I think McDermott means by a change of heart. The radically different conclusions reached by Sartre and Camus are atheistic responses to Nietzsche's infamous announcement that ‘God is dead,” that ours is an age of godlessness. But a religious interpretation of existentialism is presented by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, who,

along with Nietzsche, stands as a common influence to the two French philosophers. Dostoyevsky’s encounter with nihilism therefore forms a third existentialist approach to the issue of meliorism. On one level, The Stranger is a variation of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, where rather than refusing the priest in his cell, Raskolnikov embraces religion as a means of atoning for his murder of the old woman. Orestes rejects religious guilt as a threat to full development of his Promethean energies, but it is not clear that his freedom can ever be conditioned by concern for social ends. In contrast, Rieux rejects Father Paneloux’s sermon of religious passivity as a limit upon his capacity to meliorate human suffering in the “plague” victims that surround him. As a third alternative, the works of Dostoyevsky combine social concern with the religious doctrine that is rejected as a limitation by both Camus and Sartre. The Brothers Karamazov com-

pletes Dostoyevsky’s argument for the conquering of nihilism through religious salvation so much more than any other of his novels that it earned a place at Tolstoy’s bedside. A fourth possibility can be seen in the works of Franz Kafka. Kafka presents us with a windowless, pragmatically situationless nightmare world, in which meaningful choice and therefore also courageous meliorism are rendered impossible. His texts present an environment in which Sartre’s famous line from “Existentialism Is a Humanism,” namely, “existence precedes essence,” is reversed. In Kafka’s The Trial, for example, Joseph K. wakes from sleep to find himself already

MICHAEL W. ALLEN 93 charged with a crime, the nature of which remains mysterious throughout the subsequent text. The antihero’s “essence” is fixed a priori within a hopelessly fractured world, with the result that he is rendered helpless to either examine himself or improve his situation. Likewise, in The Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa wakes to find himself

transformed into a large insect, a situation that soon proves for the same reasons to be intractable. K. and Samsa are reduced to simply playing out the consequences of their respective, fixed predicaments in the same way that Vladimir and Estragon stumble inefficaciously through the Kafkaesque environment of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.

Three of the possibilities just discussed run counter to McDermott’s mature thought. Recalling his two requirements for amelioration, which of the positions gives up the search for ultimate meaning, but in addition provides for a change of heart? The path of religious salvation, even Dostoyevsky’s existential account, is the first that must be rejected because for McDermott the occasion of human existence is painfully temporal. The “bite” of what he calls the “existential moment” wells up out of a deep sensibility of the fragile finitude of experience.'* Moreover, McDermott’s break with the Catholicism of his youth can be read as an existential crisis of the variety that he would later celebrate in William James and is therefore one key, I believe, to understanding his subsequent interest in pragmatism. Given McDermott’s views, Kafka and Sartre must also be rejected in favor of Camus, who stands perhaps even before William James as his philosophical hero. Strictly speaking, McDermott doesn’t reject Kafka’s account of alienation, but rather implies that it is incomplete as it stands, in that he uses Kafka as a basis to develop his accounts of pedagogy and meliorism. He holds a similar view of Sartre. Accordingly, I believe he reaches beyond them, and the search for mean-

ing is therefore not “Kafkaesque” or “Sartrean” for McDermott. With regard to the way of Sartrean autonomy, which trades relations for radical efficacy, detailed analysis of a McDermottian rejection is offered in the next section.

94 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY Profusion over Absence, Efficacy without Alienation

Within his account of the cluttered excesses of Cannery Row, with its cloisters of makeshift shelters, decrepit automobiles, and above all its people with their various and intermingled stores of personal goods, plans, and desires, Steinbeck interjects a single moment of profound absence to offset the profusion. He describes a young American boy who experiences the fleeting image of a sparse Asian landscape, reflected in the eyes of a Chinese immigrant. The little boy whimpers at the “loneliness—the desolate cold aloneness of the landscape .. .

because there wasn’t anybody at all in the world and he was left.” The vivid image enriches Steinbeck’s descriptions. It also serves to highlight the lack in American culture of any genuine concept of absence. Similarly, McDermott’s America is—historically, culturally, metaphysically, and experientially—a land of profusion. I believe this is the key to his response to Sartre.

At first blush, McDermott’s thought may seem Sartrean in a few important respects. His notion of “ontological disconnectedness,”’ for example, seems to indicate the presence of the profound bifurcation between human and natural processes at the center of Sartre’s ontology. For Sartre, the universe is split down the middle between these two competing forces, which he terms respectively, “Being-for-itself”’

and “Being-in-itself.” Similarly, for McDermott, to be lonely is “to be without, to be adrift while yet stationary.”!° Even more forcefully, when lonely, “I am out of place, I am no place, I am nowhere, I am no-body, no-one, although as seen by others, I am here, there.”’!” His words seem to conjure up a human consciousness that lacks being, a pure nothingness, as Sartre would put it. In addition, McDermott seems to share Sartre’s claim that we exist purely as the sum total of

our free actions, in fact creating ourselves purely from the free choices we make, when he remarks, “Rather, our living is constitutive of our person. Who we are at any moment is precisely our living.”’® Finally, McDermott makes use of Sartre’s concept of bad faith, a form

of self-deception associated with the rejection of our freedom (CE 74).

MICHAEL W. ALLEN 95 But there are compelling reasons to reject any deep connection be-

tween McDermott and Sartre. Foremost of these is the question of whether life is worth living, the significance of which can hardly be overestimated for McDermott or for his philosophical heroes, Camus and James. But Roquentin, Sartre’s surrogate in Nausea, when asked by the “Self-Taught Man” about a Jamesian response to the question, suggests in the following text that the issue is treated quite differently by Sartre: “A few years ago I read a book by an American author. It was called Is Life Worth Living? Isn’t that the question you are asking yourself?” Certainly not, that is not the question I am asking myself. But I have no desire to explain. ‘His conclusion,” the Self-Taught Man says, consolingly, “is in favour of voluntary optimism. Life has a meaning if we choose to give it one. One must first act, throw one’s self into some enterprise. Then, if one reflects, the die is already cast, one is pledged. I don’t know what you think about that, Monsieur?” “Nothing,” I say.!°

Roquentin adds that this is “precisely the sort of lie” that those who act out of bad faith tell themselves.”° Sartre uses the term, “‘bad faith” to describe the condition of those who deny their own freedom and act as if life promises ultimate meaning or redemption. But to resist bad faith, one must consciously strive not to “throw one’s self into some enterprise,” to use the Self-Taught Man’s phrase. That is, one must resist establishing genuine relations with others and one’s environment. For McDermott, in stark contrast, “bad faith” is actually tantamount to what he calls “relation starvation.” His use of the term indicates the need not only to resist the temptation of fixed positions, but also to resist solutions that aim at isolation and individualism. There is also good reason to resist a Sartrean interpretation of McDermott’s term, “ontological disconnectedness.” The concept of profusion that is central to McDermott’s pragmatist metaphysics engages human beings in the project of generating novelty from a matrix of processive relations. Another term, “loneliness,” emphasizes the per-

sonal aspect of experience, but is not equivalent to “alienation.”

96 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY “Rather than holding loneliness to be the result of absenting, of something gone or as not having come,” he maintains, “I see loneliness as a palpable, thick, even aggressive presence in each of our per-

sonal worlds, in short, the personal space of our embodied, yet ontologically disconnected selves.’’?! But Sartre’s sparse ontology does

not capture such notions of profusion, novelty, and especially relations. The two great categories of Being and Nothingness, Being-foritself and Being-in-itself, are depicted in the well-known scene in Nausea where Roquentin is confronted by the chestnut tree. He feels himself to be “suffocating: existence penetrates me everywhere,” and in his anguish Roquentin recognizes, moreover, that the “diversity of things, their individuality, was only an appearance. . . . This veneer had melted, leaving soft, monstrous masses, all in disorder—naked, in a frightful, obscene nakedness.’’?? The passage illustrates at least two points. First, Roquentin’s unrest

does not arise from his experience of an object of nature, namely, a tree, but rather out of a more basic confrontation with Being-in-itself. That is, the diversity of the natural world is actually mere appearance, subsumed completely within a lifeless category of force that in turn threatens to consume Being-for-itself. This brings up the second point. To be free for Sartre is to live in perpetual fear of the relations encountered through contact with such a lifeless force. If one allows oneself to be influenced by the environment or motivated to change, then one has succumbed to bad faith. For Sartre, the individual must make up his or her mind alone, without “outside” aid. All meaning, at least for the early Sartre, is therefore derived completely from the individual. The subject is responsible for generating novelty entirely

from a mysterious and presumably limitless store of internal resources.

From the perspective of McDermott’s thought, Sartre’s categories are simply too conservative. Nothing ever “counts twice over” in Sartre’s ontology, to use James’s phrase. For McDermott, in contrast, there is no insulating rift that separates us from the environment we inhabit, but rather an “oscillation,” one “between naturing exquisite

MICHAEL W. ALLEN 97 and naturing carcinomic.” Nature is, at the same time, both “beneficent” and “maleficent.”?? The same natural processes that nourish us also consume us, some of us today and some of us tomorrow. For McDermott, nature both feeds us and feeds on us, catching us thereby in a twofold penetration. The double-aspect, or functional, nature of

such a penetration yields the possibility of constitutive relations, whereas the unyielding maleficence of Sartre’s view of nature yields none. Sartre’s esteem for James is suggested by his recognition that in the Principles of Psychology, the latter’s notion of a “river . . . best evokes the image of the constant interpenetration of the parts by a whole and their perpetual dissociation and free movement.’ But the power to change is not locked up strictly within the confines of the individual self. For McDermott, James’s stream of thought teems with the relational leads of an entire context loaded with implication. Novelty need not be purchased through wholesale rejection of contextual continuity. Of James’s psychology, McDermott says, “It is important to realize that even in James’s early, psychological version of the field of experience, the possibility of novelty does not conflict with the presence of sensible continuity” (WJ xxxix). The notion of absence central to Sartre’s early ontology lacks the gaudy, noisy, bumptious trappings of the West, in a McDermottian double-entendre, “the die-cast metaphysics of Las Vegas.”?> The expansive profusion of the West is not superficial or strictly ornamental for McDermott, therefore the glitzy cast of Vegas is Vegas, not a simple Sartrean “veneer.” The multiplicity of nature, not exclusive of the urban, penetrates every facet of our lives, and does so with such extraordinary vivacity that expression of its novelty again demands a metaphysics of profusion, not sparsity. Accordingly, the restless energy of McDermott’s writings embodies the American mind equally well within its Astrodome, Chicago packing houses, graffitied railroad cars, and overcrowded New England town meetings. Any sense of awe in Sartre’s universe is sheepishly anthropocentric because nature is stripped in advance of its capacity to motivate human consciousness in the direction of novel experience. Where there is no relational

98 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY lead, for McDermott, there is no capacity to be changed through relations and, moreover, no possibility of undergoing a genuine change of heart. The goal is not to change oneself within an otherwise inert environment. Such a view provides no basis for McDermott’s concept of meliorism.

McDermott’s Existentialist View of Pragmatism

McDermott recognizes that the influence of existentialism on his work in pragmatism can be viewed by others as a source of tension. A recent article, for example, explicitly adopts the voice of Camus. Claiming that as “human naturals, we find ourselves in a situation which, in its most profound sense, does not work,’ McDermott also claims, as discussed in the previous section, that the “being of being is to be disconnected, ontologically adrift.” In response to his use of such terms, he warns: Also, I am aware that this can be read as a telling departure from

the radically empirical, pragmatic metaphysics of James and Dewey. Certainly it would appall those who hold to the conservative metaphysics of Peirce. And yes, it is Camus who is speaking here, the Camus who wants to know if he “can live with what I know and with that alone” and the Camus who tells us that for him suicide is the “one truly serious philosophical problem.””°

McDermott’s warning seems justified. After all, he has warned us extensively about the dangers of alienation, typically through appealing

to these very pragmatists. But I believe that McDermott wants to press on his pragmatist readers that the turn to Camus is a distinct turn away from alienation. His own view does not recognize any final tension between Camus, and James and Dewey. But Camus supplies something that McDermott seems to find lacking in the pragmatists. When he considers the meaning of his life, McDermott tells us, he does not read the Bible or Tao te Ching. Even James’s essay devoted specifically to the topic, “Is Life Worth Living?” is of no help, as its

MICHAEL W. ALLEN 99 exclusion from The Writings of William James suggests. McDermott tells us that he reaches instead for Camus and The Myth of Sisyphus.?’ What is it that McDermott finds in Camus, and how does this round out what he gets from James and Dewey? Although McDermott’s affinity for Camus has been made explicit in recent years, the latter’s influence already extended to the deepest level of McDermott’s interpretation of James. He interprets James’s crisis of 1870, for example, explicitly in terms of Camus. James found himself confronted by a universe that, to once again apply McDer-

mott’s concept of ontological disconnectedness, “does not work,” one where repeated attempts to solve the pseudo-problem of freedom versus determinism only plunged James deeper into paralyzing despair. What is significant about James’s diary account of the event, for McDermott, is that for perhaps the first time in his life, he avoids what had been for him a derivative and escapist solution. The direction he takes can be seen as an attempt to confront the actualities of his situation, and despite all of its uncertainty, to proceed from that point. Like Albert Camus of The Rebel, James does not resolve his fundamental problem, but he no longer allows it to crush future options. (WJ xxviii)

What James discovers is that a Camusian middle position exists between the attitudes of nihilism and certainty. He learns, with McDermott and Camus, that “Being deprived of hope is not despairing.’’”* The middle ground between giving up hope and falling into despair that McDermott shares with Camus is one crucial element of the former’s existentialist interpretation of pragmatism. Again, the emphasis is upon relations, not alienation. McDermott distinguishes his con-

cepts rather sharply from any Sartrean interpretation, the brand of existentialism he seems to have in mind when he warns against the “temptation to see... [James’s] crisis of 1870 as an existentialist type of experience, primarily characterized by alienation” (WJ xxx). McDermott places James in close proximity to existentialist thought, but

100 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY maintains an emphasis upon the social benefits that attend the insight that human beings lack an inherited place. Again, the contrast with

Sartre is distinct. McDermott claims that James’s notion of self is “functionally rather than ontologically derived,” and the latter “duplicates the position of existential thought, namely that the human self has no fixed place from which to proceed. . . . It is precisely this lack of an inherited place that ... makes James’s thought so relevant to contemporary social thought” (SE 54). There is an important sense in which Camus supplies what is lacking in the pragmatist view of social relations. To illustrate, consider Meursault again. One result of the fusion of pragmatism and existentialism in McDermott’s thought is that the moment of Meursault’s death is attributed a more robust significance than it would receive if treated exclusively from the perspective of either approach. I will confine myself here to discussing Camus’s contribution to the issue. A close look at the conclusion of The Stranger indicates the presence of what McDermott might call a change of heart in the main character. Facing the imminence of his own death, Meursault finally ceases the alienating retreat into himself and instead opens himself to an experiential flood of relations. In contrast to the nearly solipsistic motility with which Meursault conducted his life prior to imprisonment, the moments subsequent to his encounter with the priest find him open to radically new possibilities. It is not that Meursault now passively adopts the religious solution embraced by Dostoyevsky’s Raskolnikov. Neither does he opt for the early Sartre’s Promethean notion of freedom, one unconditioned by concern for social ends. Left in si-

lence after the confrontation, Meursault in fact becomes oriented away from the twin pitfalls of both the certitude associated with ultimate salvation and the nihilism of alienation. Instead, he embraces the same variety of the third, Camusian, alternative that McDermott claims freed James: I must have had a longish sleep, for, when I woke, the stars were shining down on my face. Sounds of the countryside came faintly in, and the cool night air, veined with smells of earth and salt, fanned my cheeks. ... Almost for the first time in many months

MICHAEL W. ALLEN 101 I thought of my mother. ...I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe. To feel it so like myself, indeed, so brotherly, made me realize that I’d been happy, and that I was happy still. For all to be accomplished, for me to feel less lonely, all that remained to hope was that on the day of my execution there should be a huge crowd of spectators and that they should greet me with howls of execration.”

Meursault recognizes that the universe is indifferent to the beat of his heart, yet does not allow this realization to crush his desire to reach out to others, if only fleetingly. Due to its timing, Meursault’s change of heart cannot effect social change on par with Rieux’s resolve to heal the “sick” in The Plague.

In interpreting his own work, Camus claims, “Compared to The Stranger, The Plague does, beyond any possible discussion, represent the transition from an attitude of solitary revolt to the recognition of a community whose struggles must be shared. If there is an evolution from The Stranger to The Plague, it is in the direction of solidarity and participation.’*° But even so, notice in the earlier work the presence of a newly found, twofold relation to nature and other human beings. Meursault’s change of heart occurs, first, through an encounter with nature, of the variety that McDermott lauds in Camus. McDermott tells us that the voice of Camus he adopts is “the Camus of the early essays for whom the naturals of sun, sand and sweat speak for themselves, needing no further raison @etre.’’*! Second, the recollection of Meursault’s mother and the hope that his death will make

a significant mark on those gathered to witness it indicate that he glimpses for perhaps the first time the wider context that he shares with others. It is within such a context that he recognizes himself as part of something larger than himself, where his acts acquire genuine social significance. Camus’s term for such a recognition is “mature rebellion,” “Therefore the individual is not, in himself alone, the embodiment of the values he wishes to defend. It needs all humanity, at

least, to comprise them. When he rebels, a man identifies himself with other men and so surpasses himself, and from this point of view human solidarity is metaphysical.’’*

102 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY What might count as a source of difficulty for Deweyans is that the profound significance of Meursault’s change of heart has nothing to do with changing social institutions in the sense associated with traditional pragmatism. Meursault’s experience is deeply personal, but not for that reason individualistic, alienated, or antisocial. After all, our word “social” comes from the Latin socius, which meant “compan-

ion,’ or “partner.” Perhaps it takes McDermott’s appreciation of Camus to bring out this aspect of Dewey fully, but there is something

deeply, personally, and yet socially significant about the fleeting glance that Meursault trades with the spectator to his execution. No one articulates this point better than another of McDermott’s heroes, Martin Buber, to whom he devoted his first published article. McDer-

mott claims that the “core of Buber’s thought” is that, in Buber’s words, “ “All real living is meeting,’ and in ‘meeting’ we are addressed.”’** Buber offers the same twofold account of relations with

environment and other human beings, of “meeting,” that I pointed to in The Stranger. First, to engage in Buber’s dialogue is to reject the Sartrean divide between humanity and nature in favor of a McDermottian “oscillation.” In contrast to the alienating encounter with the chestnut tree described by Sartre’s Roquentin, Buber’s dialogical de-

scription of meeting a tree draws out the full manifold of relations present, “The tree is no impression, no play of my imagination, no aspect of a mood; it confronts me bodily and has to deal with me as I must deal with it—only differently.” Second, the sphere of human relations is also inherently meaningful, ““The reverent confrontation that occurs in the true meeting of one man with another gives to the moments of ‘meeting’ a sacredness, a sacramentality, filling them with wonder and grace.’ Neither does James’s philosophy fully capture the significance of Meursault’s change of heart. That McDermott esteems James’s sense

of the personal goes without question. But despite his claim that James is relevant for “contemporary social thought,” he seems to har-

bor doubts. Note the omission of James’s essays, “Great Men and Their Environment” and “The Importance of Individuals,” from The Writings of William James. It might be fruitful to dwell on this point

MICHAEL W. ALLEN 103 for a moment. Meursault’s act of rebellion actualizes the words Camus uttered in 1945 when he was conceiving The Plague, “if there is one fact that these last five years have brought out, it is the extreme solidarity of men with one another.”** In contrast, there is a sense in which James never makes the connection between crisis and commitment; this is the sense in which James’s solution to his crisis in 1870 differs from Meursault’s experience. When asked to join the APA, for example, James remarked, “I don’t see much good from a Philosophical Society. Philosophical discussion proper only succeeds between intimates who have learned how to converse by months of weary trials and failure. The philosopher is a lone beast dwelling in his individual burrow.”*” Note that both Camus and James speak of the capacity of crisis to unify. But the crisis Camus speaks of is the Holocaust, not the comparatively trifling trials of communication between aristocrats. No less than thirteen William Jameses from Massachusetts, for example, fought in the American Civil War, but the one we know was not among them.** The luxury of having months to spend confronting the “weary” difficulties of communication takes for granted the very social structures that were at stake in the war he failed even to mention in his writings. In stark contrast, Camus’s writing is a concerted social protest. Moreover, the inability of James to even mention the existence of slavery in any of his essays never sat right with McDermott and helps explain why there is a Camusian limit to his devotion to James. From the perspective of McDermott’s philosophy, all of this builds to one ultimate concern. The crucial difficulty for James and Dewey is that, straight out, neither ever genuinely asks Camus’s question, ‘To put it all in a nutshell... why this eagerness to live in limbs that are destined to rot?’’*? In contrast, John McDermott does ask himself this question, I know he does, every single day. Moreover, suicide for him possesses positive, relational significance. The issue of whether life is worth living is deeply personal and also deeply social. The quality and courage of our personal response to the question is a measure of how successful will be our efforts at meliorism. But Dewey never

104 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY discusses suicide. James does, but again strips the issue of the significance of genuine tragedy. He asks, “But can we find nothing richer or more positive... that in spite of adverse appearances even for him [the suicide] life is still worth living?” Again, “If this life be not a real fight, in which something is eternally gained for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals from which one may withdraw at will.’’*° James’s cosmic optimism with respect to life, death, and dying led him to remark that the more somber writings of

Schopenhauer and Nietzsche “remind one... of the sick shriekings of two dying rats.’**!

Despite James’s attempt to forge a middle, Camusian position with respect to his crisis, the keynote of his thought is not tragedy. In fact, the McDermottian self is at risk existentially in a way that the Jamesian self can never be. This life is for McDermott, precisely one “from

which one may withdraw at will,” to use James’s words. Far from always trying to talk the suicide down with James, McDermott claims

that the act of presiding over one’s own death promises newfound, relational significance. Recalling the relationship between courage and meliorism in McDermott’s thought, James’s philosophy is limited in its social dimension by lack of emphasis upon the irrevocable finality of death. If, on the other hand, suicide is a death without nets, then the sheer magnitude of its nature as a crisis propels the self into positive relations with others. McDermott claims that often, “suicide is an act of moral courage and altruism, putting an end to the mayhem and hurt caused by the person who no longer believes that life is worth living.’’*? Note the emphasis upon the positive social relations that result from a reflective choice to commit suicide. Again, suicide is “liberating” and a “free act... for that matter, perhaps my only free act, ever.”’*? “Having played no role in our own coming into being, with all its attendant cultural, familiar, psychosocial, and ge-

netic trappings,’ McDermott says, echoing but now going beyond Kafka, “it should not strike us as perverse that we seek to preside over our own cessation from being” (SE 161). One of the most interesting things for me about McDermott’s ca-

reer is how greatly his stance on these issues has changed over the

MICHAEL W. ALLEN 105 years. Whereas he now believes that confrontation with suicide is a viable, if not the viable, course of action, McDermott still quotes Mar-

cel, for example, and refers to his notion that we are homo viator, “people of the journey.” But now the beginning, the end, and moreover the nectar, are in the journey, not located beyond it. In this sec-

tion, I’ve discussed the influence of Camus on his views of pragmatism, but to round out the discussion, let us dwell for a moment on the fact that McDermott has by this time also re-read the religious existentialism of Buber and Marcel through the worldview of pragmatism. This is revealed in the secular interpretation that certain religious themes receive in McDermott’s mature philosophy. Take, in contrast, one concept from McDermott’s early work with Buber, the notion of surprise. For the McDermott of twenty-six, No doubt, were we to forget that every surprise moment is a little word of God, that in it God speaks to the individual man, a person irreplaceable, unrepeatable, we would be deaf to the Voice that speaks everywhere. On the other hand, were we to deprive dogma of its sovereignty, we would limit God to the little word and condemn man to isolation.“

But in his mature philosophy, surprise opens us, again, to the twin voices of nature and other human beings, not God. It is in the turn away from religious dogma and toward experience, the triumph of experience over doctrine that he would celebrate eight years later in “The American Angle of Vision” that human beings are opened to relation, indeed not “condemned to isolation.” Today, McDermott quotes from Peirce, who claims that “Experience is our only teacher” and that “It takes place by a series of surprises.’’** But the situating of

human beings within nature runs counter, for example, to Marcel: “Tt is impossible to think of personality or the personal order without at the same time thinking of that which reaches beyond them both, a supra-personal reality, presiding over all their initiative, which is both their beginning and their end.”*° Another way of presenting the issue is to note that the concept of mystery, for Marcel, is necessarily devoid of empirical content. For

106 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY the early McDermott, surprise could not be derived solely from experience in the same way that for Marcel mystery cannot be so derived, ‘For content is, when all is said and done, derived from experience; whereas it is only by a way of liberation and detachment from experience that we can possibly rise to the level of the meta-problematical and of mystery.’*” For Marcel, Dewey’s philosophy therefore deals

only with a series of puzzles, or problems. In addition to the word “problem,” another point of possible confusion is Marcel’s use of the term “primary reflection” to indicate my awareness of the presence

of problems and “secondary reflection” to indicate that of mysteries.“ The relevant Deweyan terms are “primary” and “secondary” ex-

perience, and the potential for confusion is great, as a text from Dewey attests: The problems to which empirical method gives rise afford, in a word, opportunities for more investigations yielding fruit in new and enriched experiences. But the problems to which non-empirical method give rise in philosophy are blocks to inquiry, blind alleys; they are puzzles rather than problems, solved only by calling the original material of primary experience, “phenomenal,” mere appearance, mere impressions, or by some other disparaging name. (JD 256)

I have two objects in raising the comparison of Dewey and Marcel with respect to McDermott’s work. The first is to illustrate the com-

plexity of the issues concerned with the fusion of pragmatism and existentialism in McDermott’s philosophy. An examination of the intersection of Marcel and Dewey, for example, especially in light of the terms “experience,” “problem,” and “mystery” would shed light on the transition in McDermott’s work toward the secularization of traditional religious themes. It would be a mistake to think that McDermott’s thinking on these issues has been exhausted by what he has already published. We might hope to see some future discussion of these matters. Of course, among other obstacles to a comparison of Dewey and Marcel that we have discussed, the following was revealed to me once in conversation with McDermott, “Marcel is a dwarf Luddite, and Dewey is a cosmopolitan duff!”

MICHAEL W. ALLEN 107 Second, the comparison brings up a concern on the part of religious existentialists, namely that of relativism. This thought is nothing new to McDermott, who openly adopts a position of what he calls

both cultural and moral relativism, but the issue is of considerable interest to some of his readers. I want to take this opportunity to again raise a question with regard to his stance. As the foregoing exchange between Marcel and Dewey helps illustrate, the issue turns to some extent upon the concept of experience. Would McDermott say that there is some inherent value in experience, something that answers to what Marcel finds in the “trans-empirical,” to use James’s term? If so, can McDermott’s position really be characterized as a variety of relativism? And what about James? The linchpin of his case against James today is that James’s hands were not clean metaphysi-

cally, in the way that Dewey’s were. That is, if I understand him, James’s cosmic optimism with regard to the prospect of an afterlife prevented James from recognizing adequately that the nectar is in the

journey, not beyond it. To what extent, it might be asked, in order to give the religious perspective its fair shake, is McDermott actually committed to something like James’s position in order to retain an adequate conception of value? Growth, the Live Creature, and Death Without Nets

Whereas Sartre venerates the morbid brutality of the prison life of the

writer Jean Genet in his Saint Genet, there is no positive account, nothing of what McDermott terms the “celebratory” dimension of tragic experience. The consequences Genet draws from his confronta-

tion with death make him what McDermott would call a “ghoul,” someone who is unable to find nourishment. Genet says, ““I am a dead man who sees his skeleton in a mirror, or a dream character who knows that he lives only in the darkest region of a being whose face he will not know when the dreamer is awake. I now act and think

only in term|s] of prison. My activity is limited by its framework.’ Genet has given up hope, but has also fallen into despair. Moreover, he is walled in by his environment. What McDermott has in mind in

108 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY his existential meditation on death is something completely different. The occasion of our death is the final moment in a series of reflec-

tions, forced upon us with greater urgency as we near the end, that for us as individuals, things simply don’t always work out. And no matter how well it is going now, there will be a time in the future when, for each one of us, absolutely nothing works out. The gradual process of dying for McDermott is therefore at least as important as the closing act, because it is through time that we experience firsthand the slow, painful stripping away of the systems of denial that accompany the gradual erosion of our body, mind, and our very capacity for freedom. But the final moment of the successful dying process does not occur before having already taught us something positive and crucial about the way to live our lives. If Sartre and Kafka offer brilliant diagnoses of alienation and the impediments to meliorism, they are not adequate as they stand for McDermott. This is because there is often some work to be done in this situation that does not, in any ultimate sense, work. McDermott builds on, and therefore goes beyond, Sartre and Kafka. A clue as to the exact nature of the human task is supplied through two elements of McDermott’s interpretation of Kafka. First, echoing Kafka’s The Trial and The Castle, he writes, ““To be human is to be put on trial for no cause. The castle of salvation is out of reach, or perhaps even an

illusion” (SE 69). This point recalls McDermott’s first requirement for successful amelioration, the giving up of fixed positions. Second, with regard to Kafka’s story, “The Burrow,” McDermott tells us that In an effort to protect his food from an assumed intruder, the burrower walls off a series of mazes sure to confuse an opponent. This attempt is executed with such cunning and brilliance that his nonreflective anality is missed as a potential threat. The food is indeed walled off from the intruder—from the burrower as well. He dies of starvation, for he cannot find his own food. (SE 136)

When taken in conjunction, the upshot of the two statements, again to quote from Camus, is that “Being deprived of hope is not despairing.” This means that the castle is unavailable, just as are the “Laws”

MICHAEL W. ALLEN 109 that are guarded by the doorkeeper in The Trial. The man who waits to be admitted to them grows old waiting before the entrance and wonders finally if they exist at all. But McDermott encourages us not

to wait. Give up hope, that is, do not look to the castle or to the “Laws” for the promise of fixed positions. But do not give in to despair, that is, do not be walled in from sources of nourishment. And with regard to James, do not make philosophy an individual burrow. If the concepts of situational tragedy and courageous meliorism occupy a central place in McDermott’s philosophy, it is only because McDermott does not blink at Camus’s question, his version of which is, “Why bother?” These concepts are therefore rooted in McDermott’s attitude toward death, a claim that I believe holds for his entire philosophy. The foregoing section has focused in large part on some of the consequences of the element of courageous meliorism that | find in his philosophy. I will close this section with a brief account of

the second concept, situational tragedy, as it is rooted in McDermott’s understanding of death. In the first section, I claimed that for McDermott, death possesses both environmental and personal significance. The fact that my death enriches the environment in no way deprives the affair of genuine tragedy, and the fact that I die in some measure alone, does not mean that my experience cannot be articulated in terms of a social situation. What makes such an account possible is the fact that, for McDermott, it is not that growth occurs despite the presence of death and destruction. Rather, growth occurs if and only if I face the inevitable and unredeemable finality of my death. My death not only makes possible the existence of others, by strewing the materials of my body back through the physical environment, but poses new potential for me as well, when tilled back metaphysically as raw materials for use in my own personal, present state of living. My death possesses pragmatic, social significance within an environment, and, not but, it has deep existential, personal significance. To split too deeply between these concerns is to eradicate the functional, oscillating relationship between maleficence and beneficence, life and death, and individual and community. The difference could

110 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY not be more striking between McDermott’s view and, to recall, what he terms as Peirce’s “conservative metaphysics.” The latter claims that “Everywhere the main fact is growth and increasing complexity.

Death and corruption are mere accidents or secondary phenomena. °° For McDermott, in contrast, the moment of death does not simply signal the end of my efforts to relate, but if appreciated properly, can serve as a means of establishing, nurturing, and re-evaluating relations. The ongoing process of coming to terms with my death allows me to gather together the qualitative strands of my preceding experience and project them in heightened form into the subsequent moments of my journey. When read back and then forward again through the entire fabric of my life, anticipation of the final end packs my remaining moments with newfound and potentially liberating significance. “T offer,” McDermott says, “that only a response of refusal to accept the righteous character of the inevitability of death can make it possible for life to be worth living.’’>' In reference to the initial quote of

this paper from McDermott, perhaps one could say that we were “born to live” because, not despite the fact that, we are “sure to die.” Surely no passage in McDermott is more dangerous or existentially charged than this one, from Streams of Experience: Put directly, can we experience ourselves as terminal and yet live creative, probing, building lives which, nonetheless, ask for no guarantees and for no ultimate significance to be attributed to our endeavor? I, for one, believe that we can live this way; nay, I believe that it is only in this way that we live a distinctively human life. In fact, I offer that a life lived consciously in the shadow of our own death is one which can prehend the scents of the most subtle of messages, namely, those intended only for creatures who risk living within the rhythm of time. With such an attitude, categories basic to human life and understanding undergo a change in our experience of them. As our fundamental expectation for human life changes, so too does our perception of time, growth, history, and experience undergo comparative changes. (SE 164)

Who are these “creatures who risk living within the rhythm of time?” For McDermott, they are the ones Dewey describes with the

MICHAEL W. ALLEN 111 term, “live creature.”” McDermott goes on to provide what he calls a detailed “map” of the “developments” that result from one’s encounter with death in a section of text that immediately follows. Entitled, “The Life of the Live Creature,” this is another piece of McDermott’s writing that illustrates the fusion of existentialism and pragmatism in his thought. The concept of the “‘live creature” is an integral part of

what McDermott calls elsewhere the “dramatic center of Dewey’s philosophy.” This “center,” according to him, is comprised of the first three chapters of Art as Experience, of which ““The Live Creature” is the first, and chapter nine from Experience and Nature (JD 525-26).

The passage quoted above immediately follows the section in Streams where McDermott presents what he calls the dangers of making relations. Speaking in terms of both McDermott’s philosophical

concepts and his mode of organization, therefore, his treatment of death is at the very center of the fusion of pragmatism and existentialism in his thought. His discussion of death bridges the discussion in Streams of Experience of the pragmatic dangers of making relations,

on the one side, and, on the other, the existentialist interpretation he offers of Dewey’s “Live Creature” that immediately follows. Said differently, it is the task of presiding over one’s own death that wards off the dangers associated with “relation starvation,” “relation amputation,’ “relation saturation,” “relation seduction,” and “relation re-

pression” and enables one to live instead as a “live creature” (SE 152-56). For McDermott, the firsthand, authentic life of the live creature is the positive account of what occurs when the dangers of rela-

tion are confronted successfully. The live creature is one who has faced down death in lived, existential terms and who gives up hope without falling prey to despair. Again, McDermott’s emphasis upon the situational metaphysics of Dewey balances out his existential emphasis upon the personal. The

twin deposits of pragmatism and existentialism in McDermott’s thought yield a live creature that possesses both the fragility of the relational, pragmatist conception of self and the strong, aggressive, efficacious features of the self developed by existentialism. Again, erowth results from consciously maintaining such a relationship. “In

112 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY order to grow, that is, to live the life of a live creature rather than a life of second-handedness,” McDermott maintains, “we must forge a self-conscious relationship between our acceptance of our irreversible fragility and our creative energies” (SE 167). We must forge a relation-

ship in our lives between the experienced rhythms of the situation that penetrate us in our fragility and our active capacity for powerful and creative expression of such experience. Otherwise, we live merely at secondhand, which is to say at least that we fail to escape the dangers associated with making relations.

The transition to the life of the live creature, in McDermott’s thought, is a positive extension of his notion that human beings possess no inherited place. He writes, “The deepest ontological problem is that of homelessness. The vast, limitless, perhaps infinite universe does not award us a place. The planet earth is a node in the midst of cosmic intelligibility” (SE 13). Again, in contrast to Kafka and Sartre, the notion that human beings lack an inherited place is the beginning and not the end point in McDermott’s philosophy. The latter’s interest is ameliorative, “Can vision and concern as to man’s immediate destiny, when trimmed of its pretense and overarching claims beyond the call of experience, liberate sufficient energy and commitment to the human struggle, necessary to the structuring of a noble and creative life?’ (CE 75). McDermott’s view echoes Camus’s critique of Nausea, “The realization that life is absurd cannot be an end, but only the beginning. This is a truth nearly all great minds have taken as their starting point. It is not this discovery that is interesting, but the consequences and rules for action that can be drawn from it.’ A successful confrontation with death helps ward off the dangers associated with making relations and allows one to live as a live creature. The live creature, and this is McDermott’s crucial point, comes to terms with the fact that no inherited place is to be found by instead creatively making one. The “way out of the box,” or the way out of Kafka’s burrow, McDermott tells us explicitly, and I would add, the way out of the burrow of James’s lone philosopher-beast and Genet’s prison of despair, is accomplished through “our symbolic utilization of space for purposes of the human quest.” That is, ““We manage our

MICHAEL W. ALLEN 113 ontological dwarfing and trivialization at the hands of infinite space,

and the rush of time passing and obsoleting, by our construction, management, placing, and relating of our things” (SE 136). The live creature, for McDermott, is the one who does not become walled in by received or projected meanings, but interprets its surroundings creatively to forge relations where before there were only impasses. Using Sartre’s language, McDermott says, “The self projects itself into the world.” But going where Sartre cannot, he continues, “The self constructs a personal world, a habitation.’’** The burrow buries the one who cannot transform “perceptions of time, growth, history, and experience’ to create a home. Again, such a process depends upon having grasped the inherent relationship, indeed “forging” a relationship, as McDermott puts it, between ourselves as both fragile and powerfully creative. We must grasp the relationship between our fragility in the wake of the forces of temporality posed by an environ-

ment and the creative expression of temporality through the construction of artifacts that care, nurture, and even cultivate, but must never obscure the loneliness of our quest. There is local, but not ultimate, intelligibility in the process of cre-

ating a habitation for ourselves. Loneliness of interior, existential space is externalized through our efforts to make ourselves at home in the world, resulting in social structures of physical place that remain laced with existential significance. The failure to recognize this relationship results in hollow constructions, ones that are not “open to the presence of personal space” and lack relational “feet,” therefore providing no home, no “personscape” (SE 196). Moreover, Mc-

Dermott’s views on architecture, as well as on space and time, originate in his existential notion of place. Before closing, I want to pose one final question, one that brings up a stock worry by existentialists. While the notion that human beings lack an inherited place locates him and James in close company with existentialist thought, as McDermott suggests, I wonder if there is a tension with another element of his thought. The latter is his view of the “American Angle of Vision,” which is, to use my own terms, a

novel worldview or set of views directly associated with living in

114 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY American culture. If there really is a tension, perhaps it can be stated in the following way: How is it that we must set about constructing an identity for ourselves due to our lack of inherited place and essence, and yet we also find ourselves today, as Americans, existing in a place which is already deeply constitutive of our angle of vision and our very identities? Moreover, if I become constituted by the angle of vision associated with my context, am I living secondhand, or inauthentically? Should I not reject the attempt to define myself in terms of what others have erected and rather strive to make myself over anew?

The keynote of McDermott’s philosophy must remain that of genuine surprise. Surprise is evocative of the crowded city street, of time,

and of the earth, things that we reject at our own risk, not of a god completely divorced from the travails of our temporal journey. We may wait forever to gain entrance to the castle or the “Laws,” and we may hope for a future governed by satisfaction of our desires. But if we do, McDermott reminds us, ... the power of the present, the existential moment has no bite, for we are always waiting for something else, something different, something better—a wait which is futile, for only the experience of the present can lead to a viable future. And now we understand why the great originating antique cultures believed in the cycle, historical and natural. If everything which goes around, comes around, then all of the existential worries that I lamentably describe herein, become vapid, a no-go, of no existential import.*4

No one says it like John McDermott, and every effort to talk about McDermott’s writing has left me unsatisfied. Moreover, I have put more than a few words into his mouth. McDermott closes “TIl-At-

Ease,’ my favorite of his essays, with the words, “I hope to see you around the block.” What can I say? What words, John, could capture our surprise, shock, and above all our gratitude? Indeed, John McDermott, we hope to see you around the block. And bring that leather bag, and don’t lose your hat this time. Did you remember that book for me? Tell me that story about the snake and the one about the frog. How about that wooden bicycle! Lean in close and tell me low and

MICHAEL W. ALLEN 115 breathlessly about the time that you saw Mays hit it out in the ninth. Tell me again about Bob Calvert, Manny Davenport, and Desert Hills. Pack that pipe up and let’s make that shady walk once more through the post oaks from Blocker to the Academic Building. But now you must let us tell you something, Dr. Rieux, and once and for all. We love you, we will never forget you, and, by the way, you were not too late for the fight!

FIVE

MCDERMOTT’S PROCESSIVE-RELATIONAL PERSONALISM: OPTIMISM? NO! HOPE? PERHAPS! Eugene Fontinell

[oer state at the outset that McDermott is not a philosopher whom I have encountered solely or even primarily through his writings and lectures. We have been friends for some forty-five years,

students of the great Fordham University teacher Robert Pollock (McDermott was a bit behind me, chronologically that is), and we were colleagues for over fifteen years at Queens College, CUNY. In addition to being members of the same academic and social communities, we were members of the same religious community during the early years of our friendship. Further, there is nothing I have written that he has not directly or indirectly influenced—even when I assumed a position that sharply diverged from his. There can be no pretense, therefore, of my presenting an “objective” view of his philosophies of community and religion. Of course, any alleged “objective’ view of McDermott would not be a view of McDermott, any more than would any alleged “subjective” view. To attempt either would at the outset distance me from one of the most distinctive features of his thought, namely, his view that both of these are empty { 116 }

EUGENE FONTINELL 117 abstractions. McDermott continually strives to avoid what we might call the “fallacy of false alternatives.” I also wish to note that my reading of McDermott was inevitably influenced and determined by his reading of James and Dewey as well as a number of other thinkers, primarily, though not exclusively, located in the American philosophical tradition. My task, of course, is

not to determine the adequacy of McDermott’s reading of these thinkers, but rather to describe McDermott’s philosophy by utilizing these readings.! I believe his exposition-interpretation of these various thinkers is always “reasonable” in spite of often being arguable. Further, I would contend that his exposition-interpretation method strikingly embodies continuity, creativity, and (significantly, as we shall see) divergence. He does not merely “receive” from a range and multitude of thinkers and events (natural, historical, cultural, and social); he creatively transforms what is received and integrates it into a distinctive worldview of his own. He does not just “make it up out of whole cloth” nor does he passively describe alleged objective phenomena or “clear and distinct”’ ideas. His philosophy, therefore, embodies an impressive articulation of what has been, what has been thought, what is, and what might possibly be or ought to be. Metaphysics

McDermott has no essay in which he spells out his metaphysics, and yet I would maintain that the entirety of his work is permeated by a “metaphysics.” The scare quotes, of course, indicate my awareness that I have opened a “can of worms’’—a metaphysical can of worms, if you will. My description of McDermott’s or any other thinker’s metaphysics is permeated not only by my own metaphysics, but also by my particular understanding of “metaphysics.” Years ago, under the influence and in “the spirit of McDermott,” I suggested that I would “employ ‘metaphysics’ interchangeably with ‘world-view.’ ”’ I went on to say that I would “understand by these terms both an angle of vision, or perspective from which reality is viewed, and a set of principles or assumptions which guide and direct us in our efforts to understand reality in its most comprehensive dimensions.’””

118 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY In my re-reading of McDermott’s works in preparation for writing this essay, it occurred to me that an alternate form of the question, “What is McDermott’s metaphysics?” might well be “What is McDermott’s center of vision?” He uses as an epigraph for his collection of James’s writings a text from James, “Let me repeat once more that

a man’s vision is the great fact about him.” Later, in his truly outstanding introduction, McDermott states, ““We should follow the ad-

vice of James himself, who warns a student that, in analyzing another’s thought, the stringing out of texts leads nowhere ‘unless you have first grasped his center of vision by an act of imagination.’”’ (W] viii, xxii). We might, then, ask, “How does McDermott see reality or the world in its most comprehensive character?”’ We might then

make a threefold response that is really one: the world is a world of experiences, processes, and relations.° I would argue that this apparent threefold response is really singular, since there is no experience—human or other—that is not processive and relational. This means, of course, that McDermott rejects any mode of metaphysical dualism—classical or other. “Just as there is no ontological dualism within the self, classically known as body and soul, so too there is no ontological division between the self and the world.’’* To which I believe McDermott would quite consistently add, nor within any alleged ‘“world-as-such.” This latter would be a metaphysical abstraction for him.

Does all of this land McDermott in the idealistic pit from which there is no escape? Not at all, for he would insist that while there is no world metaphysically isolated from us, there is a world(s) metaphysically independent of us, whether individually or collectively. Thus, McDermott can be designated a “realist,” or more accurately, a “‘creative realist.” It is because he presupposes a Jamesian “‘world in the making,” or “unfinished universe,” that he is able to avoid both a vacuous subjectivism and an abstract objectivism. It should be noted, however, that McDermott is not unaware of the shift away from classical objectivism and its significant implications. The discrediting of the object is no small event in the history of human consciousness. All too often this development is analyzed

EUGENE FONTINELL 119 as the other side of the growth of subjectivism. Such an interpretation is narrow and misguided, for the dispersal of objects does not necessarily throw us back on an introverted self-consciousness, although it does enhance the role of the self in the creative process. By far, the more significant implication has to do with the emergence of relational activity as the focus for meaning. The subject-object duality is no longer to the point, for at both ends these terms are but abstract statements of actually dynamic processes. (CE 32)

We might say, then, that McDermott’s “metaphysics,” or “center of vision,” is that all realities are processive-relational realities. Not only is there no metaphysical dualism, but there are also no metaphysical atomistic entities. While the recognition of reality as in process has been in the air since the time of Darwin, the pervasiveness of relations has been emphasized much less. It is, I believe, the metaphor of “fields” that most fruitfully captures and expresses the relational as well as the processive character of reality (realities). In his introduction to the writings of James, McDermott states, “It is unfortunate that James did not stay with the language he utilized in preparing for his Psychological Seminary of 1895-1896. At that time, he resorted to the metaphor of ‘fields’ in order to account descriptively for the

primal activity of the process of experience” (WJ xlv). Given his metaphysical pluralism, I believe that McDermott would have no objection to substituting “processes” for “process.” The following text,

I believe, sharply expresses McDermott’s processive-relational metaphysics. Things, and all the more so selves, are not singles. Rather, they are knots of competing relations, fluid and not definable as separate from how they are experienced in the consciousness of others. Yet with rare, albeit important exceptions, the social sciences still assume that things exist as such, that objects exist as such, and that names are descriptions of events, places, and artifacts, rather than as substitutes for processes. (SE 56)°

One of the most distinctive features of McDermott as philosopher is his ability to articulate sophisticated and technical categories in terms

120 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY of concrete experiences, which make them accessible and understandable to audiences outside the confines of the academic or professional communities. His reference to jazz is a case in point: Outside of a relational setting, jazz is meaningless, for it proceeds by a series of interwoven tensions. A jazz group is specially revealing, as single members create their music in line with their respective insight but over against other members of the group. (CE 38)°

I would suggest that one of the most important implications of McDermott’s processive-relational metaphysics is his characterization of the human person as a “relational process.” Indeed, in his essay, ‘Feeling as Insight,” he entitles a section, “The Person as Relational Process.”’ After opening with a text from Pirandello, he later states, “Beginning with William James, Henri Bergson, and the pioneering social psychology of Charles Horton Cooley and George Herbert Mead, our century has seen an extraordinary change in our approach to the nature of the person.” He then goes on to list about a dozen other thinkers ranging from Kurt Goldstein to Merleau-Ponty who have contributed to this transformation (CE 159-60). In his essay, “Life Is in the Transitions,’ McDermott describes James’s fundamental worldview—which I would maintain is also his—as follows: Reality is a network of concatenatedly related objects or things. . .. Human experience is an aware flow within the activities of reality at large, which in turn is also in process, unfinished, and broken into by novelties relative to the patterns already set up. (CE 106)

Elsewhere, he states: The most crucial difference in the post-Jamesian view of the self from that of traditional Western philosophy and psychology is the shift from spectator to constitutor as the delineating mark of selfconsciousness. .. . The person constitutes a functional point of view and a series of interlocking goals, simultaneously forging relationships. .. . (CE 163)

EUGENE FONTINELL 121 In the presentation of McDermott’s philosophies of community and religion, there will be, I believe, compelling and enlightening evidence of his distinctive articulation of a processive-relational metaphysics and personalism hinted at in the various texts cited above. Community

In attempting to describe McDermott’s “philosophy of community,” I note at the outset that it is misleading to speak of “community” as if it were a fully realized existing reality. This follows, of course, from McDermott’s processive-relational metaphysics just described that denies the existence of any fully realized reality. It is equally misleading to speak of the human community. It would be more appropriate to see the human community as an ideal or goal that energizes and orients members of particular communities. In the tradition of James and Dewey, McDermott views “ideals” as potentially creative principles rather than “pie in the sky” abstractions. He cites as a guiding principle for his first collection of essays a text from James, “Ideals ought to aim at the transformation of reality—no less” (CE 10). But as always with McDermott, he uses such a principle as a stimulus and beginning, not as a terminal conclusion. Again his effort, as we shall see, is to concretize “transformation of reality” in terms of specific changes—of what should be surrendered, what should be retained,

what is likely to be jeopardized, what should be modified, what should be added, and the like. The ideal or goal of the human community then would not be to destroy the distinguishing features of specific or particular communities, but, paradoxically perhaps, to deepen and enrich them by increased transactions and interdependencies. This ideal, of course, should not be unduly romanticized, for we can never know with any degree of a priori certainty which features of any particular community—social, political, cultural, or religious—will survive, and surely not that the “best features” will survive. That there will be losses is almost guaranteed. Whether there will be gains is perhaps less assured; yet the belief that there will be is an indispensable belief. Nothing, of course, increases the likelihood, indeed almost the certainty,

122 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY of losses more than “thinking.” No one has expressed this more profoundly and succinctly than Dewey: Let us admit the case of the conservative; if once we start thinking no one can guarantee where we shall come out, except that many objects, ends and institutions are surely doomed. Every thinker puts some portion of an apparently stable world in peril and no one can wholly predict what will emerge in its place.’

For an experiential-experimentalist like McDermott, these characteristics of “community” are not speculative abstractions. Whether in reference to his political, academic, social, or religious communities, he early saw that much that had been considered precious and indispensable would likely be lost. Again, Jamesian “risk” was for him a “lively reality.” Indeed, we should say “is” rather than “was,” for he

is well aware that the character of “risk” continues and will do so until the “end.” As Dewey states in a text cited by McDermott (SE 172), “The world is a scene of risk; it is uncertain, unstable, uncannily

unstable. Its dangers are irregular, inconstant, not to be counted upon as to their times and seasons.’ In any “philosophy of community,” no question is more central and important than the role assigned to the individual. Given McDermott’s “metaphysics of relations,” it is not surprising that he rejects any false dichotomy between individuals and community. There are no individuals in isolation from or merely peripherally related to community-communities and no community devoid of individuals. Which is not to say that the relation(s) of any individual to a community is permanent and static. The general evolution of human beings, of course, has been increasingly in the direction of individualism. Paradoxically, as I shall later note when touching upon “globalization,’ it has most recently been moving in the direction of wider and more encompassing communities. McDermott, however, has always rejected any view of American philosophy or culture which would be an unnuanced celebration of “rugged individualism”—a charge frequently, but for the most part unfairly, made against James; or, on the other hand, that a Deweyan emphasis upon the social or communal has lost or absorbed the reality and distinctiveness of individuals.

EUGENE FONTINELL 123 I have italicized “unnuanced” in the previous paragraph to avoid giving the impression that McDermott uncritically affirmed James’s version of the individual and the community. A crucial essay of his in this regard is “The Promethean Self and Community in the Philosophy of William James.” I would strongly urge a reading of this essay in its entirety, but a few excerpts will suffice to indicate the character of McDermott’s view of James on the question of “the individual and the community.” Early in this essay, McDermott states that “‘James’s version of the individual has much to teach us about a doctrine of community...” (SE 45). McDermott, quite correctly in my view, brackets the Jamesian view manifest in The Principles of Psychology and his essay, ““The Will to Believe” and focuses on James’s later radical empiricism. ““My contention,” he states, “is that if we take James’s radical empiricism as our point of departure, we can develop a notion

of the social self that can be of fundamental assistance to contemporary social thought” (SE 52). It is James’s emphasis upon the necessity and character of relations that McDermott stresses and affirms. Nevertheless, while “James was correct in stressing the creative, interested, and assertive character of the human organism,” McDermott

contends that “he neglected .. . the formative power of the social situation. ...° (SE 53). McDermott’s conclusion, then, was that “Marx, Durkheim, Mead, Dewey, have it right. The self is a social construct. But James has it right as well. It is the personally idiosyncratic seeker of relations who puts a distinctive cast on the world. ...

The social and the communal are intrusive, but so too is the personal” (SE 57).°

For McDermott, then, “the individual is not a single entity, apart, alone in geometric isolation. To the contrary, the individual is a social construct, a creation of thousands of years of human history. ... The individual as face, the individual as body, is not given proper due until the Renaissance” (SE 77).'° Closer to home, McDermott claims that “‘the intense and complex dialectic between the individual and the community is an essential ingredient in classical puritanism, especially in its American form.” Again, he does not let this last phrase hang in abstract air, for a few lines later he states:

124 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY American puritanism developed the tradition of federal theology,

in which the individual was paramount, the congregation the source of institutional gathering, and the presbytery the larger and

intercommunity arbiter of disputes. Although my judgement is controversial, I believe that the federal theology of the covenanted congregationalists is more the historical model for the American constitution than the works of Locke, the Scottish school, or the French philosophes. (SE 78)

While the bulk of McDermott’s writings deals with American philosophy and culture, his conclusion and insights are not in the least pa-

rochial. In a relatively early essay, after citing Martin Buber’s contention that we cannot live only with the “spasmodic breakthrough of the glowing deeds of solitary spirits,’ McDermott goes on

to say, “we must enter into a ‘relational event,’ a ‘living center,’ a community of human beings... . No single idea, no single rubric, no single tradition can account for our quest for human unity and creative relationship with the world” (CE 64)."! Consistent with his evolutionary-processive-developmental metaphysics, McDermott has repeatedly called attention to the emergence of urban communities in the early modern period and the emerging of a global community in the late or post-modern era. Since McDermott’s distinctive urban philosophy will be dealt with elsewhere in

this collection of essays, I will skip the city and leap right into the “world.” Long before “globalization” had become a question of wide concern—whether viewed positively or negatively—McDermott was speaking and writing about it. Some forty years ago, I heard McDermott going on about some character named Marshall McLuhan and his contention that we were becoming a “global village.” Over twenty years ago, McDermott was not only calling our attention to the reality and character of global culture, but also to the problems and pitfalls already in evidence and likely to increase. He stated: Human culture is now truly world culture. Our experience of literature, religion, philosophy, dance, music, art, and costume have been immeasurably enriched. The only viable strategy for our global future is the adoption of a pluralism in which the angles of visions, styles, and beliefs of the world’s cultures mesh in the creation of a genuinely egalitarian world society.

EUGENE FONTINELL 125 There is no question that this spiritual bequest of the twentieth century on behalf of global consciousness is salutary. Nonetheless, there is a dark side to our new-found awareness, for no sooner do we become aware of the riches of global culture than we realize the attendant problems which also emerge. In truth, the glaring fact of the matter is that we are now faced with a crisis of global proportions. This situation takes the form of a crisis in energy, food, ecology, and population, to which is added the ambivalence of high technology. (SE 171)

Following Royce’s line of reasoning, McDermott contends that “in

building a human community, we are constitutive of nothing less than the world.” Hence, “if our community is in tatters, so is the world. If our community is self-deceived and illusory, so too is the world. If our community is ongoing, integral, and supportive, so too is the world.” McDermott concludes with an exceptionally keen insight into Royce’s idealism, “Royce has transformed the traditional idealist position which reads that ‘the world is as it is thought,’ to ‘the world is as it is built to be’” (SE 103). I have mentioned several times that McDermott’s perceptive phenomenological reading of a particular situation is usually followed by insights and suggestions of how we ought to respond to that situation. Like James and Dewey, McDermott is neither a pessimist nor an optimist, rather, he is a ““meliorist.”” Or, perhaps more accurately, we might say that all three, but in particular McDermott, affirm a meliorism involving both optimism and pessimism, which, however, must be held in creative tension if we are to avoid either a self-deceiving optimism or a de-energizing pessimism. During a relatively recent lecture, McDermott stated, “Although I can be Cassandra-like, . . . I keep going in the hope of better times. . .. Consequently, please hear my remarks tonight as neither pessimistic nor optimistic. Rather, take them as melioristic. .. .”!? Dewey, as McDermott tells us, adopts “‘the approach of James, which is also indicative of the American temperament when it is at its best, namely, meliorism. Put simply and etymologically, the attitude of meliorism is to make things better. At a deeper and more profound index of analysis, the attitude of meliorism ac-

knowledges both sin and possibility” (SE 118). Hence, for James,

126 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY Dewey, and McDermott—in spite of important and crucial differences—"‘salvation” or “betterment” is neither impossible nor assured. The character of our future, to a significant degree, depends, in part at least, on what we believe and think and in how we act upon our beliefs and ideas not only individually or communally, but also globally. In the following text, McDermott lays his melioristic cards on the table: Global amelioration, then, is possible under the following conditions: 1) awareness of how institutional change takes place, mutatis mutandis, in different societies, that is, an avoidance of the innocence or the naivete that thinks that good will is a sufficient agent of change; 2) a profound awareness of the cultural heritage, values, and taboos of other societies as well an awareness of what they can in conscience yield and what in conscience they must protect; 3) an abandonment of ideology and a concentration on shared values; 4) the willingness of the technologically affluent and politically powerful nations of the world to accept comparable suggestions for amelioration of their own weaknesses and offenses. (SE 105)

McDermott goes on to say that “with these conditions met, perhaps

we, the nations of the world, could join in an effort to develop Royce’s ‘beloved community,’ while keeping an eye directly on famine, population, ecology, and nuclear war.” It is, then, “congeniality we seek, that is, a community of inquiry characterized by cooperation, insight to the needs of the other, and liberation from arrogance” (SE 105-—6).!°

I will conclude this section on McDermott’s “philosophy of community’ by citing some words from a more recent lecture. It suggests, I believe, a certain diminution of that “hope” that appeared evident in his earlier lectures and writings. This is a theme that I noted above and that I will touch upon a bit more fully in the following sections dealing with his philosophy of religion. McDermott states, “I carry with me, resonant of many others among us, a lamentable dubeity about whether, in fact, we are still able to tap that eros of community,

EUGENE FONTINELL 127 which has served us so well for the past three centuries.”'* McDermott will, I trust, respond directly to my suggestion that his later philosophy is characterized by a diminution of hope. Can we still hope with any degree of reasonability and consistency? Was his earlier affirmation of hope due to a misreading of the human condition or a significant change in that condition? Religion

McDermott’s philosophy of religion'> can be distinguished, but not separated from his philosophy of community. Indeed, as we shall see, those qualities of human experience that merit being designated “religious —when “religious” is taken positively—are those which contribute to the constructive creating of the human community. The diminution of hope just alluded to is not to be understood as denying a pervasive and persistent quality of hope that characterizes McDermott’s philosophy of religion. While he relatively early jettisioned his belief in formal and traditional religion(s),'° he nevertheless continued to suggest a “humanistic” religion in the mode of Dewey. Such a religion as is expressed in both Dewey and McDermott has its own distinct quality of “hope.” As far as I am able to determine, this shift in McDermott’s affirmation of hope is gradual, and he never more than alludes to it. If there is one need claimed, explicity and implicity, by all the traditional religions, it is the need to know that we are not alone. McDermott, on the other hand, repeatedly, explicity and implicity, argues that we must learn to accept the fact that we are alone—starkly and chillingly alone. There is no one, “nothing,” other than ourselves and other members of the human community who can help us to render life meaningful, who can participate with us in the struggle to achieve “salvation.” “The quality of the other and how we transact with the other constitutes our very being as human” (SE 197). McDermott, then, joins Nietzsche in the community of “nihilists” insofar as both deny any transcendent meaning or “God” as present in reality. They might, however, be designated “creative nihilists,” since they do not

128 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY want metaphysical nothingness to be the last, or at least the only, word; nor do they wish to render us passive and inactive. Here they part company, however, with Nietzsche being what might be designated an “elitist nihilist,” since he calls and hopes for the emergence of an elite number (not community) of individuals called “superman/ overman.” These individuals are/will be those insightful and coura-

geous enough to live in accordance with their individual creative powers. McDermott, on the other hand, might be designated a ““democratic nihilist.”” He hopes for an increasingly wider participation in

the creation of the human community. Unlike Nietzsche, he hopes for a mode(s) of living available to more than a few isolated, idiosyncratic, and heroic individuals. The participants in the kind of creative activity desired by McDermott will live consciously and fully in the present while hoping that at the same time and thereby they are contributing to an ever richer community. Both Nietzsche and McDermott, then, believe in the possibility of a “better” future, however different they desire such a future to be. Neither, however, believes that a better future is guaranteed. The most that they would claim is that it is “reasonably” possible. Both, then, might be said to be “pragmatists”’ in that they do not deny that we are entitled to our particular beliefs, but only on the condition that we are willing to act upon them after submitting them to the severest rational scrutiny. I opened this section by noting McDermott’s claim that we are radically alone, and I would like to develop somewhat this theme that I believe to be the most central and pervasive feature of McDermott’s philosophy of religion. His claims concerning the depth and character of our being alone are expressed most dramatically and fully in his Romanell Lecture. This lecture has been for me more demanding and unsettling than almost anything else he has written. The most I can do here is hint at his central theses by citing a few excerpts. The metaphysical/religious bite is already manifest in the title, “TIl-At-Ease: The Natural Travail Of Ontological Disconnectedness.” We are ill-atease because of the “mismatch between what we can get, physiologi-

cally, and what, in sum we do get... .”” Hence, McDermott claims, ‘we are living in a transaction that promises more than it delivers.”

EUGENE FONTINELL 129 He goes on to say that his judgment, derived from personal experience, is that “the core of natural travail traces to our being ontologically disconnected.” Thus, “‘we find ourselves in a situation which in its most profound sense, does not work.” Hence, he believes “‘that the

being of being is to be disconnected, ontologically adrift, casting a net here, a hook there and all the while confusing a strategy with a solution.’’!”

The loneliness that McDermott maintains characterizes the human

condition should not be confused with spatial aloneness or what might be called psychological aloneness. “I am not,” he tells us, referring to loneliness or describing loneliness as “being alone,” as one, as only one, with no one else near and hearby. Rather than holding loneliness to be the result of absenting, of something gone or as not having come, I see loneliness as a palpable, thick, even ageressive presence in each of our personal worlds, in short, the personal space of our embodied, yet ontologically disconnected selves.!®

While McDermott calls upon us to face up to our ontological disconnectedness and the radical loneliness that arises from this disconnectedness, he does not want us to “throw in the towel” or “give up the game.” In spite of believing in “separatedness to the end” and disbelieving “in the possibility of ultimate intelligibility, [or] that in the long run, so far as human naturals are concerned,” it really does work, he still takes “as a personal and philosophical obligation to seek ways of coping, amelioration and understanding in the short run.”

Later, after noting that “we do not belong, we are ontologically homeless,’ he recommends that we proceed under this assumption and “work to make the best of our situation, such that things and events will here, there, sometime and somewhere be celebratory, oc-

casions for joy.’ Whether or not we recognize it, we are disconnected. McDermott

insists, however, that there is a danger in “involuntary disconnectedness.”’

To disconnect voluntarily is not to be lonely, for in such a decision, we affirm the process most congenial, and the forced absence is on behalf of our building, kneading, constructing and

130 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY creating. Conversely, to be disconnected without our personal ap-

probation is to risk self-deception as to the worth of that with which we are left. The message here is that loneliness is a given, it is our ontological state of being human. We must fight it by forging contexts, situations and attitudes, each of which opens us to possibilities not given to simply being here or there.”°

Belief/Faith

Following James and Dewey, belief/faith plays a crucial and central role in McDermott’s philosophy and in particular in his philosophy of religion. Two characteristics of belief/faith are affirmed by all three thinkers. First, belief/faith, while distinct from “reason,” is not opposed to or in radical isolation from it; second, belief/faith is not restricted to religious belief/faith as this phenomenon is manifest in formal religions. Rather, it is present in all modes of human life. Following James, McDermott maintains that “belief becomes an energy rather than a knowledge” (CE 67). Following Dewey, he wants faith to be expanded and deepened such that it will play a creative role in the widening and deepening of the human community. He cites a text from Dewey that, I believe, reflects the processive-relational character of McDermott’s metaphysics considered above as well as his philosophy of religion. Dewey states: “Faith in the continued disclosing of truth through directed co-operative human endeavor is more religious in quality than is any faith in a completed revelation.”?! McDermott adds that “belief does not offer a privileged position, invoked as a defense against novelty and the cruel implications of human folly.” A bit later he suggests placing “belief midway between certitude and nihilism. . . . In sociological terms, belief must cease its relationship to finality; it must turn to the future rather than to the past” (CE 68, 69).

It is important to note that critical as he often is of earlier beliefs, McDermott does not call for, nor does he think possible, the obliteration of such beliefs. “Paradoxically,” he contends, “our past beliefs take on a genuine contemporaneity when they are seen as pointing to

EUGENE FONTINELL 131 unrealized possibilities in man’s understanding of himself rather than as end points already achieved. Apparently believers and unbelievers, rationalists and skeptics, find this circle of knowledge games hard to break” (CE 67). McDermott wishes “to accept the view that nothing final can be said until the last of us has had our say.’ He immediately raises the question, however, as to whether “such a view of man, of belief, of energy and openness [can] persist in the larger community, or is it to be restricted to isolated genius, largely ineffectual for the problems which beset us?” (CE 70). This desire and effort to maximize the extent, depth, and range of individuals participating in the ongoing creation of the human community gives rise, McDermott maintains, “to the most crucial question in the problem of belief and modern man,” namely: Are we able to believe in a community without suppressing our differences? And can this belief have truly religious significance for us, that is, open us to the endowed and sacred quality of all that is, while yet not offering a hierarchy of meanings fixed or specifically holy things which divide us from our brother? Can we actually celebrate this belief? Celebrate it in the way of historical religion, that is, liturgically, or in the way of contemporary protest movements, with song and ritual born of adversity? Or is it to remain an abstract goal, a containment keeping us from destroying each other but without building new symbols of solidarity and affection? (CE 70-71)

This is surely one of the, if not the, most succinct expressions of McDermott’s philosophy of religion. He desires a community with the quality/qualities of the “sacred,” without locking us into those fixed and absolute meanings that did, and still do, divide us. He wishes not

to obliterate the liturgies and rituals of traditional religions, but to transform them in such a way that without eliminating significant differences among human beings—individual and communal—they will move in the direction of that ideal human community previously discussed.

132 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY Salvation/Sacred

Nowhere is McDermott’s processive-relational metaphysics more in evidence than in his treatment of salvation and the sacred. We must remake the earth in the image of our best qualities. We must dilute and even topple the forces of aggrandisement and exploitation. Nothing will rescue us except ourselves. Neither the gods nor the forces of nature are on our side. We must reconstitute the awe and reverence of the earliest people in our quest for a new relationship with the world in which we find ourselves. We are the enemy and we are the saviors. (SE 179)

McDermott is well aware, of course, that “there is a considerable religious fervor loose in the world.” He does not wish to obliterate

this fervor, but to transform and redirect it, “Better if that energy were addressed to what is truly sacred in our lives, our land, our things and living space and, above all, our ability to provide for a creative future for our children” (SE 174). For McDermott, then, we will either save ourselves, or we will not be saved, and both are live possibilities. Further, salvation is either realized in the present or it is not realized at all. He is not, of course, suggesting that we should or even can ignore the past and the future. Rather, it is only by living in and enriching the present to the fullest extent possible that we can give meaning to and redeem the past and contribute to the future.*? McDermott might be said to propose and believe in a religion of the present. “‘It is the present,” he maintains, ‘“canopied by our hopefully storied past, that spells the only meaning of our lives” (SE 138). McDermott is aware, of course, that his valuing of the present is not widely accepted. “What is it about us,” he asks,

“that cannot abide the sacrament of the moment as we reach for a solution, an end game, an explanation, a cure, nay, immortality?” Not only must we endeavor to create our salvation in the present, but

we must also attempt to create it in a world without guarantee of salvation. “Our task,” McDermott tells us, “is to think most deeply about the most quixotic of all cosmic events, namely, the utterly transient yet powerful existence of human life. ... Those of us who have

EUGENE FONTINELL 133 bartered the present for a paradisiacal future, much less a career, have missed the drama of the obvious. ... We should not await salvation while the parade passes by” (SE 27). For McDermott, there is temporal salvation or there is no salvation.” But desirous as he is of affirm-

ing and even celebrating such salvation, he does not presume to ‘know’ that it is possible. “Can we live,” he honestly asks, “with this commitment to the affairs of time? Can we live with this secular lit-

urgy, stunningly apart from a meaning transcendent of our everyday affairs?” (SE 90).

The creative-processive character of McDermott’s philosophy of salvation is, I believe, quite evident in the texts just cited. The relational aspect comes out most dramatically in the following: Lord what must I do to be saved? .. . What shall I do to make a world which is personally mine, although it inheres, coheres, borrows, and lends to others who are making a world personally their own? ... The initial response is obvious. Make relations! Build, relate, and then reflect. Reflect, relate, and then build. Seek novelty, leave no stone unturned. Fasten on colors, shapes, textures,

sounds, odors, sights. Above all, never close down until the fat person sings. The only acceptable denouement is death. Until then all signs are go, that is, make relations until the maker is unmade. (SE 152)

While enthusiastically celebrating the role of relation-making in the process of salvation, McDermott again avoids any romanticization of his claims, for he immediately warns that “in the making of relations, dangers lurk.” He then proceeds to give detailed descriptions of five of these dangers: relation starvation (we fear the new and settle for the familiar); relation amputation (premature cessation of testing and experimentation); relation saturation (“Endless variation replaces the nectar of a rich, single experience.”); relation seduction (tempted “to transcend the boundaries of common experience and belief,” whether by means of religion, politics, or pharmacology); and relation repression (the refusal to confront experiences that appear “threatening to our well-being”) (SE 152-56). There is obviously a certain ambiguity in McDermott’s employment of the term “salvation.” His position on the salvation question,

134 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY however, is quite clear and one held throughout his work, from his earliest writings to the latest.2> Stated simply, he insists that “eternal salvation” is neither possible nor desirable, while “temporal salvation” is both. “The human organism,” he states, “struggles for salva-

tion, no matter how impoverished his context. He does this by building himself into his environment by means of establishing confidence in a number of relational ties” (CE 84-85). The struggle for salvation, of course, is radically transformed when the focus is shifted from the “eternal” to the “temporal,” or the “here and now.” A crucial consequence of this shift is the effect that it will have on the nature and character of activities of the human community. In an early essay, McDermott states, “To dilute certitude and affirm the sacred character of temporality, effects a notion of community characterized by concession, compromise, and an opening outwards.” He goes on to assert that “this tension between certitude and novelty must be viewed as a central religious and philosophical concern in any effort to assess the possibilities for building a truly human community” (CE 74). Elsewhere, he tells us that “America [for which also read ““McDermott’’] has more interest in saving experiences than in salvation outside time. ... We believe in healing and amelioration, while persistently doubting the presence of any ultimate resolution” (SE 74).7° In the same essay from which this text is taken, McDermott expresses a diminishing confidence in America—a diminution that will increase in his later years. “I too,” he tells us, experience an ontological twilight, a brownout of my consciousness, in the America of the recent seventies. Put directly, the religious and metaphysical originality of America is strapped to its

belief in the sacredness of time, its celebration of journey and transiency, and its aversion to ideology, eschatology, and final solutions. The inversion of this order of priorities will sink us as a culture. (SE 64)

As previously noted, whether or not McDermott’s description and evaluation of America culture is accurate, I bracket. These texts indicate, I would maintain, the character and distinctiveness of his philosophy of religion.

EUGENE FONTINELL 135 There are two features of the previously cited text that I wish briefly to touch upon, namely, “sacredness of time” and “eschatology.” Concerning the sacredness of time, McDermott states, “If your philosophy of history is that history has no ultimate meaning and that time is meaningful by its own means, then, sub specie aeternitatis, the human situation is necessarily tragic. Yet, it is precisely and only for that reason that time becomes sacred. Our activities take on meaning not because they are endowed by the eternal but because they are not endowed by the eternal” (SE 72). McDermott’s claim is stated even more sharply in the following, “I believe time is sacred. It is not sacred, however, because it has been so endowed by God, the gods, na-

ture, or any other force. I believe time is sacred because human history has endowed it with our meaning, our suffering, our commitments, and our anticipations” (SE 167). As with the “sacred,” McDermott does not simply deny or reject

“eschatology,” but calls for a transformation. He notes, of course, that it was the Jews who bequeathed “to us the doctrine of history as eschatological, in which all events are treated as being prophetic and are thought to take their meaning from their relationship to the future, to the end of time” (CE 3). Elsewhere, he acknowledges that “the stark and startling residual wisdom of our collective past tells us that for the most part, by far, all great movements of the past have been on behalf of a definite goal—in short, an eschatology.” He goes on to note that “rare has it been for a multitude to devote themselves to a

cause whose message was the celebrating of the finite, the generational, and especially, sheer transiency”’ (SE 63). We have already seen

that it is precisely these latter features that McDermott’s philosophy of religion wishes to affirm and celebrate. Years before he wrote the words just cited, he asked, “Cannot we say that at present we deny the possibility of a viable eschatology? Or at the very least, hold to an eschatology viable only as mediated by the values and hopes of each generation. In such a framework the goal is to be constructed rather than found or awarded” (CE 73). Even earlier, McDermott had written, “Over against the doctrine of obsolescence in which the history

136 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY of man waits patiently for a paradisiacal Deus ex machina, the American temper points to a temporalized eschatology in which the Spirit manifests itself generation by generation and all counts to the end.”

The phrase, ““temporalized eschatology,” which as far I know was coined by him, is another illustration of McDermott’s philosophical creativity, his imaginative transformation of received ideas and doctrines, rather than either a passive acceptance or simplistic rejection of them.

We have seen that whether McDermott is articulating his view of belief, the sacred, or time, he insists that the only acceptable understanding of these phenomena is one that focuses on “this life,” “the here and now,” “this world.” Nowhere is this more evident than in

his treatment of human death. The two essays in which he most sharply articulates his “philosophy of death” are “The Inevitability of Our Own Death: The Celebration of Time as a Prelude to Disaster” and “Why Bother: Is Life Worth Living?” As both these essays forcefully emphasize, absolute terminality of the life of the human individ-

ual is at the heart of McDermott’s philosophy of religion. ““To be terminal,” he tells us, “is the foreordained future of each of us.” And a bit later, “I believe that we should experience our lives in the context of being permanently afflicted, that is, of being terminal” (SE 158,

164). One of the major thrusts, if not the major thrust, of McDermott’s philosophy of religion, however, is to make terminality an energizing rather than a de-energizing phenomenon/belief. “Can we,” he asks, “experience ourselves as terminal and yet live creative, probing, building lives which, nonetheless, ask for no guarantees and for no ultimate significance to be attributed to our endeavor? I, for one, believe that we can live this way; nay, I believe that it is only in this way that we live a distinctively human life” (SE 164). Elsewhere,”* I have addressed directly the first of the two essays just

mentioned and within which the texts just cited are located. In my critique of this essay, I question the existential efficacy and indeed the consistency of McDermott’s hope-belief within the framework of his terminality-belief. He appears to accept “a hope that somehow, somewhere, somewhen, all will go well for us who are, have been, or will

EUGENE FONTINELL 137 be. Certainly, such a hope is a legitimate and understandable human aspiration.” A few pages later, McDermott concludes this most provocative essay as follows, “Indeed, can it, we, ever be cancelled? I think not. Celebrate” (SE 162, 168). After citing these words, I asked,

and I ask again, “What does it mean to be terminal if it does not mean to be cancelled?” Of course, the works and achievements of a precious few may escape cancellation—at least until the projected demise of the human race. Given McDermott’s claims concerning terminality, however, their creators do not experience a similar fate. I have suggested that the strength and distinction not only of the essay under consideration, but of McDermott’s entire body of work, is his “insistent celebration of human lives in spite of their inevitable termination and cancellation” (SGI 184, 185). McDermott bites the terminality bullet by directly and explicitly

confronting the question of “suicide.” Again this is an existential rather than an abstract question for him. “At one point in the recent past,” he tells us, “I chose not to go on living. Before my decision was

consummated, I was personally seized and forced to reconsider.’ Years before this event, however, McDermott had presented a “philosophy of suicide” with specific reference to James and Camus. A claim he makes early and late is that while insane people do commit suicide, “‘the certifiably insane rarely kill themselves” (SE 160). This same claim is made and amplified in a later essay: The assumption here is that the person committing suicide is fully

aware of what he or she is doing. It is not true that suicides are “crazy people, for the latter rarely kill themselves. It is also not true that suicide is necessarily a selfish act in that it leaves behind gaping wounds in the lives of others. Obviously, that can be and often is the scenario. Just as often, however, suicide is an act of

moral courage and altruism, putting an end to the mayhem and hurt caused by the person who no longer believes that life is worth living. Straight out then, living should be a personal choice made over against the existential, viable, often plausible and certainly liberating option of suicide.°°

A few lines back, I alluded to McDermott’s desire to “‘make terminality an energizing rather than a de-energizing phenomenon/belief.”’

138 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY I would suggest that his treatment of suicide illustrates this. After not-

ing that for both James and Camus*! suicide was a live option, he points out that neither of them did commit suicide. More importantly, “they developed imaginative and ameliorative strategies for coping with the stark reality of their own defense of the plausibility of suicide.”” McDermott goes on to say that he, too, has “some suggestions for a human response to the avoidance of suicide and for dealing with the inevitability of our death” (SE 162). McDermott’s central suggestion is, I believe, most explicitly expressed in his doctrine of “amelioration”—personal, communal, global—considered above.

Thus, for McDermott, the only authentic meaning of human life, individual or communal, is/will be that realized through our conscious efforts to transform creatively the various dimensions of this life. Briefly stated, we must live in the here and now or we will not truly live. Hence, he contends that “it is not... humanly significant to have the primary meaning of one’s life as posthumous” (SE 137— 38). Elsewhere he states, ““Coming to consciousness has nothing to do with the traditional pursuit of happiness, an attempt illusory and selfdeceiving for a human organism whose denouement is the inevitability of death without redemption” (SE 198). McDermott contends that

“we are born to live and destined to die... [and] the utter frustration of this contradiction in our personal situation cannot be resolved.” Nevertheless, “our impending death is not the major obstacle to our

becoming truly human. The obstacle is found in our running for cover on behalf of our escape from death” (SE 167, 168).

One last point concerning McDermott’s philosophy of religion should be noted, namely, the importance of “the journey.” “For me,” he tells us, “living is a journey, the origin of which is not of our making. The goals are en passant and the end is ontologically tragic, although for many of us, alas, it may be salutary, even unfortunately welcome.” A bit later he states, ““I try as hard as I can to believe that

the nectar is in the journey and not in its final destination. I stand with T. S. Eliot who warns that ‘For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.’”*? Elsewhere, he expresses his belief “that

EUGENE FONTINELL 139 the integrity of the journey is all that we share so as to live, move and have our being.’** He maintains that “the human journey is a paradox, for unless one believes that we are to be rescued by a deus ex

machina subsequent to our death, then it is a trip with an ending that culminates in oblivion” (SE 59). Paradoxically, the oblivion that characterizes the end of the journey enhances rather than diminishes

the importance and the quality of the journey. “The nectar,” he claims, “is in the journey, and only the community can sustain that nectar by the presence of sharing, thereby assuaging our loneliness” (SE 91). Hence, as previously noted, McDermott’s philosophy of community and his philosophy of religion are existentially as well as conceptually intertwined. Further, his personalism sees the human person as ever-changing—individually and collectively—and inseparably related to a variety of communities—religious and other. In closing, I would like to touch again upon that “diminution of hope” to which I previously alluded. In a late essay, McDermott suggested that “something has gone wrong along the way.’ I would encourage him to spell out more specifically just what has gone wrong. Further, are there any more fruitful turns possible or are we inevitably headed pell-mell for that ever-beckoning precipice of the abyss of nothingness?

SIX

LANDSCAPE AND PERSONSCAPE IN URBAN AESTHETICS Richard E. Hart

Works of art are .. . celebrations, recognized as such, of the things of ordinary experience. —John Dewey, Art as Experience

Some among us reach for the stars, still others pine for a revelation, secrets yielded, a private wisdom. For me, I scour obviousness, collecting flecks from the ordinary... . I offer that it is the world writ small—as in persons, events, and things—that is the matrix in and through which we live, move and have our becoming. —John J. McDermott, “The Hidden Life of Technological Artifacts” 1

| ‘ raditionally, the branch of Western philosophy known as aesthetics has been immersed in analysis of familiar themes and problems such as the art object and its ontological status, artistic form versus content, the genius or special imagination of the artist, standards of taste and evaluation, and art’s relation to society. Aestheticians agonized over just what constituted a work of “fine” art, about the difference between art and craft, whether art is real or imagined or virtual, whether it could exist outside of museums or performance halls, and how art relates to the sensibilities of refined and cultivated persons. Such foci and analyses, of course, persist in the present day, as witnessed by the contents and structure of professional journals, innumerable standard textbooks in aesthetics, and, further, the way such courses typically are taught. 1 140 $

RICHARD E. HART 141 To read John J. McDermott’s essays on aesthetics and culture, and the environments in which we live, is to witness something dramatically different from the above characterization. One finds McDermott

emphasizing, and in differing contexts always returning to, such novel ideas as the aesthetic setting, environment or field, the centrality of aesthetic sensibility, the affective life of man, and the experiences of everyday living. In numerous places, we see him struggling to make sense of the existence and meaning of “modern art,” which he considers emblematic and illustrative of what aesthetics truly is. Moreover, as his writings evolve over time, he introduces the seemingly enigmatic notion of “urban aesthetics,” to wit, that art and aesthetic experience is to be realized in our public living environments,

particularly our cities. Complementing and parallel to his writings was the now legendary course, “Culture and the Aesthetic Experience,” that McDermott taught for so many years at Queens College in New York. By all accounts, the course had rather little to do with the widely accepted “problems of aesthetics,” rather insisting on art and the commonplace, the ordinary, and the centrality of human experience. Where, and how, one might wonder, did this “‘vision,”’ this rendition of aesthetics, originate? I contend that there are at least two sources or indispensable influences: the classical figures in American philosophy—principally William James and John Dewey—and the unmistakable fact that McDermott is a true-blooded New Yorker, a man of its streets as well as its academies. The latter cannot be proven as such. One must simply read McDermott’s writings and get a feel

for the rhythm, the spirit, the life experience, that infuses and animates them. The role of James, Dewey, and others, however, can be sketched, and will require some background examination prior to arriving at McDermott’s own aesthetic terms and his unique articulation of “urban aesthetics.”

2

McDermott writes in 1997 that over forty years earlier he was told that he would have to teach the aesthetics course at Queens College

142 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY if he expected to compete for tenure. “A relative fledgling in that area,’ he naturally sought advice. He was told to start with the work of Susanne K. Langer, and “For the next 20 years I taught from one or more of her books, always with delight and with pedagogical success for my students.’’! Setting aside, for present purposes, Langer’s complicated metaphysics of art and the “virtual,” one readily notes

that “experience” and “feeling” are continuous themes in her approach to art. McDermott must surely have resonated to such em-

phases early in his philosophical life, both intellectually and pedagogically, for given all the oral and written stories about the Queens course, he taught Langer with unabashed enthusiasm and learned much from her. He also had to have greatly appreciated Langer’s attempts in all her work to break through the “deadlocked para-

doxes” and “checkmated arguments” of Western philosophical history while pointing to an original and richer philosophical future not locked down by over-worn, dead concepts and principles. In this, we find early indications of formative influences on McDermott’s

ideas about aesthetics, and he, like Langer, has fought valiantly throughout his career to overcome fruitless paradoxes and sterile analyses.

In one of his earliest publications in the area of aesthetics, McDermott rather boldly (for a junior professor) reviewed a book by Paul Weiss entitled, The World of Art. The review is critical of the book and provides a further, early indication of the drift of McDermott’s aesthetic thinking. While noting with approval that Weiss wishes “to approach art in a genuinely experiential way, there is considerable doubt as to whether he succeeds.”’ Why would this be the case? McDermott continues that while Weiss seems to avoid “‘the sterility of a meta-language some distance removed from the life of art, he does

not avoid the complexities and the neologisms of his own explicit metaphysics, the ‘modes of being,’ by which he sometimes gently, sometimes not so gently, structures the world of art.”? McDermott’s basic reservation concerns Weiss’s “metaphysical passion to distinguish” and his having implicitly offered a “fully blown metaphysics,”

RICHARD E. HART 143 but not the sort of “metaphysical statement derived directly from aesthetic experience.’’* The philosophical formulation of Weiss’s position is conditioned by his metaphysical notion of “substance,” says McDermott, rather than his own art experiences. Like many philosophers who write on art, his propensity for conceptual certitude out-

weighed the experiential intensity of art itself. In effect, whether realized or not, Weiss was more concerned with systematic metaphysics than with art and aesthetic experience. In his critique, McDermott

clearly announces that his own approach to aesthetics is rooted in experience, not metaphysical system or abstract, generalized theory. Weiss is reflective of modern man’s dilemma. Modern man is the victim of a centuries-old obsession with fixed “form” and bias toward

clarity. For McDermott, this has brought about a condition of dehumanization. As he observes in the powerful essay, ““To Be Human Is to Humanize,” “Much of our difficulty proceeds from the demand for certitude and an inability to recognize and live with the irreducibility of shadows. Who among us knows the human face, or the na-

ture of man?” (CE 27). As we begin to find our way out of this conundrum, we must, at the most fundamental level, reconstruct the modes and expectations of inquiry. We are “constantly obligated to

fuse the critique of previous forms with an attempt to create new forms’ (CE 27). Nowhere is this more urgent than in the field of aesthetics, for as McDermott writes, The philosophical discipline known as aesthetics continues to deal largely with antique problems, seemingly innocent of the fact that the art-experience of the last half-century has rendered the questions of beauty, truth in the arts, and the search for objective crite-

ria as simply not to the point. If we survey contemporary American philosophical works on aesthetics, it is astonishing to see how little they have to do with our experience of contemporary art. (CE 24)

So what does modern art teach us if we open our minds and our senses to it? For one, that man’s response to the world is no longer simply denotative, but rather constitutive. We create reality rather than simply reflect, describe, or explain it. Further, we no longer have

144 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY to accept the ingrained dependence on the visual and auditory senses alone. The new art forms “struggle against the conceptual domination of our traditional patterns of response. The arts of assemblage, kinetic sculpture and mixed media make the tactile experience central

... [and] reinvoke the primative affection for the hands” (CE 23). Modern art thrusts us headlong into novel experience, for living experience is the key to comprehending its significance. Modern art “has made innovation a central theme. .. . The key to the meaning of originality in modern art is not found in a doctrine of the ‘wholly new but, rather, in a metaphysics of relations” (CE 28). So-called nature, or the external world, no longer acts as an “objective referent for the creative affairs of men,” just as “no entity can be experienced in isolation but has to be encountered as a field of relations” (CE 28). The term “entity” is actually better replaced by “event,” that is, a living experiential phenomenon with a history and ongoing network of relations. Writes McDermott: What is most needed, therefore, is a philosophical outlook which does not ask dead questions, that is, questions which focus simply on content. Whether we say with Kandinsky “the environment is the composition” or with McLuhan “the medium is the message,” the problem is clear from the philosophical side—the need for a

doctrine of relational activity phrased in aesthetic metaphors. (CE 34)

In sum, the philosophical problem of aesthetics involves a major shift, in attitude and orientation, one that in considering the human condition integrates into “the language of description and response the shift from a metaphysics of substance, thing and place to one of process, relations, and field” (CE 217).

3

Although he draws heavily on the ideas of Dewey, especially in his

concern for developing an aesthetic sensibility . . . one suspects that it is really James who is McDermott’s philosopher.

RICHARD E. HART 145 The importance attached to the thought and spirit of James must not be allowed to overshadow the signal use which McDermott makes of Dewey’s Art As Experience.

—John E. Smith, foreword to The Culture of Experience

In truth, both James and Dewey are McDermott’s philosophers. Both are indispensable in the shaping of McDermott’s aesthetic attitude and posture. In the previously cited 1968 essay (““To Be Human Is to Humanize: A Radically Empirical Aesthetic’’)—arguably the fullest,

yet succinct and straightforward summary of his aesthetic ideas— McDermott begins by announcing: Two themes occupy us in the present essay. First, we contend that modern art works a revolution in man’s view of himself; it broad-

ens the ways in which he relates to the world and the ways by which he is informed. Second, we hold that the most fruitful philosophical statement of the meaning of modern art is to be found in the thought of William James and John Dewey, interpreted as a radically empirical philosophy of experience. (CE 21)

In concluding the paragraph, he laments the recent neglect of these

two themes, a matter he hopes to compensate for in order to show exactly how significant radical empiricism is as an approach to contemporary art. Further, he admits quite pointedly that no effort will be made “to develop a complete aesthetic” (CE 21-22). The previous section highlighted some of McDermott’s views on

modern art, and we will return to other claims about particular art works, events, or genres. What is of interest here is method, namely, that McDermott seems to have first found himself engaged by works of modern art, on a lively experiential level, and subsequently sought philosophical explanations that would provide (for him) an understanding of the operation and meaning of such art. Rather than start with grand, abstract philosophical theory—then search for art examples that illustrate and validate its accuracy—McDermott’s approach is exactly the reverse. Experience of the art comes first, the attempt to understand and explain follows. Of note here, as well, is his disinterest in developing a “complete” aesthetic. The typical philosophical

146 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY impulse to construct a comprehensive, systematic theory takes a back seat to experience. The sentiment seems, in certain ways, more Aristotelian than Platonic.

Two quotes from James and Dewey—which McDermott cites repeatedly in various of his essays—may well serve as near mantras for his evolving aesthetic. In a famous passage, James writes, “It is... the reinstatement of the vague and inarticulate to its proper place in our mental life which I am so anxious to press on the attention.’’* Moreover, Dewey contends that our philosophical “task” is to “restore continuity between the refined and intensified forms of experience that are works of art and everyday events, doings and sufferings that are universally recognized to constitute experience.’’> Without doubt a proper understanding and vital expression of “aesthetic sensibility” is tops on McDermott’s philosophical plate. He tells readers of The Culture of Experience that one strand shared by all the essays therein is the “underlying assumption that the development of ‘aesthetic sensibility’ is a primary concern of our time and is as central to our amel-

iorative efforts as are the more commonly accepted political, sociological, economic, and psychological diagnoses and strategies” (CE xiii). Importantly, aesthetic sensibility need have no exclusive or necessary relation to the world of sanctioned, recognized art objects and events, for as Dewey teaches, all experience is potentially aesthetic. Fundamentally, “aesthetic sensibility refers to how we and others feel our situation and feel about our situation,’ and the development of this sensibility “should become central to all of our evaluations and judgments, especially those which pertain to our adopted strategies for social and political change” (CE xiii). Such a tall order for the aesthetic, and the need for proper understanding of it, were made possible by some of the leading ideas of James and Dewey. A brief look at some of these notions will assist in articulating the terms of McDermott’s own novel aesthetics. McDermott loves to point out that William James responds fully and consistently to the “call of experience.” For James, the usual material of philosophy, concepts and conceptual statement, often clog the ongoing flow of concrete experience. But we cannot allow it to

RICHARD E. HART 147 take control. We must not permit insulating concepts and theories to “prevent us from maintaining a reflective confrontation with those areas of our conscious experience not given to systematic definition” (CE 30). Our lived experience forever reaches beyond boundaries. There is forever a “more” that supersedes all conceptual explanation. The living environments we find ourselves in when such conceptual boundaries break down are the realms of the aesthetic, the religious, and perhaps the psychedelic. By far the most important implication of this is the “emergence of relational activity as the focus of meaning’ (CE 32) and the extent to which fields of relationships overshadow subjects and objects in isolation. Simply put, for James (and McDermott) “relations” and the stream of human consciousness are keys to understanding the nature of reality. Our very experience of a world, the world, is as a processive, relational field. And relationships bespeak ongoing transitions, in life and the world, transitions in the connections between things and not just in the things themselves. James teaches, along with many painters and critics, that “Expressions such as ‘ongoing,’ ‘process,’ ‘reconstruction, ‘event,’ “interaction, so critical to a metaphysics of experience, and so often criticized by philosophers as vague” (CE 37), are fundamental to relational activity and aesthetic sensibility. In the ongoing, dynamic flow of experience, man becomes the creator of forms, of reality. The world does not come to us as a “given” in need only of being denoted, defined, and categorized. Rather, the world must be constituted out of relations. It is in this sense that our experience forever grows by its edges. For James, man is thus “called upon to create meaning, to engender truth,” an activity that “places man at the center of the flow of experience” (CE 44). But this involves more than “a dazzling array of selfpreening evocations of the human psyche” (CE 44), for a “world” is that which we, others, and the modern artists create. A world consti-

tuted by relations, relations forged by the interplay between the human self “‘and the affairs of our living space, our topography, our cities, and our artifacts” (CE 44). John Dewey introduces the social, cultural, and traditional into our philosophical understanding of the person. Dewey’s sense of the

148 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY person being in the world is “conflicted by the vagaries of natural forces and above all, by the bottom line admission that we are social selves, contexted, conditioned, herded, institutionalized, and tradition laden” (SE 147). These factors filter and restrict our activities, movements, and desires, but do not make of us determined automatons, do not rob us of freedom, or of rich, everyday experience. From the perspective of aesthetic sensibility, Dewey’s major offering is his stress on the “ordinary,” or experience of the ordinary as aesthetic. Alongside James’s emphasis on relations, this marks a second, liberat-

ing dimension for McDermott that profoundly shapes his thinking about aesthetics.

According to McDermott, Dewey generally agreed with James’s philosophy of radical empiricism and applied it in novel ways in one of his seminal books, Art As Experience. Moreover, “Dewey’s views provide a point of departure for a contemporary aesthetic, rooted in the very fabric of the human condition and capable of transforming our cultural attitudes” (CE 45). Dewey picks up and builds upon James’s “sense for relations and processive anthropology” (CE 45), but does so in the context of social interaction between man and his environment. His ideas, though perhaps not consciously intended, assist greatly in the understanding of much of modern art. Moreover, for McDermott, “Dewey’s book offers sustenance for our belief in the

viability of the American philosophy of experience, for purposes of enlightened analysis of the contemporary cultural situation” (CE 46). Dewey contends that our theories of art have all too often separated aesthetic sensibility from the very experiential bedding from which such art proceeds. Such division is hardly inherent in the art itself, but instead resides in the theories concerning its meaning and place. Such theories depreciate the aesthetic dimension of experience, engendering an even greater gulf between art and man. Writes McDermott, “We become correspondingly anaesthetized to the aesthetic qualities inherent in the live creature” (CE 46). Works of art, set apart in their own realm, often on metaphorical pedestals, become all the more divorced from ordinary experience and the lives of people. But in an oft-quoted passage from Dewey, “Even a crude experience, if

RICHARD E. HART 149 authentically an experience, is more fit to give a clue to the intrinsic nature of aesthetic experience than is an object already set apart from any other mode of experience.” Dewey hence examines the rhythms of ordinary experience and articulates their aesthetic qualities. He analyzes the live human crea-

ture’s interactions and relations with its environment, as well as man’s constant need to create, rather than simply to witness. Such notions are consistent with, and actually help to explain, much of the

so-called “art of the ordinary ’—junk art, found art, ready-mades, and the like. For a contemporary aesthetic, such art arises out of virtually any materials, found or created. No hierarchical ordering of materials, composition, or form is relevant any longer. For Dewey, the important point is the constituted relations among the materials and the intensified, revelatory experiences that they produce. “Aspects of our present environment have many aesthetic qualities, here-

tofore unacknowledged. If we widen the scope of the meaning of aesthetic quality, immediate experience yields new riches” (CE 49). Furthermore, observer becomes participant as “The artist, himself, makes of us a more intimate aspect of his art” (CE 49). Dewey’s “ordinary’ is thematized and celebrated as each of us is challenged to

render aesthetically rich our immediate environments. The very credo of modern art, and one might say of Dewey, then, is that to be human is to humanize. Art and the aesthetic shall be no “exception.” 4

I embrace the remonstrance of Camus, that I want to live with what I know, and with that alone. —John J. McDermott, “The Hidden Life of Technological Artifacts”

McDermott’s own aesthetic angle of vision—arising in part from his encounters with art and artists, with James and Dewey among others—will be addressed through his basic terms: space, time, relations, place/our place, the present, things/our things, and the metaphor of

the uterine versus the box. These ideas are developed most clearly in three essays, ““The Hidden Life of Technological Artifacts” (from

150 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY Lifeworld and Technology, 289-301), “The Aesthetic Drama of the Ordinary”’ (SE, 129-40), and “Experience Grows By Its Edges: A Phe-

nomenology of Relations in an American Philosophical Vein” (SE, 141-56). Following is a brief synopsis of the major themes. Place / Our Place Does man have a “place’”—prefigured, preconstituted, a slot for us to

fit in to—ordained by nature, God, or some other force that transcends us? Do we somehow cohere with the world? Does our “‘place” in the universe truly make sense, if but we could only recognize and

understand it? McDermott is dubious on such matters, as when he writes: I see no reason to fool around, to make out as though we belong, as though “it” makes sense, as though we have a place, a natural place. I see no place for us, cosmically, even planetarially, in fact,

I have painful doubts about whether we have even a local place. ... The congeniality of self and world has misfired.’

McDermott’s obvious implication is that we must “make a place,”

albeit a temporary one, through our interactions, our doings, relations, and valuations. Man appears to be the only creature possessed of a consciousness that enables the production of a world, a lifeworld of meaning and creativity. If James is correct that the human will is cognitive, then the will to believe, to do, to make, represent exactly the choices that constitute a self and an impermanent abode for the self. The creating, aesthetic dimension of the exercise of will is, of course, pivotal for James, Dewey, and McDermott. As McDermott recalls, “Dewey tells me that how I feel, how I touch, how I reach, how I fail, all counts in the persistent attempt of ours to seek from an obdurate nature, something worthwhile, something okay.”’* Yet, what can I do, given my lameness and fragility, to establish a locus, a habitable “place” for me? “Only by socializing my experiences . . . only by

carrying my personal history .. . for me, stuff of my stuff. Only by reconnoitering my past and marrying it to my present. Only by incessantly making relations. Only by busting every stereotype. . . . Only

RICHARD E. HART 151 by sucking originality out of the most mundane, prosaic events,” for “Yes, I believe that we have no distinctive self as inherited. Yes, I believe that the soul, my soul, your soul, is a mock-up. Soul, me, I, person, is a self-generated construct,’ as is our so-called “place in the universe.” Box versus Uterine Metaphors

Consonant with the foregoing account of “our place” are McDermott’s ideas about “being in the world.” Typically, we think of ourselves as “in the world” as objects are in a drawer, a pocket, a box. Things naturally reside in a container that is concretely circumscribed and largely impenetrable. But, for McDermott, the “container the-

ory simply does not work, does not adequately characterize our human situation. By contrast, the actual ways in which we carry on our human experiencing involves “activities more descriptive of a permeable membrane than of a box” (SE 129). We should then “consider ourselves as being in a uterine situation, which binds us to nutrition in a distinctively organic way’ (SE 131). We must see ourselves as “floating, gestating organisms, transacting with our environment, eating all the while” (SE 131). Of considerable importance to McDermott’s view of the aesthetic is the sense in which The crucial ingredient in all uterine situations is the nutritional quality of the environment. If our immediate surroundings are foul, soiled, polluted harbors of disease and grime, ridden with alien organisms, then we falter and perish. The growth of the spirit is exactly analogous to the growth of the organism. It too must be fed and it must have the capacity to convert its experiences into a nutritious transaction. (SE 131)

In essence, we are not “in the world,” but rather of and about the world. Space/Time/Present

Am I somehow “in space,” in “my space,” or perhaps even “lost in space?” Not really, says McDermott. Space is never an independently

152 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY existent reality, a some thing out there, enveloping me, in which I can be somehow situated and carry on a residence. Space has no reality

actually aside from our conception of it. Space, as experienced, is fraught with curious irony, as McDermott points out. For instance, the claustrophobia (for some) of the urban environment (closed in space) has its parallel in a very different sort of experienced claustrophobia, that of the “wide-open” spaces of the American West, and the trivialized, powerless feeling that some experience in such a setting. As with “place” and “our/my place,’ we must “seize the space,

and turn it into a place, our place” (SE 134). We thereby make of space our personal space—your space, my space, our space. So, one way out of the box, as it were, “has to do not with the geography and physicality of space, but rather with our symbolic utilization of space for purposes of the human quest” (SE 136). Time is a second matrix through which we live, move, and have our being. Are we creatures of time? Do we live “in time,” as slaves to time? What are the differences between “clock” or “calendar” time and “time as experienced” in the present moment? McDermott argues that, as with space, we should recognize ourselves as children of Kant and Einstein. Surely, we organize ourselves and our activities around time as though it were objectively existent. We are, indeed, lost without our clocks. For us, time often appears to be a series of discrete units that are passing away as each of us stares at our inevita-

ble demise. But, for McDermott, time is yet another “mock-up, an earth phenomenon, no more relevant cosmically than the watches which watch time, supposedly passing” (SE 132). For time as experienced in ordinary daily activity is a function of our attitude, disposi-

tion, and, in some instances, conscious choice. With appropriate adjustments in our physical environments and mentality, we can reorient the flow of time toward death. “Time would revolve around

us rather than passing through us. Time would provide the playground for our activities rather than the graveyard of our hopes. We would time the world rather than having the world time us” (SE 133). Likewise, adjustments must be made regarding past, present, and future. McDermott points out that many seek to escape from the inevitable erosions of time through retreats into the already-over past

RICHARD E. HART 153 or some projected future. Such adopted “strategies ... cut us off from nutrition” (SE 292) in the present moment of experience. Many lapse into a comforting nostalgia, “whereby the past takes on a glow that it never had as present and seduces us into living our lives backwards” (SE 292). Regrettably, the present loses its force, its vitality, as the creatures of nostalgia live vicariously and by hindsight. Such persons have “dropped out and back,” thus becoming “isolated from continuous nutrition” that only the present can provide. Likewise, others become seduced by a projected future, and in their fashion torn away from immediacy. Such persons are in constant wait for forces beyond them, from the future, to motivate or rescue them, as they “tint every experience with its alleged futuretime prospect, in the hope most often vain, that things will (must?) get better” (SE 292). In both scenarios the “present,” the “existential moment has no bite for we are always waiting for something else, something different, something better, a wait which is futile, for only the experience of the present can lead to a viable future” (SE 292-93). Things / Our Things

“Thing,” observes McDermott, is often considered, especially in philosophy, a pejorative term. Things are thought to be simply objects, “inert, lifeless and impersonal .. . transient, subject to obsolescence in contrast to the self-deceptive assumption that the person who has/ uses things has some permanency” (SE 290). But, for McDermott, things, whether sanctioned objects of art or just everyday stuff, are “potentially as febrile as live creatures” and are “symbolically pregnant” (SE 290). A consideration of “‘things”’ leads to a focus on “our things.” McDermott contends, “We are our things. They are personal

intrusions into the vast, impersonal reach of space. They are functional clots in the flow of time. They are living memories of experi-

ences had but still viable. They are memorials to experiences undergone and symbolically still present” (SE 137). Our things belong

to us and come to define us as they articulate our experience of the world while helping us constitute our world. “My snuff box, my jewelry drawer, an album, a diary, a yearbook, all tumbled into the box

154 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY of memories, but transcendent and assertive of me and mine” (SE 136-37). We and “our things” create our world out of a present that would be empty without our things. But things not only are, they happen. They sometimes become events. Things, in this sense, are for McDermott bundles of relations. One whole set of these relations is the aesthetic. How do “things as events” factor into such relations? In reflecting on the affective dimension of our experiencing, McDermott states, “It is not the things as names, nouns, which are rich. It is how

the things do and how they are done to. It is how they marry and divorce, sidle and reject. The aesthetic drama of the ordinary plays itself out as a result of allowing all things to become events, namely, by allowing all things the full run of their implications” (SE 139). Such things, as events, in their full relational implications, in their “leads and... hints would carry us into the nook and cranny of the implicitness of every experience” (SE 139).

Relations Aboriginally, the world is not made up of objects but rather is a continuum of concatenated relations (CE 149).

Much has already here been said of “relations” and the essential nature of “relations” for McDermott’s general philosophy and aesthetics. Two additional points need to be made briefly, one concerning relations and the making of our world, and the other concerning relations in art, with one art form as an illustration. When we ask ourselves, or are asked by others, what we need to do to make a world which is personally mine yet shared by others, McDermott writes, “The initial response is obvious. Make relations! Build, relate, and then reflect. Reflect, relate, and then build. Seek novelty, leave no stone unturned. Fasten on colors, shapes, textures, sounds, odors, sights. Above all, never close down until the fat person sings’ (SE 152). In other words, seek everywhere and every time to overcome “the obstacles to a salutary making of relations” (SE 151).

RICHARD E. HART 155 How exactly are “relations” integral to art? Considering one of his favorite art forms, namely, jazz, McDermott writes, “Outside of a relational setting, jazz is meaningless, for it proceeds by a series of interwoven tensions” (CE 38). Single members do their thing, make their individual contributions, but always over against other members of

the group. “Positive relational tension is realized through and... between personal mastery of the instrument and the demand for improvisation; between the developing structure of each contribution and, overall, an open system ... thus, each to his own vision but as a shared experience.” As with the plastic arts, “intelligibility is manifest when one is carried along by the possibilities and relations of the medium in question” (CE 38-39).

The foregoing themes and considerations—space, time, place, things, relations—taken together provide the underpinnings for McDermott’s reflections on the city and urban aesthetics, and the transition from “landscape” to “personscape.”

5

American urban man has been seduced by nature... at the deepest level of his consciousness urban man functions on behalf of nature metaphors, nature expectancies, and a nostalgia for an experience of nature which neither he nor his forebears actually underwent. (CE 180)

Only a radically re-constituted image of the city will provide us with a new resource for structuring once again a sense of option and experiment as continuous with everyday life. (CE 191)

Over the last hundred or so years, America has evolved from a rural to an urban nation. Presently, some 90 percent of the population lives on but 10 percent of the available land, that is, in cities and their immediate suburbs. But what has this transformation done to change the affective quality of our everyday experience? Has our experience, particularly our aesthetic experience, come to match the social facts and changes in our lives?

156 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY McDermott contends that Americans have always assumed and believed in the abiding comforts of nature and hearkened for escape into the quiet and peace that nature presumably affords. Thus, a network of nature metaphors, aspirations, and expectancies have arisen and permeate our collective cultural consciousness. Presuppositions and biases have taken root that claim superiority for the natural over the artifactual, the organic over the inorganic. All of this, collectively, has worked to the detriment of urban life and experience. This exag-

gerated estimate of the importance of nature implies, in John E. Smith’s recounting of McDermott’s position, that We have not succeeded in “mythologizing” the city and its virtues

as we have the rural scene, so that the urban dweller is less at home in his surroundings than he should be. McDermott is troubled lest a misguided affection for nature lead to failure to celebrate the experiences and values at the center of urban life.'°

Even more specifically, McDermott believes that “we have failed to articulate our distinctively city experience in aesthetic terms” just as

we have continued “to be oblivious to the teeming relational fabric of urban experience” (CE 195). To overcome urban alienation and all manner of ill-begotten bias and misunderstanding, our trick is to unite, or reunite, as it were, our affective lives with the everyday processes of urban experience. “We must develop insight into the time of city-space and the space of city-time. And we must search for a way to

render our bodies as continuous with technological artifact as they were with the environs of nature’ (CE 199). Such searching has been a sizable part of McDermott’s philosophical project over the past forty years, for as he says, “The city is now our home; in the most traditional and profound sense of the word, it is our land” (CE 199).

As city people, we must, according to McDermott, recognize the all-pervasive aesthetic dimension rooted in the very nature and structure of the urban environment. We must, in effect, develop an aesthetic sensibility that is of an urban quality. What would be the scope and reach of this new aesthetic sensibility? Writes McDermott, “The scope of an urban aesthetic is nothing less than all the affective transactions experienced in urban life, and the task of an urban aesthetic

RICHARD E. HART 157 is to articulate those transactions in a language as close to the quality of urban experience as spoken and written discourse will allow’ (CE 209). Of particular note, all this has little of any necessary nature to do with what McDermott calls the high-culture aesthetic by which cities have come to be known—that is, museums, monuments, and concert halls. Celebrations of and affection for everyday urban experience—for the contexts of experienced time and space in cities—is what he seeks. Thus, McDermott muses, “In aesthetic terms, I find the refurbishing of Yankee Stadium as equal to the construction of Lincoln Center” (CE 210). Curiously, the evolution of what we term “modern art’”—and its overthrow of the expected and proprietary— coincides with just this sort of focus on the city. Modern art is charac-

terized by a vast array of new materials, differing forms and combinations, incorporation of ordinary experience and the artifacts of ordinary life, and an endless myriad of shapes, sounds, colors, and textures. Nowhere is this development more apparent than in the experience of our cities, which can be described, in contemporary terms, as a vast assemblage, undergone kinetically, laced through with the tensions, mishaps, celebrations, and fulfillments worthy of any rich assemblage. (CE 209)

McDermott identifies two terms and layers them with his own spe-

cial meaning, terms that by their contrast help us understand even more vividly his urban aesthetics. ““Landscape,”’ he says, is that which we inherit and its meaning is rather obvious. “Landscape, and its sib-

ling, oceanscape, bring with them enormous natural complexity, a staggering givenness of space, size, color, and the drama of their inhabitants, flora and fauna.”'! “Personscape,”’ by contrast, “is what we do to landscape; first with our hands, then with our tools and finally

with the awesome resources of modern technology.” In this doing unto landscape (or nature), man has, of course, been both preservative and highly destructive. Nature, in turn, has fully demonstrated that it is on occasion anything but benevolent with regards to human interests, and that it has its own modes of retaliation. Given this point in history, for McDermott

158 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY It has become crystal clear that if we are to survive as a human species, we must simultaneously obey the dictates of nature and yet find a way to create a distinctively human place for ourselves, one that is continuous with nature but not limited by the boundaries of a reality which does not make sufficient place for us unless we modify and build our own version.”

In this building of our own version, we all too often ignore nature, but regrettably we have, also, fallen prey to building our own environments, our cities, permeated by what McDermott calls schlock. He reminds us that schlock is a Yiddish term referring to “something del-

eterious that human beings do to themselves.”” His own extended translation adds that it “means not simply the anaesthetic, but, more, the boring, the dull, the embarrassing, the repetitive, in short, the American shopping center,”'* the littering of billboards and other commercialized blights on our natural and urban landscape. This “recent tendency to obviate the aesthetic quality in the building of our public space” means that we remain “ignorant of our basic needs when it comes to constructing a human place,”’!> and, we should add, an aesthetically desirable and invigorating place. Such a place must, for McDermott, allow for the richest possible fulfillment of the sense experiences of sight, touch, hearing, and the “inchoate sensibility for an environment that persistently transcends the humdrum, the everyday and the repetitive.” This creation of “personscape”’ involves a variety of concrete, practical questions for McDermott: Is there a place to walk? ... Is the physical, building space continuous and compatible with the natural space? Does the building space provide for light, for horizon and for human gathering? ... Are there stoops, arcades, gazebos and other-assorted space places for human gathering? In short, are we building human space or simply providing space for objects, oblivious to the needs, propensities and to the interior life of human beings?!*

Cities, as McDermott thinks they ought to be, are “fabrics, woven neighborhoods, woven covenants, each integral and thick in personal exchange, yet each siding up to the other, so as to knit a concatenated, webbed, seamed, and organic whole.” Furthermore, “the history of

RICHARD E. HART 159 the city is a history of human organisms, ostensibly fit for nature, rendering the artifactual affectionate, sentimental, warm, and symbolically pregnant.” Finally, “City space is artifact supreme, the most extensive, detailed, multimedia human creation in the history of what we do to nature’ (SE 204). Sadly, our most recent efforts at creating cities that are humanly and aesthetically charged have fallen far short of the mark. McDermott mournfully recalls, in his powerful 1986 essay, “Glass Without Feet: Dimensions of Urban Aesthetics,” his visit to the downtown of Tucson at 9 p.M., only to discover that absolutely nothing was “happening.” The essay starts with his recollections of a trip to the imposing new outer city of Houston, and his inquiry as to whether a new glass building he entered “had a soul and was open to the presence of personal space.” Thrown out by a no doubt baffled security guard, “T went looking for a newspaper, a sandwich, a personal opening to these jutting edifices of technological supremacy. No luck! No kiosk! No paper! No sandwich! No body! No place! Just a marvel of impersonal use of space. Consequently no personscape”’ (SE 196). The close of “Glass Without Feet” serves as a fitting close for this undoubtedly feeble effort to convey the basic ideas and contours of McDermott’s urban aesthetics. The presence of “personscape,”’ says

McDermott, “means the urban ambience which affords the city dwellers the same bodily continuity with the environment as that found in nature.”’ Even such an overwhelming megalopolis as New York City, where McDermott was born and bred and where in spirit he largely remains, “despite its overwhelming population and the dominating presence of its huge buildings, has preserved the sense of neighborhood, intimacy and personal accessibility’ (SE 207). The recent tragic events of September 11, 2001, have proven beyond any doubt that New York City remains a viable city,!” a humanly and aesthetically rich treasure for all the world to witness. Like New York, cities can be viable and aesthetically alive only if they have downtowns. They must have real places to walk and commune and live. As McDermott warns, we must “Heed the message; cities are for people,

160 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY ordinary people who move through both the day and night in the search for nutrition, spiritual and aesthetic nutrition” (SE 209).

6

A variety of questions inevitably arise when one studies McDermott’s

urban aesthetics. Bypassing any number of tedious technical questions that might be asked about this point or that, this word or that, we close with an effort to at least pose a few of the more general issues. The “nutrition” for McDermott’s aesthetic ideas is modern art, and he gives numerous, vivid examples of just the sort of art experiences that serve his purposes. Assemblage, kinetic sculpture, jazz, and

the like are described in terms of relations, ordinary experience, space, time, and novelty. What would he say about established art works from history and tradition? Are they living or dead or somewhere in between? Would the great paintings, sculpture, or sympho-

nies of centuries past somehow be amenable to the same sort of experiential description as modern art? Would they be reflective of a different sort of connection that man had (or has) to his world, perhaps even a different rural or feudal world? Will McDermott’s aes-

thetic terms suffice in explaining or describing the aesthetic dimensions of such works?

One might argue that McDermott’s aesthetics is rooted in a psychologized metaphysics, with James as an obvious reference point. His focus is on experienced relations or relations as experienced. But man has relations with anything and everything, at least potentially. Aside from such descriptors as “intensity,” “vitality,” “human,” and the like, what qualities or conditions adequately characterize “‘aesthetic” relations? As an urban dweller, for example, I have numerous interactions with the buildings, monuments, and people that inhabit my neighborhood. But what about them, or rather what special features, make for the possibility of my having relations of an aesthetic nature with any one or more of these things or persons? Is the possibility for aesthetic experience rooted solely in my attitude or posture

RICHARD E. HART 161 or might there be something about the things themselves or the environment they populate that allows for aesthetic sensibility? In short, what exactly explains “aesthetic relations?” Lastly, where does “urban aesthetics” fit in the bigger picture of aesthetics generally and the history of aesthetic ideas and theories? Would McDermott be prepared to argue that we have evolved to a

point in our technology and our living environments such that “urban aesthetics” is basically where the action is at? Does the leading art work of our time provide strong indications of an answer? What have we gained, philosophically and practically, if we follow McDermott, and “urban aesthetics’’ becomes the focus of our attention? In several places, he speaks of social, political, and economic change that

must be founded on what seems a shift in aesthetic attitude. How exactly would this work, and would the outcomes ultimately lead to a more human, perhaps more humane world? The very fact that one formulates and ponders such heady issues upon studying McDermott’s aesthetics is a credit to the sweep, the ongoing relevance, and the enduring power of his lifelong contributions to our experience of art and the aesthetic side of existence.

SEVEN

WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO HAVE AN ETHICS? Paul B. Thompson

A Purdue University, we administer a graduate comprehensive examination in ethics comprising questions on meta-ethics, ethical theory, and applied ethics. The first section covers topics such as whether norms, prescriptions, and value judgments have truth-values and the proper analysis of universal claims. The second section

consists mainly of interpretive questions on the ethical writings of philosophers such as Kant, Hume, Mill, and Aristotle. The final section focuses on issues such as capital punishment, affirmative action,

and abortion. Although we have a fairly liberal reading of what counts as ethics at Purdue, it is difficult to imagine one of our students finding any of John J. McDermott’s original essays to be particularly relevant to the questions we tend to ask. As I was preparing to write this paper, McDermott himself cautioned against attempting to write about his work on ethics, suggesting that “moral philosophy” might be a more promising line of inquiry for anyone reacting to his lifetime body of work. { 162 }

PAUL B. THOMPSON 163 There are, of course, many twentieth-century philosophers who did little or nothing on ethics: Quine, Tarski, Husserl, Heidegger, or Davidson, to mention just a few of the better-known names. But unlike them, McDermott’s work is full of prescriptions and general advice. Granted, many of his normative recommendations could be couched within aesthetics or philosophy of education, rather than general ethics. Yet, the reader of McDermott’s essays cannot fail to come away from them without feeling that much of his work is dedicated to “moral philosophy.” McDermott seems to conceive of philosophy as an enterprise inherently preoccupied with moral concerns.

In McDermott’s writings, major turns in the history of philosophy always portend major shifts in morality, and the great philosophers are always striving for an expression or a reconciliation of guiding principles for action, for a way to live their lives (SE 3-28). If this reading is correct, it is at least striking, if not flatly odd, that a man so captivated by the moral dimensions of philosophy should produce virtually nothing that can be handed to the beginning graduate student with the advice, “Read this for you ethics prelim.” Of course, there are at least two ways to explore this phenomenon. One is to ask “What’s the trouble with McDermott?”’ while the other

is to ask, ““What’s the trouble with the ethics prelim at Purdue?” As most American philosophy departments tend to be rather narrower in focus than Purdue’s, the second alternative is actually a question asked by John Dewey: What’s the trouble with academic philosophy? It will come as no surprise to anyone familiar with McDermott’s work that someone (such as myself) inclined to take it seriously will find the second alternative to be a much more promising line of inquiry. Answering this question will, I think, throw some light on McDermott’s moral philosophy, and even, dare I say so, his ethics.

The Trouble with Twentieth-Century Ethics

A recent book by John McCumber suggests that until about 1950 American philosophy was on track to be engaged in social criticism and to philosophize in a mode that would be of obvious relevance to

164 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY real people. John Dewey and George Herbert Mead had prepared the stage for such work, and a new generation of Harvard pragmatists, philosophizing in the tradition of William James and Josiah Royce, were poised to make their appearance. According to McCumber, all this was derailed by the chilling effects of McCarthyism on academic administrators.! Even without McCarthy, however, “public choice theory” tells us that units in bureaucratic organizations will evolve

toward their best survival strategy. Philosophy departments have been and still are essential to the prestige of academic institutions.’ While administrators have canned entire departments of geography, sociology, and education on many occasions, it is difficult to get rid of the philosophy department without embarrassment. Yet, unlike virtually any other department in modern universities, philosophy departments are not really expected to satisfy any particular external constituency or deliver any kind of measurable product, either in the form of research results or student performance. On top of all that, they are relatively cheap, at least when the faculty are not creating nuisance costs for administration by irritating alumni, state legislators, and major donors. So even if McCumber has oversold the influence of McCarthyism in his book, there is ample reason to think that he has put his finger on a pulse that would steer philosophy departments toward don’t-rock-the-boat specialization in logic, epistemology, and analytic metaphysics. McCumber’s thesis is attractive to pragmatists, liberals, and general fans of William James or John Dewey and it raises questions about the link between philosophy and social power that will be reprised a bit later. But it also suggests that the sense in which academic ethics went wrong can be found in a reduced commitment to the socialist agenda, and this diagnosis will not point us in a direction that allows us to see how John McDermott got it right. We do better by going back to a Deweyan characterization of a Nietzschean insight. We could say that moral language does two jobs for us. On the one hand, we use prescriptions, valuations, and normative talk as a form of self-discovery, self-clarification, and self-discipline. This is the ethical task that is performed when we turn inward and ask, What are we

PAUL B. THOMPSON 165 to do? On the other hand, the language of morals is also the language of social control. Here, the point is to instill certain habits and practices among others. Nietzsche’s insight was that in our time, the former task has become incredibly difficult in virtue of the success that capitalism and the rise of the modern state have brought about with respect to the latter one. As McDermott, puts it, Nietzsche “encourages acceptance of the underground energies available to us as a gift from Dionysus, if we had but the will to shuck off the tired truisms of our politics, our religion and our ethics” (SE 21). Dewey’s thought offers several twists on the Nietzschean insight, one of which I have

incorporated already in framing the problem as one of conflicting functions for moral language or moral discourse. Nietzsche himself does not do this, and his writings become a rant against morality while embodying a classically philosophical interest in the moral tasks of self-expression, self-criticism, and (even though it is ironic to say this in Nietzsche’s case) self-control. For Dewey, language is a product of cultural evolution. The words, expressions, linguistic structures (such as tense, person, or form), and entire patterns of discourse that we have today are a sedimented, ha-

bitually ingrained and socially reproduced repertoire of practices. Language is, in the sense made clear by Larry Hickman’s work, a set of techniques, and Dewey’s philosophy of language is a technology.° This means that moral language is a set of tools that have proven to be broadly useful in the solution of human problems. Words such as

“good,” “right,” or “just,” and moral codes such as the Ten Commandments or the Golden Rule are socially reproduced in language games that serve any number of possible functions for the human communities that play them. Thus, for someone working in Dewey’s tradition, Nietzsche’s insight would be better described as noticing that moral language has evolved in response to at least two different kinds of functional feedback mechanisms. One is a rhetoric of selfdiscovery and self-discipline, the other is a rhetoric of social control. Of course, it hardly needs saying that for Dewey (but probably not for Nietzsche) self-discovery and self-discipline are inherently social activities. Individuals only ponder who “I” am and what “T’ should

166 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY do to the extent that they are in a community that ponders in terms of “we.” As social practices, self-discovery and self-control bleed seamlessly into social control. But surely Nietzsche is right to notice that within rationalized and bureaucratized industrial societies, at least, there are

functions of social control that are not only wholly separate from philosophical ethics, but absolutely inimical to this reflective-expressive kind of linguistic activity. Again from McDermott, “In order to

bring off the instituting of new values, we must overcome our primary opponent, bourgeois Christian ethics, especially as found in the glorification of humility and self-abnegation” (SE 21). However, the specific words and discursive patterns of moral philosophy are not that different from those of social control. For a Deweyan, this is not surprising, since (a) they both spring from a single set of linguistic practices, and (b) it is relatively recently, and coupled with changes in technology and social organization, that these practices have become sharply distinct and even inimical to one another. McDermott’s interpretation of Dewey notes, “The most perilous threat to human life is secondhandedness, living out the bequest of our parents, siblings, relatives, teachers, and other dispensers of already programmed possibilities’ (CE 140). To confine one’s ethical inquiry to forms inherited from a previous generation’s attempt at social control is to fall

victim to this peril. One must thus ask and answer genuine ethical questions while simultaneously distancing one’s speech and writing from the soul-killing discourse of social control. Nietzsche had the luxury of being able to withdraw from and cast aspersions toward the discourse of social control. But anyone philosophizing after Hitler (remember, McCarthy was a pussycat) has an

additional problem, which is the recognition that philosophy quits the discourse of social control altogether only at great peril. The discourse of social control must remain imbued with as much of philosophy’s fire and quest for truth as is possible, yet there are, increasingly it seems, things that really should not be asserted within a discourse that is functioning as a mechanism of social control. What I have in mind includes some of the Nietzschean rhetoric used so detrimentally

PAUL B. THOMPSON 167 by the Nazis, but phenomena such as climate change, globalization, and changing patterns in sexuality and family life lead any responsible person to ponder how their words might be misunderstood and misrepresented before speaking publicly. I will argue below that McDermott’s moral philosophy is in constant negotiation of the treacherous currents set in motion by the trends I have just been describing. If there is a single factor that marks the distance between McDermott’s own philosophy and that of his three great heroes, James, Royce, and Dewey, it is his cognizance of the risks that must be run. Whether this reflects his perspicuity, his temperament, or simply the vantage point of the late twentieth century is impossible to say. Yet, McDermott’s primary achievement in ethics has been to navigate the waters in which all of us must henceforth set our ethical sails in an exemplary manner. Ethics after Nietzsche

Before examining McDermott’s own ethics, it will be useful to chart a bit more explicitly what he was up against. The standard, one-sentence history of ethics in the twentieth century would surely go some-

thing like the following. Skepticism about the meaningfulness of normative statements led to an abandonment of substantive ethics and the dominance of meta-ethics until Rawls’s Theory of Justice precipitated a renaissance of inquiry into moral theory and applied ethics

during the last quarter of the century.* There was, of course, a lot more substantive work going on before Rawls than this statement im-

plies. Through G. E. Moore, J. J. C. Smart, R. M. Hare, and Peter Singer there is the steady development of utilitarian or consequentialist methods for derivation of action and policy-guiding norms. These methods were consistent with emotivist and prescriptivist analyses of moral language, which held that values are wholly subjective and reactive. Somewhat apart from the consequentialist/utilitarian line of ethics, but also prior to Rawls, were philosophers such as G. E. M. Anscombe and Bernard Williams who, influenced by Wittgenstein and Austin, respectively, took solace from ordinary language philosophy. The thrust here was that ordinary prescriptive talk was just fine,

168 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY even if the theory-building projects of the modern period lay in a shambles. To put it another way, perhaps God is not quite dead yet, at least where morals are concerned. By century’s end, Alisdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor would join this line of ethical inquiry. These primarily British philosophers were quite influential in the United States, but it is certainly true that the homegrown thought of Rawls did seem to spark a rebirth of interest in normative topics at American universities. Rawls’s Theory of Justice (1972) followed a series of influential papers throughout the 1960s in which he developed a conception of liberalism that allowed wide latitude for individuals to choose their own life plans and values, while defending a procedural approach to the specification of individual liberty and distributive justice that overrides or “trumps” these individually chosen goals in certain cases. During the last quarter of the century, a number of Rawls’s former students and followers were developing their own ver-

sions of the procedural approach in ethics and political theory. By 1985, Rawls and Jiirgen Habermas could be seen as the leading figures

among a small army of philosophers extending a program in ethics that had been brought to the attention of the English-speaking world by Kurt Baier. Kantian constructivism, or simply neo-Kantianism, did not specify particular norms or normative judgments, but instead articulated a conception of rationality, or “‘the moral point of view,” that was constitutive of morality and that would, it was alleged, generate substantive norms in specific situations. Contrary to the thrust of my one-sentence summary, future historians may interpret twentieth-century philosophy as preoccupied with the derivation and defense of action-guiding principles. It is not at all implausible to see these thinkers as engaged in a desperate and often ingenious attempt to re-establish substantive moral theory on secular foundations. Although few of these thinkers would appear to have been directly influenced by Nietzsche’s writings, all were working furiously to formulate an ethical theory in light of positivist and post-positivist trends in epistemology and philosophy of language. The names mentioned above do not exhaust the philosophical strategies pursued with respect to normative questions in the twentieth

PAUL B. THOMPSON 169 century, but they demarcate the domain of ethics as it would have been understood in most American universities during the period of John McDermott’s professional career.* This was the milieu in which McDermott wrote his prescriptive essays. The approaches being pur-

sued by the listed figures indicate what McDermott was reacting against when he disavowed any great interest in ethics. What is striking about all these figures, including Rawls, is the extent to which they are willing to limit their resources for philosophical illumination of the ethical to a rhetoric guided by the project of social control. Whether working out the subjectivist-consequentialist

project initiated by Moore or the constructivist-neo-Kantian program initiated by Baier, analytic philosophers of the twentieth century have hoped to produce arguments that justify individual action or social policy. This is what “ethics” has primarily been understood to be about. Justification has implicitly meant that agents acting in

compliance with justified norms could confidently presume their conduct to be “ethical,” as opposed to “unethical.” Such agents could

also demand that others recognize the legitimacy of their acts and expect reciprocity. The arguments that produce such justifications are understood to compel the audience, through force of reason, to recognize themselves as subject to the performance of stipulated duties and also to bear without protest all risks that arise as a result of other people acting in accordance with justified norms. Hearing the logic of rigorous moral argument was alleged to produce a psychological state equivalent to that of being in possession of moral truth, even if the twentieth century has been a time when philosophers were reluctant to link morality and truth. People in this state of moral enlight-

enment are constituted as subjects under the discipline of reason. They constitute themselves as moral subjects in accepting the dictates of reason, and in doing so, impose a logic of recognition upon others. This is, of course, the essence of social control: the complete internalization of discipline. Physical coercion of subjects is generally unnecessary and yet seen as legitimate in those cases where it is deployed. This characterization of argument and justification is, of course, a fairly hom-handed reworking of Michel Foucault’s discussion of Bentham and “panopticism” from Discipline and Punish.® At the close of

170 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY the twentieth century, analytic ethicists were being increasingly surprised by interlocutors who had also read their Foucault. Focusing primarily on neo-Kantians such as Rawls and Habermas, feminists and race theorists have argued that the characterization of the moral subject—the moral point of view—given through the original position, or ideal discourse, reflects and perpetuates power relations that favor white male elites.’ Apparently, the Foucaultians do not regard the consequentialists as even worthy of serious criticism. The feminist critique of neo-Kantian ethics takes off from a question central to many of Foucault’s empirical studies, “Posing for discourse the question of power means basically to ask whom does discourse serve?’’® There is more to Foucault’s treatment of ethics, however. In the second and third volumes of The History of Sexuality, Foucault undertakes the first stages of an uncompleted “genealogy of ethics.” This project was to be a study of how certain key elements of moral culture and philosophy evolved throughout the Greek, Roman, and medieval periods. Foucault’s primary interest was not in the code that determined which acts are permitted and forbidden throughout these periods, but in the way that practices of care for the self evolved and changed. This was a return to the classic philosophical questions of ethics, the questions we ask ourselves when seeking resources for self-discovery and self-discipline. Foucault characterized rapport a sot as having four main dimensions: (1) the aspect or the part of myself or my behavior that is concerned with morality (substance éthique), (2) the way in which people are invited or incited to recognize moral obligations (mode d’assujettissement), (3) the means available for becoming ethical subjects (tekhné), and (4) the kind of being to which we aspire when we behave in a moral way (téléologie). Foucault proposed that these four elements comprise a matrix that may be filled out in many different ways. The texts of The Uses of Pleasure and The Care of the Self provide detailed discussion and comparison of the way that these elements are specified by philosophers working in dif-

ferent historical epochs. The interdependencies among these elements are charted in a manner that allows Foucault to show how philosophy both shapes and is shaped by social institutions such as

PAUL B. THOMPSON 171 marriage, political forms, and economic relationships. Foucault links this work on the genealogy of ethics to his earlier studies on truth and

power. From antiquity through to the sixteenth century, “a subject could not have access to the truth if he did not first operate upon himself a certain work that would make him susceptible to knowing the truth—a work of purification, conversion of the soul by contemplation of the soul itself.’’ The break with this comes with Descartes, who substitutes evidence for ascesis, the ascetic practices of purification and contemplation. As a result, “I can be immoral and know the truth.”°

According to Foucault, Kant’s ethics are a response to this break and required a totally new conceptualization of all four elements in the matrix. Unfortunately, Foucault died before he could say much about rapport a soi under the conditions of late modernity and industrial capitalism. Yet, he did suggest that our problem is to reconfigure ethics as strategic games played as practices of freedom. “I do not think that a society can exist without power relations,’ he says in comparing his own work to that of Habermas, “if by that one means the strategies by which individuals try to direct and control the conduct of others. The problem, then, is not to try to dissolve them in the utopia of completely transparent communication but to acquire the rules of law, the management techniques, and also the morality, the éthos, the practice of the self, that will allow us to play these games

of power with as little domination as possible.’'° He completes this thought by characterizing philosophy as “that which calls into question domination at every level and in every form in which it exists,

whether political, economic, sexual, institutional, or what have you. !! In another essay, Foucault describes philosophy as needing to turn from Kant’s search for formal structures with universal value to “historical investigation into the events that have led us to constitute ourselves as subjects of what we are doing, thinking, saying.”'* He says that this work, “‘done at the limits of ourselves must, on the one hand, open up a historical inquiry and on the other, put itself to the test of

reality, of contemporary reality, both to grasp the points where

172 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY change is possible and desirable and to determine the precise form this change should take.”'’ He notes that the creation of capacities and the struggle for freedom remain constant throughout the variations mapped in his genealogies and concludes, ““What is at stake, then, is this: how can the growth of capabilities be disconnected from the intensification of power relations.”'* Ethics, for Foucault, is that domain of philosophy in which we turn inward, toward our selves, and undertake the still historically grounded criticism that constitutes care of the self for our own time.

Ethics after Foucault

What would such an ethics look like? One might begin by noting the similarity between some of the passages I have just quoted and Dew-

ey's emphasis on testing and reconstruction in philosophy. One might pursue this similarity by comparing some of Foucault’s remarks on the role of “problematization” as a form of careful interpretation, appreciation, and diagnosis of “what is problematic’’'> with McDermott’s characterization of what James and Dewey’s pragmatism can contribute to practical ethics.'* In fact, I suggest that anyone

searching for an example of ethics “after” Foucault should simply read the work of John J. McDermott, despite the fact that McDermott produced much of this work well before Foucault’s writings on ethics had appeared in English. For over forty years, McDermott has produced a series of historically situated critical studies that probe the way that we are constituted as subjects in postmodernity, that extend the self beyond its extant limitations, and that, in their careful atten-

tion to ameliorative strategies, husband the capabilities created against exploitation and the intensification of domination as thoroughly as is humanly possible. Though I would refer my audience to the whole of his thought to demonstrate this accomplishment, I will highlight a few examples before concluding with a few critical remarks of my own. First, I submit that in McDermott’s philosophy, experience itself is the substance éthique for subjects after the collapse of modernity. This

PAUL B. THOMPSON 173 orientation stands in contrast to the twentieth century’s exclusive focus on reason. Developed generally through expository remarks on

James and Dewey, experience for McDermott consists in making, constructing, reconstructing, and also severing relations. The subject is a nexus of accumulated relations that “grows by its edges” through

probes, ventures, and risk-taking. In contrast to the analytic tradition’s emphasis on self-interested optimization or the cultivation of a moral point of view, it is the making of experiential relations through srowth “in the transitions’ that serves as mode dassujettissement for McDermott’s ethics. McDermott is fairly direct on this point. Make relations! Build, relate, and then reflect. Reflect, relate, and then build. Seek novelty, leave no stone unturned. Fasten on colors, shapes, textures, sounds, odors, sights. Above all, never close down until the fat person sings. The only acceptable denouement is death. Until then all signs are go, that is, make relations until the maker is unmade. (SE 152)

The tekhné for care of the self consist in aesthetic appreciation and pedagogy, on which more later. They stand in contrast to the twentieth-century emphasis on argumentation. McDermott’s téléologie is, perhaps, not different from that of many in his twentieth-century cohort. It is the fullest possible realization of the potential for experien-

tial relations, to live on the fringe, but for McDermott this is an aspiration that incorporates risk into its very ontology: “If we were to

follow each thing and event to its full perceptual implication, we would explode from experiential overload” (SE 150). It is through judicious selective taking and refusal of risk that the postmodern sub-

ject of McDermott’s ethics comes into focus. Like Foucault, McDermott salutes the Stoic and Epicurean practices of asceticism, but also like Foucault, he believes “The dangers, the traps and the obstacles are more subtle, more extensive, and more seductive than they were in antiquity” (SE 152). In the essay from which this quota-

tion is taken, McDermott goes on to chronicle a few of the risks, which he characterizes in terms of relation starvation, relation ampu-

tation, relation saturation, relation seduction, and relation repression. Throughout, however, it is always death, the ultimate severer of

174 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY relations and of relating, that is the true source of risk. Experience is individuated (hence delimited) by the inevitability of death, and the foreboding, looming awareness of death can rob experience of its meaning, rendering the kind of being to which we aspire when we make relations pointless. Thus, McDermott’s teleology aims for the fullest possible realization of an experience that is persistently and permanently afflicted, in his word, terminal. This death is both personal and cosmological, and it is only in full cognizance of not only our own death, but also that of our species and our planet that experience (which is to say the moral subject) can come to recognize (which is to say experience) the transiency that is fundamental to its being (SE 157-68).

McDermott’s technology of ethics, his account of the means available for becoming ethical subjects, stands in stark contrast to that of most philosophers since Kant. As noted already, ethics in twentieth-

century philosophy has meant the production of argument. Argument and logic are often likened to knives or weapons in the analytic tradition, and the comparison is telling, for here moral argument is the means for realizing oneself as a moral subject every bit as much

as for compelling assent and submission by the other. McDermott simply does not engage this tradition of philosophy, urging instead the need to cultivate new resources for aesthetic experience. The material tools for the cultivation of aesthetic capability can include traditional objects of art such as paintings (CE 82-98), architecture (SE 196—209), or jazz music.'” Philosophy can ennoble and enrich our encounter with material artifacts of all kinds, however, and the point of

engaging with artifacts is always to find new and more connected forms of experience. Philosophical pedagogy is thus the layering and redoubling of experiences occasioned by material artifacts, both to build richer experiential relations and to selectively cut off strands of experience that threaten stagnation, overload, and other forms of aesthetic death.

In pedagogy, we come as close as McDermott will go to an ethics of argument or an ethics of social control. Pedagogy 1s care of the self for McDermott, and not the transmission or dissemination of truth

PAUL B. THOMPSON 175 from one moral subject to others. But it should go without saying that the notion of self in McDermott’s philosophy is unequivocally social. The moral subject is always a “we” rather than an “I,” as McDermott notes pointedly in the introductory remarks to The Culture of Experience and reiterates repeatedly when commenting on Dewey or Royce. Thus, in pedagogy, aesthetic experience undergoes a development that is social in much the same way that conventional moral codes involve social control. That is, one person is interacting with others. But consistent with Foucault’s caution against intensification

of power and domination, McDermott’s pedagogy must never be controlling. Rather, the art of pedagogy becomes a tekhné of ethics when approached as the task of creating an environment, a place, in which the natural inquisitiveness of others will grow into an ecology of mutually supportive and enriching exploration and relation-building. Pedagogy thus invites and even incites the risk-taking that is the mode dassujettissement of McDermott’s ethics by temporarily creat-

ing a protected sphere.'* Philosophical pedagogy occurs when the moral subjects participating in these exploratory gambits are made to understand that the risks are real.

Concluding Comments and Qualifications

Given the nature of philosophy as McDermott and I both conceive of it, there is little point and no justice to be had by searching out errors or deficiencies in McDermott’s ethical writings. However, there are a few things that can be said by way of making additional connections.

First is simply to reiterate a point implicit in the main body of the paper. I have invited readers to interpret McDermott’s thought as deeply ethical, but such an interpretation presupposes the unveiling of “the ethical’ accomplished in Foucault’s last work. Foucault brings the long night of twentieth-century ethics to a close. Though McDermott’s thought (and for that matter, Dewey's) anticipates Foucault’s, rather than coming after it, Foucault's genealogy of ethics does not, in my view, have a precedent in American philosophy. Rather, I think that pragmatism and Foucault’s genealogies wait upon one another

176 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY for the realization of their potential. McDermott’s philosophy emerges from this marriage as a full-blown ethics in the tradition of Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius, or Seneca. There is no need for embarrassment or qualification when we speak of “McDermott’s ethics,”

nor need we confine ourselves to a discussion of his “moral philosophy.” Second, and also implicit throughout, the importance of the social orientation of McDermott’s ethics cannot be overstated. In one sense, the conceptualization of ethics that I have attributed to McDermott begins with Kierkegaard, whose work traces and retraces a dialectic

of inwardness that begins with the aesthetic, is confounded by the ethical, and culminates in the religious. Certainly, Kierkegaard’s sense of “the ethical” is unlike that of twentieth-century ethics in a manner bearing numerous similarities of difference to that of Foucault’s. But

Kierkegaard may have been history’s greatest (and certainly most noble) victim of what McDermott calls “relation starvation.” His access to experience (in McDermott’s sense) was gleaned at a terrible price, as Kierkegaard severed relations with his family, his beloved, and finally through his irony and his pseudonyms, even himself. Continental thinkers such as Buber and Sartre have been able to repro-

duce the movements of inwardness that give rise to Kierkegaard’s sense of the ethical, and in this they have escaped the matrix of domination that relegates a great deal of analytic ethics to Nietzsche’s dustbin of social control. But notwithstanding Heidegger’s emphasis on “being with” or Levinas’s emphasis on the face of the other, thinkers in the Continental tradition have lacked the “social inwardness”’ that characterizes Royce’s understanding of the religious, Dewey’s under-

standing of the public, or McDermott’s own understanding of the aesthetic. It is, perhaps, just this that Foucault’s thought requires from American philosophy. Thus, I conclude by saying that there are still some connections to

be made. I might add the need to connect up McDermott’s comments on technological artifacts and devices with that of Albert Borg-

mann or the need to bring both Foucault and McDermott into the domain of practical ethics. Here, there is a need to rehabilitate and

PAUL B. THOMPSON 177 reconstruct the ties with logic and argument. On this connection, | close with a metaphor offered by Bernard Rollin, a leading bioethicist and pragmatist from the Columbia University school of philosophical naturalists led by John Herman Randall. Rollin classifies much of the

work currently being done in applied ethics as a form of “moral sumo. The objective is to wrestle, push, and otherwise force the opponent off the floor. Though Rollin does not hesitate to use argument himself, he characterizes his own work as moral judo, a martial art that utilizes the opponent’s own weight and aggression to achieve the desired end. The point in moral judo is not to show the other where he is wrong, but to use logic and argument to draw him toward what is right. Moral judo is not, I think, philosophical pedagogy in McDermott’s sense. Yet, perhaps there are more limited and less ambitious forms of pedagogy that will bridge the gap that still yawns between analytic applied ethics and the care of the self. Practical philosophy as I understand it is occasional philosophy— philosophy done for certain special occasions and tailored to suit the problems of the specific audience assembled for that occasion. That is, of course, exactly what the present essay is, as well. McDermott has done plenty of occasional philosophy throughout his career, but

despite having been drawn from speeches and publications with rather specialized audiences, McDermott’s collected essays have the feel of having been written for the ages. They certainly have something to say to everyone living in our time. Yet, perhaps because they eschew even moral judo, McDermott’s prescriptions do not draw the

audience toward any particular conclusions or plans of action. Is there a technology of ethics that avoids the intensification of power while also deploying argument and logic in pursuit of even ameliorative responses to specific problems? That, I think, is one question that McDermott’s philosophy leaves unanswered.

EIGHT

NO EROS, NO BUDS: TEACHING AS NECTARING Arthur Lothstein

He speaks in your voice, American, and there’s a shine in his eye that’s halfway hopeful. —Don DeLillo

He was barker of stanzas, a star turn, a source of instruction. And the definite growth rings of genius rang in his voice. —Seamus Heaney Talent may frolic and juggle; genius realizes and adds. —Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nectar, imagine it drinking electricity... —James Joyce

| t is with some trepidation that I speak about John McDermott as a teacher, not because, like Nietzsche, I find the act of speaking itself contemptuous, as the subject is already something dead in my heart. On the contrary, John McDermott is as alive in my heart today as he was when I was his student forty years ago. What I fear is that my words are but crumbs from the feast, that I cannot do anything like full justice to the glory of the man or the febrility of my experi-

ence. “Can Wisdom be put in a silver rod? / Or Love in a golden bowl?” Perhaps, as with all transformational experience, it is simply a case, as my citation of Blake’s motto from “The Book of Thel” implies, of luminous fact outrunning metaphorical adequacy. If you are

{| 178 $

ARTHUR LOTHSTEIN 179 allergic to panegyric, or have not been a student of John McDermott, or if you have known him only through episodic public performance, you will likely think my tribute to him over the top. But if you have found yourself repeatedly in his tuition, if you have eaten and slept and talked McDermott, as I and my fellow students did in the early sixties at Queens College, CUNY, you will find nothing here that you have not experienced yourself or noted to others.

Let me say it straight out: John McDermott is a true American original, a jewel of pragmatism, and one of the last of the great American characters. He is also the most extraordinary teacher I have ever

known, and I count my studying and friendship with him as one of my life’s greatest blessings. He tore the veil from my eyes when I was

a young man, and he remains to this day the polestar of my mental gaze. He has been showered with awards for his teaching excellence, including the prestigious Harbison, so in hyperbolizing his teaching | am saying nothing here that has not been recognized by others. This is, however, the first opportunity I have had to lionize him in print, and I mean to take full advantage of it, if for no other reason than to thank him on behalf of the countless number of students whose lives he has so deeply touched and so profoundly enriched in more than fifty years of teaching. Emerson says that “A chief event of life is the day in which we have

encountered a mind that startled us by its large scope,” and what I have always found most astonishing about McDermott is the sheer breadth of his mind, the enormous reach of his vision, which is matched only by the ardency of his language and the generosity of his

affections. When you first meet him, he seems a “blast resistless.”’ There is something scintillant and glistering about his person, as if he is strung with Christmas lights that blink on and off in conversation and in whose afterglow you find yourself beguilingly bathed. Indeed, his very head, like that of the man’s in Magritte’s “The Pleasure Principle,” seems a ball of coruscating light. You are charmed by his good humor and Rabelasian earthiness and by the sexiness of his excesses, including his nearly boundless Jumping Jack Flash energy; then you

180 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY are enthralled by his bardic brilliance and the enormity of his aesthetic presence. But these, in the phrase of Jonathan Edwards, are “mere flowers.” The deeper and fuller truth is that McDermott is the teacher you've been waiting for your whole life. For he is the rarest of originals—a philosopher who is both a wisdom-lover and visionary in the infernal modes of Blake and Emerson. To him, “Energy is the only life and is of the Body”; philosophy—a word he pronounces as

if it is Greek pastry dough which is his subject, not the history of ideas or the deconstruction of texts—is but “the bound or outward circumference of Energy.” It is, he repeatedly emphasizes, an activity of Eros, of agonistic quest for awakened selfhood. It is not a sledgehammer for killjoys seduced by the illusion of technique or the super-

masculine practice of murderous analysis by logic-choppers born with knives in their head.

For McDermott, philosophy’s environ is not a Diogenesian tub or a cork-lined Proustian bedroom or a Quinean desert landscape, but the Jamesian “world of the street,’ which on his re-envisioning of the trope verges on deamscape, on the pleasure-domed world of the id, where the only sin is limitation. Philosophy for him Greekly originates in a mood of wonderment not dubiety, and the forked lightning that fills his classrooms only reemphasizes the point: philosophy, as he does it, is not for the Doubting Thomases who snivel their snivel the world over, but for the Crazy Janes for whom love, albeit mansionly pitched in “The place of excrement,” “‘is all / Unsatisfied / That cannot take the whole / Body and soul’.”” John McDermott, the Johnny Appleseed of philosophers, manures his classes with this most un-postmodernist Yeatsian wisdom, as if his teaching were a kind of gardening, and as if his students were clipped buds desperately in need of recultivation. My own experience persuades me of the cogency of the gardening metaphor, having found myself repeatedly seeded, mulched, composted, weeded, irrigated, and greened by his teaching. This is the way my garden grew and yours probably also, if you found yourself, as I did, in McDermott’s green-thumbed tuition, one which gave me (and probably you also) the courage to dream

ARTHUR LOTHSTEIN 181 beyond brown-out or what Thomas Pynchon calls the “semi-detached Sunday dead-leaf somnambulance of a dried garden.” In other words, culture as Levittown! The garden motif is, of course, a formulating metaphor of the American experience, and McDermott’s peda-

gogical version of it is more Whitman than Masaccio, more Bugs Bunny than Hieronymus Bosch.

But this is not yet the core of the attraction. It is McDermott’s incredible capacity for making relations across centuries of discussion

and the boundaries of the different disciplines, and his unwonted ability to existentialize ideas in such a fashion as to make you believe that you have a real stake in the issue, that finally describes his peda-

gogical genius. If, as Emerson says, “transition is the attitude of power,” then McDermott is possessed of a Promethean mind of the first order. Temperamentally disinclined to view philosophy as either Lockean housekeeping or Occamite simplification, the bigger game he hunts is Geistesgeschichte, or what he methodologically prioritizes as “the culture of experience.” Ideas for him are not ab ovo constructions or the frothy afterwash of internal monologue. They are, rather, burgeonings from the bowels of commonplace experience; in Dewey’s understated prose, they are “native and constant” and their up-

ward reflection into philosophical discourse is but a secondary accretion. They exist in situ, like geological specimens, and so may be said to have a social ecology. Operationally, they are wedges into the

tissue of experience, at their best enlarging the angle of vision and thickening accrued meaning. Unfleshed, they become the chopped straw of effete academic discussion or conduce to refugee idealisms, such as those Dewey repeatedly broke his lance against. McDermott’s classrooms are theatres of ideational and existential possibility (indeed, they superbly instantiate Whitehead’s Romantic Stage of education) and are experimental laboratories of deep play, though the play is never merely carnivalesque or masturbatory. Its depth is a function of his remarkable negative capability and of his astonishing capacity for lush phenomenological description. Whatever the topic, he brings voluminous reading to it and a wealth of

182 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY interdisciplinary wisdom, ranging from the hardest of the hard sciences to the softest, most lyrical, of the arts. As a result, there is nothing one-dimensional about his discussions, as there is nothing Johnny One-Note about his person. We may say of him what Whitman says of his America, “Here the theme is creative and has vista.’ The universe of experience and discourse to which McDermott introduces his students is a Technicolored Jamesian pluriverse in which there are no final solutions, only experimental probings. This radical pluralistic inheritance of McDermott’s is arguably his strongest suit as a philosopher and teacher, and it calls attention to the fact that a man of vision need not be a woolgathering monist, or what Hegel, presciently antic-

ipating the Russian Suprematists, describes as a formlessly white “monochromatic absolute painting.” In other words, John McDermott is a Hans Hofmann, not a Kazimir Malevich! There are, however, occasions when McDermott is so fevered that his wedgings, as if by wizardry, metamorphose into rockets, and you feel yourself, as in Plato, a feathered man transported by his spiraling metaphors into the wild blue yonder, where, as Emerson says, the air

is all music and the intellect is “inebriated by nectar.’ Normally a liturgical celebrant of the ordinary, this McDermott is a silver-shod starthrower, whose consciousness, slightly revising Emerson, is so “quick and strong” that it bursts over boundaries on all sides in a diapason of “immense and innumerable expansions.” But this cosmicized McDermott is no transcendental cloud-walker or “mad dominie’’ whose head runs up into a spire. His capacity for cosmic enlargement of subjectivity attests his speculative audacity, not his propensity for skylarking or mental pirouetting. Indeed, when McDermott is on, really on, he feels to you more like a climbing vine than a rhizome; I am reminded of The Beatles’s line that “the deeper you go the higher you fly,’ which I read as but a lyrical version of the Jamesian overbelief in the umbilical connection between inner drama and cosmic destiny. I am also reminded in this context of an exquisitely McDermottesque moment in the film, Billy Eliot, in which the young English boy is asked what he feels like when he dances, and

ARTHUR LOTHSTEIN 183 after analogizing himself to a bird in flight, he says simply but ecstati-

cally, “I feel like . . . electricity.” Hence, the epigraph from Joyce’s Ulysses, “Nectar, imagine it drinking electricity.” Perhaps I should have parodically entitled this tribute to McDermott, “E=McD?,” where E stands for electrification and McD for the Irished Dionysian coefficient of consciousness.

McDermott’s passion for ideas is so contagious that you actually find yourself caring about whether the world is a vanilla monism in which there is nothing new under the sun, or a tutti-frutti pluralism in which there are always “more things in heaven and earth Horatio than are dreamt of in your philosophy’; whether we are Cartesian egos bunkered in privacy or Deweyan clots of relational process; whether the body is Brother Ass or the Jamesian “‘storm-centre of all coordinates’; whether we are naturalistic tenants of earth’s household or ontological orphans or outsiders, the mere flotsam and jetsam of a shipwrecked idealism; whether existence is a Kafkaesque trial causing us to be permanently ill-at-ease or a creatively intelligent experiment in a world consonant with the powers that we possess; whether the human journey is canopied by an Absolute or eschaton or is an improvisational, en-route affairing, whose meaning is “ever, not quite’; whether things are Whiteheadean occasions parsable by gerunds and adverbs or are atomic discreta, granular stuffs, notatable by definite articles and nouns; whether God is puff or bail-out, dead or eclipsed, or the ground of being, at once fascinans and tremendens; whether “His voice is of a thin silence” or His hearing is so sunk into our deafness that, following Buber and the novelist Lawrence Durrell, “everything depends on our interpretation of the silence around us”;

and so on. The personal upshot of all this is that, although no shepherd, you find yourself answering in the affirmative Touchstone’s question, “Hast any philosophy in thee, shepherd?”; meaning, as William James glosses the matter, that there is space and air in your mind so ample, so capacious, that your companions need not “gasp for breath whenever they talk with you.” McDermott’s is a new cosmos sensibility, and he asks these questions not cynically or debunkingly, but by way of underscoring their

184 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY centrality to the human condition. To the untutored, his gusto, including his carnivorous laughter (which ranges from Santa Clausian ho-ho-ho-ing to leonine roaring), is easily mistaken for Merry Prankster ego-tripping. But his tolerance of ideas that are at loggerheads with his own, no matter how wacky or offbeat, is well known to his students. He repeatedly reminds them of the Jamesian wisdom that philosophic study is “the habit of always seeking an alternative... of imagining foreign states of mind”; indeed, McDermott’s intellectual tastes run so much against the grain of conventionality as to model for his students the educative value of difference, ranging from Texas maverick to New York bizarre. As he encourages originality of perception and expression, so he abhors sycophancy and copycatting, especially by “‘trippers and askers” who take studying with him to be the same as the refusal of self-reliance. His eschewal of imitation is

pure Whitman, “All I mark as my own you shall offset it with your own, / Else it were time lost listening to me.” Yet, he also knows that as transfusive union is mark and criterion of love, it is also the molten core of inspirational instruction; in the formulation of Emerson: There is no teaching until the pupil is brought into the same state or principle in which you are; a transfusion takes place; he is you and you are he; then is a teaching, and by no unfriendly chance or bad company can he ever quite lose the benefit.

Of course, should the “he is you and you are he” so blur difference as to problematize individuation, you have Wuthering Heights not

“The Song of Myself,” pathological merger not authentic selfquickening. But one does not yet fully appreciate McDermott as a teacher until one grasps the awesome aesthetic power of his language and person. Every class with him is a flash flood of metaphor, a meteor shower of

mind, a “literary Franciscanism,” in the phrase of Roland Barthes, which “invites all words to perch, to flock, to fly off again: a marbled iridescent text... the pledge of continuous jubilation.” The room is aflame with the language of possibility, chance, edge, novelty, and

ARTHUR LOTHSTEIN 185 risk, a language he repeatedly tells you that is most superbly instantiated in the contemporary sciences and arts, and by the American experience in its most liberating aspects. But what continually impresses

you is that his very person, as much as his language, is a marbled iridescence, and his very breath, you imagine, has an oxygenating effect on you. Of course, the Barthesian ornithological references to perching, flocking, and flying also recall William James’s famous account of the stream of consciousness; they poignantly call attention to McDermott’s inheritance of the Jamesian notion of “selving” as

birding, though it is the soaring eagle’s cosmic dalliances, not the fallen sparrow’s peckings at the gravel, which epitomize such “‘selving” for him. Apter still is Melville’s metaphor of a “revolving Drummond light, raying away from itself all round it—everything . . . lit by it.” For to

be taught by McDermott is to find oneself caught in a Niagara of drainless poesy, one which, by sheer overbrimming, buds one’s “clammy cells.” The language is Keats’s, but McDermott’s radiantly

alluring presence is blue-eyed American, more reminiscent of the bearded proletarian bard of Paumanok than of the boyish English chanter of odes to nightingales and Grecian urns. Like Whitman, McDermott seems to side in all matters with “the roughs,” or what William James calls the “undisciplinables,” having no use for snobbish occupants of ivory towers or decadent inhabitants of artificial paradises. His theme is always the body electric of the averagely goldened; again, like the good gray poet, he “project(s) landscapes. . . full-sized and golden,’ encompasses “worlds and volumes of worlds” with “the twirl of his tongue,” and shakes his “white locks at the runaway sun.”

Untranslatable to linear minds, you will not find him between his boots and his hat, although the latter have become signature accoutrements of McDermott’s Texan reincarnation. Coupled with the Billy the Kid persona he affects in public performance, the Southernbelted McDermott strikes the pose of one tough hombre. But his students know that this is mostly showbread, beneath the George Raft feistiness and swagger is what Whitman calls “good heart as a radical possession of habit.” It is also the key that turns all the

186 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY locks to The McDermott Experience. For it is his exuberant Whitmanian generosity (“Behold I do not give lectures or a little charity, / What I give I give out of myself”), his effervescent “gracious affections,’ not his urban cowboy combativeness, which makes him the great teacher that he is. The whole man seems completely visible in his teaching; indeed, the whole person, as with his beloved James, is his philosophical subject. You'll not find either one hiding behind the protective coloration of erudition or credentials or playing possum with the dark side of his mental moon. Indeed, McDermott is the most vulnerable teacher I have ever known, and his students, plagued by their own considerable frailties, take heart in a man who is not merely open about his emotions and misdemeanors, but who also knows how to use them pedagogically in a way they find cheering and worthy of emulation.

Whitman calls his poems “trickle drops” from his bloodstream, “sparkles from the wheel” of his soul, and no less are McDermott’s teachings exfoliations from his inner life. They are bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh, as saliently illustrated by gesture, mien, and grain of voice as by assertion, analogy, and anecdote. His students are used to professors (especially philosophy professors) who, like the Englishman G. E. Moore, can only make philosophy from the philosophy made by others, and who as a result cavalierly relegate the vagaries of the subjective life to the intellectual backwater. By contrast,

McDermott’s teachings are both inherited and homemade, but it is only what “pounces unerringly on the human core”’ that is finally philosophically inherited and celebrated by him. William James, from

whom I take this phrase, says that “a professor, in addition to his Fach, should be a ganzer Mensch.” John McDermott is, like James be-

fore him, that rare bird among college professors whose Fach is so enriched by his humanness that to see him is, as one of James’s students once said of the great man, “never to forget what it means to be alive.”

But John McDermott is a hard card to play. What Alice James said of her brother William is equally true of McDermott: he is like quick-

silver, impossible to pin down or pigeonhole. To his students in

ARTHUR LOTHSTEIN 187 search of The Real or Ur-McDermott, he seems uncatchable, forever falling through the interstices in the linguistic nets thrown over him.

Horsed on the Proteus, he is as lubricious as he is nutritious, and as writhingly self-entangled as the celebrated Laocoon. His moods, following Emerson, do not seem to believe in one another; it is as if there is a seesaw in his voice, transience down, celebration up. Like March weather, he can be “savage and serene in a single hour.” Indeed, depending upon which of his moods is in the ascendant, the

same man can seem both “a god and a weed by the wall.” As his student, I found myself wondering whether he was encoiled in a Freudian psychomachy or whether he was an inheritor of Jamesian Zerrissenheit without the accompanying will to believe. But I dropped these and similar psychobiographical questions as irrelevant. For personal psychology aside, what finally mattered was that the agonistic and dervished pluralism of McDermott’s voice caught the fundamentally kaleidoscopic character of reality. I gradually came to see him as so Picassoesquely made as to render inept any reductive placeholding

of his person or philosophy. I took my cues from Blake and Whitehead: “The cistern contains, the fountain overflows,” and “Philosophy may not neglect the multifariousness of the world—the fairies dance, and Christ is nailed to the cross.” And so it is for McDermott, in whose person and teachings the antithetical moods of Zorban yes-saying and crucifixional suffering crisscross and interbleed. Just as the world to him is a great speckled bird and not a dun sparrow, a Joseph’s coat of many colors and not a Gobi of sameness, so “Glory be to God for dappled things” and woe unto him who is the prisoner of Procrustean systematizing. As Lawrence Durrell’s Pursewarden perspectively puts the point: “We live lives based upon selected fictions. .. . Two paces east or west, and

the whole picture is changed,” or, “We turn a corner and the world becomes a pattern of arteries splashed with silver and deckle-edged with shadow.” In other words, if you think the world is a Mondrian, know that it will soon metamorphose into a Pollock and vice-versa; know too that, as the motifs keep proliferating, as every moment contributes to “the picture gallery,” you will find yourself asking, as both William James and Cezanne did, When and where will it all stop?

188 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY Born to be wild or at least to yawp, McDermott is yet confident in the radical empirical belief that to be human is to humanize, which he takes to be the same as finding our sublimity in our ordinariness.

He calls such finding “secular liturgy” and his richly nuanced descriptions of the latter (call them “The McDermott Variations”’) persuade one that it is better to burn than to rust, and that such burning is “success in life.” But John McDermott is no Walter Pater aristocrat

incandesced by a privately arrogated Platonism. Final wisdom for him is muscularly enfleshed or it is an effete cheat. It is paradigmatically registered for him by the pragmatic marriage of eyes and hands and is seminally synopsized by the conclusion of Rilke’s great poem,

“Archaic Torso of Apollo”: “Du musst dein Leben andern” (You must change your life). It is a conclusion he urges upon his students not by a line of argument, but by the cumulative power of his flammable seductions. A year or more with him, and you feel as if the whole universe, as it has been filtered through his Talmudic mumblings and gruffly accented “youknowadimeans” and “huhs,” has given you a nudge, one whose reverberations carry into the remainder of your life, tilting nearly everything in the direction of its aesthetic and moral north. I mostly use the present tense in speaking about McDermott because I come to praise him not to bury him, and because the golden footprint he leaves in his students’ lives is a permanent bequest, not a vapor trail. Recently, he told me of an editor’s having chastised him

for writing about Emerson in the present tense. “He’s dead, you know,” were his editor’s admonishing words. ““Well, not for me,” was

McDermott’s terse but telling response. Likewise, once McDermotted, forever McDermotted; he gets under your skin the way a first

love does, and so much do you crave his nectaring that you revisit him at every opportunity, whether in person or in print or in imagination. And if, like me, you see him after a long hiatus, the ardency of the original encounter comes back to you in a Proustian rush. As his student, I always seemed to find him percolating just below the skin of consciousness, often leaking unpredictably into the crevices of casual conversation, including internal monologue. He would make

ARTHUR LOTHSTEIN 189 cameo appearances in my dreams, sometimes as a magus, other times as a Kierkegaardian comedian, and still other times as a John Garfield tough-guy. He was (and still is) the most intensely alive human being I have ever known, and what I experienced in his classes was nothing less than electrification leading to fecundation leading to transfiguration. Like Whitman, he ““moistened the roots”’ of all that grew for me; like Alcibiades, too, in “The Symposium,” I felt ashamed for having lived as insincerely, as unripely as I had before knowing him. I came to him a “childman weary,” having uncritically inherited a B-movie life-script, which had I continued to enact it would have transmogrified me into a gray flannel suit, if not a Kafkan bug. I left him a “man-

child in the womb,” encouraged to rewrite that script (pulping it, I learned from Freud, was an impossibility) on behalf of making “an original relation to the universe.” For the first time in my life I had a voice, a vocabulary, and a vocation, and I have never looked back in anger or regret at my loss of larval cerements. Indeed, I date the beginning of my adulthood from my studying with McDermott, for in meeting him I met myself in depth, intuiting in the process what I later found in Kierkegaard, which is that education is “‘the curriculum

one ha[s] to run through in order to catch up with oneself.” As is the wont of a McDermott student nurtured on the epistemological value of anecdote, let me describe in greater detail the circumstances of my earliest encounters with him. The year was 1961. Like most years, it was the best and worst of times. It began with the inauguration of John F. Kennedy and Robert Frost’s reading of “The Gift Outright,” which he wrote for the occasion, and it ended with Roger Maris’s sixty-first home run and the Yankees’s victory over the Reds in the World Series. It was the year of the Bay of Pigs and of the first humans in space; of the Pill and the IUD; of Bob Dylan’s debut at Gerdes’s Folk City; of The Beatles signing with Brian Epstein; of the bifurcation of Berlin; and of the deaths of Hemingway, Thurber, Jung, Ty Cobb, and Chico Marx. It was also the year of the publication of Catch-22, Tropic of Cancer, and Franny and Zooey and of 5.5 percent national unemployment. To Kill a Mockingbird won the Pulitzer prize, and American moviegoers went in droves to see Judgment

190 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY at Nuremberg, The Guns of Navarone, West Side Story, The Hustler, Splendor in the Grass, and Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Bergman’s Through a Glass Darkly and Fellini's La Dolce Vita appealed to more avantgarde tastes. The Cuban missile crisis, freedom rides, voter registration drives, and the Port Huron Statement were, as the Rolling Stones

would later sing, “just a shot away.’ A bad moon was rising, but Henry Mancini’s “Moon River” was the year’s most popular song, making it clear that, although hanging by the skin of its teeth, middle America preferred the saccharine illusions of an atavistic romanticism to the more bitter pill of moral honesty. The times they were a-changin’, but you wouldn't have known it by listening to the radio. I mention all this by way of culturally and politically situating The

McDermott Experience, and also by way of calling attention to its profoundly radicalizing effects. McDermott liked to say then that he was a centrist politically, but the literature he shared with us, not to mention the subversive Romantic mood of the sharing, suggested that he was a prescient anticipator of the counter-culture. Reading with him Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization and Norman O. Brown’s

Life Against Death, or Marx on alienated labor or Camus on art and politics or the writings of Emerson, Whitman, James, Royce, Buber, and Dewey on a host of topics, ranging from individualism to community to education, had the predictable effect of upending or at least problematizing one’s inherited sense of self and society. Nineteen sixty-one as refracted through the lens of The McDermott Experience was the beginning of the end of the world as most of us knew it, and our nectaring by McDermott made us the belated inheritors of the new epochal sensibility that the philosopher Karl Jaspers had said distinguished the modern age. As I now review it, much of the literature he shared with us was anarchistic in spirit, if not in politics, and, in my own case, it unconsciously incubated an anarcho-communal politics, one which I came to associate with Dewey, Buber, and Camus, among others. I had read radical literature with other professors, but they were little more than annotators or glossators. McDermott, by contrast, was a shaper of radical sensibility, and he seemed to know instinctively what was

ARTHUR LOTHSTEIN 191 blowing in the wind. The philosopher Richard Rorty has written that paradigm-shifting is largely a matter of changing vocabularies rather than of excavating new truths; this was the most emancipatory aspect of The McDermott Experience. It gave us a language that, as it broke the crust of convention, also empowered us to redream the world. More to the point, we came to believe in the Stevensian doctrine of “the imagination as social form” as the entering wedge into a liberatory human future. That Wallace Stevens was the most philosophical of American poets and the conscious inheritor of the pragmatism of

Emerson and James only sharpened his relevance to us radical McDermottites.

I had transferred to Queens College as a sophomore from Rutgers University, where I was taught freshman English by Paul Fussell, heard Robert Frost read his poetry in the college chapel on a snowy evening, and by the school year’s end almost completely broke down. When IJ arrived at Queens College in the fall of 1960, there was a small

Air Force ROTC unit on campus, a myriad of fraternities, sororities, and houseplans, and a smattering of students who fashioned themselves as Beats. It was not until a year later that I discovered John McDermott, who was recommended to me by Ralph Sleeper, my first philosophy professor, and a brilliant and wonderful man in his own right. Two of McDermott’s courses, “American Philosophy” and ‘Aesthetics,’ were probably the most popular humanities courses at the college, and unless you were an upperclassman or knew how to negotiate the Byzantine world of the registrar, the chances of obtain-

ing a registration card (yes, there were cards then, not computer printouts!) were near zero. Of course, you could, like so many others

did, sit in, assuming that you could find room on the floor or the window sills. But “having McDermott,” as it was called, was not the same if the having was on the fly (call this “tripping” on McDermott). The fever-glow of a febrile moment could perhaps cause a shock of recognition. The more benign climate of a full semester, however, assured a permanent shaking of the foundations. I managed to finagle a card for “Aesthetics,” and my experience was a veritable Coney Island of the mind. It was like finding myself

192 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY in the front seat of the Cyclone, or like shooting the rapids in a Rimbaudian drunken boat. Benjamin Paul Blood’s description of his reaction to his encounter with James’s Pragmatism comes closest to

capturing my introduction to The McDermott Experience: it was “the fastest, the brainiest head-on collision with experience that | [had] been into.” Nothing that I had ever experienced before prepared me for McDermott’s high-octane, high-adrenaline performances, except perhaps the reading of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and its “mindflow over jewel-center” bop prosody. “The whole mad swirl of everything that was to come then” began with my encountering McDermott; like Kerouac’s Sal Paradise, I knew that ““somewhere along the line the pearl would be handed to me.”’ Each class with Mc-

Dermott was a blizzard of epiphanies, and there was always, as in Blake, at least a single bejeweled moment, which if rightly placed and multiplied, would renovate the day. I remember in particular McDer-

mott’s blackboards, which were transiently wondrous testimony to his freewheeling anarchic sensibility. He chalked them the way Monk or Miles played jazz, unpredictably and with a style all his own. Emerson says he would write Whim “on the lintels of the doorpost,” and it was indeed sublime caprice to which McDermott’s blackboards bore continually fresh testimony. I remember analogizing them to action paintings or shamanic dream maps, and I can still recall dreaming of

them hanging in a funky New York gallery to admiring aboriginal eyes. Like him, his blackboards were “Of an aesthetic tough, diverse, untamed, / Incredible to prudes, the mint of dirt, / Green barbarism turning paradigm.” The language is Wallace Stevens’s, from “The Comedian in the Letter C,” and it seems to me to capture perfectly my experience of the wild Irish tragico-comedian in the letter M, who three times a week, in an unnamed Spanish stucco building, the home of philosophy students and pigeons, introduced me to the buzzing, blooming world of ideas and eventually to myself. I knew immediately that McDermott had the right stuff, or what in the argot of sports is simply called “‘touch.” All the great ones have it, and the absence of it, which leads to ham-fisted clutching as opposed to graceful cradling, is what Emerson calls “the most unhandsome part of our condition.” The inheritor of a flow methodology,

ARTHUR LOTHSTEIN 193 McDermott handled ideas with the same ease and soft hands that Brooks Robinson vacuumed grounders or that Willie Mays basketcaught fly balls. Indeed, McDermott’s classes were the nearest equiva-

lent to the poetry of baseball, which from the age of eight afforded me my only paradisal environs. That he was himself a Giants fan who knew baseball, especially New York baseball, as he knew philosophy (and it seemed everything else), only tightened the connection to my heart. With the same verdant clarity that distinguishes my early mem-

ories of Yankee Stadium, I can still see him, tie-clipped and chalkstained, hurriedly entering class with his beat-up briefcase bulging with books, as we sat on tenterhooks not knowing where in the big sky country of his mind we would find ourselves that day, but nevertheless assured that “‘the press of his foot to the earth” would “spring

a hundred affections,” and that no matter how much they did to scorn the best he could do to relate them, he would treat us to a bravura performance worthy of a master of relations. I can still hear the riffling of pages and the predictable quotational beginnings of his lectures, “In Dionysius in Paris, Wallace Fowlie says...”

The Magic Bus called The McDermott Experience was not all structureless sprawl or improvisatory theorizing, however. A typical

lecture was a process-structure, a torrential verbal equivalent to James’s aesthetic depiction of the mind as “a theatre of simultaneous possibilities,” which when “very fresh” carries ““an immense horizon”

with it. McDermott was surfboarding the stream of his own consciousness, and to follow the daedaled twist and intertwist of his asso-

ciations one had to have an appetite for surprise and novelty, and concomitant with this, one had to believe that refusal of the latter was tantamount to refusal of experience, or more exactly, of the experience of form as process. Mentored by one Pollock (the legendary Robert C. of Fordham), McDermott’s lecturing style conjured still another Pollock, to wit, the notorious Jack the Dripper, whose “all-over” paintings superbly emblematized the experience of form as process. Painting on the floor, the painter, like the teacher, was literally “in” the painting, as form

began to burgeon unpredictably from the primitive calligraphy of

194 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY spontaneous touchings. Pollock’s flying and fluidic line has been compared, as I would compare The McDermott Variations, to “the best jazz,” to “a lunar park full of fireworks, pitfalls, surprises, and delights,’ and the indisputable Americanness of his best-known paintings has been more than occasionally remarked on. Likewise, McDermott, as my epigraph from Don DeLillo suggests, is impossible except as an American: he speaks in your voice, a homeboy, rolling

particulars so as to find what Carlos Williams, the Deweyan doctor from Paterson, New Jersey called “the pitchblende in the radiant gist.” But the finding, we soon learned, did not bequeath a Pollyannaish optimism, but rather a chiaroscuric reading of the human condi-

tion, according to which twilight and darkness abound, as in Rembrandt, Delacroix, and de Chirico, and the tragic sense of life comes to the front. The sunny certitudes of “‘a sunny day’s complete Poussiniana,” as in Watteau, Boucher, and Fragonard, were discarded as rancid idealism. McDermott’s version of the tragic sense of life

seemed a hybridized mixture of the great American writers on the subject, such as O’Neill, Faulkner, Arthur Miller, and Carson McCull-

ers, but it also had family resemblances to Unamuno, Camus, and Aeschylus. If there was a red thread running through his teaching and writing on the subject, it was the double-barrelled notion of the sorrowfulness of existence as notated by our transience, and of the deep-

ening of our knowing through the long day’s journey into night’s suffering. I vividly recall seeing McDermott several years ago in North

Carolina with a rubber-banded, paperback copy of The Heart as a Lonely Hunter, which bore evidence of anxious rereadings. When I was his student, I read every book he ever mentioned or that I saw him carry or leaf through. So it was only natural that when I returned

home, I found myself rereading Carson McCullers’s novel, reattaching myself to McDermott through her southern veil of tears. A seminal inheritor of American journey mythology, McDermott’s has always been more a proletarian voice on behalf of the poor wayfaring stranger, of the lost, the lonesome, and the misbegotten than it has been a privileged apologia for the kings of the road. The reason is Whitmanian: he is the man, he suffered, he “was there.”” Holding to

ARTHUR LOTHSTEIN 195 an American (and specifically Deweyan) recasting of the Stoic doctrine of relations has never undermined his deep and abiding sense of the tragic. It rather has caused him, in his most optimistic moods, to believe with Dewey that When we have used our thought to its utmost and have thrown into the moving unbalanced balance of things our puny strength, we know that though the universe slay us still we may trust, for our lot is one with whatever is good in existence.

In his more pessimistic moods, he is so blindsided by suffering as to barely affirm such a benignant metaphysical stance. For in such instances, “know,” “trust,” and “good” all seem trumped by the crumminess of our condition and by, as Dewey also observes, “the extent to which, after all, our attainments are only devices for blurring the disagreeable recognition of a fact, instead of means of altering the fact itself.” Whitehead more sunnily compares “A chain of facts” to “a barrier reef. On one side there is wreckage, and beyond it harbourage and safety.” But pain and suffering can so sear consciousness as to cause it to perceive only blackout; bail-out, clear sailing, or safe harborage are hardly imaginable to a consciousness savaged by a darkness visible. Is there anybody who does not know this? Is there,

among contemporary philosophers, any richer phenomenological discussion of outrageous mortal fortune than McDermott’s lecturing and writing on the subject? As a student, following McDermott on the long and winding road of his juggernauting required a negative capability nearly as remarkable as his own. No one-trick pony, he would often so quickly change horses in midstreaming that you would, at least for the moment, lose him. But eventually you would find him, although you were not exactly clear about what, say, John Scotus Erigena and Naum Gabo had to do with one another. This was not oxymoronic name-dropping on his part, but the greased lightning of a hydra-headed intelligence. To know anything, he taught, was to know it as a field or nexus of rela-

tional energies. By relations, he did not mean mental connectives tacked onto a world of splintered sensation, as in traditional atomistic

196 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY empiricism. In the spirit of Emerson, James, and Dewey, McDermott

rather troped relations as permeatively inhering within the flow of experience, and as stubbornly and irreducibly real as what they related. They were neither Humean intruders in the dust of sensation, nor Hegelian strangers in the hurly-burly of immediate experience. They were everywhere and everywhen, stirring, as Emerson says, “in every vein” and “consentaneous and far-related.”” The upshot of this radical empirical view of relations involved nothing less than a dramatic shift in metaphysical stance: the intelligence of the universe was social and its human and other inhabitants were cooperations of relational process, not dreams or dots or bundles. It was McDermott’s pedagogical genius to instantiate this American doctrine of relations

by copious empirical and theoretic illustration (from the macrorealms of the visual and non-visual arts to the micro-worlds of cellu-

lar biology and quantum physics) and in such a fashion as to turn what in lesser hands would likely have been mere “fugitive sparkles”

into “an astronomy of Copernican worlds.” The poet Shelley calls such transcendental astronomizing “‘love’s philosophy,” and indeed, the profound amorous and erotic implications of McDermott’s appropriation of the American doctrine of relations did not escape us. For love, dialogue, community, and democracy, he made us see, were

the continuation by other means of the drama of relations choreographed in vernacular experience. Bereft of relations, we were burntout cases, not just shrunken violets; “‘fallen into fraction,” according to Norman O. Brown, “overblotted / Series / Of intermittences,” according to Ezra Pound, and “‘sick, and in so far, dead,” according to Emerson.

In Pragmatism, James analogizes philosophers to “pathfinders” whose words and thoughts are “so many spots, or blazes .. . made by the axe of the human intellect on the trees of the otherwise trackless forest of human experience.” And as a young man, I was in need of just such spotting and blazing because, as I indicated above, I had lost my way early in my life’s journey. Like Bob Dylan’s Mr. Jones, I had “been with the professors” and “they all liked my looks.” I had even read “all of F. Scott’s Fitzgerald’s books.” But I was clueless in nearly

ARTHUR LOTHSTEIN 197 everything else, interested in little but sex, baseball, and basketball; sex because I had none, baseball because it was pure between the lines, and basketball because it was jazz. In McDermott’s classes, I began to find a language that I did not know I was craving, and the giving only famished the receiver. I can still remember whole chunks of his lectures, and my notebook from his “American Philosophy” course is my only tangible memento from my college days, except, of course, my badly bruised libido. One of my most vivid recollections of his lecturing is the powerful philosophical use to which he put the

language of nutrition. I can still hear him saying, as I continue to read him writing: “I see us as uterine, a permeable membrane, eating, breathing, livering all the while.”’ He tended to reframe the great phil-

osophical questions, as did Plato, Shakespeare, Milton, Emerson, Thoreau, James, and Nietzsche before him, as ones of nutrition and alimentation. Does it feed? Am I fructified by it? Does it energize my powers? These, he taught, are the ultimate overlapping questions, the ones that hit us where we live. I was struck then, as I am struck now, by the fact that such philosophical use of the language of nutrition is

as central to the pragmatic and radical empirical discussions of knowledge-getting as it is absent from contemporary Oxbridge epistemological discussion. Another way of saying this is to ask why there is no British Talks to Teachers or Democracy and Education. By contrast, consider John McDermott’s long-standing and passionate concern with the education of children, as evidenced by both his writing and teaching on the subject, and by his brilliant use of the pedagogical writings of James, Dewey, Montessori, Buber, and Piaget, among others. Part of McDermott’s pedagogical greatness is that he so power-

fully existentializes the interaccommodation of questions about knowing and pedagogy in such a way as to make traditional epistemological discussion seem, by contrast, a Sahara of abstraction. His brilliant thinking and writing about these subjects, from the child as master of relations to his recommendations for a curriculum for the twenty-first century to his clarion call for the remarrowing of the university, all attest to his status as one of America’s leading educators and public intellectuals.

198 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY McDermott recently sent to me the published version of The Alice McDermott (no relation) Memorial Lecture in Applied Ethics he gave at the Air Force Academy in Colorado in 1998. His topic, “the erosion of moral sensibility,” starts with an epigraph from a text by Epictetus, which admonishes, “‘Remember that in life you ought to behave as at a Banquet.” I read “Banquet,” as I originally heard it in the early six-

ties, as a moveable proletarian feast rich in “the simple produce of the common day,” not as a white-gloved, gouty dinner at the Ritz arranged for an aristoi. Not once in McDermott’s classes did I ever find myself counting calories or asking for a vomitorium or worrying about whether it was all scraps or barmecidal. Emerson records in his

journal a dream in which the world, diminished to the size of an apple and floating in “the great Ether,’ has been served up to him by an angel. “This thou must eat,” the angel says. “And I ate the world,” is how the entry ends. McDermott was just such a rare and necessary angel, and my studying with him now seems to me not merely halcyon but dreamlike, epitomized by his gastronomic loyalty to us and correspondingly by our rejuvenated nutrition. Call it McDermottpaideia, the nerve and sinew of which is what the ancients called psychagogia or soul-leading, a leading which is also a feeding, a knowledge which is also a food. Or call it, in the Christianized rephrasing of Wallace Stevens’s radical empiricism, “the thesis of the plentifullest

John.” Or simply note, in the homier Irish of Finnegan’s Wake, “There was a cabful of bash indeed in the homeur of that meal.” Indeed, so wonderfully fed were we by McDermott that one semes-

ter when he fell ill with pneumonia and had to miss a number of classes, we felt thinned by his absence, as if we had been cut off from our source of sustenance. It wasn’t the pyrotechnics that we McDermott hunger artists missed most. It was the food, the nutritive presence of the man; in other words, his nectaring. When he returned, he was pale and weak and we cared for him—did he know this?—almost maternally. He was marrow to us (he helped us make blood) and we were careful, most of us, not to tax him, lest he relapse and be lost to us for the semester and beyond. It was the first time in my life that I had found myself caring so deeply for someone not blood—but now

ARTHUR LOTHSTEIN 199 blood of my blood—as if his health and my own were co-implicated with one another. Thankfully, he regained his strength as we did ours. It was several decades later that he told me that he was so seriously ill then that he almost lost his life.

Emerson says, speaking about the heroism of the American scholar, that “Instantly we know whose words are loaded with life, and whose not.” So it was (and is) with McDermott. You know immediately upon meeting him that he is an engaged proletarian intellectual exhaled on urban grounds, not an academic mandarin who lives, moves, and has his being far from the madding crowd. “The American Scholar’s” insistence that “the scholar loses no hour that the man lives” and that “to live the greatest number of good hours is wisdom” are fighting words to McDermott, not mottos of a claustrally achieved wisdom. William James’s celebrated reformulation of this Emersonian wisdom is McDermott’s pragmatic mantra, “Knowledge about life is one thing, effective occupation of a place in life with

dynamic currents running through your being is another thing.” To the Caspar Milquetoasts, Oblomovs, and Eleanor Rigbys in his classes

this is, of course, discomfiting news, and they often sandbag themselves against his polymorphous perversities as if they were satanic invasions of their spectating privacy. They refuse to hear the merman singing and so, like Homer’s sailors, they defensively deafen themselves to his seductive siren song. These are the unhappy few who experience his classes as rape or dentistry, and who tend to write him off as a Melvillean confidence man or a barbarian invader of the temple of Apollo.

“Ringers” occasionally drop in on his classes, and like impotent Davids attempt to slingshot Goliath with their pebble nuisances. They tend to be true believers or rebels without causes, and they usually do not come back for more. The vast majority, however, relish McDermott’s subversiveness, knowing that although he is half-crazy, they want to go with him, no matter the Borgesian convolutions of his tangents or the Joycean bizarreness of his sidebars or the jarring mammalian enjambments of his speech. Why? Because like Leonard Cohen’s Suzanne, he has touched their perfect bodies with his mind.

200 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY Besides, who but the most wallflowered, lily-livered conservatives would refuse a philosophical joyride in a Yellow Submarine or on a Jefferson Starship? Even Alice James got this one right, troping such refusal as “diseased vegetable growth which nips efflorescence.”

As one ages, the immediacy of the original attraction unsurprisingly fades, but never so much that one forgets what it felt like to be under McDermott’s numbfished influence. If you are lucky like me, you witness him teaching your own students, if only for a class, and you beam with pride as you show him off and vicariously re-experience through their infatuation with him your own early entrance-

ment. Emerson calls such teachers naturals, and like Bernard Malamud’s fictional hero, Roy Hobbs, McDermott is a wounded warrior who can knock the cover off the ball and break your heart at the same time. As students, we hung on his words the way we hung on a Mantle at bat or a Cousy dribble. McDermott, we intuited, could be

one of the great ones and we were right! But we also knew that he was so heavily taped up to play that there might be no second act to “Dionysus in Flushing.” And we were not altogether unprescient in our worry. Thankfully, there is as much grit in the man as grace, and he remains to this day the starting center-fielder for the Blakean Tygers, still burning brightly and still fearfully symmetrical, and still Paul Simon-crazy after all these years. Emerson also says that philosophy is failed poetry and that the true poet is “the true and only doctor” for whom “Every new relation is a new word.” It is he who “stands one step nearer to things” and who

ravishes the intellect with “the true nectar.” He is “the conductor of the whole river electricity,” one who knows that life is good “only when it is magical and musical,’ not when it is anatomized or interrogated “like a college professor.” I cite these passages from Emerson because they illuminate McDermott’s person and pedagogical genius, and because, correcting their author, McDermott is living proof that

philosophy is not failed but foiled poetry, foiled in the Hopkinsian sense of “shining from shook foil.” The philosopher and novelist William Gass says that good poetry should provide you with a “new self” and that “a consciousness electrified by beauty” is “the aim and

ARTHUR LOTHSTEIN 201 emblem and the ending of all finely made love.” It is an incisive observation about the transformative aesthetic and ontological effects of poetry, and it recalls the Rilkean existential wisdom to which I earlier alluded. It is also another way of glossing McDermott’s superb poetic imagination, which not only is the keystone in the arch of his aesthetic pedagogy, but also leads him to thinkers like Vico, Camus, and Norman O. Brown. That he writes poetry himself is but frosting on the cake.

Over the years, I have metaphorized McDermott’s mind in a myr-

iad of ways. I have thought of it as a trailmix of mostly American voices, some Yankee plain, others European fancy. I have also troped

it as a burning bush struck by a Jamesian match and as a bouquet of Deweyan daisies and Jamesian Jack-in-the-pulpits, with Camusian camellias, Roycean roses, and Brownian Birds of Paradise filling out

the arrangement. I now see him as our contemporary American Scholar, who for nearly half a century has taken, in the manner of Emerson, “materials strown along the ground,” to wit, his students, and knowing their craving for “‘a better and more abundant food,” has fed them without stint like a cherishing father. Emerson calls such feeding “the upbuilding of a man,” taking that to mean, among other

things, the cheering, raising, and guiding of men and women “by showing them facts amidst appearance.” I read him as saying that such feeding is hope’s grounding, one perhaps travestied and debased

by contemporary failings, but one not so ruined or rancid as to be unredeemable. Like the great American thinkers who have godfathered him, McDermott has always been the voice of the thick over the thin, of the lush over the arid, of experience over doctrine, of vision over “apparatus” and “pretension,” and so always the voice of at least a halfway hopefulness. Although a man of extraordinary erudition, he explains “the deeper side” of what he does as educating his students. As he once told a Texas magazine, “You have to under-

stand that until recently the main task of education was to care for students. It wasn’t to build a professional career.”’ Apart from his brilliant and much-lauded scholarship (he is, after all, the greatest living William James scholar), the simple fact about McDermott is that “he

202 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY cares’ for his students, in the sense of providing for, looking after, and tending to them, and also in the sense of having real and deep interest in them, having fondness or affection for them, and even sorrowing and grieving for them when they are in trouble or pain. They are, in the phrase of Faulkner, his “care-kin.” They know this, and continue to reconnect to him throughout their lives, usually when they are in need of an encouraging fatherly or fraternal word or of an emotional or intellectual turbo-charging. This is the unplugged McDermott, the acoustic McDermott, who patiently listens to your story and who, like Buber, encourages you in the belief that “you are able.” Unlike the other or electric McDermott, whose charisma is so commanding as to be overwhelming, the unplugged or acoustic McDermott is the more humanizing presence, and you cherish every opportunity of conversation with him, no matter the subject or location or time limit, knowing that you will be enlarged even by the smallest contact with him. The two McDermotts intersect after class when students rush to the front, and with pipe puffing, he digs down deep inside himself to find the beginnings of possible answers to their probing questions, while at the same time making clear to them that his answers are riddled with tentativeness and that finally, “I cannot answer... you must find out for yourself.” For teaching to him is not monologue but dialogue, not soliloquy but colloquy, not recitation of time-worn convention, but invitation to creative self-discovery. But McDermott wasn’t born yesterday; he

knows, as the writer of “Song of Myself’ knows, that although he teaches straying from himself, “yet who can stray from me?” For he is not oblivious to the irresistibility of his person and language.

Like Whitman’s, his “words itch at your ears till you understand them.” As teacher and public intellectual, John McDermott belongs in the pantheon of those who, following Hart Crane, have “entered the broken world / To trace the visionary company of love.”’ Whether writing

or lecturing on topics as diverse and compelling as the aesthetic drama of the ordinary, the affective dimension of social diagnosis, cultural literacy, the isolation of the handicapped, or the inevitability of our own death, McDermott’s voice is never strident or puffed-up,

ARTHUR LOTHSTEIN 203 but always compassionately inflected, always caring. Indeed, he is a model, as much by instinct as by conviction, of what Whitman calls “robust American love.” The philosopher Milton Mayerhoff has written about caring as affording us place-in-the-world, implying that homelessness is the shipwrecked condition of the uncaring self. If so, then McDermott, for all his philosophical attention to the topic of metaphysical and moral homelessness, is himself a model of humanizing moral tenancy. Having experienced his own lacerating versions of the dark night of the soul, many of which fill his writings and public lectures, he naturally encourages in his students, readers, and auditors, all of whom inhabit their own houses of pain, an emotional and moral honesty rarely found in intellectual discussion. Students flock to him and hang on him because he is a man of flesh and bone, one who knows that if it is admirable to profess it is because, as Thoreau says, “it was once admirable to live.” A man of his stature could cadillac in and out of his students’ lives and few would think less of him for doing so. Indeed, our contemporary star-driven, corporate universities teem with such easy riders, who not uncommonly see teach-

ing as a burden to be grudgingly borne, and so do all they can to connive a reduction in what is euphemistically known as “contact hours.” Noli me tangere, alas, has become the unspoken shibboleth of the contemporary knowledge factory, or in the plainer New Jersey

English of Bruce Springsteen, “You can look but you better not touch.”

McDermott, on the other hand, is as temperamentally mad for contact as he is philosophically committed to an epistemology of dirty hands. To know for him is finally to know only those truths that the hand can touch. Pedagogically speaking, he knows that were he untouched by his students, he would be out of touch with them and so finally lost to them, as they would be forever lost to him. It is hard to believe when you first meet him that he would be genuinely inter-

ested in you, if for no other reason than it seems preposterous to think that you would have anything to offer such an extraordinary man. But the truth is otherwise. For no matter who you are, deadbeat

or honors student, front-rowed or back-rowed, he seems to care

204 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY about you. Partly it is his urban Irish temperament, partly it is his own craving for fructuous connection, partly it is because he believes deeply in the redemptiveness of community, and partly it is because

he believes with Josiah Royce that the popular mind is a thousand times deeper than any of us ever believe it to be. Emerson’s way of putting the point is to compare us to bits of “Labrador spar which have no lustre as you turn them in your hand until you come to a particular angle; then it shows deep and beautiful colors.”’ This tran-

scendentalist wisdom runs deep in McDermott, so deep that it is nearly an existential a priori of his pragmatic common faith. Is it any wonder, then, that his students open their hearts to him, confide their frailties and sins to him, show him their poetry, art, and journals, tell him things that they share with no one else, except perhaps empathic lovers and analysts? They do so because they know that he will never betray them and that they will find in him the calories they so desper-

ately crave. To him, they are buddings in danger of becoming so clipped as to die on the vine, and so he cares for them as if they need his succulence and sun, as if he is their chlorophyll, as if, in the phrase of Keats, he knows how “to set budding more” because he also knows “how buds beneath are folded.” Listen to William James from Talks to Teachers:

Feed the growing human being, feed him with the sort of experience, for which from year to year he shows a natural craving, and he will develop in adult life a sounder sort of mental tissue, even though he may seem to be “wasting” a great deal of his growing time, in the eyes of those for whom the only channels of learning are books and verbally communicated information.

McDermott listens patiently and passionately to their stories, as they do to his, believing in the educative value of what he calls “the nectar of our stories.” It as if he is a philosophical Joe Gould writing the history of the world and so in need of everybody’s tale of weal or woe. His students are generous with their stories because, like Whitman, McDermott is “the caresser of life wherever moving . . . back-

ward as well as forward slueing, / To niches aside and junior

ARTHUR LOTHSTEIN 205 bending.” To them, he is shelter from the storm, a catcher in the rye; to him they are grist for the mill, soul food, as important to him at seventy as we were to him at thirty. They come to him from a culture of the ersatz and the spectacle, of the shadowgraphic and the pseudomorphic, in which, as Bob Dylan has sung, “everything is broken.” If, too, it’s alright, Ma, it’s because they have found in McDermott their philosophic tambourine man, and so they come following him in the jingle-jangle morning, afternoon, and evening like starvelings in search of sustenance. He gets them and so they get him, remaining

in his tuition because their own rejected thoughts are returned to them with a kind of alienated Emersonian majesty, because he encourages them to believe in their capacity for redemption and recovery in a world gone wrong, mad, and sour, and because he is, in the phrase of Tennyson, “the fuller minstrel.” Whether he is too much grizzled these days to feel hopeful himself is difficult to know. What

matters is that he gives them hope, halfway or full, because he is burningly alive, and because experience has taught him that too long deferred or too much ambushed by “subtle foes,” hopelessness will either sicken them to death or condemn them to what he has justly called a cynical “thrashing about.” Emerson says that we repair to the American scholar especially in “intervals of darkness” when “silent melancholy” so racks our lives as to cause us to ask questions like “Why bother?” and “‘Is life worth living?” McDermott’s pragmatic response to such despair is not lamentation but amelioration, even if over the years his rhapsodizing has turned bluer and the grain of his voice has become less confident in the human capacity for redemption. Yet, he has not backed off from believing that our central human task is the necklacing of nutritious moments on the knife-edge of loss and setback. In the language of Buber, it is in the hallowing of the everyday, in the sacramentalizing of the present moment, that we finally authenticate ourselves, although the doing is always the negotiation of a “narrow ridge,” never a cakewalk. McDermott’s more Emersonian way of making the point is to say that the nectar is in the journeying, in what “Fate” calls “the

206 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY liberty and glory of the way,” as opposed to locating it in the journey’s end. It is in this sense that he now speaks about what he oxymoronically calls “local eschatology.” As experience is a process in time,

meaning is never totalistic or totalizing, but always a sculpting in snow, always a reweaving of the Penelopean web of relations, or, in the terser formulation of John Dewey, “Fulfilling and consummating are continuous functions, not mere ends, located at one place only.” At the end of his first book, Thoreau agonizingly asks, “Where is

the instructed teacher? Where are the normal schools,” meaning schools in whose tuition we can, with confidence, morally, aesthetically, and spiritually place ourselves. Emerson’s “The Over-Soul” says that “the great distinction” between teachers sacred and profane is that the first “speak from within, or from experience, as parties and possessors of the fact”; whereas, the second do so only “from without, as spectators merely, or perhaps as acquainted with the fact on the evidence of third persons.” All of us, its writer goes on to say, “stand continually in the expectation of the appearance” of a sacred teacher, one who speaks “from within the veil, where the word is one with that it tells of.” To his students, McDermott is just such an instructed

and sacred teacher, one of those “mighty poets, artists, teachers” whom Whitman baptizes as “national expressers.” It is not merely the effulgency of his language or the sheer Eros and dramaturgy of his person that distinguishes McDermott’s pedagogical genius, but rather his unwonted ability to speak always as an insider and hence authoritatively. He has never taught for what philosophers litigiously call argument, which has always seemed to him (and to me) a poor

man’s lawyering. Who besides the visionlessly clever—in other words, those fatally ententacled by the Ph.D. Octopus—are ever swept off their feet by forensics? What has stuck with me through all these years is not an elegance of analysis as much as a febrility of imagination, and McDermott’s near alchemical capacity for finding the golden star in the drossy haymow, for bequeathing ingots where lessers leave behind only gold dust. But as with the alchemists of old, the cost of the finding is sometimes so dear as to scare off the faint of heart; “not a few have been burnt in our work” (nonnulli perierunt in

ARTHUR LOTHSTEIN 207 opere nostro) is how the former phrased the danger. I can still recall an unhappy few whose “tripping” on McDermott burnt more than their fingers, having misread The McDermott Experience as a categorical imperative to live combustibly, to be so aflame at every point as to burn, baby, burn. When I was much younger, I believed wholeheartedly that Romeo had gotten it right, “Hang up philosophy, if it cannot make a Juliet.” As an older man, I still believe in Romeo’s declamation, if we mean by making a Juliet the same as what Camus means by the return of the exiled Helen; in other words, the recuperation of Beauty. It is, sad to say, an awful truism that most professors have no vision (not to mention Eros), and that philosophy professors have less vision (and considerably less Eros) than most. So many are little more than conceptual acrobats or verbal gymnasts, aptly caricatured as “‘jumpers”’ in Tom Stoppard’s play by the same name. McDermott, by contrast, is no sombrero-refusing rationalist or square-hatted Euclid. He is as much a poet, painter, sculptor, and jazz musician as he is a philosopher, and studying with him is an aesthetic happening, first to last. In the early sixties, not far from the incredibly misnamed Utopia Park-

way, Joseph Cornell was cutting up old books for his surrealistic dream boxes. On Kissena Boulevard, where Queens College was housed, John McDermott, with porkpie and pipe, a leprechaun’s twinkle in his eye, and a devilishly pragmatic sensibility, was inspirationally turning walls into eyes and giving his students the strength to dream. Today in Texas, at the beginning of the second millennium, he continues to lay the enchantments on thickly, albeit with an urban cowboy’s touch, ensorcelling the Aggies (and his audiences everywhere) as he did us, not with theatrics, but with the seminal power of his mind and with the sweet sorrowfulness of his wild Irish heart.

To read or teach for the lustres, as poets do, as McDermott does, one, of course, needs to be lustred or aureoled oneself. To have experienced McDermott in 1961 or in 2001 is to be reminded of the Emer-

sonian proposition that the great man is “the impressionable man” par excellence, the best part of whose mind “hovers in gleams,” and

208 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY who is “of a fiber irritable and delicate, like iodine to light,” so sensitive that “He feels the infinitesimal attractions.” At our best, we are, like him, “photometers, gold leaf, the irritable foil.” I have said here that to study with McDermott is to eschew falsely virilizing argument for the numinosity of awakened selfhood. Of course, most professors of philosophy read and teach for argument not lustres and so tend to be rather unlustred themselves. Indeed, most are stuffy Casaubons

memorable mostly for their oddness of character and thinness of thought. Mindful of the etymological and semantic connection between lustre and /ustrum, Harold Bloom tells us that by lustres we should understand “gestures of freedom, stances of transcendence, the evidence of things seen.”’ To those thusly nimbused, he reminds us, the severest criticism is due, as is always due to strong originals, especially those who have helped to deliver us from our bondage to “the rotted names.” For in simply swooning, we find ourselves misbegotten or degraded and so unlustred ourselves, our own spark or radiance extinguished by knee-jerk imitation. Call this the Student’s Sublime; I take its subversive self-engendering to be one of McDermott’s sublimest bequests to his students. But as in any transference relationship, the temptation to identify often outweighs the need to individuate; in my own case, it took years to overcome the former. If there has been no criticism here of McDermott, but only praise for him, that is not because I mean to anoint

or coronate him, but rather because I mean to testify, in both the evidentiary and spiritual senses of the word, to his pedagogical genius

and influence, and to the enormous debt to him that I (and others like me) shall always feel. Electrified and pollinated by him, he has

also engoldened us, and to the extent that our lives shine in these bedimmed times, our debt to John McDermott is greater than any one us can ever possibly say.

McDermott has told me of his desire to write some pages on the topic of obsolescence. He related to me a story about a former Texas A&M high-level administrator, then retired and cancer-ridden, who had become so remaindered by his university as to have been denied a parking sticker to drive on campus. I end with this story because I

ARTHUR LOTHSTEIN 209 sensed between the lines McDermott’s concern about his own marginalization, if not obsolescence. “They'll write on my tombstone, ‘John J. McDermott, Out of Print,’”’ was his darkly comedic way of notating his worry. But his wife, Patricia, had it right then, and McD, as she calls him, has it right now: he is a saving remnant, a voice and a man for the twenty-first century, not a nostalgic remembrance of things past or an old curiosity shop or an old duffer on Golden Pond. To read or study with McDermott today is not to “grope among the dry bones of the past or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe.” It is rather to experience an originality of an angle of vision that Emerson calls infantine and which he also calls the perpetual Messiah. Is not its rediscovery the secret wonder of a liberal education considered as cultural pedagogy? If we repress such rediscovery, how do colleges and universities keep from turning into hospitals for decayed tutors who, as Yeats says, do little more than cough ink? True, we are all timed naturals who, in the haunting phrase of Pynchon, are “powdered by the finger of Nothing.” William James’s dire ontological assessment of our eonic insignificance, delivered ironically on the centenary of Emerson’s birth, is dead-on, “The phantom of an attitude, the echo of a certain mode of thought, a few pages of print, some invention, or some victory we gained in a brief critical

hour, are all that can survive the best of us.’ To which he adds, “happy are those, whose singularity gives a note so clear as to be vic-

torious over the inevitable pity of such a diminution and abridgement.” I would offer that the singularity of note which is McDermott is hardly so paper-thin as to be mere “threadbare crape”; passed on

by one to a myriad many and then to a countless more, it survives itself in its electrified inheritors, not unlike the charisma in the Jon’s magnetic chain. It may dim as you get farther and farther away from the source, but never so much as to fade to black. For there is always another who has been Midasly touched, either by the source directly or by his epigoni indirectly. Is this an answer to McDermott’s question about obsolescence? Let Emerson have the final word here:

210 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY To laugh often and much, to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children, to earn the appreciation of honest

critics and endure the betrayal of false friends, to appreciate beauty, to find the best in others, to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch .. . to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded!

NINE

THE NECESSITY OF A CULTURAL PEDAGOGY John Ryder

Introduction

ohn McDermott’s work spans some forty years, and throughout that long creative period he has considered a wide range of issues.! His essays and edited volumes address topics ranging from American culture and key figures in American philosophy to the themes of experience, aesthetics, community, health, and morality. A comprehen-

sive look at McDermott’s writings on all these subjects reveals the interesting feature that from the beginning the theme of education and pedagogy has been central to his work. Indeed, it serves as a scaffold around which his other work is built. For McDermott, as for his

intellectual forebear John Dewey, questions of the nature and goals of education in a democratic society are fundamental for an understanding of American culture and philosophy and for an adequate intellectual consideration of the problems of contemporary American society. A careful, reflective, philosophical approach to education is not simply another “philosophy of” exercise. On the contrary, it goes { 211 }

212 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY to the heart of any society that aspires to the establishment of democratic conditions for its people. Again like Dewey, McDermott’s approach to education is not carried on in the abstract. From his earliest published writings, McDermott takes up the problems of education as they develop in relation to the society as a whole, which means among other things that he has dealt not only with educational theory and pedagogical practice, but also with the primary directions of educational policy. As we will see, over the years these policy directions have been depressingly consistent, and McDermott’s has been a sharp, persistent, and reasoned voice for alternative democratic practices and policies in education. At the heart of McDermott’s educational philosophy is a commitment to meliorism. We will leave the details of this meliorism to be considered later, but the general idea is critical as a point of entry into McDermott’s thinking about education. The two most common human reactions to our situations, judging from the ways that people have tended to respond to their circumstances, are to resign ourselves to conditions as they are, regardless how unacceptable they may be, or to believe blindly and tenaciously that things will somehow improve.

Neither of these stances toward our circumstances, McDermott would point out, are adequate to healthy individual development or vibrant democratic life. On the contrary, individual development and democratic growth require a faith in the capacity of people to examine their circumstances, explore possible alternatives, and take the action, individual or collective, to recreate their lives, to reconstruct their individual and social circumstances in ways that better meet the needs and more adequately supply the conditions necessary for rich and satisfactory life. Notice the emphasis here on both the individual and the social. Democratic life is not about each satisfying her needs in disregard of the other, nor is it about submerging the individual in a collectivist fantasy about a better world. Democracy means the individual inclination, together with the appropriate social conditions, to confront our situations, to contrast them with more satisfactory alternatives, and to possess the wherewithal to make actual what at the moment is merely possible. This is the meliorism about which

JOHN RYDER 213 McDermott speaks, and the commitment to which lies at the heart of his general philosophy and his understanding of education. The inclination to reconstruct our lives and circumstances is not automatic. It can be developed or destroyed. Nor are the individual Capacities necessary to such reconstruction automatic. They can be nurtured or ignored or submerged. Depending on social conditions, for example, class distinctions and their insidious consequences for the poor, the appropriate inclinations, and the necessary capacities are grossly maldistributed throughout a society. If meliorism is a necessary feature of democratic life and society, then it is an obligation of the members of that society to see that the necessary character traits, as well as knowledge and skills, are available to its citizens. Herein lies the most profound goal of education, and here is the reason that a critical examination of education is a sine qua non of a social philosophy. McDermott’s work from the beginning is infused with this insight, and his discussions of education from preschool to university develop the necessity of meliorism as an obligation of democratic life and the proper central goal of education at any level.

Contemporary Educational Policy Directions

Education is notoriously difficult. I do not mean that it is difficult to learn, though for many it is. Nor do I mean that it is difficult to teach, though to teach well is a talent and a skill even many teachers do not possess. To say that education is difficult is to say that it is no easy matter to describe just what we want education to achieve beyond the most general level, either for individuals or for the society as a whole. Nor is it an exact science. For millennia we have struggled with the questions of what, whom, how, when, and even where to teach. Plato addressed these questions, so did Confucius, and so have many of the greatest minds in world culture through Aquinas to Locke, from Rousseau to Dewey. If it were easy we would have it figured out by now or if it were close to an exact science we would at least have been making progress. Yet, for at least the past hundred years, it has been commonplace for one study after another to decry the condition of

214 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY contemporary education. The best of the critics have offered alternatives to prevailing practices, more or less well conceived, in an attempt to improve the situation. In most cases, however, those who at one time have offered solutions and alternative approaches become

for later critics a cause of the persistent problem. In the twentieth century, John Dewey and Maria Montessori have contributed more than anyone to attempts to improve education, particularly preschool and childhood education, yet today, Dewey, Montessori, and many others have become a favorite target of educational critics. One of the reasons for this is, again, that education is notoriously difficult. On the one hand we can fairly clearly articulate in highly

general terms the end result we would like to see the educational process produce, even allowing for a range of differences of opinion. The goal, in short, is intellectually and morally well-developed indi-

viduals who can understand themselves and their world, including their complex relations with their environments and with each other, well enough to make their own way in life successfully and to bequeath to subsequent generations better conditions than they had themselves. On the other hand, the factors that contribute to an individual’s development toward this end are so many and so complex that to consider them is quite possibly to despair of the possibility of even partial success. There are the genetic, physiological, and neurological characteristics of students that are different to some extent for each individual; there are home and family issues; there are economic factors, social factors, and religious differences; there are the broader

cultural characteristics of a society that can either help or hinder achievement of educational ends; and there is the vexing question of the proper education of teachers. With so many ingredients, any one of which can subvert the educational process, it is small wonder that we continue to struggle with the question of education, in general with little sustained progress. Many of the critics of education for the past century have been deeply concerned about the ends of education, but they have also tended to underestimate many of the factors contributing to its success. The tendency among critics has been to isolate and focus on one

JOHN RYDER 215 or another aspect of the goals of education at the expense of the others. In the current political climate in the United States, one of the most common targets of criticism is the progressive school movement of the early twentieth century. One of its most vociferous con-

temporary critics is Diane Ravitch, who in her most recent book directs her attack against Dewey more than anyone else. Ravitch is concerned, as many others are, that in contemporary public schools the academic goals and methods have been sacrificed to others at the expense of the education of our children. This, she thinks, is the fault primarily of progressive education in general, Dewey in particular, for having proposed and installed in the public schools methods and ends other than the traditionally academic. According to Ravitch, education, to be worth anything at all, must be subject-centered, and it must abandon its experiments with “student-centered” and “teachercentered” schooling.’ Ravitch’s concern is not new. In 1962, Thomas Molnar published a book titled, The Future of Education, in which he made a similar argument.’ In one of his earliest published writings, McDermott reviewed Molnar’s book, and his criticisms of it apply equally well to Ravitch. In 1962, in Commonweal, Molnar and McDermott engage in a dialogue on the question. From Molnar’s point of view, education should be strictly academic, devoid of such frills as extracurricular activities, psychological counseling, and other services. He objects to schools being “adjusted to the needs of democracy, scientific evolution, mental health, space age, and what have you.” In place of such intrusions into education, Molnar advocated “learning pursued in insti-

tutions devoted exclusively to academic ends.’* McDermott responded that, on the contrary, it is precisely such contemporary social concerns as democracy, scientific evolution, mental health, and the space age that education should address: I think we must retain our commitment to the organic relationship of school and community, the education of the total society and the use of criteria drawn from experience as the source of evaluation in those disciplines requiring value judgments. In such

a framework, however, we must revamp our curricula so as to

216 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY guard against a political and social provincialism, as well as provide a realistic setting, particularly in our secondary schools, for meeting obligations placed upon our society by contemporary science and technology.°

That a purely academic education, one unrelated to its own social environment, is unacceptable has been a central theme of McDermott’s treatment of education. The reason is that education must be related to experience for it to matter at all in the lives of students. Overlooking the necessity of the relationship to experience is one of the most critical mistakes made by some approaches to education. Another is to create, as Molnar did forty years ago and Ravitch does today, a false dichotomy between the need for education to bear a

relation to its social context and its academic character. There is nothing inconsistent about these two important characteristics of education. In fact, McDermott, like Dewey, argues persistently that it is in the relation to the lived contexts of individuals and their social environments that the academic dimension of education becomes the most profoundly meaningful. Another prominent trend in education, forty years ago no less than today, is what we might describe as a mechanistic, or technocratic approach. This is the understanding of education in which prominence is accorded to such aspects of formal education as testing, standards, measurable outcomes or performance-based assessment, standardization, technological literacy, and skills development. It is an understanding of education in which the mechanisms, the technologies, in

short the means of education, come to overshadow its more farreaching and certainly more profound purposes. In some cases, it is the development of skills that are deemed essential for employability, without concern for the individual and cultural consequences of conducting education primarily for the purposes of job training; in other cases, it is the application to education of methods from other spheres of social activity, primarily from business, to make the educational process more manageable. In 1963, McDermott reviewed a book critical of one of the prevalent trends of the time, the so-called scientific management of education. Such movements as scientific management in the schools, like

JOHN RYDER 217 many of the so-called “accountability” measures popular today among many state legislatures, school districts, and educational administrators, derive directly from the attempt to organize education on principles appropriate to other spheres, business being the most prominent. To see how inappropriate this can be, one need only consider a value such as efficiency. In business, it is in the interest of maximizing profit to apply efficiency as a fundamental goal of the production and distribution of a business’s goods and services. In education, however, though all other things being equal, it is of course worthwhile to work more efficiently than less, all other things are often not equal. It is far more efficient and cost-effective to teach forty children in a room rather than twenty, but it is not likely to be conducive to the more profound ends of education. Moreover, it is certainly not efficient or cost-effective for a teacher to spend an unusually extensive amount of time with one child or one student who is having more problems than the others, but it may be precisely what the education of that child or student requires. The general lesson is that the application of values from other spheres can easily distort the educational process. McDermott’s cultural pedagogy is a sustained response to the mechanical approach to education and to the exclusive emphasis on abstract academic values. With respect to the first, he argues throughout his work that the goals of education are above all to generate growth and insight for all students, and in a more technically philosophical vein, to provide the conditions necessary for the development of relations. He responds to the call for exclusive attention to academic ends by arguing that the general goal of helping children to grow and develop relations is best achieved through an emphasis on literacy, the arts, the humanities, and the sciences and that such an emphasis always be couched in terms that connect the academic subjects to the lived experience of the students and the prevailing concerns of the broader society. If education is to provide the value to children that it is capable of, it must be a humanizing process, a goal not easily achievable. It is an all too common experience for education and the schooling in which

218 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY it formally occurs to be more alienating than humanizing. This situation poses a challenge for both the methods and content of education. One of the modern forms in which alienation can easily occur, which McDermott noticed as long ago as 1965, is the increasing use of technology in education. Today, it is all too common to regard technol-

ogy, especially in its current digital incarnation, to be an essential good that will revolutionize education for the better. While it would be a happy outcome if that were so, technology in the educational process can easily have, indeed it frequently does have, the effect of alienating children from the forms of human development that are not themselves amenable to technological design and manipulation. In any case, it is all too easy to lose sight of the fact that technology can only prove valuable in the educational process if it is carefully used so that it does not obscure the more important goals of that process. As McDermott has put it, “If it is the technological revolution that is alienating large segments of our people then we must make that very power direct itself to humanizing ends. Significant ameliorative possibilities await us if we can entwine vision about human potentialities, freshly understood, with the capacity of automated learning.’’®

The potentially alienating character of education and schooling is one of McDermott’s persistent concerns. Whether it is due to too mechanistic a methodology or to a disassociation of education from children’s lives, the alienation of students from the personal growth and development that education can provide is a threat to its capacity

to achieve its ends. To avoid alienating children, the educational process must take up as one of its central goals what McDermott calls the development of relations. He is unambiguous about this, “Help-

ing our children to learn how to make relations is the central and most important task of education” (SE 184). But why, we might ask, are relations so important or don’t relations develop naturally anyway? The answer to the first question is that the alternative to an alienating life is an engaged life. The danger of alienation in education derives from the possibility that the educational process may, contrary to its own intentions, disengage children

JOHN RYDER 219 from their own abilities and potentialities. They may easily reach a

point where learning and understanding is simply not a value to them. It happens far too often, as anyone who works in education at any level is all too aware. Furthermore, children and students of any age can easily become alienated from their own social environments and as a result find themselves disinterested in the very social circum-

stances and problems that condition their own lives. Finally, and most seriously, children may readily be alienated from their own natural surroundings, the most detrimental consequences of which are

a disinterest in the condition of their natural environment and the profound and critical ecological problems the environment currently faces.

In his 1986 essay, “Cultural Literacy,” McDermott addresses these issues directly. The reason he describes learning to make relations as “the central and most important task of pedagogy” (SE xxx) is that without a distinctive relationship with their world, children fall into dull routine and become unable even to recognize opportunities for

inquiry and understanding. The making of relations, by contrast, means confronting the many facets of one’s lived context and making them meaningful. Traditional education, rigid in its fixed curriculum, and much contemporary education, narrowly vocational or mechanical in its goals and methods, impede the process of developing relations and of expanding the meaning of children’s activities. Furthermore, the enrichment of experience in the sense of deepening the connections of people to their own capacities, social circum-

stances, and natural environment does not happen automatically. Rousseau may have thought that if children were only placed in the right kind of environment, all of their natural inquisitiveness would emerge of its own accord, but there is no reason to think that he was right about that; even if he was, it would be merely by sheer chance

that a child might find himself in the right kind of environment, whatever that might be. The enrichment of experience that characterizes a full, satisfying, and responsible life has to be nurtured, especially if we find ourselves in a culture in which many aspects mitigate against it. Education is not the only aspect of a child’s life in which

220 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY such enrichment can and should occur, but it is surely one of them, and in many ways one of the most important because public education properly administered reaches throughout a society into every town and neighborhood. Improving education is not simply a matter of learning more, as so many current approaches to educational reform seem to assume, but a matter of focus. McDermott argues, and we will see this in greater detail below, that the development of relations and the enrichment of experience can be promoted in education through a curricular emphasis on the arts, the humanities, and the sciences.

The Necessity of Social Context

The importance of experience and relations in McDermott’s thinking about education is related to his view that the problems of education must be understood within a social context, which is to say in light of the specific needs of a society at a specific time. The challenge to public education in America specifically is posed by our own egalitar-

ian ideal. The principles of the American Revolution, if not the founding national document, were unambiguous in their expression of social equality as the foundation of a just society and the proper goal of a democracy. Putting those principles into practice was always far more ambiguous, as the founders themselves discovered when at the Constitutional Convention they determined that the only way to deal with the question of slavery was to agree not to talk about it.’ But ambiguity notwithstanding, the principled commitment to social equality has been an impetus to many of the most important events in American history, from the Revolution to the Civil War to the New Deal. That same commitment ought to be the driving force behind the construction and delivery of public education in America, for the simple reason that without an educational focus on social equality,

the principles of the Revolution are at best hollow and at worst cynical.

With a democratic egalitarianism as a background, it is all the more clear that education cannot serve its own ends if it divorces itself from its social environment. McDermott has been making this

JOHN RYDER 221 point from his earliest writings. In a 1964 essay titled, “Montessori and the New America,’ he was interested in the question how the Montessori approach to education could take hold in America. The initial answer is that like anything else, it needs an “operational insight into the ways in which growth and change occur in the culture in question.” He highlights two specific aspects of American culture at the time that would have to be addressed. The first is the general needs of an egalitarian-oriented society, and the second is the specific challenges to educational theory and methodology posed by the consequences of developing technology and the “sociologically alienated children” in inner cities, most importantly racial and ethnic minorities.6 He was particularly moved by the problems posed by poverty. Michael Harrington’s The Other America had recently been published, and like many others, McDermott was moved by the picture it painted of the debilitating depth and extent of poverty in America. For McDermott, the effect of an impoverished environment on the education of young children is so profound that special and monumental efforts are needed to rescue them from its consequences. Some two decades later, the situation was no better, and our commitment to correcting it had waned rather than deepened. In his 1985 essay titled, “Adults and Children,” similar in content to “Cultural Literacy,” McDermott provided a short introduction in which he makes the observation that education continues to suffer from the

Reaganite dismissiveness of the conditions of children’s development.’ The year before, in a republication of his Introduction to Maria Montessori—Her Life and Work, he had made the point that contemporary children are too easily the victims of inner loneliness, alienation, cultural sadness, and despair, and that too many educators seem to be able to deal with them only in terms of performance on standardized exams or to see the ultimate educational goals in terms of computer literacy. The social conditions of children have everything to do with their education.'!? Dewey and Montessori both understood this, which is why McDermott was so much influenced by their work. People like Molnar and Ravitch, who argue passionately

222 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY for an exclusively academically oriented education, do not understand it. To avoid the same mistake, McDermott has always been

careful to place his own commitments to academic rigor in the broader context of social and cultural conditions. Yet, two decades further on, we still find ourselves unable to take account of children’s economic and social conditions when we confront the problems of education. In the State of New York, for example, there is, as I write, a serious proposal under consideration in the highest educational policy circles to require teacher-education programs to offer what amounts to a warranty on their graduates. If the students of new teachers are unable to succeed, the teachers are to be returned to their teacher-education programs for further training. Never mind the fact that this treats the teachers themselves as commodities produced by a teacher-education factory; the most astonishing feature of the proposal is one that would be all too recognizable to McDermott, namely, that the success of children will be understood largely in terms of performance on standardized exams, and more to the point, it ignores the all too obvious fact that there are other variables that affect how well children develop and learn, most fundamentally the economic, social, and cultural conditions in which they live.!!

Poverty, racism, and social inequality are among the social conditions that constitute both the context in which education must func-

tion in America and the challenges to our egalitarian values. McDermott returned to these themes in his 1988 essay, “Gamble for Excellence,’ in which he deals again with the profound alienation suffered by the victims of social injustice, whether economic or racial, in that they are deprived of both the aesthetic and educative dimensions of experience. Unlike many other educational reformers, Mc-

Dermott gives no ground on this point: if we value equality of opportunity, then we must make the profound assumption that all children are educable, and the realization of that potential for all chil-

dren is “the primary obligation of the community.” It will not do simply to shrug one’s shoulders and write it all off to the nature of things. First, as McDermott points out what Dewey had before him,

JOHN RYDER 223 the problem is a system of social inequality, where insecurity is gener-

ated not by nature, as in the past, but by social conditions. Furthermore, the unacceptable social conditions cannot change by “moral” means alone. The social world does not improve simply by individuals improving, but it requires change in social institutions themselves. This is one of the fundamental points that distinguish McDermott’s approach to educational policy from many of his more mainstream and, unfortunately, more influential, contemporaries. As serious as the problems of poverty, racism, and inequality are, McDermott, in some of his later writings, regards the “most unsettling” of our current circumstances to be the environmental problems, or what might more properly be described as the ecological crisis of our time.'* The educational process can no more ignore the fact that our natural environment, and therefore our own future and that of the organisms with which we share the planet, is in serious danger than it can overlook the fact that inequality affects children’s educational success. The more one considers the depth of such social and environmental issues, the more absurd it becomes to believe that the schools should pursue a curriculum abstracted from the reality outside their doors. Even if it were a good idea, it could not last long, and for that reason alone it cannot supply an adequate pedagogy if we are genuinely interested in an education that advances the potential of all our citizens.

Of course, it is one thing to say that education must take account of prevailing social conditions, but it is quite another to describe how it might do that. Over the years, McDermott has made specific proposals for pedagogical methodologies appropriate to the democratic ends of education. First, McDermott takes the view, following Dewey, that the classroom should be a leveling-up environment, in the sense that it has the capacity to compensate for the deficiencies many children experience as a result of debilitating social environments. This is how the community fulfills its “primary obligation” to help all the

society's children realize their full human potential. If the purpose of education, furthermore, is to provide the conditions necessary for children to develop relations and pursue the conditions required for

224 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY a meaningful life, then the methods that formal education employs

must compensate for the broader social conditions that mitigate against these ends. The influence of both Montessori and Dewey are evident here. Dewey noted that the classroom is an artificial environment, which means among other things that it is an environment that we construct. If we construct the environment, then we have the capacity to construct it according to the ends we choose. Dewey further believed that it is not only possible, but also necessary to construct a classroom environment in which children are able to have experi-

ences that are denied them by their more routine social environments. Montessori, who believed, like Dewey, that the environment we construct in the classroom is critically important, argued for what in the Montessori tradition is called a “prepared environment,” one in which the developmental capacities, the “self-supporting energies, of the child can reveal themselves.'* This means not simply that children are exposed to materials that are not normally available to them, but more importantly that they are able to have active experiences they would not otherwise have. As Dewey would have it, the classroom is constructed to include problems for the children to encounter and solve. The specific problems constructed will depend on the experiences we wish them to have and the habits we wish them to develop, and it is precisely at this point that our interest in the children developing into active, thoughtful problem solvers comes into play. Here are their opportunities to develop those habits of mind and body that will enable children to grow into adults who have the inclination and ability to construct a meaningful life for themselves and a democratic society for the community. One of the more detailed examples that McDermott provides of a pedagogical method is in the context of the environmental problem. First, the classroom can itself be constructed as something of a “minlature ecosystem,” as he puts it in “Bequeath a Shamble.” Second, there are specific lessons that can be developed to help children gain a feel for the nature of ecological problems. We might, he says, intro-

duce desirable materials, but in insufficient number or amount, which will help children to understand and deal with the problems

JOHN RYDER 225 of scarcity. We might also introduce consumable and non-renewable

materials, which poses the problems for the children of “who is to use them” and “in what amounts?” We might also introduce to the children materials that corrode, and that corrode those around them, to help them begin to understand the problem of pollution. Such a “miniature ecosystem,’ when combined with other characteristics that emphasize the interrelations among the children that mirror community relations, can encourage them to develop for themselves an environment that is “aesthetically alive, pedagogically responsive, and ecologically responsible” (SE 178-79). Necessity of Cultural Context

Just as there is a social context of which education must take explicit account, there is also a cultural context that should inform our thinking about education. McDermott’s concern is with education not so much in general, but in its American context. We have already seen that his focus is on the obligations that education has in a society that aspires to democracy and a corresponding equality of opportunity for all its people. His is to a significant degree a culture-bound enterprise, so it is not surprising that it would be important to him to take into consideration the characteristics of the culture that he is concerned to affect. In ““Montessori and the New America,” McDermott had occasion to consider the salient features of American culture. There are two primary criticisms that have been made of America’s general cultural characteristics, he says. The first is that America has no specific “‘future commitment” or “long-range historical purpose.” The second is that it is fundamentally anti-intellectual. With respect to both criticisms, he turns what are alleged to be faults into cultural virtues. With respect to America’s lack of over-arching purpose, he argues that ours

is a culture that values not a priori commitments, but open-ended experience, and for him our disinclination toward theory is transformed into a trust of immediate experience. Despite its European origins, he points out, even by the eighteenth century, American culture had come to be characterized by a reliance

226 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY on open-ended experience. We became open to taking ourselves where experience points, rather than allowing experience to be rigidly circumscribed by a particular theory or ideology. This openness to experience has received intellectual expression, he reminds us, in Em-

erson, James, Dewey, Mead, and many others, and one might add Franklin to the list. This is an “opened-out view of nature,’ McDermott says, whereby in experience, the individual is continuously remade and expanding. From the beginning of its history, American culture lived in this unsettled, precarious environment in which the old doctrines, as McDermott would say, never lasted, no matter how hard many tried to sustain them. The obvious example from early American culture is Puritanism, which despite its well-developed ac-

count of God and nature and its detailed expectations in the social order, could not maintain its vitality in the face of profound changes in science, economics, and politics. The fact that the old doctrines tend not to stand up to experience, and that when push comes to shove, American culture sides with experience, is the reason, McDermott argues, that such phenomena as religious and political fundamentalism, as psychologically attractive as they may be in unsettled circumstances, are nevertheless doomed in the American milieu. Any approach to education in America, he goes on to point out, must take this into account. It cannot pretend to a settled answer for all time. Related to this trust in experience and its open-ended character is the American acceptance of pluralities. There is no one way or one answer that we expect to prevail eternally. Ours, McDermott says, is an “ad-hoc metaphysics” in which the resolution of problems is the goal, and appropriate resolutions change with the problems. There is an important truth in this picture of American culture, though in the

end, one has to square it with what does appear to be a persistent commitment of our culture, and one on which McDermott and many others want to rely. That is the commitment to a democratic society and to the radical egalitarian vision of individual and community that it embodies. To be sure, there have been and continue to be many occasions in which American intellectuals and political leaders have

JOHN RYDER 227 wished to scale back the democratic impulse, but on each such occasion, there are others, like McDermott himself, along with Dewey, Emerson, Thoreau, Jefferson, and others, who are there to remind us that democracy is not to be reduced to private financial gain or to occasional trips to the ballot box. Throughout our history, the deep commitment to democracy resonates in American culture and it continues to provide a beacon by which we navigate difficult waters. The second feature of American culture that interests McDermott is what its critics call anti-intellectualism, but what McDermott refers to as our deep empiricism. American society from the beginning was forced to adapt, adjust, and manipulate its surroundings, all based on its immediate experience. Empirical requirements both natural and social provided the imperatives. Theory, for the most part, did not.

Experience thus understood, and any educational approach that wants to make sense in this culture, takes as its point of departure the understanding that learning is not primarily a matter of mind. Such an empiricism resonates with Montessori’s view that children learn

“not through the mind but through life itself.”!5 As Dewey put it, experience can carry any amount of theory, but theory alone does not make sense even as theory.

One might wonder whether or not such a trust in long-standing traits of American culture is itself wise in current conditions, with so much changing around us. For McDermott, however, the openendedness of our approach to the world around us and our willingness to respond to our own experience are among the strongest virtues we have. They provide the inclination to take our experience, including our problems, seriously, and they point the way to an experimental approach to their solutions. It is when we abandon them and resort to a priori theory or to tenaciously held ideas despite our experience, as Peirce would have put it, that we come up short in the

effort to understand our problems and to solve them. For McDermott, a continued trust in our ability to comprehend our new social problems and to resolve them in the interest of individual and social development is precisely what “the New America can offer | Harrington’s| Other America.’’'

228 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY One does wonder, though, whether McDermott may have missed the significance of another, perhaps more pervasive, ongoing trait of American culture, its individualism. Americans have not invented individualism, but it has resonated deeply throughout American cul-

ture, and it has contributed to the problems that concern McDermott. On his view, democracy must be egalitarian, but egalitarianism does not rest easily with individualism, if only because even basic attempts to ensure equality of opportunity tend to require interfering

with some individuals’ freedom to do what they want with their property, or to pay fewer taxes, or in the contemporary educational environment to send children to charter schools, or to refuse to agree to the taxes required to run the schools properly. The deep insistence on the individual’s prerogatives is itself related to an even deeper atomistic conception of the individual that derives from early modern European experience. It appears, then, that despite the American disinclination to embrace absolute doctrines and certainties overtly, there are commitments that have persistently exercised a covert influence on our aspirations and our approach to social and national problems. Put bluntly, the American cultural environment, rooted as it is in the assumption of the atomic individual, may not be fertile ground for the experiential and cooperative education that McDermott takes to be necessary for a healthy democracy. Resources of a Cultural Pedagogy

McDermott’s approach to thinking about education relies not only on his understanding of American culture, but also on three other key sources: his understanding of American philosophical traditions, his appreciation of Maria Montessori’s educational theory and prac-

tice, and his commitment to the centrality of the humanities in education.

It is a mark of McDermott’s debt to Dewey and James that the concept in the American philosophical tradition that is most important to his own work, especially on education, is “experience.” One of the primary reasons is that experience is in an important sense a

JOHN RYDER 229 paradigm of education or, as McDermott would put it, experience is itself pedagogical. In a 1988 article titled, “Gamble for Excellence,” from a Festschrift for Elizabeth Flower, he describes Dewey’s conception of experience as it relates to pedagogical considerations. Experience is most generally the transaction of the individual with her world. But experience is not numerable, disconnected events on the model of the passive, sense-data conception with its roots in the eighteenth century and so common in much of Anglo-American philosophy in the twentieth century. Experience is not primarily a matter of mind, as other philosophical traditions would have it. On the contrary, experience has directions, “leanings,” so that experiences are “cognitive of one another.” One might go so far as to say, though he does not, that they are constitutive of one another, and so integrally related and relational. But the ongoing reconstruction of our worlds, reflecting the precarious nature of experience, is not smooth. Life, McDermott says, is a gamble. The pedagogical, the educative dimension of experience, derives from “living the gamble consciously.” Experience is also aesthetic in a sense that has deep significance for the character of our individual lives and communities, and for its educative character. It is aesthetic in that we each seek a harmonious balance with our environments. The aesthetic dimension of experience is an active thing, as we pursue harmony among the constituents of our lives and our worlds. Experience is also political. Social injustice deprives its victims of the aesthetic and educative dimensions of experience. As a result, our own experience, our own gamble, particu-

larly if lived consciously and with a commitment to democracy, brings us inevitably into conflict with those aspects of social life that

impede our own and others’ pursuit of harmony. The appropriate response to such affronts to the reconstructive character of experience is to restore social conditions beneficial to all. This in turn in-

volves the important democratic principle that all people are educable. Making genuine, open, and constructive experience available to all is, in an expression we have seen before, the “primary obligation of the community.” As we have also seen before, experience so understood means correcting social inequality not just in terms of

230 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY one’s individual life, but through changes in social institutions. McDermott’s understanding of experience, following Dewey’s, is not simply active, but activist. It is here that his general philosophy of experience, his social philosophy, and his philosophy of education converge.

The same interest in the nature of experience and its centrality to education explains McDermott’s interest in the work of Maria Montessori and the pedagogical method she developed. Montessori, like Dewey, was interested in experience, not experience plain and simple, even understood actively, but in the quality of experience. Experience is not necessarily educative. It can be debilitating, alienating, and destructive. This is precisely the problem that many children face as a result of the impoverished environments in which they live. Their experience is in fact counterproductive. Dewey, Montessori, and McDermott regard this to be a central truth, one that frames one of the fundamental tasks of education that is, to provide children with experience that is qualitatively beneficial, that is conducive to the develop-

ment of relations, and that is amenable to the construction of a harmonious balance in one’s environment. McDermott reads Montessori in the context of the late nineteenth century, specifically in light of the emerging view of nature and human behavior as developmental. The great influence of Darwin and Marx on European and American thought was to place change, process, and development at the center of an understanding of nature and human being. Seen in that light, Montessori was a product of her time. Like Marx, she understood that some aspects of individuals’ environments can be destructive, while others are beneficial. Montessori’s emphasis in the pedagogical method that she developed was on individual liberty,

toward which end she developed an evolutionary and experimental pedagogy. “Her basic atmosphere for the educational process,” McDermott says, “is freedom; her basic methodology is experimental.”’!” Also in the spirit of Dewey, Montessori realized that freedom of the individual and the individual’s integral relations to the community go hand in hand. In her pedagogy, then, she emphasized the communitarian dimension of human experience in the process of the free development of the individual. Her specific methods all speak to this end: an

JOHN RYDER 231 emphasis on the cognitive and creative role of sense-life, the importance of the nature of learning materials, and most fundamentally, her concept of the “prepared environment.” All of this resonates for McDermott with the central need to design a pedagogy that makes the most of a child’s experience in the interest of free, conscious, and active individuals. From his perspective, contemporary American conditions still call for a pedagogy with these fundamental commitments.

The third primary source of McDermott’s perspective on education is his understanding of the importance of the humanities in the pedagogical process. No amount of reliance on professional training, skill development, or technological proficiency can replace the profound dimensions of the human experience that are revealed in and through the humanities. First, if students are to be educated within the context of their own cultural conditions and histories, then there is a clear need for the resources of history and culture, and those resources McDermott believes are most readily available and accessible in the humanities.

It is a common observation in our own time, McDermott says in his 1986 essay, “Cultural Literacy,” that students are becoming ignorant of history and their own cultural resources, an observation that he makes in common with otherwise hostile critics like Ravitch. There are any number of reasons for this, one of which is that teachers themselves tend to be educated fairly mechanistically rather than humanistically, and they naturally pass this along to their own students. This would be bad enough, but along with it is the fact that, as he puts it, the ambience of the contemporary school alternates “between boredom and violence” (SE xxx). In middle-class schools, the character of education is so shallow that students see education solely as a means to procure a job, and in poorer and inner city schools, the problem is worse still—absenteeism, dropouts, and, though their significance is questionable, plummeting test scores. None of this, from shallow teacher education to excessive vocationalism to the mind-numbing consequences of poverty, can be tolerable in a democracy. A democracy, on the contrary, requires that all children be educated so as to make the best use of their abilities to

232 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY build a human future. The mechanistic, technocratic, and vocational-

ist character of contemporary education exacerbates the problem: “The erosion of humanistic sensibility, awareness of the past, and basic competency in literacy and science... constitutes a major threat to this essential national endeavor” (SE 182). Furthermore, this threat to a democratic education is greatly underappreciated, as is the gap

between rich and poor that deepens the problem. We are in need, McDermott says, of a “Marshall Plan” for education, one that relies centrally on the capacity of the humanities to help the culture reclaim its history and individuals to develop their human capacities. A Contemporary Cultural Pedagogy

One dimension of such a plan is an education that promotes the meliorism necessary to confront our individual and collective problems thoughtfully and creatively. Another is a humane curriculum from preschool through higher education that is capable of resuscitating our humanity. McDermott’s emphasis on meliorism is his response to the demand that education locate itself within the social context in which individuals live their lives, which means inevitably to build into education the conditions for a response to contemporary social and individual problems. In a mid-1970s’ essay titled, “From Cynicism to Amelioration: Strategies for a Cultural Pedagogy,’ McDermott makes his most sustained case for the necessity of meliorism as a central principle of a pedagogy adequate to contemporary conditions and to the principles of a democratic society. The specific context of his analysis is an attempt to evaluate the impact that the counter-culture had through the late 1960s and early

1970s. Three of its deepest and most enduring characteristics, he thinks, were a distrust of science as the inevitable source of future improvement, a distrust of progress as it had been understood for at least several decades previously, and a lack of faith in the possibility of institutional transformation. The overall impact was a new cynicism, which though detrimental to the culture, is nonetheless understandable. The previous thirty years, he points out, consisted of profound

JOHN RYDER 233 events that could easily reinforce such a cynicism, obvious examples of which were the “Holocaust, Hiroshima, totalitarian labor camps,

Biafra, [and] Vietnam.” Though understandable, if such cynicism were to stick, an effective cultural pedagogy would be impossible. If we do not see the point of attempts to change our social environments for the better, then they will improve only with sheer luck. McDermott mentions the reemergence of the idea of cycles as a

common but troubling illustration of a cultural cynicism. As a response to the challenges of contemporary social life, the appeal to perpetual cycles leaves history meaningless and impotent, except as a series of examples of earlier cycles. Even the richest traditions and most sensitive writers who appeal to “cycles” leave us devoid of a strategy to attempt to address contemporary problems. McDermott

has in mind here Buddhism, Hinduism, Nietzsche, Norman O. Brown, and even James Joyce. The result, he argues, of treating contemporary social reality as an instance of a perpetual historical cycle is “an abandonment of personal responsibility for the quality of our collective social and political life” (CE 123). Another counter-cultural legacy that impedes a meliorative pedagogy is the view, which he attributes to Herbert Marcuse among others, that history is on our side and all will be well in the long run. To ameliorate the human journey, McDermott says, it is necessary to take history seriously in the sense that the journey itself matters to

the outcome. There is an intellectual alternative for McDermott in Emerson, James, Dewey, and others in the American intellectual tradition. A “cultural pedagogy” can appeal to this American tradition, but it cannot simply appropriate one or another of the major intellectual figures of the past, even one from the fairly recent past such as Dewey, who was not writing in the context of the Holocaust and the destructive capacity of nuclear weapons. But if recast and updated, Dewey, especially his idea of “aesthetic experience,” can be an excellent source of a contemporary cultural pedagogy. So what is a “cultural pedagogy’? McDermott uses the term “culture” more or less the way Dewey did, that is, as equivalent to “experience.” A cultural pedagogy, then, is an experiential pedagogy and a

234 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY pedagogical experience, a meaningful proposition if we recall that for McDermott and Dewey “experience” means the interaction of things

and people and not simply a sensory undergoing: “Pedagogy becomes, then, the twin effort to integrate the directions of experience with the total needs of the person and to cultivate the ability of an individual to generate new potentialities in his experiencing and to make new relationships so as to foster patterns of growth” (CE 134-

35). Pedagogy must be experiential, and in a democratic society fraught with deep social difficulties that tend to undermine democratic relations, pedagogy must also be ameliorative: “A genuinely liberated social and political environment is one which encourages the individual . . . to experience the world in all of its potential intensity’ (CE 141-42). So, we live in time and in culture, in experience. Because we live in time, history matters. Because experience is not simply an undergoing but an interaction, we have a role to play in the what and the how of experience, of culture. That is precisely the ameliorative character of human lives. Therein lies our cultural pedagogy. Of course, it is one thing to make the point theoretically, but an-

other to make the effort to see it practiced. The first condition of applying McDermott’s insights is to consider an appropriate curriculum. At every level from pre-school through the university, McDermott’s curricular proposals are the result of his commitment to the centrality of the humanities and their capacity to provide the humanizing dimension of experience that encourages meliorism. In “Cul-

tural Literacy,’ he makes a specific curricular proposal for grade school and high school that centers on autobiography/biography, the science of living things, sculpture, and theater. McDermott will grant

that this is an idiosyncratic list, and he will also grant that others could devise a different list of core elements that could lead to the same ends. Nonetheless, his rationale for this particular selection of core elements is instructive. Biography can expand the edges of our experience and in the process introduce us to history, to other cultures, to significant events, and to science. The science of living things introduces the student to the life and death cycles of plants, animals,

JOHN RYDER 235 insects, and humans; it demonstrates both the sharing and conflict that is characteristic of life and the function of various organs. Sculpture teaches students to build. It is with our hands that we fashion our

world: we touch, feel, use tools, and make music. And in the study of theater, ranging from performing written plays to writing original scripts, the pedagogical rewards are many: for one thing, theater is contextual, so that the students enter a world other than their own, and the preparation for a production is itself instructional. In the end, whether one uses these particular elements or others, for example, archeology, pathology, dance, or anthropology, the critical point is that students learn to create their own world, to forge relations. These are the habits of mind and the skills necessary for a cultural pedagogy

that speaks to the needs of contemporary society and individual development. At the university level, the details change, but the underlying principles are the same, as is made clear in “Teaching: The Uncertain Profession, a 1972 interview with McDermott and two other winners of the Harbison Award. The pedagogical problems of university education at the time were the result, he suggests, of changing expectations

of students, student expectations of education, and the growing di-

versity of the student body, among others. The typical solution, which is simply for the professorate to insist on “maintaining standards,” is wrongheaded, he thought, primarily because it represents more than anything else a fear of change. An appropriate response to changing conditions in the university is to embrace and make use of what he calls the “tacit knowing of the community.’ Conclusion: Cultural Pedagogy as Appropriate Contemporary Pedagogical Alternative

Contemporary educational policy and “reform” suffers from a deplorable lack of imagination. Primary and secondary schooling is being reduced more and more to an ever-enlarging series of standardized tests, and there is no end in sight. Local school boards, state governments, and now the federal government have adopted testing and

236 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY its funding consequences as the solution to the problems of education. At the university level, a similar process is taking place, where, in the name of accountability, less and less time is spent on scholarship and teaching and more and more on assessment. Lost in this process are the most serious dimensions of the problems faced by education as well as the ends to which a democratic education must be directed.

Organizing our pedagogy primarily to help children pass exams, or restructuring our curricula so that it will be easier to represent quantitatively or graphically the student learning results, are serious misdi-

rections. They obscure the profound social and environmental problems that constitute the context of contemporary life and thereby the world into which students must grow. They also fail to develop in students the inclination to understand and, more importantly, to

address their worlds so as to contribute to the correction of those problems and, just as importantly for the students as individuals, to develop the meaningful experience necessary for a rich and humane life. The body of John McDermott’s writings on pedagogy is a sustained and developed alternative perspective, one that a society that aspires to democracy would do well to take to heart.

AFTERWORD

YOU ARE REALLY ABLE John J. McDermott

1

N | othing can be written here that does justice to the occasion that

gave rise to the foregoing series of essays addressed to my work and person. Presented originally at a conference held at Southern IIlinois University for the purpose of honoring my fifty years of teaching and my seventieth birthday, this gathering of more than one-hundred

persons, in the main, was characterized by the presence of former students. In an extraordinary display of intelligence and learning, bracketed

by the unusual capacity to understand another person’s life and thought, a fortiori, this gathering resulted in an event heralding more affection and loyalty than anyone could hope to expect, let alone realize. Each of the presenters, in turn, zeroed in on a theme central to my work, combed all of my publications and reconnoitered my pedagogical remarks so as to render my positions accurately. En passant, trenchant criticism and some dubiety about my intellectual path was 1 237 $

238 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY addressed to those shared concerns relative to matters deep and complex.

In kind, I offer a commentary on each of these nine papers, a response laced with gratitude and some reservations of my own making. Herein, I offer a necessarily telescoped gloss on these thematic interpretations. I note that the seriousness of the issues enjoined tran-

scends the essays and the commentary. It is hoped that thinking philosophically, this way, will encourage others to do likewise. Before discussing the issues addressed by the participants, it may

prove salutary to set out my working philosophical assumptions. Each of these assumptions has been developed in one or more of my published essays and is central to my teaching. Still more vestibular, I open with a story. For me, stories, not narratives, which I take as a highbrow term, are the warp and woof of pedagogy. I was raised on stories in the Irish enclaves of New York City. My father was laconic, but my mother was a gifted teller of stories and, more important, was an indefatigable listener to stories, frequently mine. It is poignant that the story I tell traces to an event shared with my mother, more than sixty years ago.

It was dusk and New York City damp-chilly on an autumn day, late 1930s. I, aged five, clasped my mother’s hand as we scurried along

Liberty Avenue, no doubt hoping to get a “Depression special” for the economically beleaguered millions at Tannenbaum’s dry-goods store. Perhaps a sweater or, remarkably, a pair of shoes. The giant El came to an end at Lefferts Boulevard. From that point to our block, 130th Street, you rode the trolley. Ah! the trolley—what an exquisite creature was the trolley with its cane seats, wide windows, and the cacophonic sounds of the bell that signaled the frequent stops and starts.

But the story. A woman has gone to the fruit and vegetable market. Ay! pomegranate, fresh anise. She, too, was scurrying. In the gloom of a browned-out Depression street, she misstepped. The trolley, exquisite notwithstanding, squashed her right in front of my very own saucered and horrified little-boy eyes. Ghastly though that be, it was

not the story. As she went under the trolley, her paper bag from the

AFTERWORD: YOU ARE REALLY ABLE 239

market tipped and out came the potatoes. They did not scurry. They rolled, slowly, inexorably over the trolley tracks and finally came to rest, one by one, at the curb just beneath my feet. I remember those potatoes. I remember! They haunted me for decades. Now I know why. The potatoes were in the wrong place. They were lonely. They were disconnected. Those potatoes taught me that our journey, stellar or impoverished, ultimately, goes nowhere. Addressing that baleful news is a central motif of our journey philosophically taken.

2

Returning to my working assumptions, they are the upshots of my experiences and are not to be construed as a procrustean bed or as an a priori schema. Following the spirit of John Dewey, what I see, feel, hear and touch, as embodied, is what I get, what I have as personal

and who I am. Further, following Maria Montessori, all of my assumptions are un tentativo, for fresh experience is apace and novelty lurks.

First, I do not accept a canopy of ultimate explanation or a canopy of ultimate intelligibility. Explanation, yes. Intelligibility, yes. Ultimate, no. Meaning given, meaning made, yes. Absolute Truth, no. In this position, I side with William James against the early Royce and the neo-Hegelians. With James, I believe in “separateness to the end,”

and that our version of reality is not denotative, but a construct. A canopy of transient explanation has to be built by each of us, in concert with others, and as it obviously frays under the press of experience, we are called to mend it along the way, during our journey to oblivion. For some, the absence of a canopy of ultimate explanation is ontologically depressing, whereas for others, this absence is liberating. To be without such a canopy is to burden ourselves with the responsibility for developing a personal Tao, in, through, and by which

the nectar available to me is found in my journey and only in my journey. Consequently, to be a live creature (no redundancy here), in Dewey's sense of that appellation, is to take on an existential diurnal urgency, for nothing is foreordained or to be posthumously mollified.

240 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY One significant philosophical consequence of my denial of the ‘canopy is the absence of an overarching philosophy of history, that is, a tapestry of puppets that preexists human history or is taken to be its eschatology. Whether it be the Augustinian De civitate Dei, the Hegelian Absolute, or the Marxist classless society, among others, as in Toynbee and Spengler, these grandiloquent attempts at “ultimate explanation” are unconvincing, empirically, and act as an obstacle to our having responsibility for creating a history in as melioristic a way

as can be abled. We must, too, own up to the depressing correlate that it is we who are responsible for the systemic personal and social evil that plagues our journey; instance the Holocaust. To a primary question, does history make us or do we make history, I respond that it is the latter. Consequently, an appropriate and telling word here,

until we face that opportunity and burden, we shall continue to scapegoat, assign blame, wring our hands, and abandon the mission existentially instantiated by virtue of human history. As the saying goes, the future is ours to lose. If we were to reflect on the twin horrors, now extant as dreaded possibilities, namely, nuclear obliteration and destruction of the planetary ecosystem by systemic pollution, it should occur to us that the “canopy” is of our own making and must be addressed by us, and by us alone. I do not see the coming of a deus ex machina of any stripe, whatever! Although I have long taught both historically and textually the theological and epistemological versions of this question of ultimacy, they do not constitute the fabric of my interior life. Long-standing issues evolving, revolving, and devolving as atheism, agnosticism, relativism, realism, idealism, and countless other labelings of the questions of ultimacy have their conceptual fascination, but, for me, at least, they dilute, block, and self-deceive the thickness that comes with experience. Percepts first, concepts next. The moral implication of eschewing an overbelief as to transcendence and especially as to the doctrine of specific providence, is daunting. If I do not believe that there exists a face, a power, a force that has me as its focus, then I must take full responsibility for what I

AFTERWORD: YOU ARE REALLY ABLE 241

think, what I say, and what I do. To live a life without excuses, without a bailout, and without resorting to assessments, sub specie aeternitatis, is burdensome, reflectively and emotionally exhausting. To that

end, I take worrying not to be a defect, but rather appropriate to being a responsible, helping, and caring human being. Second, the common wisdom is dominated by the assumption that in the Beginning all was well. Then, quickly, things went awry and culturally, mutatis mutandis, like Humpty Dumpty, we had a great Fall. Given that scenario, human history is an attempt to overcome the baleful results of this Fall, variously understood. In some traditions, this version of our situation leads to the bizarre and offensive

contentions that evil is the absence of good. Surely, one can agree with the assertion that human beings are wounded and flawed. It does not follow, however, that this characteristic results from having had a Fall, from grace, from a halcyon origin or by virtue of having been created “‘free.”” Rather, I see our difficulties emerging from the fact that we are out of place. In short, we do not belong and as such are ontologically disconnected. Human creatures are an androcentric intrusion on a cosmic ecosystem that is innocent of our aspirations. Not only do we start personally disconnected, as in umbilically, but species-wise as well.

Following the above assumption, the human task is to make connections rather than to repair the damage done by the alleged Fall. In short, the famous line of Augustine, that we have an “irrequitor cor” that will not be quieted until we rest in God, turns out to be diagnostically accurate, although having no terminus ad quem. I call this restlessness an ontological shroud by which we are always “‘IIl-At-Ease.” We never resolve this plight of being human, although we can and sometimes do meliorate. Faced with fundamental disconnection, our lives are characterized by proceeding hand over hand to make connections, that is, following William James, to make relations. Being in the world is to forge, suture, loop, tie, fold, embrace, and reach the ever danglings of ends that emerge from whatever we think, do, or hope.

242 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY Haltingly, and against the long-standing traditional belief that these dangling ends are temporary and, in time, will be healed, I offer that such a belief obviates the resonating messages of our experience. Further, to flee from the inexorable and not-to-be-healed experience of ontological disconnection is to dilute and perhaps to sully the authenticity of particulars, the quotidian, and, alas, to indulge a denial of the inevitability of my own death. In this vein, the belief in personal immortality becomes the reigning denial strategy. Third, when William James, in The Principles of Psychology, wrote that “essences are teleological weapons of the mind,” he overturned the regnant position of the history of epistemology. Put simply and directly, we witness here a shift in the major metaphor for philosoph-

ical inquiry, from substance to process. Primarily, a breakthrough found in the nineteenth century, one can find initiating moves in the difference between the thought of Kant and Hegel and the explosive introduction of Darwinian evolutionary theory. Aggressively and explicitly, the move to process is found in the work of William James, John Dewey, A. N. Whitehead, and Robert C. Pollock. Correlations

and permutations abound in modern physics, dance, painting, and jazz.

If objects are mock-ups and bundles of relations that we make and unmake, then the process is constitutive of what we come to call the

real. In James’s lexicon, flightings are our way, and perches help. Concepts chase percepts for purpose of management, transient structure, and pragmatic need. We have no fixed place, no fixed self, and no Archimedean point from which we survey an external world. We do not speak here of a necessarily frenzied situation, for it is not only externality that is in question. Rather, often in silence and in reverie do we come upon process, the most subtle shifts in retention, intention, and rejection. To be a “live creature” is not only to be alert to

every nuance in the flow, but to ourselves as ever transforming as well.

Fourth, the Tao under consideration here is not accepting of the proposition that philosophical inquiry is exclusively a function of the mind. Although it is a truism that the phrase, “a change of heart,”

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has become stock and even banal, in fact, that admonition signals far

more than is habitually addressed. We speak here not of a sheerly emotional response, bereft of insight, nor of any secondhanded toadying to a set of seductive promises in the name of one or another alleged salvific nostrum. To the contrary, the change of heart that we

have in focus is in the tradition of the Hebrew teshuvah, variously translated and interpreted, but herein simply spoken of as the Turn, or in Martin Buber’s words, to be “at the Turning.” In philosophical terms, I offer that this “turn” is a form of recovering from the domination of the a priori, considered here as allowing ourselves to be blanketed by categoreal schema and inherited assumptions. Subtly, yet rife, in our approach, is a systemic intellectual torpor that prevents us from starting afresh, asking not only a second but a third question, while being chary of conclusions until our experience has run its course.

I am not naive with regard to the “traps” in which we find ourselves. Even if one were to forgo the ancient religious trap of original sin, modern culture has announced several replacements. Paradoxically, these traps seem mutually exclusive of each other and yet each seems to be justifiable. I think here of Marx and the contention that

institutions condition consciousness, thereby calling into serious doubt my person as original and originating. Also, we have Freud who tells us that we are interiorally at war, inappropriately and inelegantly locked in our body, unable to avoid the libidinal and doomed to “discontent.” More recent and the most foreboding is the trap of the genomic, the sociobiological and the attendant fallout from the egregiously telescoped judgment, you are your DNA. Although these traps do not have the cachet of the religious canopy of explanation, they function similarly, forcing us to read our experiences not at dead reckoning, but in terms, under labels and brackets hatched elsewhere, beyond our experiential province. It is very difficult to talk and write of a personal turning, of taking responsibility for a recovering from the traps when common parlance depicts the personal as derivative, a statistic, an example, rather than an exemplar. Adding to this difficulty is the notorious increase in the habit of

244 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY obsoleting, rendering vacant all that came before us or is not of use to us, or so we think. Symbolic of this cultural virus is the noxious phrase, “been there, done that,” as if persons, places, and events as

experience have no roots, no feet, and no future-time eruptions. Locking ourselves up this way leads to an encapsulation, a narrowing such that affective inanition sets in and leaves us spiritually sterile, without creative issue. We can take our pick in the dolorous future that redounds from buying into pervasive obsolescence. Either we be-

come jetsam, tossed aside and hung out to dry in abandonment, or become flotsam, following false sirens with no place of our own, no human abode. Directly, the issue before us is as follows: If I choose not to live under the canopy of ultimate explanation and I choose to accept my life as inevitably destined to be terminated without any form or semblance of resurrection or redress, then I am encumbered to provide a

grounding for both meaning and action. I claim no originality for this position, for John Dewey, among others, has a stance likewise. Nonetheless, my contention is more baldly put than his, although I take help from the melioristic social and political philosophy that rests on his historically generated commitment to “warranted assertions” and “accrued wisdom.” I do have an advantage, however, for a crystalline presentation of life without the canopy of ultimate explanation was provided to me by the work of Albert Camus. The episraph for Camus’s Myth of Sisyphus comes from Pindar: “O my soul, do not aspire to immortal life, but exhaust the limits of the possible.”

Subsequently, in his section on “Philosophical Suicide,” Camus writes: “I want to know whether I can live with what I know and with

that alone.” Clearly here for Camus, to “know” is not primarily the province of reason. The existentialist attitude toward knowing is remarkably akin to that of William James as found in his “knowledge by acquaintance.” Read “acquaintance” here as experience, as affect, and irreducibly, as embodied. So too is this knowing in concert with Dewey’s understanding of the aesthetic as transacting rhythms with, in, and of nature.

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It is with this philosophical bedding in mind that I speak of a turn, a change of heart, a process as palpable as it is fluid. No salvation is promised. Salving becomes both the task and, one hopes, the actuality of our journey. Admitting to ourselves that the nectar is in the jour-

ney and only there may not yield the best of all possible worlds. Nonetheless, such a way of life is better, far better than living a secondhand life, one in which the actuality of my experience is diluted by a mythopoetic canopy distant from me, yet approbating of me. That my life is not the best but serially better is not a fall from grace. Too much self-deception accompanies decisions about what is best. We should not feel let down or spiritually inept by trying to be and do better.

3

I now respond, in cameo, to the nine presentations, seriatim. The wide-ranging foci of these papers causes me to isolate an issue or two

on which commentary may be helpful. I note also that some commentaries are shorter, due only to my not wishing to repeat a response to the major themes that understandably emerged in earlier essays.

Not having narcissism as one of my many character defects, I rarely go back over my published writing. Or, perhaps this is just facesaving because I am leery of catching myself in one or more articu-

lated mishaps. No such worry occupied the writers of these essays, for, indeed, they left no published stone unturned, scouring material written some fifty years ago. There is comparatively little repetition of texts cited, although the thematic girding of my work reappears over and again, as is expected. For me, two major lodestones are at work. The first is the sacred calling of pedagogy, namely, I am a teacher. That is who I am. Second, I carry on within the exhilarating, frustrating, and deeply pockmarked cultural context, known to me as America. Some regard this as jingoistic, a position | find baffling. Certainly, to regard one’s culture as superior and to adopt an attitude that is patronizing, uninformed as to other cultures, and arrogant in

246 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY interlocutory style is unacceptable and not entailed by the recognition of the cultural strandings that often pervade philosophical thought. The contention that we can develop a global or planetary consciousness, leaving aside or behind our local, provincial origins, be they ethnic, linguistic, or regional is a dangerous myth. Cultural fructification has no future without the experience of roots, singulars, or particulars, that is, my roots, my coming to consciousness. The now exten-

sive and vaunted appeal to “globalization” is hollow if it does not embrace the centrality of an affective, liturgical, and aesthetic binding, one that only personal experience can yield. Global consciousness must emerge inductively and not trickle down deductively and fictively. Following William James, particulars are wanted, and, for each of us, there is a distinctive cultural spring from which we come. Whether we accept or reject this mooring in our lives, such origination counts to the end.

Thematically, under the twin rubrics of pedagogy and the American setting, the essays herein address the religious question, the philosophical diagnosis of matters medical, urban, and educational and the relationship between aesthetic and moral sensibility. The first is that offered by William Gavin, in an essay entitled, “Locality in American Culture and the American Experience.” By unearthing my work written almost fifty years ago, Gavin puts his pen on a tension that has dogged my thought ever since. This tension can be phrased in a variety of articulations, for example, the intensity of the quotidian and the local setting over against the attention paid to the more embracing historical setting. Another way of considering this tension is that found between the allegedly trivial and the profound. As Gavin notes, I find it propitious to diagnose our experience from three vantage points. I hold that we have an experience of experience, inchoately, yet pedagogically meaningful. In turn, we become self-conscious of our experiencing and then, at least some of us, attempt to address this process philosophically, diagnostically. I do not hold this approach to experience to be cast in stages or on levels. Such use of stasis is only a pragmatic construct and should not be employed to value clarity over authenticity. Gavin presents a series

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of demurrers with regard to my discussion of experience, mostly centered around his worry that I have an elision between thick description of experiencing and the attendant need for criticism. His point is well taken, for although I have given instances, along the way, as to how the sheer undergoing of experience is rife with messages, leads, and warnings that feed criticism, I have not yet put that relationship into sufficient focus. It may be of help on this shared issue, if I say that I am in complete agreement with John Dewey’s claim that “Reflection is native and constant.” Clarification, modeling, organizing, and criticism are secondary activities relative to the way in which we

are “informed” by the sheer undergoing of experience. Actually, Gavin should not be uncomfortable with my version of the “experience of experience’ for he is the author of a masterful study of the “vague” in William James. It is the pedagogy of the vague that I have in mind. After tracing my efforts through the past decades to offer “variations on a theme,” namely, the diagnoses of experience as undergone and as tentatively rendered, Gavin wonders whether my interpretation of a distinctively American secular spirituality masks a “hidden dimension,” that of the tragic. In fact, Gavin asks whether I believe that the fundamentally tragic situation of being human is “unduly repressed.” I am not sure about the adjectival “unduly,” but of course it is repressed, functionally that is, for how else could one make it through the day, to say nothing of the night. I hold depression to be natural and not a fall from either grace or health. We did not choose to be born, and yet we are born to live and sure to die. Summarily here, Gavin has brought to the fore the dangerous terrain occupied when one goes with the experience of experience. Can my experience be trusted and can I be trusted to follow its messages? It is not coincidental that I return again and again to The Confidence Man of Herman Melville, for whom experience is the ultimate shill. A warning here for my persuasion, a major warning. As it turns out, my reflective journey over the past seven decades has been carried on within the laced and webbed context, the double-helixed matrix of both America and my personal, afflicted, and more than occasionally

248 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY celebratory journey. Fittingly, too, for a proletarian ethnic American, the entire endeavor has been labor intensive. If it is true, as my father always contended, that work saves, then I am saved. If, however, work is but a distraction, a mask, a dissembling Tao, which prevents me from owning up to what is really happening, then I am not in good stead.

Although Gavin does not make explicit the import of the metaphoric motifs in my work, transiency, and journey, nonetheless, in an uncanny way his essay is a manifestation of both of those cardinal

points of departure. Reminiscent of Royce’s mediating third term, Gavin has made public a distress that I have been reluctant to face, reflectively. Obviously, I have faced it experientially. Put baldly, nectar is not the exclusive logos of the journey. The world both sings and spits. Romance aside, the wilderness has many voices, some threaten-

ing, of which the most horrific is the wilderness that abides in each of us. Yes, I do believe that the nectar is in the journey and only there,

but we must be heedful that not all berries are friendly. Some are poison.

The second presentation is by James Campbell, a scholar who is destined to become the premier historian of Classical American Philosophy, inclusive of roots and branches, as witness his incisive books

on Benjamin Franklin and John Dewey. His essay, “The Pragmatic Scholar and the History of American Philosophy,” offers an understanding of my interpretative work as acute as it is accurate. So, too, are his queries about the selectivity and direction of my commentaries. Campbell rightfully notes that I concentrate on the thought of William James, Josiah Royce, and John Dewey. He wonders why I have not cast my net wider in discussions of other thinkers, as, for example, C. S. Peirce, G. H. Mead, and Santayana. In fact, he anticipates my response to this question, and I provide here only some adumbration. My understanding of the philosophical quest is tied, for the most part, to the relationship of philosophy to the way in which we find ourselves in the stream of personal experience, had socially, politically, religiously, aesthetically, and physiologically, that is medically,

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broadly construed. This inclination should not be taken as a denial of my fascination with philosophers and philosophy of every conceivable position and approach. I am so inclined, and in more than fifty years of teaching, I have discussed the philosophical views of countless philosophers, most of whom I am not bound to as a way of life. Still, paraphrasing Dewey on Hegel, each of these philosophers has left a “permanent deposit” on my thought. Such is the case with Parmenides and Heraclitus, Scotus Erigena, Spinoza, Marx, and Kierke-

gaard. Coming to modern times, I am deeply indebted to Albert Camus and influenced by Gabriel Marcel and Martin Buber. Although I was reared intellectually in the history of philosophy, the emergence of existentialism, especially the early work of Camus, jolted

me into a more “personalist” attitude toward philosophy. As with many students and teachers of philosophy in my generation, the works of Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, Kafka, and Freud seeped into otherwise traditional philosophical settings. Further, under the tutelage of Robert C. Pollock at Fordham University, I came to realize that philosophy, and creative thought of any persuasion, was manifest in and through an historical matrix. Such a webbing was inevitably interdisciplinary and recast the conventional boundaries that had been fois-

ted on previous philosophers. Consequently, the entire history of philosophy took on a freshness and a contemporaneity not often found in the more denotative explications. In the middle 1950s, I was beginning research for a dissertation on Max Scheler. In a startling and transforming conversation, Pollock

told me that I was working in a terrain alien to my philosophical needs and instincts. He suggested that I study American philosophy, about which I knew nothing. Directly, he told me to start with Wil-

liam James, and in my doing so, I became captivated not only by James, but also by the powerful notion of experience that striated his thought, as well as the entire undertaking of American philosophical and intellectual history. While writing my dissertation on “The Genesis and Essence of the American Nineteenth-Century Notion of Experience,’ there appeared in 1957 an incisive essay, by John E. Smith,

250 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY ‘The Course of American Philosophy,” extolling the rich and lamentably unsung philosophical insights to be found in American philoso-

phy. In subsequent conversations with Smith, I became convinced that I had access to a philosophical lodestone heretofore unknown by me. Soon, I became aware, as well, that there was spadework to be done, specifically, the editing of texts. As a nefarious fallout to the comparative neglect of attention addressed to the Classical American philosophers, their published work was in disarray, or alarmingly, in

a state of disappearance. I undertook to redress this deplorable situation. In one way, mentioning this editorial effort is a response to Campbell’s question concerning my interpretative emphases. Beginning in the middle 1960s, I prepared comprehensive scholarly editions of the works of James, Royce, and Dewey. The volumes devoted to James and Royce included master annotated bibliographies of their publications. By 1969, the Critical Edition of The Works of John Dewey was being published under the editorship of Jo Ann Boydston. In 1970, I joined with Frederick Burkhardt to found the Critical Edition of The Works of William James in nineteen volumes. In 1989, I became the general editor of the Critical Edition of The Correspondence of William James in twelve volumes, edited by Ignas Skrupskelis and Elizabeth Berkeley. As I write this, the final volume of the thirty-one is in press. My point here, in response to Campbell, is that I chose to focus

on those thinkers in whose work I was saturated editorially and whose thought most assisted in my wider effort to make a contribution to a philosophy of culture. In the middle of Campbell’s crystal-clear explicatio de texte of my interpretations of the thought of Emerson, James, Royce, and Dewey, he raises a question that should not be overlooked. He writes, “McDermott does not say if he thinks it possible to recognize predatory causes before he is ensnared.”’ Campbell has in mind here my commentary on the powerful warnings in Royce’s notion of the “detached individual.” Philosophically and pedagogically, I believe that one can learn to prehend the emergence of the predatory. Yet, I am sorry to

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say that personally and previously, I have failed, abysmally, to recognize, to diagnose, and to abet the emergence of the predatory. I refer here to my clinical alcoholism, which after decades of denial, left me

hapless, helpless, and virtually dead in 1989. Were there warning signs? Was there a dew-line? Certainly, and they became shrill and foreboding. How could I have missed those signs of the predatory right smack in the center of my daily experience? Herein enters that which none of our canonical philosophers, Peirce, James, Royce, and Dewey, address, namely, the practice of denial as an overwhelming subaltern of systemic self-deception. After attending and attending to a program of recovering for the past fifteen years, I respond differently to Campbell’s acute observation that I “settle uncomfortably” upon the dual claim that the “self is a social construct” and, as well, a “personally idiosyncratic seeker

of relations who puts a distinctive cast on the world.” I admit to a predilection for James’s understanding of the self as Promethean. Further, as filtered through the lens of existential sensibility, both the power and the acute vulnerability of the self remains paramount in my thought. Still, both James and Camus warn against failing to pay attention to the way in which life concretely comes and to the dangerously misguided effort to be more than we are, that is, as Dewey reminds us over and again, we are human organisms, mortal. As with the onerous and foreboding question posed above by Campbell, the furtive character of the predatory that lurks in the reading of our own experience, so too, here, do I say that I must pay further attention to this hydra-headed approach to the nature of the human self. In preliminary terms, I hope to forge a position that I call a “social cosmology.” My intent here is to preserve the energy and the creative drive that one finds in the Jamesian self, while widening its focus such

that the reach is both nuclear and astral. The daunting task in this endeavor is not to have the self obliterated by the infinite space in which we find ourselves or left to be barely functional by the web of genetic relationships that are so powerfully at work behind the scenes

as a conditional of who I am. Surely, I do not want to be a cosmic

252 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY twerp, nor do I want to be a DNA puppet. Just what is possible for me, John J. McDermott, allegedly one of a kind? As to Campbell’s two remaining concerns, namely, my not publishing material on the mainstream analytic tradition and on philosophical naturalism in the American tradition, I have familiarity with both persuasions and have taught the philosophy of Wittgenstein, Austin, Strawson, and Quine. Frankly, I am not comfortable writing in the argumentative mode and do not see philosophical discussions as primarily for terminological or propositional resolutions. So be it. As for philosophical naturalism, I agree with Campbell that I should have made more of its importance in my writing. I have in mind here some discussion of J. H. Randall’s Nature and Historical Experience, which I take to be the most seriously forgotten work in American philosophy. On the other hand, I am clearly on record as being a phil-

osophical naturalist, as found explicitly in my invited Romanell Address, “‘Ill-At-Ease: The Natural Travail of Ontological Disconnectedness,” given to the American Philosophical Association. Fur-

ther sustenance for my “naturalism” is present in my writings on Santayana, death, my rejection of the “canopy of ultimate explanation,” and my textual loyalty to John Dewey’s Experience and Nature,

a masterpiece in the vein of philosophical naturalism. Campbell’s wotries have an ironic ring, for it is he who is now combing the full reaches of the American philosophical landscape in a way that is contemporaneously matchless. Our third presentation is by Jacqueline Ann K. Kegley, who is an informed and impassioned commentator on philosophical issues in medicine and medical practice. Her recent book, Genuine Individuals and Genuine Communities: A Roycian Public Philosophy, is a clarion call to revivify the tradition of the public intellectual, especially on behalf of philosophy. In an epigraph for her chapter on “Loyalty, Patriotism and Enlightened Provincialism,” she cites the social philoso-

pher Peter Manicas as follows: “Persons only become human in association with others, but not all associations liberate human powers.” I add here, to say the least! This caveat by Manicas is key to what seems to be an Auseinandersetzung, in Kegley’s reprise of my writings

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on matters medical. With an occasional exception, for example, the diagnosis of suicide, I am in abiding agreement with her positions as taken in the essay, “Living Creatively, While Terminal.” The title of this paper does not do justice to the wide range of concerns tellingly addressed by Kegley. Her criticism of my work moves in two directions; the first, holding that I did not address a central issue, and the second, that I did not consider an alternative. The question here is whether I am guilty of commentary neglect or simply have a different focus, purposefully. The criticisms offered by Kegley should not block from view the recognition that her essay yields the most acute, creative, and informed grasp of my writings on medicine.

As I do not warm to jousting over points of interpretation, | choose here to reconsider those wider areas of discontent in Kegley’s paper, that is, her contention that my “focus is too individualist” and “too narrowly focused on technological liabilities” in contemporary

medicine. She and I have similar roots in the philosophy of Josiah Royce and therefore are in agreement with regard to the irreducible entwining of the individual and the community. I, however, have some experiential skepticism with regard to the ameliorative character of the social matrix, especially on the thorny questions of suicide and on the period of denouement in terminal illness. Kegley has an abiding commitment to the needs of the community, variously present as family, deep friendships, and those whose lives would be adversely affected by our death, for example, for us, students. I have no disagreement with that form of moral sensibility. Yet, often, nay very often, a suicide finds survivors responding with the patronizing contention that those who commit suicide are moral, physical, or psychological cowards. For the more self-righteous observers, all three forms of cowardice are affirmed. Certainly, I hold, as does Kegley, that the aftermath of suicide as experienced by those persons remaining can be horrendous. I have written in ““Why Bother: Is Life Worth Living?” that “suicide can be and often is a selfish act which leaves behind gaping wounds in others.” Still, so too, and more than equiva-

lently, can a suicide be a response to the “others” who, in fact, are causing the intractable pain or, note well, on behalf of the “others”

254 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY who are receiving intractable pain from the person contemplating suicide. The word at work here is “intractable,” and only those who have experienced that temporal finality, as I have, that feeling of being squashed irresolutely in the fabric of time, my time, only my time as

being undergone, can grasp its power. I wish to make it clear that I am not callous as to the sadness present in the act of suicide. Also, I am not referring to suicide as a result of dominations by cult or, alas, by fad, found sometimes in the “rash” of adolescent suicides. Rather, I write here of persons for whom the nectar has gone permanently sour and for whom the door of amelioration has been locked. Those with severe mental illness rarely commit suicide. Rather, it is those of us who with intelligence and the last act of a free will, decide that our journey, as personally experienced, must end. With regard to the less dramatic but more pervasive event, known as “giving up’ in allegedly terminal illness, Kegley claims that I shortchange the dying person. For her, there are four reasons to “prolong

life’: to accumulate more experience, to have more opportunity for new achievements and roles, to prolong relationships with significant others, and to increase the complexity and depth of our social networks. Surely, each of these desiderata are meaningful and laudable, yet in the framework of a discussion of physician-assisted suicide, I find them to be existentially disconnected. One serious difficulty in discussions of this kind is the presence of highly charged, deeply influential personal experiences of the writers. I am not privy to Kegley’s death experiences, and consequently she may have cause for considering these reasons to prolong life. For me, with extensive experience on this question, my response is that in the majority of instances, the sooner the death, the better. Words such as “more” and “increase” are quantitative measures in a qualitative nightmare. I fol-

low Dewey, for whom it is the “quality of the experience which counts.” No doubt, Kegley agrees with this dictum of Dewey, but her time frame for its presence in such dire circumstances stretches far beyond mine. For example, her claim that I do not sufficiently value

the family and social network in these death settings is met by my

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dubiety as to whether this “other,” this interpersonal network of family, friends, and assorted visitors, is always helpful or even benign. Frequently, I have been family, friend, and even an assorted visitor in death-settings and I hope I was helpful, as Kegley urges that I could be and should be. Still, I have sufficient death-bed experience, per-

sonally and clinically, to say that danger lurks in this assumed-tobe-helpful setting, as found in the often present dispensers of guilt, purveyors of bad memories, architects of manipulation, and the subtle venality found in the jockeying for post-mortem effects and power. This scenario is poignantly presented and preserved by Eudora Welty in The Optimist’s Daughter. Despite Kegley’s hopeful invocation of the salutary interpersonal other, even she admits that for my friend, Dax Cowart, the Galveston burn victim, the arena of his interpersonal network was a nightmare. An important interpretative thread that laces Kegley’s essay has to do with the nefarious patterns and sources of alienation, especially in a medical setting. She has very perceptive and persuasive views of her own making, and I am at one with her concerns and with her sugges-

tions for amelioration. Along the way, however, perplexingly, she suggests that I overestimate the importance of medical technology in the sustenance of alienation and dehumanization. Coupled with this assertion is the claim that I underestimate the baleful influences of “philosophical biases,” especially of the Cartesian variety. To the contrary, I am anti-Cartesian, that is, against any form of mind-body du-

alism, and I am aware that medical technology, despite its brilliant, startling successes, cloaks a pervasive sense of interpersonal distance, loss of personal control, and often subjects us to an impersonal paternalism. Exemplary here is the complex rationale for the regimen of chemotherapy in egregiously sick patients, the performance of radical surgery, and, insufficiently noted, the exponential increase in pharmacological therapy, itself often innocent of disastrous “side effects,” a euphemism for being blindsided. Further, in Kegley’s discussion of alienation, she incorrectly attributes the diagnoses of relations as the work of William James, when, in fact, it is mine. Had she built my discussion of relation starvation, saturation, and amputation into her

256 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY assessment of my position, she would have seen my approach as more of a companion to her intentions. At the end of the essay, Kegley cites our agreement on two of four

positions with regard to the conflicted issue of “prolongevity,” in short, that we should look forward, melioristically, rather than to ‘“beweep my outcast state.”’ I trust that Kegley agrees with me that such an attitude is easier said than done. The third issue raised by Kegley is that having to do with the network of social relationships as healing in the face of death. On this matter our intention is mutual, whereas our perspectives differ in that I cling more to the impervious existential reality—it is I who am dying. For the most part, granted occasional exceptions, the social network is comprised of spectators. The last position taken by Kegley affirms that in the ongoing hazardous experience of prolongevity, many persons forge “‘a connection with some deeper foundation of existence within or above ordinary experience.” She adds, “this aspect of that goal McDermott would deny as having validity.” Aside from the fact that the appellation “validity” is neither on my verbal lexicon nor in use in my prose, the far more crucial fact is that I would never, never intrude on another person's overbelief. To do so is arrogant, self-righteous, and meddling and very harmful pedagogy, no matter the situation. Granted that | am chary of “foundations” and of assorted overbeliefs, this does not entail judgment of others who find these ways to be compatible with their living and with their dying. I have sufficient difficulty in gauging the authenticity of my own beliefs without tramping about in the sacred precincts of others’ beliefs. Who knows, I may, as allegedly did Voltaire, return to a traditional belief when faced with my own death. For now, I try to emulate Montaigne, for whom, on behalf of Cicero, the advice is “to philosophize is to learn to die.” I trust that my rendering of these interpretative conflicts with Jacquelyn Kegley does not distract the reader from paying close atten-

tion to her scintillating thoughts on the philosophy of medicine, intensively focused on the personal and social ambience surrounding the ways in which we die. As in her aforementioned book, she resurrects the unfortunately moribund presence of the philosophical public intellectual. Her prose bristles with care, with life, and is relievedly

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free of jargon and conceptual ensnarement. It is gratifying, indeed, to

be the subject of her reflections and of her suggestions. I am also grateful to Mary Mahowald, herself a distinguished philosopher of medicine, for reading Kegley’s paper in her absence at our conference. The three of us are bound together not only by our work in medicine, but also, for a larger time, by our fidelity to the rich philosophical deposit left to us by the writings of Josiah Royce. In the fourth presentation, “The ‘Bite’ of the ‘Existentialist Moment,’ ’’ Michael W. Allen probes the abiding and influential existential strand in my approach to American philosophy. Some fifty years ago, I read a paper on the thought of John Dewey at a small philosophy conference in New York City, the Metropolitan Round Table. After my discussion, a Roman Catholic nun came to me and said that although she enjoyed my remarks, my version of Dewey seemed alien to her. She had written a dissertation on Dewey in the 1930s and commented that it was her surmise that my Dewey resulted from having cut my teeth, philosophically, on existentialism. She was presciently right and so is Allen in his richly perceptive understanding of existentialism and how that stance plays out in a doctrine of Deweyan social meliorism. No matter the protests of the protagonists, an intellectual, literary, and cultural event of considerable philosophical significance occurred

in the middle of the twentieth century. With complex nourishing roots in the lives and thoughts of Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, and Kafka, this event, “Existentialism,” has pressed the experience of choice into what and how I am, or how I “have” me. The articulation

differs, but the existentialist stance is regnant in thinkers otherwise diverse as Camus, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Jaspers, Heidegger, Tillich, Berdiaev, Shestov, Buber, Mounier, Marcel, Ortega, and Unamuno. Patently, obviously, and importantly, there resides no American thinker among them. Instructively, one reason for this omission is that American thinkers have a startling disinterest in the question of Being. William James wrote in a Notebook that as to “the question of being, it is the thickest of all’ and then said nothing else. This concern is not to be found as central in the work of Peirce, Dewey, or the later Royce.

258 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY A second reason for the absence of American existentialists is that

for the American, personal identity is rarely an inheritance. Rather, given that we are often known to ourselves as hyphenated, we forge identity as a project, au naturel. Also, America itself has had a constant querulousness relative to its own identity, a characteristic not found so pervasive in other national traditions. In a way, this responds to Allen’s question as to whether we can live as constituted by an American angle of vision and yet reach for a personally authentic existence. Because of the processively reconstituted fabric of the American way, we can and, occasionally, we do. To some critics, although not to Allen, it may seem strange for one

influenced so profoundly by the existentialists as I, to publish most of my work on the American strand. Yet this is not quixotic, for I read the mantric use of “pluralism” as a marking for “heterodoxy”; I read the American literary, social, political, and philosophical concern for transiency as meaning existence without a fixed essence. The sustaining texts abound: James’s denial that consciousness, as an entity, exists; his contentions that all relations, inclusive of simple conjunctions, are as affectively undergone as the nominated poles of the relationship; and Dewey’s belief that our aesthetic rhythms are constitutive of our person and not an appending articulation of a fixed self.

When Emerson, in the preface to his essay on “Nature,” calls for a religion by revelation to us, he presages the existentialist call for authenticity in matters of belief. So, too, does Emerson’s plea for us to have “an original relation to the universe” anticipate the ““choose oneself”’ so central to an existentialist anthropology. Allen writes that we should not distinguish too sharply between tragic experience and environmental metaphysics. Nor, he holds, should we bifurcate personal courage and social problem-solving. Within those descriptive parameters he explores my writings as a sustenance for his judgment that the dualisms in question lurk furtively and are deleterious to my diagnosis of how things go on, humanly.

He is on the mark in his pointing to those nodal points in which existentialist sensibility striates my understanding: death, suicide, the

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absence of a canopy of ultimate explanation, nectaring in the journey and only there, and the need for the virtue of hope. In Allen’s affectionate last paragraph, which glistens with memories of my talking walks and walking talks with students over the last half century, he concludes with the cryptic remark that I was not too

late for the fight. His allusion here is to a text from Voltaire, in La Henriade, which came to me by way of William James. The message of the text is a staple of my pedagogy. Voltaire refers to a letter from Henry IV, King of France, to an ill-knighted person by the name of Crillon, who, most unfortunately, arrived after a great battle had been

fought. To the tardy Crillon and mindful of the carnage, Henry IV wrote: “Hang yourself, brave Crillon! We fought at Arques and you were not there.”’ As Allen knows, I ask of myself, was I there? I ask of others, too, rhetorically, were you there? Standing midway in the brace of nine speakers, Eugene Fontinell sends interpretative sparks fore and aft. It is he who has grasped the linchpin that holds together what may seem to be my isolated reflective sorties. By his title, “McDermott’s Processive-Relational Person-

alism: Optimism? No! Hope? Perhaps,” he states his intention to ferret out the mainline thread of the relational webbing I choose to diagnose: persons, communities, schools, hospitals, cities, artifacts, and naturals, in short, the textures of human journeying. Given that he has presented a thorough redress of all of my major assumptions, positions, contentions, and rejections, it is not necessary for me to revisit that material at this time. Truthfully, from this time forward, if someone were to ask me what am I up to, what is the message, | would respond by giving this person Fontinell’s essay on my work. I could not, myself, do as well.

I do note that Fontinell comes to disagree with a now frequent claim by others that I have escalated my sense of doom and have become more pessimistic. He says, rightly, I believe, that my later work, especially the Romanell Address on “IIl-At-Ease,” is more provocative, yet fundamentally continuous with my reflective stance since the inception of my published writings. Support for this continuity in my work was offered to me by the philosopher John Compton. After my

260 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY dreadful personal collapse in 1989, which rendered me functionally inert and disconnected on all fronts in all areas of my life, Compton told me that the news of my “trouble” did not come as a surprise to him. He said that his reading of my work before 1989 led him to predict a flashpoint out of which would come self-destruction or a fresh Start.

My collapse had many dimensions, all of them noxious. Still, a philosophical strand was present as well. At some point, one has to “walk the walk,” and, if I write that the nectaring of the journey is all we have, then I must live with that, not as an idea, but as a Tao, an ontology. Although, if I may coin a phrase, Fontinell is “ill-at-ease”’ with this form of secular spirituality, yet he realizes that it addresses

nagging problems in his form of belief, brilliantly presented in his major work, Self, God and Immortality. Surely, we are in agreement as to the abhorrence we feel when apprised of the rancid activity of evil deeds and events that “plague” our planetary history. To this history, Fontinell asks of me “what” has gone wrong? I say, it was ever

thus, for from the outset we have been disconnected, sitting awkwardly and certainly not fortuitously in a cosmic ecosystem that does not favor human life as a priority or even as a distinctive occurrence.

I do not think it fitting to press him in this context as to how he accounts for “‘what’’ has gone wrong. It is my understanding that he is uncomfortable with the maxim that in the long run all will go well.

To live sub specie aeternitatis has a protective ring, with no feet, whereas living sub specie temporalis, while not salvific, is simply “so,”

and thereby and therein my fidelity to the admonition of Camus, “I want to know whether I can live with what I know and with that alone.”

One way of coming to closer quarters in the McDermott-Fontinell

discussion of a half-century duration is to enjoin the question of death, specifically as to its inevitability and to one conflicted way in which it happens, suicide, as found above in my response to Jacqueline Kegley. In my invocation relative to my own death, to my being “terminal,” always, inexorably, I write, “Indeed, can it, we, ever be cancelled? I think not. Celebrate!” This affirmation is my response to

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the question posed by Rainer Maria Rilke in The Duino Elegies: “But

this having been once, though only once, having been once on earth—can it ever be cancelled?” Fontinell is perplexed by my statement and asks, ““What does it mean to be terminal if it does not mean to be cancelled?”’ Fair enough.

For me, “terminal” means the end of the journey, a rhythm that by nature or by event ends. That is the lot of the rhythms of an organism, human, animal, or vegetative. It may even be the rhythm of the universe itself, and certainly it is the destiny of planet earth. I did not set it up this way, but that is the way it goes. To be cancelled is notoriously different. Cancelled means defunct, cast out of the flow, even of the Aurelian nitrogen cycle. Cancellation is the extreme enactment of obsolescence. The fidelity to the past; the pursuit of history; the power of legend, liturgy, ritual, and affective repetition; the keeping of archives; and the telling of stories are all ways of mounting a refusal to accept obsolescence as a way of life, that is, as a way of an empty life. Fontinell is correct in writing that I do not believe that we and what we do counts ultimately, counts as in a terminus ad quem in and by which all will hang together. Rather, to be counted is en passant in

the human journey, and during that journey all of us are present, even in death. Perhaps, I could phrase this as a daily reminder of the Roman Catholic annual liturgical celebration of all souls day. I am

not oblivious to the fact that for most the absence of a canopy of ultimate explanation makes the avoidance of obsolescence impossible. I can only try to remember all, always. Ironically, despite having some form of an overbelief on this matter, albeit very sophisticated, | know of no one who is more faithful to the lives, memories, and journeying metaphors of those persons who were entwined in his life than is Eugene Fontinell. Divided as we may be on the question of ultimacy, the eschatological, we are at one in response to Kant’s question, “What can I do?” He agrees that while the discussion may be interminable, our friend is terminal, so in the meantime, it is the time—to help!

In our sixth presentation, Richard E. Hart brings to bear his own fertile aesthetic sensibility on my efforts to contribute to an Emersonian-Deweyan aesthetics of the ordinary. His epigraph for this essay is

262 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY chosen wisely, for it pinpoints what I am up to, especially the line which reads, ““for me, I scour obviousness, collecting flecks from the ordinary.”’ One has to be careful here for just as not all berries are nutritious, not all flecks are meaningful. I try to walk this thin line between the rich deposits of the ordinary and the equivalent characteristic of a frequenting numbing repetitiveness. In my ongoing efforts to write a prose poem on “America: Roots and Edges,” I have admonished myself to abide by the following mantra: ““Remember the difference between a grinding obviousness, a repeating sameness on the one hand and a studied ordinariness on the other hand. The first dulls, the second can flash.”’ To use Dewey’s phrase, one has to be on the “qui vive,” a “live creature,” to tread this line with alacrity and caution. Over the last decade, there has occurred a revival of interest in my earlier writings on urban aesthetics, notably, as found in the work of Vincent Colapietro and Andrew Light. The focus here is the philosophi-

cal upshot of my distinctions between urban-time and nature-time and urban-space and nature-space. Hart comments on this material, but having been my student, he fashions a wider context for an urban aesthetic, indirectly taking into consideration the importance of abstract expressionism and the “sculpture” known as assemblage. The

importance of these mid-twentieth-century developments is to be found in a radical reconstruction of what constitutes aesthetic materials, as well as in a heightened sensibility to sheer relations, for example, in the paintings of Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. So, too, did that artistic direction cast a searing light on the too often “hidden life of artifacts.”” One thinks here of the haunting mock-ups of Edward Kienholz, signally rendered as a testament to the subtle “drama of the ordinary” as found in his “Beanery.” Hart is aware that my attending to instances of artworks, both celebrated and unsung, is aspectival to my central pedagogical mission, that of encouraging an aesthetic turn. Fundamentally, this turn has

to do with a personal and cultural epistemology that is irreducibly embodied. I note that both James and Dewey were students of physiology, a knowledge and an approach that stayed with them throughout their reflective lives. This fidelity to the physiological grounding

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in and for all of our experiencing is a mainstay of James’s Principles of Psychology and is the vertebral strand that courses through and sustains the continuity of Dewey's Art as Experience. Hart wisely sees my reflections on affectivity, the arts, the environment and the rhythms of the quotidian as all of a piece. This understanding by Hart becomes characteristic of his own writings, for example, on John Steinbeck. At the end of his essay, Hart proposes a series of questions pertaining to the melioristic possibilities extant in the development of an urban aesthetic, especially in a pedagogy. Obviously, I agree as to the

worth of such a focus, yet I wish to widen this approach to other settings as well. Soon after publishing my essays on cities, and encouraged by John Lachs, I moved to the “heartland” of central Texas.

The question remained the same, does the environment in which | find myself speak to me, affectively. In time, the response was affirmative, although that affect did not happen quickly or easily. I had to reconstitute my nodal points for messaging. I had to look in different places, hear different sounds, and open myself to a very different experience of space, time, and artifact. In the fall of 2001, I was privileged to be a guest on a 15,000-acre ranch in Wyoming, presided over by the last descendant of the century-old family holding. Certainly, the vastness of the terrain and the staggering extent of “owned” land was prominent. Nonetheless, what struck me were the implements,

the artifacts, the tools, the raincoats, the boots, and the shortwave radio. The primary resident and the helpers were bound to their horizontal vastness analogously to how urban dwellers are bound to their hierarchical vastness, tall buildings, with many stories, many stories, indeed. So too, on the ranch, I heard many stories. As Hart knows, an aesthetic turn means more, far more, than “just the fact.” Following

Emerson, “‘we learn nothing rightly until we learn the symbolical character of life.” Or, following the poet Hopkins, “their lives the dearest freshness deep down things.”

In the seventh paper presented, Paul Thompson holds that I am ethicist, malgre lui. Given his own originating understanding of ethics, he is right. I rarely use the term “ethics,” for it frequently involves

the imposing of proscriptions, prescriptions, and, in our century,

264 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY tends to be cast in the argumentative mode of point-counterpoint. This is not to deny my roots in Aristotle’s Ethics or that of the Stoics. Rather, I choose to use a language more consonant with the affective than with the cerebral. Thompson is in agreement with this distinction in the use of moral language. He finds the dominating characteristic of twentieth-century ethics to propose “arguments that justify individual action and social policy.” Against that tradition of “social control” is an approach that has a moral language turn within, seeking a transformation of our interior lives. He sees my work, not by denotation so much as by intention and description, as being of the latter cast.

By way of elucidating his response to the title of his essay, “What

Does It Mean to Have an Ethics?’’ Thompson suggests that I am thinking in the same morally interpretative vein as Foucault. At first, this claim was startling, for although I read Foucault carefully, I never built his work into my formulation. Following Thompson’s astute tutelage, however, the parallel is quite remarkable, even though the lan-

guage of articulation is quite different. Put starkly, Foucault was a master at diagnoses of “power” elites and patterns of ““domination” in both institutional and interpersonal settings. Second, he stresses the need for a “concern of self” and an ethics driven by “The Care of the Self.” Clearly, there are differences in cultural metaphors, stories, and philosophical origins, yet on both issues just cited, we find a parallel project. The question of power is phrased by me as the deleterious presence of secondhandedness in our personal transactions, be they in family, work, or in the full range of having to do with other persons. My version of care is also similar to that of Foucault. I have

written about care with an eye on the German word, Sorge, which means to care “for” and to care “about.” Both are necessary in any form of genuine caring. Further, my language for care of the self has echoes of the importance of physiology in any diagnosis of human attitude and activity. Thereby, for me, the moral question, pedagogically structured, is to enhance experiential nutrition and to avoid ways of life whose outcome is the systemic spreading of inanition.

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Perceptively, Thompson is aware of the moral import of pedagogy,

when it is seen as “the task of creating an environment, a place, in which the natural inquisitiveness of others will grow into an ecology of mutually supportive and enriching exploration and relation-building.” This is what we all must do. My long experience in all “levels of education,’ from early childhood to graduate teaching has convinced

me that we must “prepare an environment,” following the wisdom of Maria Montessori, so that pedagogy will be laced with eros, selfworth and social conscience. Having opened with a lamentation that my “ethics” does not appear on the radar screen of establishment philosophy, Thompson closes his essay by asking whether I could hook up my work so as to “rehabilitate and reconstruct the ties with logic and argument.” I, too, lament my comparative neglect in the professional establishment, which is a cause of some personal pain, although truthfully, not over my threshold. My response is in the form of a worry. Can I write about these matters, tell these stories, and implore others to find their own way and to tell their own stories in a mode that will satisfy the criteria of logic and argument? I am dubious. The reason that I choose the essay as my genre, rather than a full-length volume, is because I intend to point rather than to conclude. Actually, it is Thompson himself who could be up to this task, for he knows my sentiments and he is gifted in managing the philosophical discourse now extant. However that goes, the crucial issue here, following Dewey, is that “it is not sufficient to have an idea. A way must be found to communicate.” Other than offering, herein, an act of gratitude for the extraordinarily affectionate essay by Arthur Lothstein, I find it immodest to comment on his generosity with regard to my teaching. It should be noted that Lothstein is a brilliant teacher, a shepherd for many students, and, as is dramatically shown in this piece, “No Eros, No Buds:

Teaching as Nectaring,’ a person of capacious mind and of intense participation in the affairs of pedagogy. Still, there are several apercu of Lothstein’s that have a wider significance than that found in these remarks.

266 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY I have in mind here Lothstein’s belief that I help students to “dream beyond brownout.” This phrase is extremely incisive as to a subtle, yet pervasive, malady coursing through the lives of many stu-

dents. Blackouts get attention as does “acting out.” A brownout, however, seems to slip between the cracks of the pedagogical alert and

alarm system. By brownout, I think that he is referencing a disconnection between the student and whatever is on the plate as the subject, issue, or event of inquiry. The self-centered remark, now quite common, “What does that have to do with me?” is an indication of how frequently we can become trapped in an ever-narrowing vortex of our own making. Despite its subtlety, brownout over time results in equivalent relation-starvation, as do more egregious forms of selfcenteredness and self-indulgence.

In his evocative phrase, “helping students to dream beyond brownout,’ Lothstein alerts us to one delicate mission of pedagogy, namely, that every person has a need, a hankering, even a sequestered hunger for contact, for touch, for awareness of something now beyond their ken. It may be botanical, entomological, mathematical, astronomical or, mirabile dictu, philosophical. Try all of these doors among countless others and one will slowly open. When that takes place, our student will find a corridor that runs behind all of the other doors, able now to be opened from the inside. I do not intend here to suggest full-scale education programmatics. Rather, I have in mind carefully wrought asides, suggestions, stories, and leads given with backups aplenty. Just as the brownout is subtle, so too must the path be subtle. Whatever comes of one’s academic and scholarly reputation, now sure to be obsoleted posthaste, the pedagogy that enables persons, be they students, family, neighbors, or members of the wider community, to “dream beyond brownout” is to be cherished and celebrated, even if only locally. Lothstein’s second remark of importance is that I help students to realize that “they have a stake in the issues.” In order for this to take

place, a person has to accept that the “issues” confronting us as a human community, however irresolute, ultimately, nevertheless, cry out for healing, for assuagement, for transformation in the direction

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of “better.” Pedagogical honesty is a requirement, for a promise of halcyon days; permanent fixes and salvific nostrums are not the staples of meliorism. To effect a healing meliorism is not trite. For some of us, this is all we can ask of a troubled, divisive, and competitive human tapestry. You, yes you, have a stake in these issues and your participation is needed and salutary. Once a person begins to dream beyond brownout, the exigency of such participation becomes obvious and self-motivating. As few do, Lothstein grasps the urgency of these pedagogical desiderata, and there are many of us who embrace the view of Eugene Fontinell that “we need shared effort to realize convergent goals and values.” The ninth and last speaker at our conference was the distinguished international educator, John Ryder. The title of his paper, ““The Necessity of a Cultural Pedagogy,” reflects my long-standing commit-

ment to seeing the practice of education as a seamless garment, unfettered by levels, hierarchies, or any other forms of separation, competition, and neglect. As Ryder notes, although we come from different intellectual traditions, we are in fundamental agreement as to both diagnosis and reconstruction of contemporary American institutional processes and structures. In fact, because his explication of my writings on pedagogy and education is so clear and accurate, | have no reason to contend any of his statements. Of notice is that although his anecdotes pertaining to educational mishap are of a dif-

ferent cast than mine, he being an academic administrator, both forms of reportage have a similar ambience. I refer here to what seems to be an implacable tendency to value system needs over personal needs, and to the assessments of success and even worth to external, wooden, sheerly quantitative methods of evaluation. We are also in agreement that the ancient rubric of “common sense,” found, for example, throughout the writings of Aristotle, has virtually disappeared from judgments educational. We do have one issue that merits further discussion, namely, the mythopoetic power of the individual and individualism in American society. Echoing a criticism offered by Jacquelyn Kegley and discussed

above, Ryder writes as follows: “Put bluntly, the American cultural

268 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY environment, rooted as it is in the assumption of the atomic individual, may not be fertile ground for the experiential and cooperative pedagogy McDermott takes to be necessary for a healthy democracy.”

Obviously, if he is correct that our roots are in the assumption of individuals as “atomic,” then our situation is dire. I offer two responses, in brief. First, I think that the “atomic individual” is a “‘fallout’ from the American historical penchant for lionizing the lives of single persons precisely because of their idiosyncratic style, achievement, suffering, or innovativeness. These Bunyanesque figures cut an

enormous swath in the American psyche, no matter the origins of their “individualism,” be it the arts, entertainment, exploration, invention, or sports. One could say that for many Americans, our history is a series of vignettes, regaling tales of the famous over against the seeming vacancy of virtually all others. For many, the word “America” brings to mind the out-of-size presence of, to name but a few, Abraham Lincoln, Babe Ruth, Marilyn Monroe, Muhammad Ali, and Martin Luther King Jr. With others so designated, this mélange is brought together by a liturgy on behalf of the “extraordinarily sin-

gular person.” Fed by intense media focus and the mavens of commercial advertising, these figures, and others of similar fame, float above the madding crowd concomitant with efforts to reveal their clay feet. Yes, this is a phenomenon of American life, but it is a classic example of Whitehead’s insight on the “fallacy of misplaced concrete-

ness.” One does not have to be a revisionist historian, looking for historical shards of ordinary life in America, to know that these atomic individuals are not to be considered, in Emerson’s sense, “representative.” They exist more as a papier-maché construct than as revelatory of the heart and soul of American life. Second, and more difficult to express, is the struggle to maintain individual sensibility

and identity while ineluctably being rotated, railed, labeled, and “crowded” on the social matrix. I do not hold to any version of atomic individualism. The European tradition of the sociology of knowledge, initiated by Marx and adumbrated by Weber and Durkheim, cannot be obviated. Further, the corresponding development of American social thought, especially in the works of L. F. Ward,

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C. H. Cooley, G. H. Mead, and John Dewey convinces us that the notion of the individual, the self, is a social construct. Still, what of William James and his equivalently convincing limning of the single self, constructing more than constructed? The direction | take here is to assume that the social philosophy of Dewey has as its intention to create a society in which persons live and are treated as if they were Jamesian protean selves. I believe that it is incumbent upon us to demonstrate how an educational environment can be instantiated such that a pervading sense of my person as creative, as singular, can flourish. To that end, I have made specific curricular suggestions, and I am committed to the en-

twining of pedagogy from early childhood through the university. That most faculty are oblivious to both possibilities and problems in the “schools” strikes me as irresponsible. I find it pleasing that Ryder, a higher education administrator with extensive international experi-

ence, takes so seriously these very concerns, even resurrecting my long-ignored suggestions for a new primary school curriculum.

4

Despite my insecurity with regard to having provided even a minimum of responsive justice to the carefully wrought, intelligent, informed, and generous essays that grace this volume in my honor, | do rest secure that when I responded verbally at the conference, | offered an equivalent sense of justice to the quality of their work and person. The conference at Southern I/linois University was held in the heartland of America. It was followed in 2002 by a similar celebration at C. W. Post College of Long Island University. The format for that conference was a series of panel discussions on teaching, education, aesthetics, medicine, culture, and politics. The New York conference

was arranged and administered by David Sprintzen and featured a keynote replay of my Philosophy 10 course in aesthetics by my daughter and former student, Marise McDermott. To cover the proverbial

two coasts and a middle, a third conference was hosted by Patrick Burke at Seattle University. A noted participant was Patrick Hill,

270 EXPERIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY whose first day of high school was my first day of teaching, early January 1953. We have been personally and intellectually close from that day when I was his teacher to this day, more than fifty years later. It is of note that guests at these conferences included my two sons,

three daughters and stepdaughter, seven grandchildren, five siblings, and other family members. More than once, was it observed by longtime conference attendees that they had never witnessed family present, and certainly not representing ages from year one to year fifty. Of special delight was the toast for the banquet at Seattle University, given by my grandson, aged twenty-one, who said that I taught him the relationship between the deepest, most difficult times of both the personal and the intellectual life. He has come to realize that they are as one. Certainly, those who know me realize that nothing I write here has

the slightest move toward self-aggrandizement. Humility is the watchword for occasions such as these. Rather, I hope to make palpa-

ble that pedagogy is a delicate, profound, and mysterious form of reaching, of helping, even though most often it is unsung. Remarkably for me, my students of the distant past, of the very present, colleagues, friends, and those countless persons who have come my way,

have seen to it that for this one time, fifty years teaching, aged seventy, the unsung will sing, nay, it is a choir that sang. The genesis of my pedagogical journey has been chronicled on behalf of others, for mine is not unique. Still, it may be of interest to know that an urban, proletarian ethnic from a large, economically scarred family can wind up having taught philosophy, letters, history,

and matters cultural to more than twenty thousand students in classes of under fifty attendees. Along the way, too, giving hundreds of public lectures, here and abroad, most bequeathing unforgettable stories. Try the young man in the South Pacific kingdom of Tonga who, after my presentation in an ad-hoc program carried on uncomfortably in the “bush,” asked me to help him with his work on Peirce.

Or the students who write me from the penitentiary, thanking me for making sense and yet regretting that my message was rejected. Memorable also were the students in Budapest, whose intellectual

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hunger broke through their shabby surroundings and sent chills through me. I have as freshly memoried hundreds of these vignettes, anecdotes, and stories. No doubt, the capstone here is an event of the 1960s. The story is long and painful and I give here only its ending. A nineteen-year-old auditing student wrote to me from his hospital bed on the day he died. The letter came to me as written on a sheet of paper, intentionally from a yellow pad that is so favored by me. Quite simply, he wrote that “I am dying, and I know that you are afraid to die. So Iam doing this for you. If I can do it, so can you!” I retreat now to an apothegm that still reverberates in the hearings of my New York City childhood, genug, genug, enough, enough, already. On behalf of the spirit of that maxim, I invoke the wisdom of William James. At the conclusion of A Pluralistic Universe, the last of his works before he died in 1910, James wrote: “Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes, but ring the fuller minstrel in.” And who will be those minstrels? My students, your students, our students. To them | say what Martin Buber said to the student who accosted him as to the difficulty of living a reflective and healing life: “You are really able.” When young, I was told that I was “able.” In turn, I have said that to my children and to my students. No matter the intellectual disagreements and the ever-tightening noose of bureaucracy, teaching remains a hallowed calling. To teach is to help others move through the vestibule and into the feast. The generational continuum of teacher and student is an ennobling lifeline and perhaps, at times, a lifeboat on a fractured, contentious planet earth. The participants in these conferences, their peers elsewhere who have written letters of affection and appreciation, and, to be sure, the authors of the essays in this volume attest to that generational fidelity. To each of them, to all as an intentional community, I offer gratitude and say, “There is work to be done!”

Notes

a>) INTRODUCTION James Campbell and Richard E. Hart

1. William James, Some Problems of Philosophy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), 12, 18, 19. 2. John J. McDermott, The Culture of Experience: Philosophical Essays in the American Grain, 1976a; ed. The Philosophy of John Dewey, 1973a; ed. The Basic Writings of Josiah Royce, 1969a; Streams of Experience: Reflections on the

History and Philosophy of American Culture, 1986a; and ed. The Writings of William James: A Comprehensive Edition, 1967A