Re: [xmca] Jane Addams, Dewey, and the (Hegelian) dialectic -

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

Bruce, Michael, and others interested in critical thinking and
democracy, 

As much as I hate to leave Hegel and Dewey (maybe grist for
another thread), As Michael G notes, Addams’ position is very
much about reality, and yes, the Pullman strike was at the
heart of the conversation between Dewey and Addams that I am
referring to (described on pp. 312-315 of The Metaphysical
Club). In order to get a better sense of what Addams is
arguing, here are some of Dewey’s quotes of what Addams’ said
in their conversation. (And let me add that I take Addams to
be arguing a point that is at the heart of Marx’s idea of
Communism – namely that it is possible for us to see the
interest of the whole of humanity as identical with the
interests of the individual):

Regarding Addams’ position that antagonism was always
unnecessary, Addams told Dewey that antagonisms never arose
from real objective differences “but from a person’s mixing in
his own personal reactions—the extra emphasis he gave the
truth, the enjoyment he took in doing a thing because it was
unpalatable to others, or the feeling that one must show his
own colors” 
and as a practical, real-world example, Addams offers the
following: “we freed the slaves by war & and had now to free
them all over again individually, & pay the costs of the war &
reckon with the added bitterness of the Southerner beside”
When Dewey pushed her with examples of capital and labor,
church and democracy [!], Addams insisted:  “The antagonism of
institutions was always unreal; it was simply due to the
injection of personal attitude & reaction; & then instead of
adding to the recognition of meaning, it delayed and distorted
it.”
Despite that fact that Dewey notes that this was “the most
magnificent exhibition of intellectual & moral faith I had
ever seen”, it still took some time for him to be convinced of
this.  

As I understand her position, Addams is not saying that these
antagonisms are “interpersonal” in the sense that the
individual people on one side don’t like the individual people
on the other side (although that is often the case). It is
much more than that. The antagonism is intrapersonal – it
speaks to one’s sense of who one is. And both sides of this
debate feel that they are the bearers of Truth and engaged in
a battle (a war?) with that which is UnTrue. (isn’t this what
drives us as academics?).

Regarding this particular debate Bruce, I’m afraid that you
may have started off on the wrong foot if your desire is
indeed to get beyond antagonisms (and although it was clear
that you didn’t agree with her methods, I wasn’t clear how you
felt about the end goal of Addams – getting beyond
antagonisms). If the goal is to have a dialogue with
creationists or intelligent design folks, it seems that it
would be better to start by actually talking to them rather
than starting with what the evolutionists say that
creationists say is the creationist position. If Addams has
anything to tell us, it is that when one side characterizes
the position of the other side, they will likely mis-construe
the other side’s position, thus furthering antagonism. 

[Oddly, this fundamental drive for misunderstanding seems at
the core of much of what we academics do. When this type of
work is poorly done, such as by undergrads or young grad
students, we get frustrated with them on the grounds that they
are being polemical, not realizing that this is precisely what
we are doing – only we do it much better. There is little
incentive in academia to say “the other gal/guy has a point
with XYZ”, it’s always some variation of “I’m right, she’s
wrong” (at least in every way that matters). This provides us
with the motivation to do what we do – we do it not because of
the lavish salaries (HA!), but because we believe that we are
engaged in an endeavor that is fundamentally “right”. It gives
us Worth.]

Just to take one phrase from the description of the book that
you reviewed (and please correct me if this misconstrues the
intent of the book – no time to read the whole book!): 
“Will Creationism Win the 2,500 Year War with Materialism and
Reason?”

Here we are told that we are engaged in a “war” with creationism?
I can’t help but feel that this war is infused with the feel
of a “holy” war – on both sides!
This is where Jay’s concerns about the dogmatic faith in
evolutionism seem to really ring true. 

What if we were to abandon this laced (implicative?) rhetoric
and let the arguments play themselves out? What if, instead of
focusing on the content of knowledge taught in our schools, we
were to focus on the process of knowledge-making and have that
process be THE core value of our educational system? This
takes us back to the suggestion by others that “critical
thinking” should be the core value (and I do wonder if there
aren’t a collection of other core values that are necessary.
Martha Nussbaum suggests three: Socratic capacity for
self-criticism, understanding of onself as a part of a
heterogeneous nation, and a narrative imagination through
which one can imagine oneself in the shoes of another. But I’m
not sure I’m happy with that list either). If critical
thinking where the one thing that was taught in the schools,
then wouldn't the rest work itself out?

So, getting to where the rubber meets the road: open dialogue
and debate amongst adults is one thing, but I will admit that
it starts to get scary when one thinks about taking these
things seriously in the teaching of children. It is a scary
thought to imagine my children being taught things that I know
are wrong (whether by reason or by faith), but I think that my
role as a parent includes educating my children to think
critically (and if critical thinking were truly the core value
of education, then wrong things would last long in the
schools). But maybe it is even scarier to think about other
people’s children being taught things that I know are wrong
since I know that many parents in the US today do not talk to
their children (and let’s be honest – having time to regularly
be able to talk to one’s children is a very bourgeois thing).

I think at bottom of this discussion is a question about faith
in humanity and faith in reason. Do you have sufficient faith
in people to set them free to intensively engage with ideas
that might be wrong? I think Hegel (and Marx) and Dewey are
relevant here precisely because they all seem to have this
kind of faith in humanity and in reason (and even in
history!), but maybe they were wrong to do so (and certainly
the facts of Hitler’s Germany should give us pause regarding
optimism about humanity and reason).

One point where I feel I may be too optimistic is regarding
the possibility that people will actually talk to each other
(parents to children, Evangelicals to aethists, citizens to
citizens). It seems more and more the case that the sort of
conversation that would be necessary may be one of the most
serious casualties of late modern capitalism which involves a
splitting off of us one from another into neatly targetable
niche markets (the modern day version of Marx’s alienation
from species being – an alienation of man from man), and this
troubles me much more than whether my kids will be taught
intelligent design in school (no worries that this will happen
here in Hyde Park, though!). 

-greg


>Message: 4
>Date: Wed, 6 Jan 2010 12:02:16 -0000
>From: "Bruce Robinson" <bruce@brucerob.eu>
>Subject: Re: [xmca] Jane Addams, Dewey,	and the (Hegelian)
dialectic -
>	upside down
>To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
>Message-ID: <96F009BDCA2E4327BB5013828A410DAD@BRUCEROBINSOPC>
>Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed; charset="utf-8";
>	reply-type=original
>
>Greg,
>
>Leaving Hegel and Dewey aside for now, maybe we should return
to the real 
>world and ask whether "all antagonisms are unreal"? For me,
most serious 
>social antagonisms (not things such as bad interpersonal
relations) have a 
>basis in real material  relations and are not reconcilable at
the level of 
>who has the best rhetorical or moral argument, though that
may affect the 
>eventual outcome.
>
>Putting it in terms of the evolutionist / creationist debate,
what might a 
>compromise look like? Would it be just a little bit
creationist? Is a 
>meaningful dialogue between superstition and science
possible? I've just 
>written a short review of 'Critique of Intelligent Design:
Materialism 
>versus Creationism from Antiquity to the Present' by John
Bellamy Foster, 
>Brett Clark, and Richard York. They make the point that no
compromise which 
>advocates two non-overlapping spheres of science and religion
(as advocated 
>by Steven Jay Gould and moderate religious evolutionists)  is
acceptable to 
>the creationists as they recognise that once science is
allowed to define 
>its own sway, god can only be reduced to an ever smaller role
ending up with 
>pantheistic or 'final cause' positions. As they also point
out, the conflict 
>between materialism and creationism is over 2,000 years old
and is hardly a 
>question of misunderstandings.
>
>Bruce R
>
>
>----- Original Message ----- 
>From: "Gregory Allan Thompson" <gathomps@uchicago.edu>
>To: <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
>Sent: Wednesday, January 06, 2010 6:12 AM
>Subject: [xmca] Jane Addams, Dewey, and the (Hegelian)
dialectic - upside 
>down
>
>
>>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
“progressâ€・ and
>> “truthâ€・ in contradiction to those “backwardsâ€・ and
“ignorantâ€・
>> 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 “prayercastâ€・ 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 upâ€・ the signs and symbols of one’s
own party
>> with sacred energies of “truthâ€・, “justiceâ€・, and
“the goodâ€・,
>> and simultaneously cast the opposition as “falseâ€・,
“unjustâ€・,
>> and “evilâ€・, 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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