[xmca] Jane Addams, Dewey, and the (Hegelian) dialectic - upside down

[Gregory Allan Thompson <gathomps@uchicago.edu>]

I continue to be fascinated by the possibilities of Jane
Addams’ description of the unreality of antagonisms.

To recap her point (apologies for the duplication):
Addams saw all antagonisms as unreal. Dewey found this
difficult to understand since he had understood the Hegelian
dialectic as a series of antagonisms that are resolved through
reconciliation. But following a long conversation with Addams,
Dewey wrote: "I can see that I have always been interpreting
the [Hegelian] dialectic wrong end up, the unity as the
reconciliation of the opposites, instead of the opposites as
the unity in its growth, and thus translated the physical
tension into a moral thing" and then he notes "I don't know as
I give the reality of this at all-- it seems so natural and
commonplace now, but I never had anything take hold of me so."

Following Addams' position that all antagonisms are unreal, it
seems that the hindrance to progress in a conflictual issue is
the domination of one side over the other (whether by war or
by court or something else). In this antagonistic pitting of
one against the other, both positions become entrenched and
there is no possibility of the opposites growing into the
unity - of "aufgehoben" to use Hegel’s term. As Jay notes, the
evolutionists accept evolutionary theory as dogma while the
anti-evolutionists, well, it seems to go without saying what
their dogma is. What I take to be the Addams-ian argument is
that if both of these two positions were set free of their
dogmas and allowed to engage in civil conversation, then a
true aufgehoben could be possible, a sublation of both
positions that would simultaneously negate and bring forward
something of each.

Take, for example, the evolutionist/creationist tension,
although educational policies have changed dramatically since
the 1926 Scopes trial, the central opposition still exists.
This courtroom battle was one that, as with all battles, did
not resolve the contradiction. Rather, it was a victory by
fiat of the courts. As a result, there was no sublation of the
opposing sides, and instead the two sides remain. Half of the
problem here can be located on the side of the winners who
took (and continue to take) this as evidence of “progress” and
“truth” in contradiction to those “backwards” and “ignorant”
people on the other side, and half of the problem certainly
rests on the other side. This contradiction becomes realized
in interpersonal terms – personal attacks, both implicit and
explicit, of one side to the other – the result of which is
the recalcitration and polarization of each side. In fact,
these interpersonal processes lead to hyper-polarization of
positions because each time there is an attack from one side
to the other, the side receiving the blow circles the wagons,
battens down the hatches (sorry for the mixed metaphor – both
seemed appropriate), and engages in intensive discursive work
to justify and further elaborate their position and their
life-world to their own group and eventually to others. [at
the heart of the problem I've outlined is a failure of
*recognition* of those on the opposing side, and the result is
continued struggle, and even the expansion of struggle]

At these times, one can see the power of the group working on
individuals when the group comes together in some form (as I
mentioned these are increasingly mass mediated – esp. of the
Foxnews variety but also of the “prayercast” variety). These
moments of group feeling (collective effervescence) are
powerful instantiators of identity and thus serve as
motivation for further action in that these collective moments
serve to “charge up” the signs and symbols of one’s own party
with sacred energies of “truth”, “justice”, and “the good”,
and simultaneously cast the opposition as “false”, “unjust”,
and “evil”, and those on the other side are either laughed at
(as with Foxnews or MSNBC) or pitied (as with the prayercast).

The Addams-ian solution to this problem would be to begin a
civil conversation about these issues. The real difficulty is
to determine the conditions of what such a conversation would
look like and how it could be civilized (I’m not convinced
that Habermas has quite got this figured out, but it seems
like a start; and equally Honneth's emphasis on recognition is
also of critical importance). This may seem a bit
Pollyanna-ish, but I think that even if you can convince one
side of the conversation to commit to the ideal, then you can
make a true civil conversation happen. If Gandhi could do it
with such a violent and domineering interlocutor as the
British, then couldn’t we imagine such non-violent action at
the level of discourse when engaging with the considerably
less violent (but possibly no less domineering) interlocutor
of The Evangelical? And can we imagine doing it not just as a
rhetorical strategy to win in the end but because we actually
respect those persons and the life worlds and life projects
that they are engaged in?

What do you think, does this continue to sound too optimistic?

-greg
---------------------------------------
Greg Thompson
Ph.D. Candidate
The Department of Comparative Human Development
The University of Chicago

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