Pragmatism and Education

Pragmatism and Education Pragmatism and Education Daniel Tröhler Pestalozzianum Research Institute for the History of Education, University of App...
Author: Erik Carter
0 downloads 1 Views 389KB Size
Pragmatism and Education

Pragmatism and Education

Daniel Tröhler Pestalozzianum Research Institute for the History of Education, University of Applied Sciences Zürich: Teacher’s College, Switserland

Jürgen Oelkers Institute for Education, University of Zürich, Switserland

SENSE PUBLISHERS ROTTERDAM / TAIPEI

A C.I.P. record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN 90-77874-07-0

Published by: Sense Publishers, P.O. Box 21858, 3001 AW Rotterdam, The Netherlands

Printed on acid-free paper

All Rights Reserved © 2005 Sense Publishers

No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work.

Contents

Introduction: Pragmatism and Education in the International Discussion Daniel Tröhler / Jürgen Oelkers

1

The Hegelian Roots of Dewey’s Pragmatism James A. Good

11

William James’ Theory of Religion and Pluralistic World Meike Sophia Baader

27

Public Intercommunications. Dewey Reconstructs Errant Modernizations Hans-Peter Krüger

43

The Concepts of Activity and Effectiveness in Dewey’s Aesthetics Roswitha Lehmann-Rommel

53

Modern City, Social Justice and Education. Early Pragmatism as Exemplified by Jane Addams Daniel Tröhler

69

Jane Addams’ and Mary Parker Follett’s Applied Pragmatism. Social Management and Pedagogy Birgit Althans

95

George Herbert Mead and the Theory of Schooling Gert Biesta

117

Some Historical Notes on George Herbert Mead’s Theory of Education Jürgen Oelkers

133

Dewey And James in Germany – Missed Opportunities in German Pedagogy for Creative Encounter with American Pragmatism Philipp Gonon

157

The Perception of Dewey’s Pragmatism in Germany after 1945 Stefan Bittner

173

Dewey’s Optimism Philip W. Jackson

195

DANIEL TRÖHLER / JÜRGEN OELKERS

INTRODUCTION: PRAGMATISM AND EDUCATION IN THE INTERNATIONAL DISCUSSION

At the Third International Congress of Philosophy in Heidelberg in September 1908, pragmatism in general and William James’ theory of truth in particular came under extremely sharp criticism by the philosophers and philosophizing educationalists attending the congress (Elsenhans, 1909, pp. 711-740). Continental European philosophers made up the majority of attendees in Heidelberg, even though it was Josiah Royce who delivered the opening address. Together with Paul Carus, Royce (1855-1916) was the chief witness against pragmatism, for which in 1908 the philosophical contours had as yet only been sketched out in some programmatic writings. Nonetheless, almost all of the speakers at the Heidelberg congress distanced themselves from pragmatism passionately and vehemently. In disassociating themselves from pragmatism, they went as far as personal vilification in this public forum. The flat-out rejection of pragmatism had two consequences. For one, it allowed the philosophers to accentuate their own position in a seemingly concise manner. That position can be described – notwithstanding some differences in the details – as “idealist.” In Heidelberg, even the Marxists and anarchists presented their arguments based on German idealism, mainly on Kant and Hegel. Philosophical “truth” was not to be diluted or softened materialistically or pragmatically; its idealist core was to be maintained. With this, the priority of spirit over matter or thought over action was a given, the basic assumption being dualistic separation of these. Kant’s transcendental idealist Critique of Pure Reason was just as authoritative here as was Hegel’s philosophy of the objective spirit. The other consequence resulting from the disassociation from pragmatism was that pragmatism came to be ignored for decades, mainly in Germany and especially within educational philosophy. This meant the loss of an opportunity to examine an alternative to one’s own tradition, allowing for the contest among arguments to serve development of better theories. It was alone the only two speakers in Heidelberg representing pragmatism that took this opportunity into consideration. All of the other speakers held the idea of continuous self-correction of theory to be downright “unphilosophical.” Whereas the European social sciences relatively early on contributed to the development of the specifically American thinking, German philosophy took up initial impulses from pragmatism only in the last third of the twentieth century. Even here, however, German education has as a rule taken a rather defensive position up to today. Just prior to the Heidelberg congress, William James’ lectures on Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking had been published in German translation and had already created great unrest. The lectures were translated by the D. Tröhler, J. Oelkers (eds.), Pragmatism and Education, 01–09. © 2005 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved.

DANIEL TRÖHLER / JÜRGEN OELKERS

Viennese philosopher and educationalist Wilhelm Jerusalem, who had studied empirical psychology under Wilhelm Wundt in Leipzig and was a strong opponent of the neo-idealism in Austrian philosophy mainly inspired by Franz Brentano. Jerusalem was a participant at the Heidelberg congress, speaking on pragmatism certainly not uncritically, but still basically supporting the pragmatist view. The problem was how truth can be determined philosophically without any empirical study. When the English pragmatist Ferdinand Canning Scott Schiller stated at the congress that statements (Aussagen) did not from the start have to be absolutely true and that it was sufficient for them to be probable and to prove themselves in experience (Schiller, 1908/09, p. 739), it was a provocation of German philosophy in its hardly ever reflected but assumed fundaments. At the core of these fundaments we find the dualistically opposed, contingent so-called phenomenal world and the timeless and unchanging so-called noumenal world. Therefore, Schiller’s words amounted to more than an intellectual sideswipe; they were a frontal attack on the way that the Germans saw not only their philosophy but themselves. The self-understanding of the German philosophers was based on the one hand on a construction of an intellectual, or rather spiritual, history that extended from Luther and Herder to German idealism, and on the other hand on praise for Germany’s literary history, its epic poems and sagas (cf. Tröhler, 2004). Thus, the German national identity as it was understood by many intellectuals and philosophers around 1900 was based on pure, unadulterated intellectual products such as the Nibelungs, Luther’s translation of the Bible, Kant’s critical philosophy, and, especially, Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s (1762-1814) national pedagogy and assertion of the purity of the German language. This assumption can be found up to Heidegger’s philosophy of language. In other words, the national identity rested on transcendentality, historically unspoiled originality, and thus national superiority, at least in terms of culture and therefore not in terms of the empirical sciences. The interest of their American colleagues in German thought particularly after the Civil War did not go unnoticed by German philosophers, but they probably did not see that at the American universities of the nineteenth century German idealism became somewhat widespread primarily as a counter reaction to Scottish common sense realism and English empiricism and biologism (Feffer, 1993). In that context, Hegel’s idealism was used mainly as an intellectual weapon against materialist philosophy, that is, against biological and social determinism that leaves no place for free will. Herbert Spencer’s theory was a test case here. It was on the one hand anti-state (laissez-faire) and therefore politically liberal, but on the other hand it was evolutionary and based on sociobiological processes of power and selection. Hegel’s concept of “positive freedom” was utilized by some American authors in order to be able to bring together individual self-realization and organic community. The prerequisite for this was Hegel’s critique of the “abstract freedom” (negative freedom), which was understood as the opposite of the freedom to act and achieve something. Along these lines, William Torrey Harris 2

INTRODUCTION

(1871) distinguished between the abstract and the concrete, a pair of opposites that Dewey would still use in 1938. When in the secondary literature the significance of Hegel for the constitution of pragmatism is occasionally emphasized, especially with regard to John Dewey, it is for the most part overlooked that elements of Hegelian philosophy were utilized after the Civil War in order to have a way to reflect upon American democracy without having to use theological concepts. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, the “Metaphysical Club” of William James, Charles S. Peirce, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Chauncey Wright and others read Hegel critically, for the entire program of a non-scientific, “pure” philosophy was viewed with skepticism (Menand, 2001, p. 261ff.) One of the first to take the opposing view to pure philosophy was Charles Peirce, who had the idea to simply proceed from the learning of the natural sciences and to view all philosophical statements as hypotheses that have to be proven on the basis of experience by means of methods that had to be independent of the philosophy in which the hypotheses or assertions were generated. This idea is fundamental for today’s philosophy of science, which no longer claims for itself a superior position. It can comment on research, but it cannot lay claim to any pure “truth” independent of that research, as it could still do unchallenged in 1909. Taking recourse to German idealism did not pay off. Hegel had wanted to found a Prima Philosophia, or a science of pure thought based on the foundation that first principles, and thus abstract concepts, determine concrete experience. “Being” is inherently the opposite of “non-being,” just as “essence” is distinct from “seeming” and “reality” from “appearance.” But, says Peirce in one of his inimitable examples, it makes a difference whether I have a hundred-dollar bill in my pocket or not. The given case, and not the abstract concept, determines being or non-being. That which “is” and that which “is not” must exclude each other concretely (Peirce, 1984, p. 145); there can be no ultimate premise for being or non-being, because no one will ever experience it and thus know it (p. 177). The response in Germany to examples like this could be none other than categorical rejection, just as William James’ metaphor of “cash value” had to be rejected. James (1907) used “cash value” for purposes of evaluating the significance of proposed problem solutions; solutions are good only if they are of practical utility and associated with visible consequences: But if you follow the pragmatic method, you cannot look on any such word as closing your quest. You must bring out of each word its practical cashvalue, set it at work within the stream of your experience. It appears less as a solution, then, than as a program for more work, and more particularly as an indication of the ways in which existing realities may be changed. But if you follow the pragmatic method, you cannot look on any such word as closing your quest. You must bring out of each word its practical cash-value, set it at work within the stream of your experience. It appears less as a solution, then, than as a program for more work, and more particularly as an indication of the ways in which existing realities may be changed. (p. 21)

3

DANIEL TRÖHLER / JÜRGEN OELKERS

Examples and metaphors such as these by Peirce or James were quickly seized upon in Germany as an opportunity to discredit the creative provocation of this “new” thinking. For example, Konstatin Gutberlet (1908), philosopher and Catholic theologian and editor for many years of the Philosophisches Jahrbuch of the (Catholic-oriented) Görresgesellschaft [Görres Scientific Society], wrote the following in response to William James’ Pragmatism: We are confronted with a new fashion in philosophy, this time from across the ocean and the land of the dollar, the dollar which must be seen as the ideal of this philosophy. (p. 437; freely translated here) This maligning equating of money and philosophy, however, was but a first step that was soon followed by another: the American philosophy was deemed analogous with the utilitarianism of nineteenth century England. Gutberlet (1908) goes on to say that the American philosophy degraded truth to utility, just as a similar direction of thought in former times from the land of the petty-minded shopkeepers (Gutberlet referring here to England) had exported to German shores the belittling of morality to utility (p. 437). Accordingly, in Gutberlet’s wholesale judgment, Americans were slaves to material things, industry, and the dollar (p. 455). Passages such as these, and the dozens of others that could be mentioned, only poorly conceal the nationalism of German philosophy and German education theory. The resentment of many German scholars was not directed simply at pragmatism, but also at the “West” as a whole, meaning France, England, and the United States – at capitalism and especially democracy. For the self-understanding of the German thinkers, a philosophy that not only made democracy the subject of discussion (which was already sufficient to cause displeasure), but instead made democracy the fundamental assumption, had completely departed the field of arguments. It upset altogether the German identity, which wanted to rely, so to speak, on idealism. In 1909, the intellectual field in Germany was dominated by anti-West cultural critique, the roots of which reached back into the nineteenth century and which permitted only few alternatives (Oelkers, 2005, pp. 76-92). The German philosophical identity was grounded first in the opposition between “outward” and “inward.” This postulate sets in dualistic contrast an outward, diverse, perceivable, and transitory world and an inward, in itself identical, geistig, and eternal world. Second, it was assumed that the inward world of Geist was the more important; the outward world could only have a supporting character. For this reason it is not surprising that the demand for usefulness was made out to be “ungeistig.” Geist was man’s true medium, and all efforts of education, which was conceived of as Bildung, had to be directed to Geist. An examination of the development of the concept of Bildung yields a paradigmatic illustration of the direction of German thinking since 1750 (Horlacher, 2004). Along this philosophical path of Geist and Bildung, dualisms were generated that had a lasting impact and are perceptible up to today. These dualisms were used at the end of the nineteenth century to create a contrast between Germany and the Western world. The following distinctions, for example, served this purpose: 4

INTRODUCTION

- Culture versus Civilization - Community versus Society - True freedom versus the banal right to vote - Geist versus Erfahrung - Unity versus Plurality - Inward versus Outward - Bildung versus Knowledge It is not surprising, therefore, to find Werner Sombart, a German sociologist and national economist, describing in 1915 the First World War as a war between the commercial and the heroic ethos (Sombart, 1915, p. 5) – with the West having the soul of the petty-minded shopkeeper and Germans having the soul of the warrior. What is most remarkable is that even though Germany was the leading economic power in Europe at the time of the First World War, only the states to the West were reproached with materialism. This discrepancy between real economic prosperity and the prevailing ideology was not, however, due to a lack of knowledge about Germany’s national economic potency. Instead, the contradiction was consciously nullified by another dualism: inward purity and outward corruption. This shows up clearly in the work of Rudolf Eucken, New Idealist philosopher of life (Lebensphilosophie) and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Eucken (1914) acknowledges that Germany – like France, England, or America – had experienced tremendous economic growth in the nineteenth century, but he writes that the crucial difference, however, was that in Germany this development did not corrupt the true character of the German people: Did we then fall away from our own selves when we turned to the visible world, when we developed our forces on land and water, when we took the lead in industry and technology? Have we thus denied our true, inner nature? No, and once again no! (p. 8) That true nature, which according to Eucken differentiates the Germans from all of the other nations, is an inner spiritual life (geistiges Leben). Following Eucken (1914) that inner life was originally religious, and through the course of history it came to characterize the whole of German life and supreme thought (p. 12 f.). The inward purity, Geist, and Bildung were being correlated within a seemingly apolitical context; in fact, however, what was being tacitly defended was the German Empire (see Tröhler, 2003). On March 14, 1915, a young philosopher of education, Eduard Spranger, wrote a letter to Georg Kerschensteiner, who was a well-known reform educator who had visited Dewey in New York in November of 1910 and had shown interest in Dewey’s concepts of education at the laboratory school in Chicago. Kerschensteiner had even offered to translate Dewey’s How We Think into German – a plan that never reached fruition, however. In his letter to

5

DANIEL TRÖHLER / JÜRGEN OELKERS

Kerschensteiner, Spranger quite accurately calls Kerschensteiner “Pestalozzi’s true heir” and continues: … that being so, I would like to see you disavow and distance yourself from the pragmatist Dewey. The economical and technical are not able to fill up the latitude that is foreseen in German education. The German idea of the state and the German idea of science are much richer than people over there [the Americans] will ever understand. (Spranger, 1915, cited in Englert, 1966, p. 30, freely translated here) In a return letter, Kerschensteiner hastens to reassure Spranger by emphasizing that even reading William James’ some years before had left no impact on him. However, Kerschensteiner writes that he is indebted to Dewey for increased clarity, but only in those areas that he himself had been interested in for years: “I think I’m not a good student; I just learn what I’m driven to learn in any case” (Kerschensteiner, cited in Englert, 1966, p. 34). In a second letter to Kerschensteiner a few days later, Spranger appears to be satisfied. He considers some similarities between Dewey and Kerschensteiner on questions concerning Lebenstotalität (totality of real life), but pronounces Kerschensteiner to be well above Dewey’s “kitchen and crafts utilitarianism” (p. 36). At this same time, John Dewey was working on an extensive critique of American education theory’s references to German philosophy, stating that education theory must become independent of the “educational teaching” of the Herbartians, but also of Pestalozzi’s “parlor education,” and Froebels’ romantic philosophy of the “kindergarten” and “Menschenbildung.” In all three of those approaches, writes Dewey, democracy was not a subject for discussion, whereas the innovation of education theory must start out from precisely that basis (Oelkers 2005a). Recourse to English utilitarianism was out of the question here; Dewey’s idea of usefulness never referred to the value of man, but to methods of problemsolving. It was not only in Germany that nationalism predominated in people’s thinking around and following 1900, and criticism of pragmatism was formulated not only by German nationalists (we think, for example, of Émile Durkheim; see Durkheim, 1913-1914/1955). There were also critics of pragmatism in the United States, such as Royce (Royce, 1912) or Arthur O. Lovejoy (Lovejoy, 1963). Moreover, around this time Dewey found some positive reception in the Netherlands (Biesta and Miedema, 2000) and especially in Geneva (Tröhler, 2005). It is almost an ironic aperçu that the Second International Congress of Philosophy – that is, the congress preceding the Heidelberg congress – had been organized in 1904 in Geneva by the two Genevan propagators of pragmatism, namely Théodore Flournoy and Edouard Claparède, and that neither one of them attended the Heidelberg congress of 1908. Flournoy remarked in a letter to William James of 20 September 1908: I have had news of the Congress at Heidelberg only through [Lorenzo M.] Billia, the philosopher from Turin, who passed through Geneva … He found the Congress very tedious, much too German and not international. (Flournoy, 1908, cited in Le Clair 1966, p. 202) 6

INTRODUCTION

Under the sign of the increasing internationalization of educational discussion within the last ten to twenty years, in which not coincidentally researchers in smaller European countries have been more active, a conference was organized in Zurich in 2003 by the Pestalozzianum Research Institute for the History of Education and the Educational Institute of the University of Zurich. The conference topic was the relation between pragmatism and education theory. With a delay of 100 years, so to speak, the aim of the conference was to discuss how the German theory discussion could profit from thinking about pragmatism, or in other words, what the “cash value” of international theory discussion would be. A hundred years’ delay, however, points not only to a deficit, for since the linguistic turn, reception research as well as discussion within historiography has after all produced important insights that we did not have 100 years ago and that stand in critical opposition to traditional assumptions of linear impacts of ideas. Even though German educational thinking up to the present shows massive deficits with regard to acceptance of democracy as a fundamental category, the aim at the Zurich conference was not to become recipients of missionary messages about democracy, so to speak, for pragmatism 100 years ago was indeed partly shaped by Reformed (Calvinist) visions of salvation (Tröhler, 2005a). The conference goal was to discuss outstanding problems of education precisely in connection with democracy (Oelkers, 2000). Steven C. Rockefeller (1991) produced what is an impressive biography of John Dewey, but it is prefixed by an intention of which we take a critical view: This task is undertaken in the convictions that the greatest relevance of Dewey’s philosophy to the dilemmas of contemporary American society and the merging global community is to be found just here in the way he endeavored to address the intellectual, social, and religious problems of the age by holding them together and thinking them through together. (p. 5) As it is described in the preface to Rockefeller’s study, the current relevance of Dewey is not restricted to Americans, but it is also said – and in a rather missionary manner as well, and thus in a manner that is really not unproblematic, as we should realize today – to hold “for all those throughout the world today who love freedom and seek to pursue the democratic way of life” (Rockefeller, 1991, p. ix). In contrast, the goal of the conference was to remove pedagogical motives from educational thinking, that is, to adapt educational thinking to the standards of international academic discussion in the humanities and the social sciences. If pragmatism was correct in its basic ideas, namely, that learning is problemsolving and that resolved problems in turn always create new problems that must be solved, then it follows that solution proposals that were drafted around 1900 in the context of the urbanization of the cities of America cannot simply be applied one hundred years later to the whole world. The idea of the conference was, one hundred years later, to make up for the missed opportunities for international discussion, at the same time considering the new substantive and methodological findings produced in the twentieth century. We did not expect to achieve 7

DANIEL TRÖHLER / JÜRGEN OELKERS

completeness in addressing this topic, and the fact that this volume contains no contribution on Charles Sanders Peirce, whose work in fact needs to be examined in relation to education, shows that the work is not yet comprehensive. The contributions to this volume start out from selected examples, concrete cases, and concrete problem connections in order to discuss, from today’s perspective, what theory opportunities arise from the positions of pragmatism. The contributions in this volume appear in a kind of chronological order. First, James A. Good examines the repeatedly asserted Hegelian roots of Dewey’s philosophy, while Hans-Peter Krüger, Meike Sophia Baader, and Roswitha Lehmann-Rommel address specific aspects of pragmatism, such as public communication, religion, and aesthetics, with the main emphasis of the analysis on William James and John Dewey. Jane Addams’ and George Herbert Mead’s education stands at the center of interest in the contributions by Daniel Tröhler, Birgit Althans, Gert Biesta, and Jürgen Oelkers, while Philipp Gonon and Stefan Bittner turn to the question of why pragmatism had such a hard time of gaining a foothold in Germany. The final contribution, Philip W. Jackson’s systematic analysis of Dewey’s thought, breaks with the chronological perspective of the volume, shifting the focus to other central and fruitful issues. The holding of international conferences has become quite common, but if a conference has been held in a non-English-speaking country, it is as a rule difficult to then make the discussions available to an international readership. We have experienced these difficulties firsthand, and we would like to extend our thanks for support from the United States, most especially to James A. Good and Philip W. Jackson. We owe special thanks to Thomas S. Popkewitz, who referred us to Sense Publishers, and to the founder and owner of Sense Publishers, Peter de Liefde, who kindly took us on. We also thank Michael Geiss, who handled the difficulties of the layout of the texts with impressive ease. Great thanks are due to Ellen Russon, who translated a few of the original contributions in German, but mainly provided highly professional assistance with the great deal of editorial work that preparing diverse contributions for a conference volume entails, so that we now look forward with pleasure to the response that we hope our volume will receive. REFERENCES Biesta, G. J. J., & Miedema, S. (2000). Context and interaction. How to assess Dewey’s influence on educational reform in Europe? In J. Oelkers & H. Rhyn (Guest Eds.), Dewey and European education. General problems and case studies. Studies in philosophy and education, 19(1), 21-37. Durkheim, E. (1955). Pragmatisme et sociologie (1913/1914). Cours inédit prononcé à la Sorbonne en 1913-1914 et restitué d’aprés des notes d’étudiants par Armand Cuvillier. Paris: Libraire philosophique J. Vrin. Elsenhans, T. (1909). Bericht über den III. Internationalen Kongress für Philosophie zu Heidelberg, 1. bis 5. September 1908. Heidelberg: Carl W. Winter’s Universitätsbuchhandlung. Englert, L. (1966). Georg Kerschensteiner – Eduard Spranger. Briefwechsel 1912-1931. München: Oldenbourg. Eucken, R. (1914). Die weltgeschichtliche Bedeutung des deutschen Geistes. Stuttgart/Berlin: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt. Feffer, A. (1993). The Chicago pragmatists and American progressivism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

8

INTRODUCTION Gutberlet, K. (1908). Der Pragmatismus. Philosophisches Jahrbuch, 21, 437-458. Harris, W. T. (1871). The concrete and the abstract. Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 5, 1-5. Horlacher, R. (2004). Bildungstheorie vor der Bildungstheorie. Die Shaftesbury-Rezeption in Deutschland und in der Schweiz im18.Jahrhundert. Würzburg: Königshausen&Neumann. James, W. (1907). Lecture 2: What pragmatism means (pp. 17-32). In W. James, Pragmatism: A new name for some old ways of thinking. New York: Longman Green and Co. Le Clair, R. C. (1966). The Letters of William James and Théodore Flounory. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press. Lovejoy, A. O. (1963). The thirteen pragmatisms and other essays. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press. Menand, L. (2001). The metaphysical club. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Oelkers, J. (2000). Democracy and education. About the future of a problem. In J. Oelkers & H. Rhyn (Guest Eds.), Dewey and European education. General problems and case studies. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 19(1), 3-19. Oelkers, J. (2005). Reformpädagogik. Eine kritische Dogmengeschichte (4th rev. ed.). Weinheim/München: Juventa Verlag. Oelkers, J. (2005a). The conceptualization of democracy and education. In D. T. Hansen (Ed.), John Dewey and our educational prospect: A critical engagement with democracy and education. Albany, NY: The State University of New York Press. [in print] Peirce, C. S. (1984). Writings of Charles S. Peirce. A chronological edition. Vol. 2.: 1867-1871 (E. C. Moore, Ed.). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Rockefeller, S. C. (1991). John Dewey: Religious faith and democratic humanism. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Royce, J. (1912). The sources of religious insight. Lectures delivered before Lake Forest College on the foundation of the late William Bross. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark. Schiller, F. C. S. (1909). Schlusswort [der Debatte über den Pragmatismus bzw. dessen Wahrheitsbegriff]. In T. Elsenhans (Ed.), Bericht über den III. Internationalen Kongress für Philosophie zu Heidelberg, 1.-5. September 1908. Heidelberg: Carl W. Winter’s Universitätsbuchhandlung. Sombart, W. (1915). Händler und Helden: Patriotische Besinnungen. München/Leipzig: Duncker und Humblot. Tröhler D. (2003). The discourse of German Geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik – A contextual reconstruction. Paedagogica Historica. International Journal of the History of Education, 39(6), 759-778. Tröhler, D. (2004). Politische Moral und deutsche Pädagogik. Die geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik und ihre Sprache. MS Zürich. Tröhler, D. (2005). Langue as homeland: The Genevan Reception of Pragmatism. In T. S. Popkewitz (Ed.), Dewey as an indigenous foreigner: Pragmatism, the modern self and education. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. [in print] Tröhler, D. (2006). The ‘kingdom of God on earth’ and early Chicago pragmatism. Educational Theory, 56. [in print]

Daniel Tröhler Pestalozzianum Research Institute for the History of Education University of Applied Sciences Zurich: Teacher’s College Jürgen Oelkers Institute for Education University of Zurich

9

JAMES A. GOOD

THE HEGELIAN ROOTS OF DEWEY’S PRAGMATISM1

The traditional view of Dewey’s philosophical development dates back to Morton White’s The Origins of Dewey’s Instrumentalism, published in 1943. According to White, Dewey embraced British neo-Hegelianism as a neophyte philosopher, but during the 1890s he began to criticize neo-Hegelianism and gradually overcame his need for transcendent realities. Dewey heroically liberated himself from his Absolutist chains and proclaimed to the world his newfound philosophical freedom in the Studies in Logical Theory in 1903.2 For years, subsequent studies debated the precise timing of Dewey’s development during the 1890s, but accepted the Studies in Logical Theory as his declaration of independence (Coughlan, 1973; Dykhuizen, 1973; Westbrook, 1991; Rockefeller, 1991). Perhaps few Dewey scholars still read the Studies in Logical Theory; when I first read it several years ago I was astonished to discover that Hegel was never mentioned in the book.3 Despite James’s oft-quoted praise of the book, it is significant that Peirce, who complained that the book was a Phänomenologie of thought, failed to see it as a clean break from Hegel (Peirce, p. 8:180).4 Perhaps one reason White located Dewey’s break from Hegel in 1903 can be found in his autobiography. The Origins of Dewey’s Instrumentalism was White’s Ph.D. dissertation at Columbia University, which he defended in the spring of 1942. White (1999) explains: I followed Dewey’s development only up to 1903…because I had written enough in my discussion of these early years for a coherent book that could earn the Ph.D. And since I had to publish my thesis according to the rules then existing at Columbia—and might have had to publish it at my own expense—there was a premium on keeping it short. (p. 32) Regardless of why the traditional view was initially articulated, the issue of Dewey’s debt to Hegel continues to beleaguer Dewey scholars partly because, in 1930, he acknowledged “that…Hegel ha[d] left a permanent deposit in [his] thinking” (Dewey, 1981-99, p. 5:154). But Dewey’s vagueness about the content of that deposit has puzzled scholars ever since. In recent years, John Shook and I have countered the traditional interpretation of Dewey’s intellectual development by arguing that he broke from British neo-Hegelianism by 1894, but he did not abandon Hegel at that time (Shook, 2000; Good, in press). In this paper I do not attempt to excavate Dewey’s Hegelian deposit, but to show that the traditional view, conceived at the height of World War II, has outlived its usefulness. The original purpose of the traditional view, I believe, was to demonstrate that Dewey, the philosopher of American democracy, had presciently recognized the allegedly inherent authoritarianism of Hegelian philosophy well before World War I. D. Tröhler, J. Oelkers (eds.), Pragmatism and Education, 11–26. © 2005 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved.

JAMES A. GOOD

THE AMERICAN HEGELIAN TRADITION

During the early years of his philosophical development, Dewey was immersed in an American Hegelian tradition that Dewey scholars have misunderstood. The story of the American Hegelian tradition is punctuated by war. The American Civil War (1861-5) and the series of European wars that culminated in German unification (1864-70) stimulated the growth of a budding American interest in German culture. During the period between the end of the Civil War and the outbreak of World War I in Europe in 1914, the vast majority of American intellectuals viewed Germany as one of the most advanced nations in the world and German idealism as a politically liberal philosophy. The American perception of German culture was abruptly reversed during World War I, however, as many intellectuals argued that German idealism, particularly the philosophy of Hegel, was inherently militaristic and authoritarian. Some World War I attacks on Hegel were republished during the Second World War, and new ones appeared as well. 5 Our post World War II perception of Hegel has clouded our understanding of the way Americans perceived German thought and culture during the nineteenth century. Early in the nineteenth century, prominent American educators travelled to Germany to observe the educational system and a few Americans studied there (Walz, 1936, pp. 8-19).6 After the Civil War, the trickle of American intellectuals who travelled to Germany became a torrent, partly because of the unification of the German states, which was completed in 1870. Americans viewed unification as a liberal advance that paralleled the unification of the United States during and after the Civil War.7 Moreover, the fact that German-Americans who fought in the Civil War overwhelmingly chose to fight for the abolition of slavery associated Germaness with the advance of liberal politics in the minds of American intellectuals. At this time, many prominent Americans viewed Germany as the nation the United States should emulate.8 Perhaps the most significant German contributions to American education were theoretical. American educators studied the writings of Pestalozzi and Froebel, both of whom advocated love and respect for the individuality of the child (Headly, Toth, Günther). Higher education in America was dramatically transformed by the German concepts of akademische Freiheit, or academic freedom, Lehrfreiheit, or the freedom of professors to teach “what they believed to be the truth” without fear of dismissal, and Lernfreiheit, the freedom of students to choose the academic courses they took (Walz, 1936, p. 51; Hofstadter and Metzger, 1955, pp. 383-407). Because of its emphasis on respect for the individual and these freedoms, American intellectuals viewed German educational thought as a liberalizing influence on American universities. It is well known that the central motif in Hegel’s philosophy is his concept of freedom, and during the late nineteenth-century, American intellectuals generally viewed Hegel’s philosophy as politically liberal.9 This is apparent in the writings of the St. Louis Hegelians, a philosophical group that began to form before the Civil War and that coalesced after the War. The primary leader of the group was William Torrey Harris, a Connecticut Yankee who rose to prominence as a local 12

THE HEGELIAN ROOTS OF DEWEY’S PRAGMATISM

public educator (Leidecker, 1946). Harris served as editor of the Journal of Speculative Philosophy (JSP) from 1867 to 1893, Superintendent of the St. Louis Public Schools from 1868 to 1880, and United States Commissioner of Education from 1889 to 1906. During Harris’s superintendence, the St. Louis public school system received international recognition for its progressive approach to education (McIntyre). Although it is often noted that Harris and his peers in St. Louis were close students of Hegel’s logic, in fact they studied all of Hegel’s work and were particularly interested in the Phenomenology of Spirit and the Philosophical Propaedeutic.10 Some scholars have also incorrectly labelled the St. Louis Hegelians as right-wing Hegelians, but their reading of Hegel is more comparable to the German Hegelian center—Eduard Gans, Karl Ludwig Michelet, Karl Rosenkranz, and Johannes Schulz. The Center Hegelians were pupils of Hegel, or “Old Hegelians,” who opposed Prussian conservatism as well as the revolutionary thought of the “Young Hegelians” (Toews, pp. 71-154, 203-42). Michelet and Rosenkranz were auxiliary members of the St. Louis Philosophical Society, and, according to Arnold Ruge, Rosenkranz was “the most liberal of all the Old Hegelians” (Löwith, p. 54). The St. Louis Hegelians corresponded with Rosenkranz and were particularly influenced by his 1844 biography of Hegel. In that work, Rosenkranz drew upon Hegel’s short political essays to depict him as a lifelong advocate of the ideals of the French Revolution.11 During their nation’s sectional crisis, the St. Louis Hegelians were attracted to Hegel’s thought as a philosophy of cultural and national unification. Napoleon’s invasions of Germany forced the post-Kantian idealists to grapple with the unification of individual and societal interests; the Civil War raised the same issues for the St. Louis Hegelians as they drew explicitly upon Hegel’s political philosophy (Harris, H.S., 1972; Ripalda, 1977; Kelly, 1987; Dickey, 1987). Hegel’s criticisms of radical French revolutionaries provided them with the conceptual tools to argue that radical American abolitionists like John Brown suffered from a deficient understanding of their relationship to society. Hegel’s criticisms were motivated by the Reign of Terror which, he argued, arose because revolutionaries believed they followed a morality that transcended their society and that gave them license to summarily execute their opponents. Hegel criticized Kant in the same way, arguing that the notion of an absolute duty to the categorical imperative disregards our desires and the concrete social limitations in which we must act. More seriously, Hegel warned that absolute devotion to an abstract ideal would lead to fanaticism and a disregard for the consequences of our actions (Kelly, 1969, pp. 301-6). Moreover, Hegel criticized radical French revolutionaries because they embraced a negative or abstract theory of freedom, the notion that man is free and equal in the absence of social restraints. Similarly, the St. Louis Hegelians argued that this one-sided perception of freedom led the radical abolitionists to mistakenly conclude that the eradication of the institution of slavery alone, without more profound reform of society, would fully emancipate American slaves. Hegel’s analysis of the Reign of Terror convinced the St. Louis Hegelians that negative freedom would inevitably lead to the indiscriminate destruction of 13

JAMES A. GOOD

social, religious, and political institutions as the way to protect transcendent rights. As institutions were destroyed in the Terror, Hegel argued, restraints upon individuals were diminished, resulting in an accelerating frenzy of annihilation. In the same way, the St. Louis Hegelians feared that negative freedom would inevitably lead to “some sudden eruption…of madness and fury” (Harris, 1898, p. 287).12 The St. Louis Hegelians were also influenced by Hegel’s theory of learning, which used the Bildung model of education to promote cultural, rather than national, unity.13 Hegel was critical of the Enlightenment’s fixation on a narrow conception of knowledge, arguing that Bildung requires self-knowledge, an accurate perception of one’s talents and abilities. Hegel’s concept of Bildung entails that knowledge is gained only from experience and from the widest variety of experience. Furthermore, on the Bildung model, learning involves activity. Hence Hegel rejected Locke’s passive spectator theory of the mind, according to which we should restrain our passions in order to gain objective knowledge. For Hegel, learning involves a passionate search for truth. Hegel’s notion of Bildung emphasized Selbsttätigkeit, self-activity, self-development, and self-direction. For Hegel, true education was a matter of conscious self-development that required arduous individual effort and responsibility (Bruford, 1975; Reid, 2000; Schmidt, 1981; Smith, J.H., 1988; Zammito, 2002, pp. 15-41). Yet Hegel was also critical of the “beautiful soul”, the person who is so consumed with their own salvation that they have no adequate sense of the suffering in the world and are unwilling to act to counter it for fear that they will corrupt their own soul. For Hegel, fulfilment must come in the activities of real life.14 I have argued elsewhere that the St. Louis Hegelians’ influence on Dewey was significant (DeArmey and Good, 2001; Good, 2000, 2002). Dewey published his first article in the JSP and was encouraged by Harris to pursue a career in philosophy; Dewey corresponded with Harris until Harris’s death in 1909. Moreover, because for the first fifteen years of its existence the JSP was the only serious philosophical journal in the English language, all of the philosophers with whom Dewey studied were well aware of the St. Louis Hegelians’ interpretation of Hegel as a politically liberal philosopher. Finally, Dewey associated with Harris and other St. Louis Hegelians at Thomas Davidson’s Glenmore Summer School of the Culture Sciences throughout the 1890s.15 Among other things, this American Center Hegelian tradition encouraged Dewey to see Hegel as politically liberal, to embrace his view of the individual’s relationship to society, and to develop a theory of learning similar to Hegel’s. DEWEY AND HEGEL

As a graduate student at Johns Hopkins from 1882 to 1884, Dewey embraced Hegelianism under the tutelage of George Sylvester Morris, a frequent contributor to the JSP and a friend of Harris’s. To be sure, during these years Dewey was a close student of the British neo-Hegelians, especially T.H. Green, but as early as 1886 he distinguished his thought from theirs in “The Psychological Standpoint” 14

THE HEGELIAN ROOTS OF DEWEY’S PRAGMATISM

and “Psychology as Philosophic Method” (Dewey, 1967-72, pp. 1:123-43; 1:14467; 1:168-75). According to Dewey, the neo-Hegelians erred in the same way as Kant because they attempted to explain experience by introducing elements that went beyond possible experience when they posited a transcendent absolute self.16 In 1892 Dewey elaborated on this critique in “Green’s Theory of the Moral Motive.” First, Dewey explained, Green erected a sharp dualism between the ends that would satisfy the finite, individual self, and those that would satisfy the infinite, universal self. The ideal self was the goal of the moral life, but it was ultimately unattainable for the particular self. Second, Dewey argued that ethical theories based upon standards of moral perfection were impractical because they remain “the bare thought of an ideal of perfection, having nothing in common with the special set of conditions or with the special desire of the moment” (Dewey, 1967-72, p. 3:163). Here Dewey is restating Hegel’s critique of Kant’s categorical imperative. Dewey referred to Green as a neo-Kantian because he transformed Hegel's immanent absolute into a transcendent absolute for the same reason that Kant postulated a noumenal realm and the categorical imperative. To say the least, it is odd to claim that this Hegelian critique of Green’s moral theory signals that Dewey was progressing toward a definitive break with Hegel. In my dissertation I have argued that Dewey was developing a non-metaphysical reading of Hegel, similar to that espoused in recent years by Klaus Hartmann and the numerous Hegel scholars he has influenced (Hartmann, 1972; Engelhardt and Pinkard, 1994, pp. 225-229).17 Unfortunately, this shift this been difficult to discern partly because Dewey articulated it most clearly in a 104-page 1897 lecture that remains unpublished. We get a sense of this shift near the beginning of that lecture in a passage that calls to mind Hegel’s infamous claim, “What is rational is actual; and what is actual is rational” (Hegel, 1991, p. 20; cf. Hegel, 1969, p. 546). According to Dewey (1897): Hegel was a great actualist. By this I mean that he has the greatest respect, both in his thought and in his practice, for what has actually amounted to something, actually succeeded in getting outward form….Hegel is never more hard in his speech, hard as steel is hard, than when dealing with mere ideals[,] vain opinions and sentiments which have not succeeded in connecting themselves with the actual world. (p. 6) By this point in his philosophical development, Dewey had come to understand Hegel’s dictum, not as an admonition to passively accept the actual, the status quo, because it is rational, but as a critique of ethical theories that provide only abstract rules, empty ideals, as guides to action. Truly rational moral principles have actual effects in the world, and the rational does not transcend the world in any way. This understanding of Hegel’s maxim was common among American Hegelians. In Lectures on Modern Idealism, Royce wrote that “for Hegel, thought is inseparable from will, [and] logic exists only as the logic of life…” Royce also stated that the dialectic possessed, “for Hegel pragmatic significance…illustrating the way in which men live as well as the way in which men must think” (Royce, 1964, p. 145).18 15

JAMES A. GOOD

Dewey’s lecture also contains a brief intellectual biography of Hegel that characterizes him as a politically liberal philosopher. At this time only two fulllength biographies of Hegel had been published. The first was that of Rosenkranz, which I have already mentioned, and the second was Rudolf Haym’s (1857) biography of Hegel, Hegel und seine Zeit.19 To a large degree, Haym’s biography instigated the characterization of Hegel as the philosopher of the Prussian state. Hence, it is significant that at this time Dewey preferred Rosenkranz’s interpretation of Hegel to Haym’s. There is other evidence in the lecture that Dewey agreed with Rosenkranz. Although Dewey characterized Hegel’s theory of the state as artificial, he explicitly rejected the notion that Hegel was an apologist for Prussian authoritarianism. According to Hegel, Dewey asserted, the central task of the modern state was the preservation of individual rights (Dewey, 1897, pp. 8498). Of Hegel’s philosophy of history, Dewey flatly asserted that it “is absurd” to claim Hegel forced the particular events of history into an a priori scheme (Dewey, 1897, p. 86). As late as 1904, Dewey argued that Hegel had opposed the formalism of Kant’s characterization of moral reason by grounding morality in “an ethical world (as real as the physical) from which the individual must take his cue...” (Dewey, 197683, pp. 3:55-56). And although Dewey associated himself with the newly forming pragmatist camp in 1905, in that same year he also acknowledged a continuing debt to Hegel in his Presidential Address to the American Philosophical Association (Dewey, 1976-83, p. 3:154). In that address, Dewey complained about the “purely Anglo-American habit” of “interpreting Hegel as a Neo-Kantian, a Kantian enlarged and purified.” Unlike Kant, Dewey argued, Hegel emphasized “life in its own developing movement” over logic (Dewey, 1976-83, p. 3:86). In “Intelligence and Morals” (1908), Dewey rejected the notion that Hegel’s identification of the real with the rational glorified the conservative Prussian state. According to Dewey (1976-83), Hegel’s dictum gave the pleasant appearance (which Hegel did not strenuously discourage) of being specifically an idealization of the Prussian nation, and incidentally a systematized apologetic for the universe at large. But in intellectual and practical effect, it lifted the idea of process above that of fixed origins and fixed ends, and presented the social and moral order, as well as the intellectual, as a scene of becoming, and it located reason somewhere within the struggles of life. (p. 4:43) Dewey’s opinion of Hegel changed abruptly during World War I, however. While it is true that the direct influence of Hegel’s philosophy on Dewey, and on the English-speaking world more generally, had gradually declined before World War I, Bruce Kuklick (1984) correctly notes that “the anti-idealist movement might have been a dubious challenge to Hegel’s place in Modern Philosophy were it not for the war…. After the war Hegel became, for Americans, a silly, pompous, and defeated figure, unworthy of the great tradition” (p. 133). Thus, as Americans deliberated about whether the United States should enter World War I, Dewey

16

THE HEGELIAN ROOTS OF DEWEY’S PRAGMATISM

prepared his first published criticism of Hegel, German Philosophy and Politics (GPP). Dewey’s GPP contributed to the defeat of Hegel of which Kuklick speaks. Dewey’s primary goal in GPP was to reveal the cultural/philosophical roots of German militarism.20 The book’s main target is Kantian dualism or what Dewey called Kant’s “two worlds” thesis. Though it may seem odd that Dewey focused on the advocate of “perpetual peace,” much like Hegel, throughout his career Dewey criticized Kant more than any other philosopher. Dewey proclaimed that Kant’s doctrine of “the two realms, one outer, physical and necessary, the other inner, ideal and free” is the element of German philosophy that has defined German national character. The German people were not, Dewey added, consciously devoted to Kantian philosophy, rather “Kant detected and formulated the direction in which the German genius was moving, so that his philosophy is of immense prophetic significance” (Dewey, 1976-83, p. 8:152; cf. p. 12:136). In this regard, GPP is Hegelian intellectual history. Dewey’s claim was that Kant had understood and was a vehicle for the German Zeitgeist. In a summary of his objections to Kant, Dewey (1976-83) wrote: Kant’s decisive contribution [to German philosophy] is the idea of a dual legislation of reason by which are marked off two distinct realms—that of science and that of morals. Each of these two realms has its own final and authoritative constitution: On one hand, there is the world of sense, the world of phenomena in space and time in which science is at home; on the other hand, is the supersensible, the noumenal world, the world of moral duty and moral freedom. (p. 8:147) Kant’s dualism, Dewey averred, facilitated a “combination of self-conscious idealism with unsurpassed technical efficiency and organization in the varied fields of action” (Dewey, 1976-83, p. 8:151). More explicitly, Dewey claimed that Kantian philosophy fostered an absolute devotion to transcendent ends, ends that could not be checked by practical and humane considerations, thereby making possible a preoccupation with technical efficiency at the expense of everyday decency.21 Dewey scholars have missed the extent to which this is an Hegelian critique of Kant, and after his discussion of Kant Dewey turned his attention to Hegel without acknowledging the similarity. Dewey associated Hegel with the “purely artificial cult of race” in Germany, which he described as a crucial component of Germany’s geopolitical ambitions (Dewey, 1976-83, p. 8:188).22 This represents a dramatic shift in Dewey’s characterization of Hegel and it correlates to a shift in the sources he chose to use. In his 1897 lecture, Rosenkranz’s reading of Hegel apparently influenced Dewey as it had the St. Louis Hegelians. But in GPP, Dewey uncritically cited Rudolf Haym’s biography of Hegel (Dewey, 1976-83, p. 8:193; Haym, 1857). It is perhaps noteworthy that this is the only place in Dewey’s entire thirty-seven-volume corpus in which he mentioned or cited Rudolf Haym. Dewey (1976-83) also quoted, without citation, passages from §258 of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right to support this reading of Hegel.

17

JAMES A. GOOD

‘The State is the rational in itself and for itself. Its substantial unity is an absolute end in itself. To it belongs supreme right in respect to individuals whose first duty is—just to be members of the State.’…The State ‘is the absolute reality and the individual himself has objective existence, truth and morality only in his capacity as a member of the State.’ (p. 8:192-93) Comparison with S. W. Dyde’s 1896 translation of the Philosophy of Right, the only one then available, indicates that Dewey used his own rather loose translation of passages from the Philosophy of Right. Dewey chose to ignore a passage just two paragraphs after the one he quoted that contradict his reading.23 In that passage, Hegel wrote: The state is the actuality of concrete freedom. But concrete freedom requires that personal individuality [Einzelheit] and its particular interests should reach their full development and gain recognition of their right for itself….The principle of the modern state has enormous strength and depth because it allows the principle of subjectivity to attain fulfilment in the selfsufficient extreme of personal particularity, while at the same time bringing it back to substantial unity and so preserving this unity in the principle of subjectivity itself. (§260) In a discussion of this passage, Allen Wood (1991) writes that it is “a gross distortion to associate Hegel’s view with the image of individuals having to sacrifice themselves to the ends of the state. Such sacrifices may be required in some circumstances, but it is precisely the abnormality of such circumstances which makes the state an end in itself” (p. xxvi). Despite these evidentiary problems in his reading of Hegel, and despite the fact that in 1905 he claimed Hegel did not elevate logic above lived experience, Dewey now claimed that the problem in Hegel’s political thought arose from the identification of the actual with the rational, coupled with the conviction that reason drives history with no regard for individual rights and interests (Dewey, 1976-83, p. 3:86). This is similar to Dewey’s critique of Kant. Both philosophers, Dewey claimed, subordinated practical considerations of right and wrong to an overarching rationality, both set up a “dual legislation of reason.” Dewey went on to state that Hegel equated reason with both God and the state, thus making it the duty of the individual to completely subordinate his interests to the state (Dewey, 1976-83, p. 8:147).24 An important element of this shift is revealed in Dewey’s characterization of Hegel’s philosophy of history, which he reiterated in Democracy and Education, published in 1916: But since Hegel was haunted by the conception of an absolute goal, he was obliged to arrange institutions as they concretely exist, on a stepladder of ascending approximations. Each in its time and place is absolutely necessary, because a stage in the self-realizing process of the absolute mind. Taken as such a step or stage, its existence is proof of its complete rationality, for it is an integral element in the total, which is Reason. (Dewey, 1976-83, p. 9:64)

18

THE HEGELIAN ROOTS OF DEWEY’S PRAGMATISM

In GPP, Dewey’s characterization of Hegel is completed in his claim that Hegel’s necessary teleology is fulfilled through war. Dewey rejected the St. Louis Hegelians’ perception of Hegel as cosmopolitan, construing Hegel’s philosophy of history in nationalistic terms. As a rabid nationalist, Dewey contended, it was inevitable that Hegel would articulate a “philosophical justification of war” (Dewey, 1976-83, p. 8:197).25 Hegel had become, for Dewey, the bellicose philosopher of Prussian conservatism.26 Dewey’s reversal in 1915 is further complicated by another apparent reversal in The Quest for Certainty (1929). In that book, Dewey claimed that, for Hegel, “The moral task of man is not to create a world in accord with the ideal but to appropriate intellectually and in the substance of personality the meanings and values already incarnate in an actual world” (Dewey, 1981-99, p. 4:51).27 It appears Dewey had returned to his conviction that Hegel did not posit a transcendent morality and did not elevate logic above lived experience. But Dewey republished GPP in 1942, one year before the publication of White’s The Origins of Dewey’s Instrumentalism, with a new introduction that included a criticism of Hegel. He distinguished Hegel’s concepts of Vernunft (reason) and Verstand (understanding) in a way that is difficult to defend with reference to Hegel’s writings, and in fact he provided no defense of his reading. According to Dewey, Hegel subordinated Verstand, which Dewey defined as “reflection, inquiry, observation and experiment to test ideas and theory,” to Vernunft. Dewey’s point was that Hegel denigrated empirical inquiry, valorizing a transcendent reason instead. Hence Dewey defined Hegel’s concept of Vernunft as a metaphysical entity or force, the agent that moves world history (Dewey, 197683, p. 8:441).28 Oddly enough, in 1916, Dewey republished his 1900 essay, “Some Stages of Logical Thought”. In that essay, Dewey characterized Verstand as our ability to make ideas precise rather than experimentation to test ideas. Moreover, in that essay Dewey implied that Verstand is a stage of thought, rather than a discrete faculty. Dewey made no changes to the republished essay although he republished it during World War I. Nor did Dewey bother to mention in the 1942 edition of GPP that he had characterized Verstand very differently in previous work (Dewey, 1976-83, p. 1:156).29 In 1994, Tom Rockmore asserted, “Hegel…proposes a new paradigm of systematic knowledge without foundations with an obvious, but as yet largely unexplored relation to pragmatism” (Rockmore, 1994, p. 54). Many other scholars have identified unexplored similarities between Hegel’s thought and pragmatism.30 I have suggested one reason for the lack of exploration. George Eastman (1965) complained about Joseph Ratner’s need to show “that Hegelianism—and idealism in general—is an effete, a somehow suspect, if not dissolute philosophy from which Dewey wisely, and heroically, freed himself” (p. 104).31 I suspect Dewey’s GPP, and other books like it, some written during and after World War II, have motivated the need of many Dewey scholars to identify a clean break from Hegel and to place it at a relatively early date in his intellectual development. I also suspect it is no accident that the book that inaugurated this trend in Dewey scholarship, Morton White’s (1943) The Origins of Dewey’s Instrumentalism, was 19

JAMES A. GOOD

written and published during World War II. In order to fully understand Dewey’s debt to Hegel, scholars must appreciate the American Hegelian tradition in which he was immersed during his formative years and the pre-World War I sense that Americans had of Germany as one of the most advanced nations in the world. Dewey scholars must liberate themselves from the chains of prejudice that were created by the horror of twentieth-century warfare.

NOTES 1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

20

Good, James. John Dewey’s Permanent Hegelian Deposit and the Exigencies of War. Journal of the History of Philosophy 68 (2007). © Journal of the History of Philosophy, Inc. Reprinted with permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press. According to White, during the 1890s Dewey “continued to hammer away at his [Hegelian] chains” (1943, p. 106). Dewey’s focus in the Studies is a critique of the assumptions of traditional epistemology, exemplified in Rudolf Hermann Lotze’s Logic (1884). Because Lotze was known as an idealist, scholars assume that Dewey attacked Hegelian logic in his critique of Lotze. But Lotze viewed his logic as an attack on Hegelian logic, and was criticized by Henry Jones, a British neo-Hegelian, in much the same way that Dewey criticized him (1895). In a letter to F.C.S. Schiller, James excitedly declared that the Studies “was splendid stuff, and Dewey is a hero. A real school and real thought. At Harvard we have plenty of thought, but no school. At Yale and Cornell, the other way about” (Perry, 1935, pp. 2:374, 521). For example, Dewey’s German Philosophy and Politics was published in 1915 and 1942. New books that attacked Hegel during and after World War II were Russell, 1945; Popper, 1950; and Reichenbach, 1951. Many important American educators, such as Calvin Stowe and Horace Mann, traveled to Germany and published influential reports in the United States (Jeismann, 1995, pp. 21-42). George Bancroft, Edward Everett, and Frederic Henry Hedge all spent time studying in Germany during the second and third decades of the nineteenth century (Good, 2002). Denton Snider (1841-1925), one of the St. Louis Hegelians, compared the American Civil War to the “European Teutonic Movement”—the Prussian subjugation of Schleswig-Holstein in 1864, the defeat of Austria in 1866, and the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 (Snider, 1920, pp. 143-44). Cf. Good (2000). For whatever reason a specific individual might have gone to Germany, Carol Gruber (1975) estimates that between 1820 and 1920, nearly nine thousand Americans studied at German universities (p. 17). Cf. Diehl (1978), Herbst (1965), and Jarausch (1995). In this context, “liberalism” means a devotion to the ideals of the French Revolution—liberty, equality, and fraternity. Although Hegel was a liberal in the context of late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Prussia, he was quite critical of the British liberal tradition (Smith, S.B., 1989). The Philosophische Propädeutik was an unfinished manuscript Hegel worked on while he served as rector of the Nuremburg Gymnasium from 1808 to 1815. Karl Rosenkranz discovered the manuscript on education seven years after Hegel’s death in 1831. He attempted to impose some order on the patchy text and published it as a volume of Hegel’s collected works. Some thirty years later, Rosenkranz recommended the Philosophische Propädeutik to the St. Louis Hegelians. In his recent translation of the work, A.V. Miller acknowledged a debt to Harris’s partial translation that was published in the JSP (Hegel, 1986). The St. Louis Hegelians also studied Rosenkranz’s Pädagogik als System (Rosenkranz, 1872b; Brackett; Harris, 1881). The St. Louis Hegelians published an important essay by Rosenkranz on Hegel’s political thought under the title “Hegel as Publicist” (Rosenkranz, 1872a). Moreover, 129 pages in the JSP were devoted to translations of Rosenkranz’s commentary on Hegel. In addition to Rosenkranz, other important European intellectuals were auxiliary members of the Society, specifically, James Hutchinson Stirling, Ludwig Feuerbach and J. H. Fichte (Leidecker, 1990). For more on Rosenkranz and the St. Louis Hegelians see DeArmey and Good (2001), pp. 1: xvii-xviii.

THE HEGELIAN ROOTS OF DEWEY’S PRAGMATISM

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

Harris’s discussions of the “spontaneous or formal will,” and the “moral or rational will,” closely follow Hegel’s analyses of abstract and concrete freedom (Harris, 1898, pp. 120-34; Hegel, 1977, §§582-595, §§34-40). Though Hegel’s cosmopolitanism led him to oppose political unification of the German states, it also made him critical of their excessive localism. These are prominent themes in Pinkard. The Preface to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit centers on a discussion of Bildung, and it is a central motif throughout the Philosophy of Right. Josiah Royce advocated reading the Phenomenology as a Bildungsroman much like Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre and Friedrich Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell (Royce, 1964). On the “beautiful soul” see Hegel, 1977, §§632-671; Schmitt, 1986; Norton, 1995. Davidson was an active member of the St. Louis Philosophical Society from 1868 to 1875. In 1889 he established the Glenmore Summer School of the Culture Sciences in the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York at which Harris, Dewey, Royce and Santayana all lectured for several summers. Harris built a summer vacation cottage for his family at Glenmore. Dewey bought land across the road from Glenmore where he too built a summer vacation cottage (Good, 2004). Many scholars would agree with Dewey’s assessment of Green as more Kantian than Hegelian (Passmore, 1966, pp. 55-56; Metz, 1950, pp. 272-73; Thomas, 1987, pp. 40-41). Dewey continued this critique of the neo-Hegelians in logical writings of this time as well (Dewey, 1967-72, pp. 3: 125-141). Shook (2000) is correct to note that Dewey was, in some ways, moving in the direction of Edward Caird’s idealism because Caird also criticized Green for making the absolute transcendent. Yet Shook also points out that Dewey criticized Caird for retaining the view that psychology and philosophy required different methods (pp. 66-69). Engelhardt and Pinkard (1994) also provide a complete list of the published writings of Hartmann (pp. 231-241). By claiming that Dewey embraced a non-metaphysical reading of Hegel, I am able to deflect the apparent force of statements made by Dewey that have been used to indicate that he was rejecting Hegel. One that is often quoted to that effect, and that I place in a very different light, is in a letter from Dewey to James Rowland Angell (10 May 1893): “While I continue to get more and more out of Hegel, I get less and less out of the Hegelians so-called. They seem to be largely repeating phrases when they ought to be analyzing the subject matter. Metaphysics has had its day, and if the truths which Hegel saw cannot be stated as direct, practical truths, they are not true” (Hickman, 2001). I believe this statement bolsters my claim that Dewey was rejecting the British neo-Hegelians and their metaphysical reading of Hegel at this time, but does not indicate he was rejecting Hegel per se. Cf. Royce’s claim that “Nothing is true, for them [the post-Kantian idealists], unless therein the sense, the purpose, the meaning of some active process is carried out, expressed, accomplished. Truth is not for these post-Kantian idealists something dead and settled apart from action. It is a construction, a process, an activity, a creation, an attainment” (Royce, 1964, p. 86). Caird (1883) and Luqueer (1896) were partly biographical but could not have provided the sort of detailed knowledge that Dewey displayed in the 1897 lecture. Further indication that Dewey was familiar with Rosenkranz is contained in a letter he wrote to Harris in 1882 in which he offered to translate Rosenkranz’s introduction to “Kirchmann’s ed. of Hegel’s Encyclopädie” (Hickman, 2001). Dewey’s translation never appeared in the JSP. See also, John Dewey to W. T. Harris, 22 October 1881 (Hickman, 2001). Rosenkranz wrote two introductions to Hegel’s Encyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse (Rosenkranz, 1845, 1870). Dewey expressed concern about authoritarianism in German culture as early as 1895: “Herbartianism seems to me essentially a schoolmaster's psychology, not the psychology of a child. It is the natural expression of a nation laying great emphasis upon authority and upon the formation of individual character in distinct and recognized subordination to the ethical demands made in war and in civil administration by that authority. It is not the psychology of a nation which professes to believe that every individual has within him the principle of authority, and that order means coordination, not subordination” (Dewey, 1967-72, pp. 5:113-46). Dewey’s criticism of Kant’s moral thought makes the same point as the Frankfurt School’s later criticisms of “instrumental reason,” reason that could efficiently solve technical problems but could not critique ends. See especially Horkheimer and Adorno (1996), pp. 81-127. Axel Honneth (2001) has recently noted this similarity between Dewey and the Frankfurt School (pp. 321-322). In this

21

JAMES A. GOOD

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

22

way Honneth highlights the difference between the instrumentalism Dewey championed and what the Frankfurt School condemned as “instrumental reason.” Despite the similarities in their names, the two doctrines are subtly different in very important ways. Larry Hickman (2000) clearly reveals a dualism at the heart of the thought of the Frankfurt School that remains in Habermas’s much more recent work and that forms the basis of his critique of what he calls “technical activities” or “purposive-rational action” (Habermas, pp. 91, 92). Hickman demonstrates that Dewey successfully avoided that dualism (Hickman, 2000, pp. 501-13). In his introduction to Volume 8 of Dewey’s Middle Works, Sydney Hook (1979) claimed Dewey had committed “an injustice to Hegel, who was free from racialism” (p. xxxi). Hook’s assertion begs for explanation that he did not provide, however. Hegel is infamous for his argument in the Philosophy of History that Oriental and African cultures are outside world history because they had not internalized conceptions of law and morality that are necessary to the attainment of concrete freedom. Nevertheless, Hegel was highly critical of German anti-Semitism and, although he was certainly Eurocentric, his negative assessments of other cultures were not based on biological racism (McCarney, 2000, pp. 140-5). Hegel scholars would certainly find H. B. Nisbet’s 1991 translation less objectionable than Dewey’s. Contrary to Dewey’s claim, in Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, Hegel wrote “the universal spirit or world spirit is not the same thing as God. It is the rationality of spirit in its worldly existence” (Hegel, 1975, 213). Cf. Dewey’s remark, “One can only regret that [Hegel] died before his contemplative piety could behold Bismarck” (Dewey, 1976-83, p. 8: 194). The St. Louis Hegelians’ perception of Hegel as cosmopolitan is more consistent with recent Hegel scholarship. Terry Pinkard, for example, depicts Hegel as a neo-humanist, like his good friend Friedrich Immanuel Niethammer, and explains that neo-humanists “saw themselves as developing a national German culture, which for them did not in any way necessarily imply a single, national German state” (Pinkard, 2000, p. 269). Cf. Dewey, 1976-83, pp. 12:189-90, 194-5. Also, in a 1904 review of W.R. Benedict’s World Views and their Ethical Implications, Dewey praised Hegel’s emphasis “upon the positive significance of conflict and the suffering that attends it, in the constitution of an active and worthful universe, instead of tending to give a negative interpretation of conflict as due to the ‘finite’ over against the complete, or to ‘appearance’ over against Reality” (Dewey, 1976-83, p. 3:311). Not only does Dewey offer a more positive view of Hegel’s perception of conflict in world history in this passage, he also appears to reject the implication that he made later in GPP that, like Kant, Hegel had a “two worlds” thesis. Cf. Karl Löwith’s (1964) claim that, with Hegel, “Philosophy becomes an eternally living activity, excluding any revival of past systems. The philosopher who is to do justice to this transitory nature must be the most persevering and productive spirit of his age, a man with the surest capacity for making distinctions in order to be able to differentiate what is valuable from what is worthless, and what is significant for the future from what is merely topical” (p. 130). For a good discussion of Hegel’s dictum and the ways it has been misunderstood see Jackson (1996). Cf. Dewey’s definition of “posit” in Baldwin’s Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology (Dewey, 1976-83, p. 2:207). In his definition of “Rationalism,” Dewey indicated that Hegel’s concept of reason was not opposed to experience (Dewey, 1976-83, p. 2:218). In “Understanding and Reason,” Dewey depicted Hegel’s concept of reason as “the result of the development of the understanding to its full implications,” rather than as a faculty opposed to the understanding (Dewey, 1976-83, p. 2:261). Of Dewey’s two explanations of Hegel’s concepts of Verstand and Vernunft, the pre-World War I version is arguably the easier one to defend. Rather than depict Hegel’s concepts of Vernunft and Verstand as two distinct and separable entities or mental faculties that could be in a relationship in which one is subordinate to the other, contemporary Hegel scholars tend to describe Verstand as a moment, or stage, of Vernunft, the stage of analysis that must be completed in Vernunft. A good example of this view of Hegel’s concepts of Vernunft and Verstand can be found in Hinchman (1984), pp. 73-75. Hinchman claims to “dispel the widely held belief that Hegel scorned ‘mere’ understanding for the sake of higher reason which could dispense with the labor of finite thought.” Cf. S.B. Smith’s (1989) penetrating discussion of Hegel’s concept of rational necessity, in which he

THE HEGELIAN ROOTS OF DEWEY’S PRAGMATISM

30

31

casts significant doubt not only on the characterization of Hegel’s concepts of reason and understanding that we encounter here in Dewey, but also on the notion that Hegel believed in the sort of necessary historical teleology that Dewey claimed he did in GPP (p. 204-217). For example, according to R. Solomon (1983), to find a concept of experience similar to Hegel’s, we would need to look at the “practical-minded writings of the American pragmatists William James and John Dewey.” Solomon also claims that Hegel’s “is a heavily practical conception of Truth with strong affinities to what has been defended in this century (by William James and others) as the ‘pragmatic theory of truth’” (Solomon, 1983, pp. 11, 176). See also Ratner (1965), pp. 105-07.

REFERENCES Brackett, A. (1881). The science of education. Journal of speculative philosophy, 15(1), 35-52. Bruford, W. H. (1975). The German tradition of self-cultivation: Bildung from Humboldt to Thomas Mann. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Caird, E. (1883). Hegel. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott and Co.; Edinburgh: W. Blackwood and Sons. Coughlan, N. (1973). Young John Dewey: An essay in American intellectual history. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. DeArmey, M. H., Good, J. A. (Eds.). (2001). The St. Louis Hegelians, 3 vols. Bristol, England: Thoemmes Press. Dewey, J. (1897). Hegel’s philosophy of spirit: Lectures by John Dewey, The University of Chicago. Southern Illinois University, Morris Library, Special Collections, John Dewey Papers, Collection 102. Dewey, J. (1967-1972). The early works of John Dewey, 1882-1898 (Vols. 1-5) (Boydston, J.A., Ed.). Carbondale, IL: University of Southern Illinois Press. Dewey, J. (1976-1983). The middle works of John Dewey, 1899-1924. (Vols. 1-15) (Boydston, J.A., Ed.). Carbondale, IL: University of Southern Illinois Press. Dewey, J. (1981-1999). The later works of John Dewey, 1925-1953. (Vols. 1-17) (Boydston, J.A., Ed.). Carbondale, IL: University of Southern Illinois Press. Dickey, L. (1987). Hegel: Religion, economics, and the politics of spirit, 1770-1807. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Diehl, C. (1978). Americans and German scholarship, 1770-1870. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Dykhuizen, G. (1973). The life and mind of John Dewey. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Eastman, G. (1965). Review of the book John Dewey: Philosophy, psychology and social practice. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 4, 95-104. Engelhardt, H. T., & Pinkard, T. (Eds.). (1994). Hegel reconsidered: Beyond metaphysics and the authoritarian state. Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Good, J. A. (2000). A world-historical idea: The St. Louis Hegelians and the Civil War. Journal of American Studies, 34(1), 447-464. Good, J. A. (2002). Introduction. In J. A. Good (Ed.), The Journal of speculative philosophy, 18671893, 22 vols (Vol. 1, pp. v-xx). Bristol, England: Thoemmes Press. Good, J. A. (2002). Introduction. In J. A. Good (Ed.), The early American reception of German idealism: Vol. 4. Prose writers of Germany (pp. v-xvi). Bristol, U.K.: Thoemmes Press. Good, J. A. (2004). The value of Thomas Davidson. Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 40(2), 289-318. Good, J. A. (in press). A search for unity in diversity: The permanent Hegelian deposit in the philosophy of John Dewey. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Gruber, C. (1975). Mars and Minerva: World War I and the uses of higher education in America. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press.

23

JAMES A. GOOD Günther, K. H. (1995). Interdependence between democratic pedagogy in Germany and the development of education in the United States in the nineteenth century. In H. Geitz, J. Heideking & J. Herbst (Eds.), German influences on education in the United States to 1917 (pp. 43-58). Washington, DC and New York: German Historical Institute and Cambridge University Press. Habermas, J. (1970). Toward a rational society (Jeremy J. Shapiro, Trans.). Boston: Beacon Press. Harris, H. S. (1972). Hegel’s development: Toward the sunlight, 1770-1801. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Harris, W. T. (1881). Analysis and commentary. Journal of speculative philosophy, 15(1), 52-62. Harris, W. T. (1898). Psychologic foundations: An attempt to show the genesis of the higher faculties of the mind. New York: D. Appleton and Co. Hartmann, K. (1972). Hegel: A non-metaphysical view. In A. MacIntyre (Ed.), Hegel: A collection of critical essays (pp. 101-124). Garden City, NJ: Anchor Books. Haym, R. (1857). Hegel und seine zeit. Vorlesungen über entstehung und entwickelung, wesen und werth der Hegel’schen philosophie [Hegel and his time. Lectures on the emergence and development, nature and value of Hegelian philosophy]. Berlin: Verlag v. Rudolph Gaertner. Headley, N. (1965). The kindergarten: Its place in the program of education. New York: Center for Applied Research in Education. Hegel, G. W. F. (1969). Hegel’s science of logic (A.V. Miller, Trans.). Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press. Hegel, G. W. F. (1896). Hegel’s philosophy of right (Dyde, S.W., Trans.). London: George Bell & Sons. Hegel, G. W. F. (1975). Lectures on the philosophy of world history: Introduction: Reason in world history (H. B. Nisbet, Trans.). New York: Cambridge University Press. Hegel, G. W. F. (1977). The phenomenology of spirit (A.V. Miller, Trans.). Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hegel, G. W. F. (1986). The philosophical propaedeutic (M. George, & A. Vincent (Eds.), A.V. Miller, Trans.). New York: B. Blackwell. Hegel, G. W. F. (1991). Elements of the philosophy of right (A, W. Wood (Ed.), H. B. Nisbet, Trans.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Herbst, J. (1965). The German historical school in American scholarship: A study in the transfer of culture. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Hickman, L. A. (2000). Habermas’s unresolved dualism: Zweckrationalität as idèe fixe. In L. E. Hahn (Ed.), Perspectives on Habermas (pp., 501-13). Chicago and La Salle: Open Court. Hickman, L. A. (Ed.). (2001). The correspondence of John Dewey. Charlottesville, VA: Intelex Corporation. Hinchman, L. (1984). Hegel’s critique of the enlightenment. Gainesville and Tampa, FL: The University Presses of Florida. Hofstadter, R., & Metzger, W. P. (1955). The development of academic freedom in the United States. New York: Columbia University Press. Honneth, A. (2001). The logic of fanaticism: Dewey’s archaeology of the German mentality. In W. Rehg & J. Bohman (Eds.), Pluralism and the pragmatic turn: The transformation of critical theory (pp., 321-322). Cambridge, MA: The M.I.T. Press. Hook, S. (1979). Introduction. In Dewey, J. (1976-1983). The middle works of John Dewey, 1899-1924. (Vols. 1-15) (Boydston, J.A., Ed.) (Vol. 8, pp. ix-xxvi). Carbondale: University of Southern Illinois Press.. Horkheimer, M., & Adorno. T. (1996). The dialectic of enlightenment (John Cumming, Trans.). New York: Continuum. Jackson, M. W. (1996). Hegel: The real and the rational. In J. Stewart (Ed.), The Hegel myths and legends (pp., 19-25). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. James, W. (1969). The Chicago school. In Collected essays and reviews (pp., 445-47). New York: Russell and Russell. Jarausch, K. H. (1995). American students in Germany, 1815-1914: The structure of German and U.S. matriculants at Göttingen University. In H. Geitz, J. Heideking & J. Herbst (Eds.), German influences on education in the United States to 1917 (pp. 195-212). Washington, DC and New York: German Historical Institute and Cambridge University Press. Jeismann, K. E. (1995). American observations concerning the Prussian educational system in the nineteenth century. In H. Geitz, J. Heideking & J. Herbst (Eds.), German Influences on Education in the United States to 1917 (pp., 21-42). Washington, DC and New York: German Historical Institute and Cambridge University Press.

24

THE HEGELIAN ROOTS OF DEWEY’S PRAGMATISM Jones, H. (1895). A critical account of the philosophy of Lotze: The doctrine of thought. Glasgow: J. Maclehose and Sons. Kelly, G. A. (1969). Idealism, politics, and history: Sources of Hegelian thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kelly, G. A. (1978). Hegel’s retreat from Eleusis: Studies in political thought. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kuklick, B. (1984). Seven thinkers and how they grew: Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz; Locke, Berkeley, Hume; Kant. In R. Rorty, J. B. Schneewind & Q. Skinner (Eds.), Philosophy in history: Essays on the historiography of philosophy (pp. 125-39). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Leidecker, K. F. (1946). Yankee teacher: The life of William Torrey Harris. New York: Philosophical Library. Leidecker, K. F. (Ed.) (1990). The record book of the St. Louis Philosophical Society, founded February 1866. Lewiston, NY: E. Mellen Press. Lotze, R. H. (1884). Logic (Bosanquet, B., Trans.). Oxford: Clarendon Press. Löwith, K. (1964). From Hegel to Nietzsche: The revolution in nineteenth-century thought (D.E. Green, Trans.). New York: Columbia University Press. Luqueer, F. L. (1896). Hegel as educator. New York: Macmillan and Co. McCarney, J. (2000). Hegel on history. New York: Routledge. McIntyre, S. (1997). Our schools are not charitable institutions: Class, gender, ethnicity, and the teaching profession in nineteenth-century St. Louis. Missouri Historical Review, 92, 27-44. Metz, R. (1950). A hundred years of British philosophy. New York: Macmillan. Norton, R. E. (1995). The beautiful soul: Aesthetic morality in the eighteenth century. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Passmore, J. (1966). A hundred years of philosophy (2nd ed.). London: Duckworth. Peirce, C. S. (1931-1958). The collected papers of Charles Sanders Peirce (Vols. 1-8) (C. Hartshorne & P. Weiss, Eds.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Perry, R. B. (Ed.) (1935). Thought and character of William James (Vols. 1-2). Boston: Little, Brown and Company. Pinkard, T. (2000). Hegel: A biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Popper, K. R. (1950). The open society and its enemies (Rev. ed.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Ratner, J. (1965). Reply to George Eastman. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 4, 105-07. Reichenbach, H. (1951). The rise of scientific philosophy. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Reid, J. (2000). Hegel and the state university: The University of Berlin and its founding contradictions. The Owl of Minerva, 32(1), 5-19. Ripalda, J. M. (1977). The divided nation: The roots of a bourgeois thinker, G.W.F. Hegel (F. Franklin & M, Tillman, Trans.). Amsterdam: Van Gorcum, Assen. Rockefeller, S. (1991). John Dewey: Religious faith and democratic humanism. New York: Columbia University Press. Rockmore, T. (1994). Hegel’s Metaphysics, or the Categorial Approach to Knowledge of Experience. In H. T. Engelhardt & T. Pinkard, (Eds.), Hegel reconsidered: Beyond metaphysics and the authoritarian state (pp. 43-56). Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Rosenkranz, K. (1844). Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegels Leben. Berlin: Duncker und Humblot. Rosenkranz, K. (1845). Introduction. In G.W.F. Hegel, Encyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse. Berlin: Duncker and Humboldt. Rosenkranz, K. (1870). Introduction. In G.W.F. Hegel, Encyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse. Berlin: L. Heimann. Rosenkranz, K. (1872a). Hegel as publicist (G. S. Hall, Trans.). Journal of speculative philosophy, 6(3), 258-79. Rosenkranz, K. (1872b). Pedagogics as a system (A. Brackett, Trans.). Journal of speculative philosophy, 6(4), 290-312. Royce, J. (1964). Lectures on modern idealism (J. Loewenberg, Ed.). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Russell, B. A history of Western philosophy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1945). Schmidt, J. (1981). A paideia for the burger als bourgeois: The concept of civil society in Hegel’s political thought. History of political thought, 11(3), 469-77.

25

JAMES A. GOOD Schmitt, C. (1986). Political Romanticism (G. Oakes, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press. Shook, J. (2000). Dewey’s empirical theory of knowledge and reality. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press. Smith, J. H. (1988). The spirit and its letter: Traces of rhetoric in Hegel’s philosophy of Bildung. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Smith, S. B. (1989). Hegel’s critique of liberalism: Rights in context. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Snider, D. (1920). The St. Louis movement in philosophy, literature, education, psychology, with chapters of autobiography. St. Louis, MO: Sigma Publishing Company. Solomon, R. (1983). In the spirit of Hegel: A study of G.W.F. Hegel’s phenomenology of spirit. New York: Oxford University Press. Thomas, G. (1987). The moral philosophy of T. H. Green. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Toews, J. (1980). Hegelianism: The path toward dialectical humanism, 1805-1841. New York: Cambridge University Press. Toth, C. R. (1990). German-English bilingual schools in America. New York: Peter Lang. Walz, J. A. (1936). German influences in American education and culture. Philadelphia: Carl Shurz Memorial Foundation. Westbrook, R. B. (1991). John Dewey and American democracy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. White, M. (1943). The origin of Dewey’s instrumentalism. New York: Columbia University Press. White, M. (1999). A philosopher’s story. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania University Press. Wood, A. (1991). Editor’s Introduction. In G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the philosophy of right (pp. viixxxii) (A. W. Wood, Ed., H. B. Nisbet, Trans.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zammito, J. (2002). Kant, Herder, and the birth of anthropology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

James A. Good Department of History North Harris College Houston, Texas

26

MEIKE SOPHIA BAADER

WILLIAM JAMES’ THEORY OF RELIGION AND PLURALISTIC WORLD

INTRODUCTION

“I offer the oddly-named thing pragmatism as a philosophy that can satisfy both kinds of demand. It can remain religious like the rationalisms, but at the same time, like the empiricisms, it can preserve the richest intimacy with facts.” – William James, from a lecture on pragmatism delivered in 1906 (James, 1907/1998, p. 23). James connects his definition of what pragmatism means directly with his theory of religion and religious experience. For James, the philosophical dilemma to which pragmatism responds also stands in direct connection with the question of religion. For James (1907/1998), in Lecture 1, “The Present Dilemma in Philosophy”, in Pragmatism. A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking, the conflict, or competition, is between science and religion: Never were as many men of a decidedly empiricist proclivity in existence as there are at the present day. Our children, one may say, are almost born scientific. But our esteem for facts has not neutralized in us all religiousness. It is itself almost religious. Our scientific temper is devout. (p. 14) People want facts; they want science; but they also want religious convictions. As the kind of philosophy actually offered to meet these needs: You find an empirical philosophy that is not religious enough, and a religious philosophy that’s not empirical enough for your purpose.…You find...the ‘conflict between science and religion’ in full blast. Either it is that Rocky Mountain tough of a Haeckel with his materialistic monism...or it is Spencer treating the world’s history as a redistribution of matter and motion solely, and bowing religion politely out at the front door. (p. 15) At the end of Lecture 1, James announces that the pragmatic philosophy “preserves as cordial a relation with facts” as it also treats positive religious constructions seriously (p. 26). As hypotheses, these constructions can be justified through experience and reflection (James, 1896/1979, p. 8). It is James’ intention to show that from a scientific perspective, religion can exist as an approach to reality in its own right. He sees his own contribution to pragmatism in the application of the principle of pragmatism, developed by Charles Peirce in 1878, to religion.1 D. Tröhler, J. Oelkers (eds.), Pragmatism and Education, 27-41. © 2005 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved.

MEIKE SOPHIA BAADER

In this paper I discuss in a first step the essential features of James’ concept of religion. I focus on his main work on religion, The Varieties of Religious Experience. In a second step I examine the historical context of his position and analyze what distinguishes James’ view from other contemporary answers to the question of the meaning of religion in the scientific age. Here I focus on German discussion contexts and include consideration of the pedagogical debates as well as the marginal reception of James in Germany. In a third step, finally, I come to a brief outlook on current debates in sociology of religion and philosophy and on the place value of James’ theory of religious experience in those discussions. JAMES’ VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE

James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience. A Study in Human Nature, published in 1902, is based on lectures that he gave as Gifford Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh in 1901/02. James writes in the preface that initially, he had considered speaking on both ‘Man's Religious Appetites’ and ‘Their Satisfaction through Philosophy,’ but in the end, due to the wealth of psychological matter that he wished to discuss, he focused all twenty of the lectures in the series on “man’s religious constitution” (James, 1902/1985, Preface). James’ Varieties is regarded as one of the most important works on the psychology of religion; sociologist Hans Joas (1999) calls it the truly epochmaking new approach to dealing with religion at the start of the twentieth century (p. 990). What is ground-breaking in Varieties is that in developing a theory of religion, James’ starts out from individual religious experience and not teachings, dogmas, and belief systems. James is not interested in the social side of religion, as was his contemporary Emile Durkheim in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life published in 1912, but rather was interested exclusively in the individual dimensions apart from all institutionalized forms. Even among the pragmatists, James is the only one who does not examine religion first and foremost as a social phenomenon. James (1902/1985) examines the subject of what he calls ‘personal religion,’ which he describes as more fundamental than either theology or churches, for “the founders of every church owed their power originally to the fact of their direct personal communion with the divine” (p. 30). With personal experience preceding all institutionalized forms of religion, “personal religion should still seem the primordial thing” (p. 30). James’ approach bases on a subject-oriented, psychological, and functional concept of religion that examines what it is that characterizes and distinguishes religious experience from all other experience, what function it has in the life of the individual, and how it relates to certain character structures. Here James’ sets out a central distinction between the religion of the healthy-minded religious person, the sick soul, and the divided self – a typology that continues to exist in the psychology of religion today (Reck, 1996, p. 374).

28

WILLIAM JAMES’ THEORY OF RELIGION

James defines religion as “the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine” (James, 1902/1985, p. 31).2 Thus James wants us here to interpret the divine in a broad sense, any object being divine that the individual holds to be ‘godlike’. This would thus encompass also Emersonian modern transcendental idealism as well as Buddhism (James attaches particular importance to the latter).3 James writes that in the strict sense Buddhism is atheistic, as it does not assume a God (p. 31). But he finds that in their effects on the lives of men, both systems of thought – Emerson’s philosophy and Buddhism – are comparable to Christian responses: “We must therefore, from the experiential point of view, call these godless or quasi-godless creeds ‘religions’” (p. 34). Empirically then, for James the issue is the effects of religious orientations. If their consequences for the leading of lives and for life’s feelings are comparable, then whether a person believes in Emerson, Buddha, or Jesus is secondary. Focusing on individual experiences as the starting point of the scientific study, James applies the principle of radical empiricism that he developed in writings in 1904/1905 (collected and published in 1912 in Essays in Radical Empiricism). Radical empiricism is interested in all experiences and thus also in experiences that appear irrational from the perspective of scientific empiricism. In contrast, as James criticizes, scientific empiricism takes its orientation from the structure of the scientific disciplines. It cuts up the world according to the ordering of the disciplines and does not, indeed, start out from the concrete experiences of individuals. Individual experience is thus neglected. James based his analysis of religious experiences on numerous autobiographies and on survey studies on religious experience conducted by Edwin Starbuck, who – like James Leuba and William James – was one of the pioneers of empirical psychology of religion. The Starbuck surveys that James used had gathered information from 192 American Protestants, including many young people and many Methodists, concerning their conversion experiences. Starting out from his pluralistic, individualistic, and broad concept of religion, in Varieties James is interested in discovering what is common to all religions.4 The variety of religious belief systems did not seem to him in any way regrettable. James (1902/1985) could not see: how it is possible that creatures in such different positions and with such different powers as human individuals are, should have exactly the same functions and the same duties. No two of us have identical difficulties, nor should we be expected to work out identical solutions? (p. 487). The variety of religious orientations is thus legitimized by the variety of life problems and the variety of ‘happinesses.’ For James, the various forms are indispensable, and “we should treat them with tenderness and tolerance so long as they are not intolerant themselves” (James, 1902/1985, p. 515). In exercising our individual freedom, “we build out our religion in the way most congruous with our personal susceptibilities” (p. 514). The choice of the form of belief is for James connected with our individual dispositions, and the ‘will to believe’ is connected 29

MEIKE SOPHIA BAADER

with a pluralism of happinesses. The most interesting objective to man is the seeking of happiness (James, 1899/1983).5 Religion contributes to individual happiness and makes life easier. This, in a nutshell, is the result of James’ study of religious experience, which was undertaken with the goal to examine the “value” of religious consciousness for life as a whole and, certainly, from the “biological point of view”. Through religion, the unavoidable surrenders and sacrifices that life demands of us are accepted in a positive manner, and “even unnecessary givings-up are added in order that the happiness may increase. Religion thus makes easy and felicitous what in any case is necessary” (James 1902/1985, p. 51f.). Here lies for James the specific function of religion for human evolution, “performing a function which no other portion of our nature can so successfully fulfill” (p. 52). For the feeling of happiness that a religious orientation imparts is different than other forms of happiness; it is “absolute and everlasting” because it contains “that element of solemnity” (p. 48). The punch line of James’ psychology of religion lies in this specific function that James assigns to religion for the evolution of the human race. James offers Darwinistic grounds for the necessity of religion, without, however, elevating Darwinism and the idea of higher development of the species itself to a religion, as did his German contemporary Ernst Haeckel, other exponents of monism, or the founder of eugenics, Francis Galton. In James’ attempt to demonstrate from a scientific perspective that religion possesses reality in its own right, the category of the subconscious self, which he points out as being a recognized psychological entity, plays an important role. Religion stands in a special relation to the subconscious. James (1902/1985) writes that the many elements of the self that are not directly accessible to conscious reflection are a contributory factor in religious life: Let me then propose, as an hypothesis, that whatever it may be on its farther side, the ‘more’ with which in religious experience we feel ourselves connected is on its hither side the subconscious continuation of our conscious life. Starting thus with a recognized psychological fact as our basis, we seem to preserve a contact with ‘science’ which the ordinary theologian lacks. (p. 512) At the same time, James states that the theologian’s claim that the religious person is moved by an external power is justified, for “it is one of the peculiarities of invasions from the subconscious region to take on objective appearances, and to suggest to the Subject an external control” (James, 1902/1985, p. 512).6 In religion, then, we communicate with the hidden, subconscious part of our own self, which appears to us to be a higher instance. This is the psychologicalscientific answer to the question of the structure of religious experience. James’ personal standpoint, however, is that there is, on the farther side, a higher power outside of the self that is not accessible to scientific explanation. A functional conception of religion, it can be noted, has to be backed up scientifically, but a substantive conception, which seeks to explicate the nature of the divine or the holy, does not.7 30

WILLIAM JAMES’ THEORY OF RELIGION

James finds belief in a divine ruler about which science can say nothing to be characteristic of nearly all religions, and the worldview connected with this is not the same as the materialistic view; it has its very own constitution. The world viewed religiously is such that results are expected in it and different behavior is required. This view James calls the “pragmatic view” of religion, which for most people has been taken as a matter of course. This pragmatic way of viewing religion gives the world a different constitution that in turn affects human conduct. And this view gives religion not only a soul, but also a body. For James, the religions provide people with specific energies that allow them to master their lives: “the real effects in question, so far as I have as yet admitted them, are exerted on the personal centres of energy of the various subjects” (James, 1902/1985, p. 517), and we are thus obliged “on account of their extraordinary influence upon action and endurance, to class them amongst the most important biological functions of mankind” (p. 506). “But that which produces effects within another reality must be termed a reality itself, so I feel as if we had no philosophic excuse for calling the unseen or mystical world unreal” (p. 516). All efforts to reconcile religion with science from a functional perspective notwithstanding, James makes it clear at the end of his examination that he finds the explanatory approaches of science limited: “the total expression of human experience, as I view it objectively, invincibly urges me beyond the narrow scientific bounds. Assuredly, the real world is of a different temperament, – more intricately built than physical science allows” (James, 1902/1985, p. 519). According to James (1902/1985), the decisive difference between science and religion is that: Religious thought is carried on in terms of personality, this being, in the world of religion, the one fundamental fact. To-day, quite as much as at any previous age, the religious individual tells you that the divine meets him on the basis of his personal concerns. Science, on the other hand, has ended by utterly repudiating the personal point of view. (p. 491) Personal experience, however, is the measure of our concrete existence and all that we suppose to exist; anyone “that should lack such a feeling, or its analogue, would be a piece of reality only half made up” (James, 1902/1985, p. 499). With that, religion is closer than science to the actuality of human life for James. Religion deals with our personal fortunes and remains in this way in connection with the only absolute realities that we know. Personal and individual experience, as that which we feel is real, is for James based in feeling, and it is that feeling that religion addresses, whereas science suppresses “the egotistic elements of experience” (p. 499). With this view of religion as a thing of feeling or of the heart (which, therefore, also differs radically from morals), James stands in the tradition of an understanding of religion that focuses on feelings and affections. 8 Religion, James writes, frees individuals from “a sense that there is something wrong about us” and helps us to surrender the unfavorable self; these phenomena “involve the change of personal centre” and allow “feelings of security and joy” (James, 1902/1985, p. 31

MEIKE SOPHIA BAADER

508). Religion stabilizes individuals by giving them the feeling that they are part of a larger whole. In this connection, James speaks of the fact that “the conscious person is continuous with a wider self through which saving experiences come” (p. 515). This “wider self”, as James calls it, is produced by religion.9 The “Darwinian notion of chance production” (p. 491), however, as the epitome of the scientific world, does not allow this sense of being taken up in a larger, meaningful whole: “Nature has no one distinguishable ultimate tendency with which it is possible to feel a sympathy” (p. 492). This is also why, in a world shaped by science, the varieties of religious experience are not an anachronism, but rather continue to survive, and for good reason (James, 1902/1985, p. 507). In contrast to science, religion appeals to an affective and motivational dimension that plays an important role in James’ plural concept of the self, as Joas has shown (Joas, 1995, p. 204). James’ personal involvement with his subject matter is readily apparent in his study. The Varieties of Religious Experience is not only a theoretical contribution to the study of the diverse forms of belief; it itself contains his confession to an individual, privatized, syncretist, non-institutionalized form of religiousness that, as does the essay as a whole, doubtless stands in a Protestant tradition. James’ grandfather was an Irish Protestant (Calvinist), and his father, Henry James, Sr., was a religious writer and lecturer who adhered to the writings of Swedenborg (1688-1772), the Swedish philosopher and mystic. In the postscript to Varieties, James (1902/1985) speaks of “my own inability to accept either popular Christianity or scholastic theism” (p. 521) and in order to describe his general point of view, his individual religiosity, he says that he could agree in principle with the “Buddhistic doctrine of Karma,” as it is “a view that judgment and execution go together” (p. 521).10 James saw direct connections among pragmatism, his theory of religion, and his philosophical pluralism. The world as understood pluralistically has its roots in a religious pluralism. The metaphor that James selects for a pluralistically understood world, however, stems from politics. In his conclusions in his late work, The Pluralistic Universe (James, 1909/1977), which contains the series of eight Hibbert lectures that James delivered in 1907 at Manchester College, Oxford, James returns to religion and says: Pragmatically interpreted, pluralism or the doctrine that it is many means only that the sundry parts of reality may be externally related … Things are ‘with’ one another in many ways, but nothing includes everything, or dominates over everything. The word ‘and’ trails along after every sentence … The pluralistic world is thus more like a federal republic than like an empire or a kingdom. (p. 145) What in politics is the empire is in the philosophical-religious perspective monism, which for James stands in contradiction to the pluralistic universe. There is no greater contradiction that that between pluralism and monism (James, 1896/1979, p. XI), and “pluralism lets things really exist in the each-form or

32

WILLIAM JAMES’ THEORY OF RELIGION

distributively. Monism thinks that the all-form or collective-unit form is the only form that is rational” (James, 1909/1977, p. 146). From the pluralistic perspective, “God is not the absolute, but is himself a part when the system is conceived pluralistically … Having an environment, being in time, and working out a history just like ourselves, he escapes from the foreignness from all that is human” (James, 1909/1977, p. 143) 11. God thought of as absolute, in James’ opinion, leaves no room for human action and no room for improvement of the world, or in other words, no room for what James calls “meliorism,” the doctrine that the world can be made better through human effort. His criticism of monism and the assumption that plurality is taken up in a higher oneness sets James apart from other views of religion and religiosity of his day, particularly from those that characterized the discussion contexts in Germany, which were relevant for education and, especially, German Reformpädagogik. RELIGION AFTER NIETZSCHE AND DARWIN: DIFFERENCES BETWEEN JAMES’ ANSWERS AND THOSE OF GERMAN REFORMPAEDAGOGIK AROUND 1900

The time around 1900 stands out with intensive debate on religion and religiosity. This is reflected also in the significance that was attributed to the question of religion for sociology at the turn of the century. James found reception by, for instance, Durkheim and also Weber. Wilhelm Hennis reconstructs the – as yet not proven – influence of James on Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism by showing that Weber’s concept of human action was added to this work only after Weber’s contact with James in 1904 (Schubert & Spree, 2001, p. 22). A whole generation of intellectuals in the German context – Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Scheler, Simmel, and Troeltsch – was very taken with James’ Varieties and the notion of religious experience (Joas, 1999, p. 990ff; Joas, 2000, p. 237)12 James’ works were translated into German relatively quickly: The Will to Believe (1896) was published in German translation (Der Wille zum Glauben) three years later in 1899, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) in 1907 (Die Vielfalt religiöser Erfahrung), and Talks to Teachers on Psychology (1899) already in 1900 and in a second edition in 1908 (Psychologie und Erziehung. Ansprachen an Lehrer). It is well-known that pragmatism was the subject of lengthy discussion and controversy at the Third International Congress of Philosophy in Heidelberg in September 1908.13 James, who did not attend for health reasons, was a presence in the lectures and debates as founder and representative of pragmatism.14 His psychology of religion was brought up in contributions to the congress that dealt explicitly with pragmatism, but it was in addition brought up in the philosophy of religion section of the congress, such as, for example, by Luigi Visconti of Italy in his lecture on the nature and limits of religious individualism. However, pragmatism was not mentioned in lectures that dealt with the relation of philosophy, psychology, and pedagogy – by Rudolf Lehmann of Poznan and Lorenzo Billia of Italy, for instance. 33

MEIKE SOPHIA BAADER

The reception of James’ works on religion was marginal within the field of education in Germany. The foreword to the German translation of The Will to Believe (James, trans. 1899) was written by the philosopher and pedagogue Friedrich Paulsen (1846-1908), who was a believing Protestant. In the foreword, Paulsen puts James in the tradition of Hume, Kant, Fichte, and Carlyle, stating that James, on a positivistic basis, held to an idealistic view of the world with an energist tendency and pointed to the limits of materialism, agnosticism, and a scientifically wrongly measured world (James, trans. 1899, p. VII). 15 Paulsen does not mention the fact that in The Will to Believe James was mainly interested in belief as a precondition for human action.16 James found reception also by the Swedish writer on progressive education, Ellen Key (1849–1926), whose works had an impact mainly in Germany (Baader, 2001). Key discussed James’ definition of religion and his positions in a book that was published in Germany in 1906, Der Lebensglaube, in which she attempted to develop a new religion following Darwin, Nietzsche, and Haeckel (Key, 1906, p. 129, p. 545; Baader, 2002, 2005). Key was a convinced follower of the monism of Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919). Haeckel, a biologist and philosopher, popularized Darwin’s work in Germany. Haeckel held that at the beginning of the world there was one divine power underlying all phenomena that united with a natural element. Haeckel proposed a monistic nature religion that linked belief in the principle of evolution with a political belief in progress. His monistic faith, which leveled all differences between God and world, spirit and matter, ethics and aesthetics, was to be spread mainly by the school. He advocated this view in Der Monismus als Band zwischen Wissenschaft und Religion [Connecting Religion and Science] in 1893. Haeckel’s monistic religion and his reception of Darwin were key shaping influences on the German progressive education movement, Reformpädagogik. Reformpädagogik was characterized by a roaming religiosity (Nipperdey, 1990, p. 121), which – apart from the Christian tradition – had mystical, nature religious, evolutionarymonistic, Nietzschean, Buddhist, and national elements (Baader, 2002, 2005). Reform pedagogues distanced themselves from denominationally oriented religiosity and the doctrines of the church in connection with the question of the form that religious instruction in the schools was to take. They held church doctrines to be no longer appropriate in the scientific age. A reform education memorandum on religious instruction in the school stated that Nietzsche and Haeckel and his monism were to be seen as the predominant worldview (Gansberg, 1906). Despite this distancing from a religiosity bond to churches and institutions, the memorandum nonetheless supported education in religiosity. Many German reform pedagogy approaches held formation of the religiousmoral personality to be central and the highest goal of education, in spite of differences in the different religious orientations (Baader, 2002, 2005). In this regard, James’ position on religion differs from the mainstream in German progressive education in many respects. First, James distances himself from monism and Haeckel’s monism.

34

WILLIAM JAMES’ THEORY OF RELIGION

Second, James distances himself from Nietzsche and his cultural pessimism, speaking of Nietzsche’s ill humor. However, Nietzsche had a shaping impact on the religiosity of German Reformpädagogik.17 Third, James contradicts strictly the idea of the link between religion and morals. Precisely that link, however, determined the German reform pedagogy concept of the “religious-moral personality.” James, in contrast, assigns morals to the realm of cognition while assigning religion to the realm of feelings and motivation. Fourth, for James the religious personality does not outrank others. But for German reform pedagogy, the moral-religious personality, which is the expressly stated goal of education, is constructed as a higher-order personality and provided with a mission. As the spiritual aristocracy formed through Reformpädagogik, the religious-moral personality is to save the culture. These reform pedagogy ideas on the religious-moral personality are strongly stamped by Protestant theology and German cultural Protestantism (Graf, 1989). Nowhere in James’ Talks to Teachers does James recommend awakening religious feelings in the child. In German Reformpäadogogik, however, this is widespread, as is also reference to great personalities who are to serve as role models with their superior morals. While Talks to Teachers contains a reference to a master thinker, James puts the emphasis on his productivity and performance. And for James, what makes a genius is not particular greatness or higher being, but instead the capacity for unusual perceptions and insights.18 Despite his high estimation of personal experience, James does not think of “the personality” as a higher entity.19 James does think of the self primarily as a unity, for also the self is plural. “The divided self” is for James – as Joas (1995) points out – definitely the rule. The starting-out point is similar. For James and for a large part of German Reformpädagogik, the questions examined have to do with the justification of religious orientations in a world after Darwin’s theory of evolution, limits of science, and areas of experience that are not completely accessible to science. The topics include forms of religiosity that are no longer oriented to the church and that are individual, privatized, syncretist, and plural. The sources used by James for The Varieties of Religious Experience are in part identical to those referenced by supporters of the Life Reform (Lebensreform) movement in Germany, such as Emerson, Whitman, theosophy, Annie Bésant, Tolstoy, Buddhism. However, their responses to the issue of the field of tension between science and religion in the modern age are very different. For James, the religious person is neither moral nor a higher being, nor is the religious person laden with societal hopes for redemption. Whereas for large parts of German reform pedagogy formation of the religious-moral personality is the goal of education, for James (1899/1983): Education, in short, cannot be better described than by calling it the organization of acquired habits of conduct and tendencies to behavior. In the last analysis it consists in the organizing of resources in the human being, of

35

MEIKE SOPHIA BAADER

powers of conduct which shall fit him to his social and physical world. (p. 27) The German reception of James on education at the time did not, however, take up on the central position of the concept of action. If James is classified as belonging to Reformpädagogik, as does, for instance, Herman Röhrs in Reformpädagogik (Röhrs, 1980/1998, p. 53), then these differences are a matter for examination. They can be described as fundamental differences in the assessment of the human mind and spirit and as a response to Darwin. For James, the mind is a function of biological adaptation and not, as in the German philosophical-pedagogical tradition, evidence of a higher entity. James’ reception of Darwin places the category of “adaptation” at the center of attention, whereas in the version of the reform pedagogues in Germany, the focus is on “higher development.” THE SIGNIFICANCE OF JAMES’ THEORY OF RELIGION TODAY

While there clearly was reception of James in Germany at the beginning of the twentieth century, it was restricted mainly to the period before the First World War. We have seen a reawakening of interest in James only within recent years. In the sociology of religion of the last decades, functional approaches, to which James can be assigned, have come to the fore. Influential examples of this are Thomas Luckmann’s (1967) The Invisible Religion and Niklas Luhmann’s (2000) Die Religion der Gesellschaft.20 That religion in the modern age is individualistic, syncretist, pluralistic, and worldly was not first shown by Luckmann, but already by James in Varieties. In that he starts out from the assumption that individuals choose their religiosity according to their own preferences and susceptibilities, James provides proof that “religious bricolage” is not only a distinguishing mark of postmodernity.21 In the face of a pluralistic, societal, cultural, and religious world, it is obvious that the trend is towards increasing evidence of James’ “varieties of religious experience.” His determination of the limits of religious tolerance also has validity: the limits lie at that point where religions are themselves intolerant and there is no longer a moment of volition. With his pluralistic perspective, James even goes so far as to make a plea for choosing between competing religious options in an “age of toleration.” This would reveal what religion works best (James, 1896/1979, p. 8). James’ pluralistic concept of religion and his definition of religion seem to me to be analytically fruitful also for the reawakened scientific interest in religion that can be observed in recent years. As in Luckmann and Luhmann, James’ definition of religion deals with transcendental experiences and how we process them. Charles Taylor (2002) recently offered a criticism of James from a Catholic perspective. Taylor accuses James of narrowness, for not being interested in the church and the sacramentality emphasized in Catholic traditions. For James, in good Protestant tradition, prayer stands at the center of religious experience. And

36

WILLIAM JAMES’ THEORY OF RELIGION

in fact, James does not make a topic of discussion of the differences between institutionally accredited and institutionally less accredited forms, also not in their psychological stabilizing function. Those differences, however, were one of the main topics of the religious debates around 1900. The objection that James ignored institutions is legitimate. At the same time, the actual point of James’ essay is to insist that religion is justified in a scientific world. Pragmatism and radical empiricism form the bases – against totality claims of science and religion alike – for insisting on the possibility of both stances. As a prerequisite, both a broad concept of religion and a concept of science that takes individual experience seriously are needed. This Taylor overlooks when he reproaches James, with Durkheim, for neglecting the institutions. Taylor calls James a philosopher of the threshold, who tells us that we must decide between the one or the other system. That reading of James is inappropriate in a certain respect, for pluralism and the “philosophy of the and” refer precisely to the relation between science and religion: “You can see that pragmatism can be called religion, if you allow that religion can be pluralistic or merely melioristic in type” (James 1907/1998, p.144), for pragmatism builds a synthesis “between the two extremes of crude naturalism on the one hand and transcentental absolutism on the other” (p. 144). James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience is also useful and current for education debates, since the question of religion in many ways has not disappeared from education.22 It is especially fruitful for the German discussion, because in Germany religion is a subject taught in the schools. Of particular explosiveness for education debates seems to me to be James’ strict separation of morals and religion. That religiosity plays little role in power of moral judgment has also been shown by recent empirical investigations on moral judgment (Eckensberger, 1993). By separating morals and religion, James differs also from Dewey. On Dewey’s concept of religion, as he developed in A Common Faith (Dewey, 1934), Joas (1999) writes that in James’ tradition, but also influenced by Durkheim, the leading pragmatist John Dewey wrote a slim volume on religion, in which he – significantly less saturated with illustration than James – introduced the pragmatic theory of religion, digging deep into the formation of the self, the creation of ideals, and the experience of intersubjectivity and successful communication. Joas writes, however, that in doing so, Dewey was aiming at de-institutionalization of religiosity, which is very implausible seen in today’s perspective and which for Dewey held the promise of common belief in democracy, that is, the sacralization of democracy (Joas, 1999, p. 997).23 Dewey seeks to put religion under science, to free it of the supernatural, and he links it with morals, sociality, and politics. What distinguishes James’ view, in contrast, is precisely the rejection of this connection. James’ strength lies in a perspective that derives from the plurality of religions a world fundamentally conceived as pluralistic and an evolutionary concept of truth – a perspective that finds the basis of democracy ultimately in the plurality of religions.

37

MEIKE SOPHIA BAADER

NOTES 1

2

3

4 5

6

7

8

9

10

11 12 13

14

15 16

17

38

“It lay entirely unnoticed by anyone for twenty years, until I, in an address...at the university of California, brought it forward again and made a special application of it to religion” (James, 1907/1998, p. 29). In 1904 Marcel Mauss criticized James for inadequately explaining his concept of experience (Mauss, 1904/1968; Joas, 1995). Ralph Waldo Emerson was a close friend of James’ father, Henry James, Sr., religious philosopher, and a regular visitor in the James’ household (Diaz-Bone & Schubert, 1996, p. 18; on Emerson, see also Baumgarten, 1938). Eduard Baumgarten’s reception of pragmatism during the period of National Socialism has not yet been reappraised. In the foreword to Die geistigen Grundlagen des amerikanischen Gemeinwesens, Baumgarten wrote that “his treatise aimed to understand the Americans on the basis of their strange belief, that is, on the basis of their own energy” (Baumgarten, 1938, VII, freely translated here). However, his explanations remain rather roughly sketched (Reck, 1996, p. 374). The exact quotation is: “The most natively interesting object to a man is his own personal self and its fortunes” (James, 1899/1983, p. 63). “In the religious life the control is felt as ‘higher’; but since on our hypothesis it is primarily the higher faculties of our own hidden mind which are controlling, the sense of union with the power beyond us is a sense of something, not merely apparently, but literally true” (James, 1902/1985, p. 513). On the conflict between functional and substantive conceptions of religion, see Knoblauch (1991, p. 12). Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834), for instance, separates religion and morals in his Reden on religion of 1799 and, with this, takes a firm position against Kant (Schleiermacher, 1799/1999). For James, this is a further difference between religion and morals. Religion, he says, broadens the individual’s room for action, while morals narrow it down. Joas (1999) describes it this way: For James, the person guided by morals is a high performance athlete of the discipline, while the religious person lives out of a passion and excitement that is grounded in exceptional states of life that have become lasting; James analyzes the belief of religious people not as a cognitive holding-tobe-true, which could be shaken by a discourse of argumentation, but rather as a stance towards reality that is supported by the certain presence of a stronger power (Joas, 1999, p. 991). As to his own belief, James called himself a “piecemeal supernaturalist,” a “crasser supernaturalist,” as opposed to naturalists, on the one hand, and to philosophers that James called “refined supernaturalists,” on the other. The “piecemeal supernaturalist” does not submit to the type of naturalism that takes the facts of the natural sciences too much at face value. James also criticized that in “refined” or universalist naturalism, the question of the existence of God, which he takes as a name for the higher part of the universe, has no consequences whatsoever for the individual (James, 1902/1985, pp. 521). This is a position that James did not yet discuss in Varieties. Ernst Troeltsch reviewed Varieties in 1904 (Joas, 2000, p. 242). Three lectures in particular gave rise to the debates: lectures by James’ friend, Josiah Royce, on The Problem of Truth in The Light of Recent Research, by Ferdinand Canning Scott Schiller on Der rationalistische Wahrheitsbegriff, and by A.C. Armstrong on The Evolution of Pragmatism. For example, James was called a literateur, feature writer, and writer of short novels, but not a real philosopher by Paul Carus, who was originally from Germany and edited the journal The Monist in Chicago (Elsenhans, 1909, p. 737). In the foreword, Paulsen criticizes James’ treatment of chance coincidence (James, 1899, p. VIII). James is mentioned several times also in Herman Nohl’s Die pädagogische Bewegung (Nohl, 1933/1963). James not only distanced himself from Nietzsche, but on the question of religion also gave a different answer than Freud: James rejected Freud’s assumption of a connection between sexuality and religion and did not judge the support that individuals find in religion critically in the sense of

WILLIAM JAMES’ THEORY OF RELIGION

18 19

20

21

22

23

regressive needs or unsuccessful detachment processes. James speaks of the widespread fashion of the times to criticize religious feelings by showing their connection with sexual life (see James, 1902/1985, p. 10, p. 26). James not only doubts in connection with religion that sexuality plays an important role, but also does not attribute all too much significance to sexuality for the personality (Rosenzweig, 1994, pp. 115–117). See Rosenzweig (1994) also for very instructive information on the relationship between Freud and James. “Genius means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way” (James, 1890, p. 80). On the concept of the personality in the German-language context of education around 1900, see Baader (2003). With “invisible religion”, Luckmann heads up his examination with a theme taken from James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience. Luckmann holds that a substantive definition of religion, which seeks to define what is sacred, is beyond the reach of science; also Luhmann declares as failures all existing attempts to do so. In this respect, too, James proves to be postmodern avant la lettre, as Diaz-Bone and Schubert describe him (Diaz-Bone & Schubert, 1996, p. 16) Apart from the issue of religious instruction in the schools, the issue of religion is relevant to education in several respects: for history of education research, in the anthropological perspective, in connection with the question of formation of the personality, and finally, in connection with the question of morals and sociality. On Dewey’s religiosity, see Tröhler (2000).

SOURCES Dewey, J. (1957). A common faith. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Elsenhans, T. (Ed.) (1909). Bericht über den III. internationalen Kongress für Philosophie zu Heidelberg. Heidelberg. Gansberg, F. (Ed.) (1906). Religionsunterricht? Achtzig Gutachten. Ergebnis einer von der Vereinigung für Schulreform in Bremen veranstaltete allgemeine deutsche Umfrage. Leipzig: Voigtländer. Haeckel, E. (1893). Der Monismus als Band zwischen Wissenschaft und Religion. Glaubensbekenntnis eines Naturforschers vorgetragen am 9. October 1892 in Altenburg. Bonn: Strauss. James, W. (1890). The principles of psychology. New York: Henry Holt. James, W. (1896/trans. 1889). Der Wille zum Glauben und andere popularphilosophische Essays. Mit einem Geleitwort von Friedrich Paulsen (T. Lorenz, Trans.). Stuttgart: Frommanns. (German translation of W. James (1896). The will to believe) James, W. (1900). Psychologie und Erziehung. Ansprachen an Lehrer (F. Kiesow, Trans.). Leipzig: Engelmann. (German translation of James (1889), Talks to teachers on psychology and to students on some of life’s ideals) James, W. (1908). Psychologie und Erziehung. Ansprachen an Lehrer. Zweite, leicht überarbeitete Auflage Leipzig: Engelmann. James, W. (1912). Essays in radical empiricism. New York: Longmans, Green & Co. James, W. (1977). A pluralistic universe. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (First published 1909) James, W. (1979). The will to believe and other essays. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (First published 1896) James, W. (1983). Talks to teachers on psychology and to students on some of life’s ideals. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (First published 1899) James, W. (1985). The varieties of religious experience. A study in human nature. New York, London: Penguin Books. (First published 1902)

39

MEIKE SOPHIA BAADER James, W. (1994). Das pluralistische Universum. Vorlesungen über die gegenwärtige Lage der Philosophie (J. Goldstein, Trans.). Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. (German translation of James (1909), A pluralistic universe) James, W. (1997). Die Vielfalt religiöser Erfahrung. Eine Studie über die menschliche Natur (E. Herms, & C. Stahlhut, Trans.). Mit einem Vorwort von Peter Sloterdijk. Frankfurt am Main: Insel. (German translation of James (1902), The varieties of religious experience. A study of human nature) (Translation first published 1907) James, W. (1998). Pragmatism and the meaning of truth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (First published 1907) James, W. (2001). Pragmatismus. Ein neuer Name für einige alte Denkweisen (K. Schubert, & A. Spree, Trans.). Herausgegeben und mit einem Vorwort von Klaus Schubert und Axel Spree. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. (German translation of James (1907), Pragmatism and the meaning of truth) Key, E. (1906). Der Lebensglaube. Betrachtungen über Gott, Welt und Seele. Berlin: Fischer Mauss, M. (1968). Rezension W. James. In Œuvres. Vol. I. (pp. 58-65). Paris: Ed. De Minuit. (First published 1904) Nohl, H. (1963): Die pädagogische Bewegung in Deutschland und ihre Theorie. Frankfurt am Main: Schulte-Blumke. (First published 1933) Schleiermacher, F. (1999). Über die Religion. Reden an die Gebildeten unter ihren Verächtern. New York: De Gruyter.

REFERENCES Baader, M. S. (2001). Ellen Key: Das Jahrhundert des Kindes. Die international bekannte Autorin eines pädagogischen Bestsellers. In K.-P. Horn & Ch. Ritzi (Eds.), Klassiker und Aussenseiter. Pädagogische Veröffentlichungen des 20. Jahrhunderts (pp. 139-156). Baltmannsweiler: Schneider Hohengehren. Baader, M. S. (2002). Erziehung als Erlösung: religiöse Dimensionen der Reformpädagogik. Zeitschrift für pädagogische Historiographie, 8(2), 89-97. Baader, M. S. (2003). Persönlichkeitsbildung als Aufgabe von Schule um 1900. Jahrbuch für Historische Bildungsforschung, 9, 225-248. Baader, M. S. (2005). Erziehung als Erlösung. Transformationen des Religiösen in der Reformpädagogik (1880-1950). Weinheim: Juventa. Baumgarten, E. (1938). Die geistigen Grundlagen des amerikanischen Gemeinwesens. Bd. II: Der Pragmatismus: R.W. Emerson, W. James, J. Dewey. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann. Curry, L. A. (1996). The impact of William James: A thought process for recognizing truth in an unprecedented future. Journal of Thought, 31, 9-17. Diaz-Bone, R., & Schubert, K. (1996). William James zur Einführung. Hamburg: Junius. Eckensberger, L. H. (1993). Moralische Urteile als handlungsleitende soziale Regelsysteme im Spiegel der kulturvergleichenden Forschung. In A. Thomas (Ed.), Kulturvergleichende Psychologie. Eine Einführung. Göttingen: Hogrefe. Graf, F. W. (1989). Rettung der christlichen Persönlichkeit. Protestantische Theologie als Kulturwissenschaft des Christentums (pp. 103-132). In R. v. Bruch, F. W. Graf & G. Hübinger (Eds.), Kultur und Kulturwissenschaften um 1900. Stuttgart: Steiner. Joas, H. (1995). Der amerikanische Pragmatismus und die frühe Religionssoziologie. In V. Krech & H. Tyrell (Eds.), Religionssoziologie um 1900 (pp. 195-209). Würzburg: Ergon-Verlag. Joas, H. (1999). Die Soziologie und das Heilige. Schlüsseltexte der Religionssoziologie. Sonderheft Merkur. Deutsche Zeitschrift für europäisches Denken, 53, 990-998. Joas, H. (2000). Social theory and the sacred. Ethical Perspectives, 7(4), 233-243. Knoblauch, H. (1991). Die Verflüchtigung der Religion ins Religiöse. Thomas Luckmanns Unsichtbare Religion. Preface/Vorwort zu Die unsichtbare Religion (pp. 7-41). Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.

40

WILLIAM JAMES’ THEORY OF RELIGION Luckmann, T. (1967). The invisible religion. The problem of religion in modern society. New York: Macmillan. Luhmann, N. (2000). Die Religion der Gesellschaft. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Nipperdey, T. (1990). Deutsche Geschichte 1866-1918. Bd. 1: Arbeitswelt und Bürgergeist. München: Beck Reck, A. (1996). James, William. In S. Brown (Ed.), Biographical dictionary of twentieth-century philosophers (pp. 373-375). London, New York: Routledge. Röhrs, H. (1998). Die Reformpädagogik. Ursprung und Verlauf unter internationalem Aspekt (1980). Weinheim: Deutscher Studienverlag. Rosenzweig, S. (1994). The historic expedition to America. Freud, Jung and Hall the king-maker. St. Louis, MO: Rana House. Schubert, K., & Spree, A. (2001). Einleitung zu William James: Pragmatismus. Ein neuer Name für einige alte Denkweisen. Herausgegeben und mit einem Vorwort von Klaus Schubert und Axel Spree. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Taylor, C. (2002). Die Formen des Religiösen in der Moderne. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Tröhler, D. (2000). The global community, religion and education: The modernity of Dewey’s social philosophy. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 19, 159-186.

Meike Sophia Baader Institut für Allgemeine Pädagogik University of Hildesheim

41

Suggest Documents