In the last chapter we examined the possibilities and limitations of inquiry as evidenced in Dewey’s philosophy of action. By making practical action central and simultaneously connecting it to contingency, Dewey identifies inquiry as the source of knowledge. Inquiry thus retains, in his view, Aristotle’s sensitivity to contingency as embodied in practical wisdom, but is nonetheless capable of serving as the determinant process for acquiring knowledge in all domains of life. Since inquiry emerges out of fractures or problems in experience, the products of inquiry are judged as effective responses within that horizon. The meaningfulness of human agency, questioned by Hodge in the wake of Darwin, is a function of effective action, and does not hinge on our ability to achieve epistemic certainty or to connect to something supernatural in character. This approach, however, makes central to inquiry the practice of giving and asking for reasons and so must contain normative resources to resist the problem of radical subjectivism. This completes Dewey’s initial response to the problem identified in chapter 1. The aim of part II is to reconstruct his understanding of religion, morality, and political life in the light of these claims. We begin, in this chapter, with his reflections on religion.
We must now ask the following: How should we conceive of our religious lives given that our fundamental orientation proceeds from the domain of practical action? This is the question behind Dewey’s 1934 Terry Lectures, A Common Faith, which he delivered at Yale University; it directs our attention away from the traditional questions within the history of theology. What this means for religion he indicates in his 1933 review of Is There a God? A Conversation by Nelson Wieman, Douglas Clyde Macintosh, and Max Carl Otto:
Separating the matter of religious experience from the question of the existence of God … I have found—and there are many who will corroborate my experience by their own—that all of the things which traditional religions prize and which they connect exclusively with their own conception of God can be had equally well in the ordinary course of human experience in our relations to the natural world and to one another as human beings related in the family, friendship, industry, art, science, and citizenship. Either then the concept of God can be dropped out as far as genuinely religious experience is concerned or it must be framed wholly in terms of natural and human relationship involved in our straightaway human experience. (DR [LW9:224] [original emphasis])1
This passage encapsulates Dewey’s understanding of religious naturalism: nature—broadly conceived—can generate both a sense of piety and a guiding faith in life without requiring a supernatural source for their intelligibility. These themes run throughout Dewey’s philosophy in various forms between 1900 and 1935. The major difference is that, in 1934, he turns in A Common Faith to self-consciously distilling its import through the idiom of religion, suggesting a more genuine interest in the latter than otherwise thought.2
In this chapter I focus then on Dewey’s A Common Faith in order to explore the conversation it generates between religious experience and political life. The focal point is the kind of self that is at work, the character it entails, and the implications for social life. Dewey already begins to flesh out these implications when he writes of the term “religious” that “as a quality of experience [it] signifies something that may belong to all these experiences … aesthetic, scientific, moral and political” (CF [LW9:9]). This indicates a difference from his earlier claim in “The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy.” In that essay, we recall, Dewey explains that once inquiry is freed, it can then be applied to morality, politics, and religion. But his intention, at least from the perspective of A Common Faith, is more radical and can be stated as such. Religious experience is subject to the reach of inquiry because it is potentially an aspect of any dimension of practical action.
In the first section below I argue that Dewey’s perspective is not new in this respect. Ralph Waldo Emerson is most clearly the model, rather than Peirce or James, both of whom seem far more reluctant than Dewey to embrace religious naturalism.3 Emerson’s goal is to awaken the primordial element at the core of democratic life that exalts our everyday transactions with nature. His religious naturalism articulates a vision of self-reliance, to be sure, but one whose originating and constraining elements emerge from a kinship with nature. Similarly, Dewey’s philosophy of practical action emphasizes the importance of the ordinary, where that term denotes the everyday space of shared currency—a site of transactions among others by virtue of which the art of living develops. In keeping with Emerson, then, Dewey wants to cultivate a more reflective sense of dependence—that is, to give an account of the democratic core of self-reliance.
Because this first section of the chapter is both lengthy and elaborate, I must give a clear explanation of why it should serve as a preface to our discussion of A Common Faith. At the heart of A Common Faith is an investigation of the relationship between inquiry and the categories of piety and faith. But this is parasitic, I argue, on a larger concern about the socio-psychological presuppositions of a vibrant democratic community. The importance of those presuppositions to political and moral deliberation is only gestured to here, but taken up fully in chapters 4 and 5. Notwithstanding, what is at stake in this context is the “ethos” of democracy under the conditions of modern pluralism: the relationship between a democratic framework and the activities that go on inside, “the manner in which citizens understand themselves as members of a political community,” the responsibilities that emerge in the context of responding to common problems, and how they understand the emergence and maintenance of their respective commitments, which are now devoid of epistemic certainty.4 The most immediate intellectual ancestor to whom Dewey connects his thinking on these matters is Emerson. This background makes more explicit the democratic ethos at the heart of his religious naturalism and conditions the explanation Dewey offers of religious experience. To turn to A Common Faith without this preparatory work invites confusion.
In the second section I explore the two important themes of A Common Faith—namely, piety and faith. Precisely because Dewey seeks to develop an account of democratic self-reliance, piety cannot mean blind deference as we traditionally understand the term. Rather, piety is a critical but retrospective assessment of the narrative of experience we inhabit and on which we depend; it allows us to deepen our apprehension of the present. Dewey refers to this with his term “habit” (as noted in the third section of chap. 2). But as previously indicated, habits denote the layered dimension that underwrites identity and thereby provide the starting points for future judgments and behavior. To speak of habits as constituting a narrative of experience is to see them in the form of traditions that we come to assess, employ, and honor. Jeffrey Stout refers to this conception of piety as a “just or appropriate response to the sources of one’s existence and progress through life.”5 What makes piety a “just or appropriate” response in Dewey’s philosophy is its entailment of inquiry—a position that carries political ramifications for how we appeal to religion in the context of public discourse.
For Dewey, if piety is a virtue where the posture of reflection is retrospective, faith is primarily forward-looking. This explains the distinction he makes in A Common Faith between “Religion” and “the Religious” (CF [LW9: chap. 1]). For him, the category of “Religion[s]”—that is, the institutions, practices, and beliefs that comprise religion—can no longer lay claim to absolute certainty, and so leaves individuals without certain answers to questions about life’s ultimate meaning. But because of this, Dewey argues, individuals are opened to the possibility of ideals being continuous with, rather than external to, actual existence. This is Emerson’s point in his provocative 1838 “Divinity School Address”: “[L]et the breadth of new life be breathed by you through the forms already existing.”6 The metabolic imagery denotes, in Dewey’s language, the transmutation of experience into a vision of the ideal through the inferential dimension of inquiry. He describes this facet of inquiry as the imagination.7
From the perspective of A Common Faith, the fractures or problems in experience to which inquiry repeatedly responds are now described as the attempt to achieve a whole or harmonious self. Although this configuration of one’s ideals from actual existence orients the self in practice, Dewey is clear that it can only unify in imagination. The disjunction between actions that result in pursuit of ideals and what the world will allow explains his use of the term “faith.” Defined this way, faith is always operative whenever a hypothesis of action is to be tested in experience. But what makes this description peculiarly religious is the all-inclusive nature of the ideal vis-à-vis the demands of practical action in toto. What we have hit upon in Dewey’s philosophy is the intimate relationship of inquiry to the moral virtues of piety and faith.
What are the concerns that A Common Faith addresses? Dewey speaks directly to this issue in a 1935 letter to the Unitarian humanist Max Otto: “My book was written for the people who feel inarticulately that they have the essence of the religious with them and yet are repelled by the religions and are confused.”8 He reiterates this point four years later in a rejoinder to reflections on his writings when he says: “A Common Faith [is] not addressed to those who are content with traditions in which ‘metaphysical’ is substantially identical with ‘supernatural.’ It [is] addressed to those who have abandoned supernaturalism, and who on that account are reproached by traditionalists for having turned their backs on everything religious” (EKV [LW14:79–80]). If we recall from chapter 1, these passages indicate Dewey’s attentiveness to the crisis of religious certainty that partly developed out of the encounter with Darwinian evolution. But these passages also indicate his attempt to explain that religious experience does not require special obedience to specific beliefs or institutions or, by implication, commitment to their permanence.
This characterization of Dewey’s intentions yields an important claim that explains how we ought to receive his Terry Lectures. A Common Faith is an exhortation to embrace a kind of character in the modern world—to be a self-reliant individual. As such, he signals the tentativeness of his project in “Religion and Our Schools” of 1908, when he says of the emergence of religious naturalism that it “may be” the coming into existence of a “fuller and deeper religion”; if so, he adds, “I do not claim to know” (ROS [MW4:168]). And again in A Common Faith he shows caution in stipulating the existence of this fuller and deeper religion largely because his own work attempts to bring this account of religious naturalism to fruition:
History seems to exhibit three stages of growth. In the first stage, human relationships were thought to be so infected with the evils of corrupt human nature as to require redemption from external and supernatural sources. In the next stage, what is significant in these relations is found to be akin to values esteemed distinctively religious. This is the point now reached by liberal theologians. The third stage would realize that in fact the values prized in those religions that have ideal elements are idealizations of things characteristic of natural association, which have then been projected into a supernatural realm for safe-keeping and sanction. (CF [MW9:48] [emphasis added])
As the passage makes clear, Dewey is cautious about claiming that this third stage exists, even as he attempts to describe what it might require and how it might orient us to the world. In other words, the third transformative stage is not one of fact, but rather a suggestion to be tested. To say this is not to deny that Dewey believes the historical milieu in which he writes is ripe for this transformative stage. But what this fully requires has yet to be stipulated. A Common Faith, then, must be read as a proposal—a picture of life we may well want to inhabit.
The use of self-reliance to describe Dewey’s project may seem odd at this point. In what sense is this implied by his vision? On my reading, he means to capture the revolutionary orientation at the core of that term. As Emerson says of self-reliance, it works “in all offices and relations of men; in their religion; in their education; in their pursuits; their modes of living; their association; in their property; in their speculative views.”9 The workings of self-reliance in our daily functioning make more explicit its existential dimension—that the absence of permanence in matters of religion requires and invokes courage, a willingness to forsake certainty for the insecurity of discovery. This understanding of courage underwrites Dewey’s account of faith; it is precisely what makes faith difficult, as he says. However, this conception of faith is a constitutive part of the moral dimension of self-reliance—that is, a state of dependence that entails responsibility. The relationship between courage and dependence, self-reliance and democracy stimulates self-assertion, but also tempers its meaning; without this self-assertion would easily slide into hubris.
DEMOCRACY AND SELF-RELIANCE
In Dewey’s 1908 essay “Religion and Our Schools” the themes of democracy and self-reliance are already present. He argues for a suspension of religious training in public schools; the reason, he explains, that the American tradition is opposed to any connection between church and state relates to the “diversity and vitality of the various denominations, each fairly sure that, with a fair field and no favor, it could make its own way” (ROS [MW4:168–169]). He does not want us to ignore the reality that the life of the state, “the vitality of the social whole, is of more importance than the flourishing of any segment or class” (ROS [MW4:169]). Here he voices a theme dominant throughout much of American political discourse, even if not always expressed in practice. The worry is that in losing sight of the social whole, we court domination by mingling state authorization with some class of interests, religious or profane, that claims to speak in the name of truth. This much he says of dogmatic faiths: “The characteristic of religion from their point of view, is that it is—intellectually speaking—secret, not public; peculiarly revealed, not generally known; authoritatively declared, not communicated and tested in ordinary ways” (ROS [MW4:173]). Dewey repeats this anti-authoritarian claim in A Common Faith: “The method of intelligence is open and public. The doctrinal method is limited and private” (CF [MW9:27]). From the perspective of the doctrinal method, we move dangerously close to making our religious faith a hindrance to the political life we expect it to sustain—a political life that aims for openness and general accessibility, and is based on discursive evaluation and public experimentation. Dewey’s aim is to contribute to a conversation in which, as Alexis de Tocqueville remarks with a note of overconfidence, “the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom … [are] united intimately with one another.”10
Dewey is not naïve, however. He recognizes the uncertainty that attends a framework of religious plurality and voluntary deference, especially where epistemic certainty is abandoned for a more humble, although still fleeting, sense of security. “I do not suppose,” he says in A Common Faith, “for many minds the dislocation of the religious [as an orientation] from a religion [that is, a specific set of religious beliefs and institutions] is easy to effect” (CF [MW9:11]).11 In a passage from “Religion and Our Schools,” already quoted in chapter 1, we find the following remark: “There is undoubted loss of joy, of consolation, of some types of strength…. There is manifest increase of uncertainty; there is some paralysis of energy” (ROS [MW4:168]). But he quickly adds: “Bearing the losses and inconveniences of our time as best we may, it is the part of men to labor persistently and patiently for the clarification and development of the positive creed of life implicit in democracy” (ROS [MW4:168] [emphasis added]).
We get our clue to Dewey’s appreciation for religious plurality and voluntary piety from his talk of democracy and the social whole. This undoubtedly prompts a moment of pause. Does this not cut against his presumed appreciation for individuality? Hans Joas voices this complaint in his reading of A Common Faith when he writes: “[Dewey] skips over the particularism of each individual experience and lands … in an empty universalism of the democratic ideal, the motivating force of which remains unfathomable.”12 Alan Ryan makes a similar point, although as a more general gloss on Dewey’s political philosophy: “It is hard to repress the thought that Dewey may simply have been asking too much of democratic politics and that a moderate degree of alienation from one another is the price we pay for a liberal society and its virtues of privacy and diversity.”13 If Joas and Ryan are correct, we should rightly scold Dewey for wrongly describing democracy as the only source of spiritual enrichment.
We should not conclude on this note so quickly, however. The criticism, I believe, misses its mark by attributing to Dewey an overly romantic conception of democracy’s role in the life of its citizens. There is a more subtle argument here. As I read him, Dewey does not mean to obscure the importance of individuality, let alone the religious commitments that particular individuals hold. Rather, he seeks to explain individuality’s proper place in the context of democratic life. The “social whole” must mean something other than a strong communitarianism.
He points to the meaning of the term in his Liberalism and Social Action of 1935, published one year after A Common Faith: liberal democracy is “committed to an end that is at once enduring and flexible: the liberation of individuals so that realization of their capacities may be the law of their life” (LSA [LW11:41] [emphasis added]; cf. DEA [LW11:217–218]). This requires development of “a social organization that will make possible effective liberty and opportunity for personal growth in mind and spirit in all individuals” (LSA [LW11:41]). The “social whole” thus refers to the sharing of common elements (i.e., goods, virtues, practices) that bring individuals together, allowing each to find something of themselves in others. This is a necessary factor for being able to bestow singular consideration on each other in the context of shared concerns, without compromising one’s developing self-understanding (E3 [LW7:345]). He is careful, then, not to conflate this vision of shared identity—in which our natural tendency for communal living is emphasized and becomes the object of contestation and evaluation—with the kind of collective will idea that comes to mind when we think of communion (PP [LW2:243–247]; cf. HNC [MW14: chaps. 5 and 26]).14 As Dewey says in his 1927 work, The Public and Its Problems, publics “consist of all those who are affected by the indirect consequences of transactions to such an extent that it is deemed necessary to have those consequences systematically cared for” (PP [LW2:245–246]).
This is not a postulate, but rather an argument about how we ought to understand democracy as a form of social practice. He is clarifying and developing, to use his language, what the positive creed of life implicit in democracy means for the goods we seek. As far as he is concerned, and in keeping with his Protestant counterparts, the issue is not about whether the goods within life will stand in a supporting relationship to democracy, but rather how to envision and manage that relationship. From “the ethical point of view,” says Dewey, “it is not too much to say that the democratic ideal poses, rather than solves, the great problem: How to harmonize the development of each individual with the maintenance of a social state in which the activities of one will contribute to the good of all others” (E3 [LW7:350]).
In his view, the historical emergence of democracy stipulates a problem, the management of which it attempts, in principle, to confront. Consider the image of democracy Dewey conceives in thinking about our religious lives: “Whether or not we are, save in some metaphorical sense, all brothers, we are at least all in the same boat traversing the same turbulent ocean” (CF [LW9:56]). This image means to call to mind an important relationship between the activities within a democracy, on the one hand, and the relationship between those activities and democratic life, on the other. Like Neurath’s boat, the democratic state is adrift at sea. The boat makes possible the activities and goods the crew enjoys; those activities have an autonomy, which, although not reducible to the maintenance of the boat, do not intend to sink it. In fact, it is what allows the crew to call the boat home and to see each other as fellow crew members in the light of their common vulnerability. Analogously, democracy provides a framework in which religious experiences (among others) develop and are negotiated, but democracy is not to be identified with the goods of those experiences as such or vice versa.15 In keeping with the metaphor, we do not presume that the activities of citizens attempt to sink the ship, but rather seek to enhance the quality of life it provides. For Dewey, the motivation for sustaining our commitment to democracy is the goods it manages and makes possible, rather than replaces.16
The subtext to the “Religion in Our Schools” essay of 1908, A Common Faith, and the letters that follow is Dewey’s account of the subject; he believes a new account of individuality emerges with the modern revolt against monarchical and ecclesiastical authority, which foregrounded the necessity of political accountability and demystifying political legitimacy. We have already encountered Dewey’s understanding of identity formation in his philosophy of action. But in that context, identity formation emerged in his attempt to excavate both the possibilities and the limitations that attend our everyday practical encounters with the world once freed from the philosophical constraint he called the quest for certainty. Here, his philosophy of action doubles as a narrative of the emergence of the modern subject—an account that is presented in less systematic form in Emerson—in which the meaning-content of individual identities is not exhausted by their functional location in society. As such, individuals are no longer positioned to assume that within the social practice of democracy, their fellow citizens share the same private ethical assumptions—that is, assumptions relating to the meaning-content of their identity.
This is the undercurrent to The Quest for Certainty, and it becomes a central theme in the essays that comprise Dewey’s 1930 Individualism: Old and New. Just as the quest for certainty, in Dewey’s view, no longer exhausts the possibilities of philosophy and the importance of practical action to human well-being, religious authority and hierarchical structures in posttraditional societies no longer provide the primary source of self-understanding for individuals. His articulation of the creativity of practical action bespeaks the emergence of a new, albeit ambivalent, conception of subjectivity that his work tracks and attempts to support. Sounding much like Hodge or Weber, Dewey writes in the appropriately titled chapter 4 of Individualism: Old and New, “The Lost Self”: “The significant thing is that the loyalties which once held individuals, which gave them support, direction and unity of outlook on life, have well-nigh disappeared” (ION [LW5:67] [emphasis added]).
This remark, which seemingly reads as a lamentation, appears in a work that is ostensibly addressing the rugged individualism of laissez-faire capitalism that is an obstacle to social transformation. But what does this have to do with the issue of religion? To begin, Dewey argues that the response to America’s economic problems cannot simply be distributive. Merely extending “to all individuals the traits of economic initiative, opportunity and enterprise” is, to him, insufficient (ION [LW5:81]). That these are important cannot be denied, since a robust vision of freedom should acknowledge the necessity of, and access to, external resources on which one must rely. Effective freedom, as Dewey describes it, denotes the capability of persons to realize their life projects, a capability that most certainly requires economic resources (E3 [LW7:305–309]; ASC [LW11:130–145]). But we cannot, he argues, leave untouched the understanding of the self that underwrites twentieth-century America, lest we transform institutions and practices without the appropriate psychology to sustain, nurture, and provide for their extension. The character type that has achieved currency, Dewey tells us, is that of an individual who seeks to “go west”; to be adventurous without concern; and to slough-off all traditional ties and remake himself wholly by his own devices without reliance on what is held in common.
In response to this development, he argues for “a new psychological and moral type” that reconfigures character in a democratic idiom (ION [LW5:67]).17 Here Dewey negotiates a vision of individual identity, as Emerson did in the 1830s and 40s in response to a similar form of moral crisis that crass individualism posed to democracy. They do not want identity exhausted by traditional commitments, but nor do they wish to run headlong in the opposite direction of the unencumbered self that fuels what Dewey calls the “industrial oligarchy” (ION [LW5:66]). For both Emerson and Dewey, rugged individualism feeds “a system of selfishness … of distrust, of concealment, of superior keenness, not of giving but of taking advantage.”18 The fact that the intimation of spiritual sickness appears in a context so obviously about economic degeneracy should not be too difficult to understand. For if spiritual sickness bespeaks the emptying out of moral life then laissez-faire capitalism in the 1930s may well appear to be its partner. Dewey’s contention is that the response must begin with a mood shift, the articulation of which, he believes, is one step to bringing it to fruition.
This new psychological type is grounded in an appreciation of the ordinary that connects Dewey to Emerson. For Dewey this is a positive attribute of Emerson’s philosophy:
[Emerson’s] ideas are not fixed upon any Reality that is beyond or behind or in any way apart, and hence they do not have to be bent. They are versions of the Here and the Now, and flow freely. The reputed transcendental worth of an overweening Beyond and Away, Emerson, jealous for spiritual democracy, finds to be the possession of the unquestionable Present. When Emerson … designated the There and Then as “wild, savage and preposterous,” he also drew the line which marks him off from transcendentalism—which is the idealism of a Class…. It is such disinherited of the earth that Emerson summons to their own. “If man is sick, is unable, is mean-spirited and odious, it is because there is so much of his nature which is unlawfully withholden from him.” (EPD [MW3:190])
So if the identity of individuals no longer centers on nor is wholly directed by tradition, class, or eschatological understandings of the world, they may be able to lay claim to that part of their nature which is “unlawfully withholden” from them, and which, once active, can creatively reinvigorate and socially bind. But how so? Is this what Dewey is trying to describe with the term “spiritual democracy”? Consider the classic passage from Emerson’s 1836 Nature, where he waxes lyrical on precisely this point:
Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky … I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. Standing on the bare ground—my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God.19
The poetic renderings yield an important claim about our shared lives that maps onto Dewey’s philosophy of action. By “Universal Being” Emerson does not mean traditional Christianity’s God. It is the nature that is at once “not me,” that is “all other men and my own body,” but of which I am a part.20 The self is not extinguished in this passage, nor in the case where it is distinguished from the “not me,” the partiality that selfhood can display. Hence the individual that vanishes is not the expression of egotism proper, the other part of the Universal Being that Emerson calls “the Soul,” but of a “mean egotism.”21
But egotism proper implies a form of self-regard that implicitly acknowledges dependence on social practices, what Dewey refers to in the last chapter as the complicated arts of associated living. “Conduct,” he writes, “is always shared. … It is not an ethical ‘ought’ that conduct should be social. It is social, whether bad or good” (HNC [MW14:16] [original emphasis]). As I indicated in the last chapter, this is the sense in which our extra-natural world implicates us in a normative world and thus contains liberating and constraining aspects. In Emerson’s and Dewey’s view, individuals are ac countable to the socially constituted present, wherein they carve out forms of life. But this present equally contains the socially constituted future, wherein they reconfigure or maintain those forms of life. In this context of an implicit solidarity the partiality of selfhood, both present and future, is made both possible and circumscribed.
I do not mean to suggest that for Dewey this solidarity is not forged and discursively negotiated through social life; it rests on what can be described only as a form of mutual responsiveness. Recall the way habits recede into the background, appearing prereflective. Thus he writes: “To learn to be human is to develop through the give-and-take of communication an effective sense of being an individually distinctive member of a community” (AE2 [LW10:332]).22 What Emerson provides, as Dewey understands, is the philosophical scaffolding that points to the appropriate function of self-regard. The point here is that both he and Emerson are attempting to make explicit the social-psychological standpoint democratic life uncovers and relies upon. Making explicit this solidarity allows mean egotism to be challenged—that is to say, the display of one’s egotism functions as something for which it is proper to offer and inquire after reasons—thus making it answerable on common ground. We make explicit, says Dewey, “some more comprehensive point of view from which the divergence may be brought together”—that is, where conflicting outlooks may be assessed and resolved from the critical dimension of where perspectives overlap (DE [MW9:336]). This comprehensive point of view is possible because the forms of life we pursue are not wholly independent from or reducible to the practices in which we pursue them. But this is not to say that the comprehensive point of view cannot be the subject of criticism in some later context.
Of course the critic will ask: Can we sincerely push this connection between Emerson and Dewey through the language of self-reliance? At first blush self-reliance appears to underwrite the kind of individualism or romantic conception of the self that is prevalent in Jackson’s and Hoover’s America.23 It is Emerson’s “mean egotism,” and what Dewey refers to in A Common Faith as militant atheism: “The essentially unreligious attitude is that which attributes human achievement and purpose to man in isolation from the world of physical nature and his fellows” (CF [LW9:18]).
Both Emerson and Dewey (more emphatically) are too sociologically sophisticated to accept this position, but they want the fact of social life to register appropriately in one’s life. They want to address the following observation that Stout has recently captured—namely, that human “pride being what it is, it will not be easy to think for oneself, in the pursuit of self-critical but genuine piety, without succumbing to the temptation of denying the very conditions of one’s own existence or otherwise masking from oneself the sources on which critical thinking depends.”24 Consider Emerson’s response in his essay “Man the Reformer”; it nicely extends the implication of Nature while simultaneously approximating the language Dewey comes to use:
And further, I will not dissemble my hope, that each person whom I address has felt his own call to cast aside all evil customs, timidities, and limitations, and to be in his place a free and helpful man, a reformer … who must find or cut a straight road to everything excellent in the earth, and not only go honorably himself, but make it easier for all who follow him, to go in honor and with benefit.25
For Dewey’s part, the narrower understanding of the self often associated with liberalism mistakenly reads the liberation of the individual from traditional moorings back into its philosophy as an ontological (rather than normative) claim about subjectivity.26 From Dewey’s perspective, this account is unable to make the enlargement or curtailment of freedom or authority an emergent issue within a practice of giving and asking for reasons. Modern selfhood is thus oddly expressed in a negative injunction that places freedom and authority in opposition, thus obscuring the normative resources already at work in our social practices. This is the ambivalence of the new conception of selfhood referred to earlier.27 The vision of self-reliance Emerson and Dewey have in mind is therefore epistemic with practical intent, where the issue is the appropriate posture the self ought to take toward that on which she depends, taking for granted that dependence is her condition. Of course we must acknowledge dependence, but for them, we should also realize that without self-reliance, all allegiances may become invitations to epistemic blindness or, worst, injustice and cruelty.28
Dewey does not deny that theological frameworks, traditions, or even class identifications may psychologically integrate the individual. He accepts that they provide unity to one’s identity and a narrative of meaning, making us, as Michael Sandel puts it, “encumbered selves.”29 Indeed, after noting in A Common Faith the difficulty in cultivating critical independence from one’s religion, Dewey says: “Tradition and custom, especially when emotionally charged, are a part of the habits that have become one with our very being” (CF [MW9:11]). Unlike Sandel, however, he cautions against embracing a “strong view” of community, a position that makes “sociality a term of moral honor beyond criticism” (FC [MW13:8].30
And here we ought to follow. For Dewey, without being able to critically say what our relationship is to these powerful identity-spheres, how they allow us to move fluidly within the flowing stream of life, the result is either “dogmatic fundamentalism … or private estheticism” (ION [LW5:72]). The former, the vision of community Sandel seemingly embraces, often translates into a strong and blinding sense of belonging and devotion that blocks from view a critical piety, while the latter confuses self-reliance with a lust for originality or novelty.31 It makes self-creation an ethical goal, as one often sees in Nietzsche and Rorty, but obscures the relevance and demand of the context in which such an aspiration is rendered intelligible and sustained.
Dewey discourages the inclination in either direction, and in so doing crystallizes his understanding of the positive dimension of the modern subject:
The new centre is indefinite interactions taking place within a course of nature which is not fixed and complete, but which is capable of direction to new and different results through the mediation of intentional operations. Neither self nor world, neither soul nor nature (in the sense of something isolated and finished in its isolation) is the centre, any more than either earth or sun is the absolute centre of a single universe and necessary frame of reference. (QC [LW4:232]; cf. EN [LW1:325–326])
The context of this passage is the emergence of knowledge, including self understanding, as the result of transactions in and through experience. His point is that precisely because the center is shifting under the conditions of modernity, we must be careful before moving too quickly in assuming that our frame of reference is the necessary starting point. We must not assume that our reference point exists at the level of phenomenological fact, untouched by the contingency that is part of its development.
COURAGE AND DEPENDENCE: REINHOLD NIEBUHR REVISITED
We have seen that for Emerson and Dewey a democratic ethos under modern conditions demands that individuals walk with less certainty about the commitments they hold, while simultaneously acknowledging the fact of sociality. The first curbs the high epistemic demand individuals attach to their commitments, but also mitigates the tendency toward dogmatism in their encounters with others. The second constrains “Promethean triumphalism” and a romantic conception of independence, which would otherwise lead individuals to believe that the vision of life they fashion has nothing more at its base than their own individual wills.
This picture of Emerson, and especially Dewey, seems strangely at odds with the basic understanding that we have of them. After all, the account offered here makes humility far more constitutive of their democratic politics. In the context of American political thought it is not Emerson or Dewey with whom we associate humility, but rather Reinhold Niebuhr. Indeed, the comparison is critically important because of the frequency with which Niebuhr is identified as being far more attentive than Emerson, Dewey, and liberal Protestants to the failings of human nature in ethical and political life. We often read Niebuhr’s Augustinian stance as a diagnosis of the weakness of the American imagination, with its tendency toward pride and self-absorbed desire. For him, the Christian worldview humbles our pretension toward believing that our frame of reference is total in its comprehension and therefore can save us from a more definitive uncertainty. Of course, one cannot do justice to the complexity of Niebuhr’s arguments in this comparison, but I think there is an important line of inquiry here that is worth pursuing and not wholly beyond reflection, given what has been said thus far. Indeed, it reveals a theological precommitment that undermines Niebuhr’s realism in politics and falls short of the kind of courage self-reliance demands.
In his review of Liberalism and Social Action in 1935, Niebuhr criticizes Dewey for ignoring “a constitutional weakness in the liberal approach to politics.” 32 But what is the source of this error, in Niebuhr’s view? He provides us with the answer in his Gifford Lecture of 1941, The Nature and Destiny of Man: A Christian Interpretation, where he takes up Dewey’s 1935 work once more: “Not a suspicion dawns upon Professor Dewey that no possible ‘organized inquiry’ can be as transcendent over the historical conflicts of interest as it ought to be to achieve the disinterested intelligence which he attributes to it.”33 What Dewey misses, Niebuhr contends, is the inescapable sin that contaminates intellectual intervention and which social life exacerbates. Niebuhr’s reading of Dewey is mistaken, however, since inquiry itself is emergent out of specific problems that structure its movement. Inquiry, in other words, is never disinterested. But the reason-giving quality of inquiry helps explain how our interests are formed and, contra Niebuhr, how they may be transformed in the context of other conflicting claims. Dewey guards against an antecedent individuation of subjects (prevalent in rational choice theory today) that renders us blind to the formation of differentiated interests among those subjects.
There is something more at issue between the two than Niebuhr’s mischaracterization of Dewey’s position. What is interesting about Niebuhr, especially in the context of his political activism, is his aversion to the ordinary, which reveals his Christian orientation.34 In this context, Michael Eldridge argues that the disagreement between Dewey and Niebuhr is over “the scope of intelligence in human affairs.”35 But Niebuhr, too, endorses pragmatism’s method of justification, which prompts individuals to reexamine their presuppositions as they manage life.36 So while I think Eldridge’s inclinations are correct, the difference between Dewey and Niebuhr must give rise to another disagreement that prefigures the extent to which intelligence functions in the management of life. Each understands differently the ground from which intelligence proceeds, affecting how we relate to the sources of our existence.
In this context, Niebuhr’s Christian traditionalism is tied to the meaning he attributes to “constitutional weakness” in his philosophy.37 This term has ontological implications about human nature that cut against his experimentalism. After all, the charge of constitutional weakness is not levied merely against liberal theory, as he suggests, but against human intervention as such. What defines Nieburh’s ontology then is the doctrine of sin, through which “one may understand that … there is no level of human moral or social achievement in which there is not some corruption of inordinate self-love.” 38 This is precisely why, for him, pride (read as mean egotism) always mingles with reason to the detriment of individual and collective life. The result, as he argues in Hobbesian fashion in Moral Man and Immoral Society, is a “perpetual state of war.”39 Yet Niebuhr rejects Hobbes’ authoritarian—but worldly—conclusion.40 Indeed, his is the standard Christian response: “The man who searches after both meaning and fulfillments beyond the ambiguous fulfillments and frustrations of history exists in a height of spirit which no historical process can completely contain.”41
Here is the downside for democrats like Emerson and Dewey: The urgency of acting in the world, and the responsibility it entails, is in danger of losing its gravity. If all is “going to Hell,” why act? Or, if one believes that meaning exists beyond the ambiguous fulfillments of history, to whom is one accountable? When one’s commitments exist beyond the pale of nature or are defined as clandestine emanations, the “inhibition of responsibility” is in jeopardy.42 But when one looks beyond the world, nature itself will seem terribly empty and mundane. We will encase ourselves in our dreams as the world about us loses its luster, never thinking for a moment that our failure to act is the source of the world’s diminishing glow. Under this interpretation, Niebuhr’s realism dissolves, and Dewey is well aware of why: “Belief in the supernatural as a necessary power for apprehension of the ideal and for practical attachment to it has for its counterpart a pessimistic belief in the corruption … of natural means…. [T]his apparent pessimism has a way of suddenly changing into an exaggerated optimism” (CF [MW9:32]).43 Biographer Richard Fox is correct to note that the “progression of [Niebuhr’s] thought went from humanity to God … not from God to humanity.”44 But this is because humanity, on the level of ontology, always leaves something to be desired.45
Emerson and Dewey do not subscribe to Niebuhr’s bias; they nurture an appreciation for the ordinary, but without installing it as an untouchable God. After all, Niebuhr’s worry is that we do not respect the fundamental boundary between the perfection of God and the imperfections of this world. The result is to overstate what we are capable of achieving. Yet inquiry does not presume to imitate the creative production once attributed to God precisely because contingency is more thoroughly embedded within practical action. For “nature,” Emerson says in The Conduct of Life of 1860, “is no sentimentalist,—[ it] does not cosset or pamper us.”46 In this regard we should recall Dewey’s meliorism, which argues that the world we confront daily is neither the best nor the worst possible, but may be subject to improvement through human action. A melioristic outlook generates caution; it acts to circumscribe our efforts and prevents us from conflating inquiry’s possibilities with facts about nature, as when he says in A Common Faith: “The outcome, given our best endeavor, is not with us” (CF [LW9:17]; cf. EN [LW1:326]).47 The claim encompasses not simply the wrath of physical nature, but the individuals that are part and parcel of nature and who may well reveal their mean egotism.
There is a positive upshot here, however. Dewey distills a moral interpretation of life, as does Emerson, that generates hope from the fact of social existence. The difference between Niebuhr and them is not simply that of two dissimilar ways of orienting ourselves to the world—one that emphasizes a redeeming God and the other, a redeeming intelligence—both of which seem to be merely an act of willing oneself to believe without evidence or support. Commitment to a redeeming intelligence read through Emerson and Dewey has something more at its core than volition. This much Emerson explains:
We have all a certain intellection or presentiment of reform existing in the mind, which does not yet descend into the character, and those who throw themselves blindly on this lose themselves. Whatever they attempt in that direction, fails, and reacts suicidally on the actor himself. This is the penalty of having transcended nature. For the existing world is not a dream, and cannot with impunity be treated as a dream; neither is it a disease; but it is the ground on which you stand, it is the mother of whom you were born. Reform converses with possibilities, perchance with impossibilities; but here is sacred fact. This also was true, or it could not be: it had life in it, or it could not have existed; it has life in it, or it could not continue.48
Choosing to orient ourselves to the world in the way Emerson suggests is not a leap of “personal volition,” a kind of “moral magic” as Dewey says, but rather a “humbler exercise of will to observe existing social realities and to direct them according to their own potentialities” (ION [LW5:74] [emphases added]). This is Emerson’s point in the passage: the existing world is not a disease, and should not be treated as such. There are, as Dewey says, existing social realities on which we rely, however unstable and contingent. Emerson pushes further, gesturing not merely toward the possibility of reform within the world—or what Dewey denotes with his term “direct”—but its naturalness. There is a refined materialism to their account that justifies the subjunctive mood, lest we suffer the penalty of trying to transcend the uncertainty of nature; it demands courage, but nothing less. To invoke Paul, we may well be “perplexed” by human frustrations, “but not unto despair.” Hence the last two lines of the passage.
The exchange among Emerson, Dewey, and Niebuhr need not reach a philosophical and practical impasse.49 Dewey’s rhetorical formulation is cast such that the positive upshot of the term “direct” is reflected through a sensibility of humility, thus allowing him to accommodate at least some of Niebuhr’s worries. Dewey’s and Emerson’s preoccupation with the ordinary goes in the direction of their critics, placing them in closer proximity to the realism otherwise attributed to Niebuhr without abandoning a healthy sense of hope. Dewey’s realism cashes out differently depending on what dimension of his philosophy one explores. Here, it represents a thoroughgoing experimentalism that completes the trajectory of liberal Protestantism charted in chapter 1. Dewey’s experimentalism, however, neither backslides, as in the case of Hodge, nor loses something of its courage, as in the case of liberal Protestants. Echoing Emerson, Dewey says as much:
Religious faith which attaches itself to the possibilities of nature and associated living would, with its devotion to the ideal, manifest piety toward the actual…. Respect and esteem would be given to that which is the means of realization of possibilities, and to that in which the ideal is embodied if it ever finds embodiment. Aspiration and endeavor are not ends in themselves; value is not in them in isolation but in them as means to that reorganization of the existent in which approved meanings are attained. Nature and society include within themselves projection of ideal possibilities and contain the operations by which they are actualized. Nature may not be worshipped as divine even in the sense of the intellectual love of Spinoza. But nature, including humanity, with all its defects and imperfections, may evoke heartfelt piety as the source of ideals, of possibilities, of aspiration in their behalf, and as the eventual abode of all attained goods and excellences. (QC [LW4:244] [emphasis added]; cf. EN [LW1:312–315]; CF [LW9:36])50
Note the use of nature in this passage. In its undifferentiated form, nature denotes the whole, the totality of that which exists. But I take the passage also to mean, indicated by the claim that nature may be the “eventual abode of all attained goods and excellences,” that the whole does not exhaust what may exist. Have we not found an opening for wonder and faith in things unseen? Do we not sense, even if its experienced character remains uncertain, the opening of the infinite horizon of meaning? Are we not enticed by and seduced into continuing on, albeit with a humble mind and heart? Perhaps, but at this juncture the differentiated form of nature is the result of treating it as a testing ground—that is, allowing one’s naturalism to run all the way down without a note of pessimism (à la Hodge, Weber, and Niebuhr) or exaggeration (à la liberal Protestants) about what the encounter with nature will produce. 51 As Dewey is aware, our tendency to move in either direction conspires against our best wishes to be realistic and measured in our valuations.52
We have considered at some length the way democratic considerations and their relationship to Emersonian self-reliance are part of a much larger argument about character, our stance toward commitments, and identity for Dewey. There are several conclusions we must now keep in mind as we make the transition to A Common Faith. First, self-reliance stands in between a vision of identity that is exhausted by any one object of allegiance and one that denies the hold of allegiances altogether. Second, this middle position evokes both courage and dependence, since the care of the self is dependent both prospectively and retrospectively on the seen and unseen of nature. Third, the result is a vision of religious experience that is plural, but which always must square itself with democratic life. The issue to which we must now turn is the precise way these considerations animate the themes of A Common Faith, namely, piety, faith, and their relationship to imagination and ideals.
Properly understood, A Common Faith attempts to articulate a naturalistic outlook that is religiously inflected, but which does not threaten from its inception to run roughshod over the communal dimensions of our nature. Dewey offers a way for individuals to conceive of their spiritual projects that does “not beg the question against democracy” and that makes “wise critical judgments possible” in public discourse.53 This means that the kinds of experiences he will want to identify as religious are those that intensify and deepen our communion with the larger world of which we are a part. “An individual did not join a church,” he says in A Common Faith. “He was born and reared in a community whose social unity, organization and traditions were symbolized and celebrated in the rites, cults and beliefs of a collective religion” (CF [LW9:41]).
DEMOCRATIC PIETY
Before Dewey turns to the issue of piety in chapter 1, “Religion Versus the Religious,” he begins with a discussion of religious pluralism. This is part of Dewey’s rejoinder to the definition of religion that he cites from the Oxford English Dictionary, which reads: “Recognition on the part of man of some unseen higher power as having control of his destiny and as being entitled to obedience, reverence and worship” (CF [LW9:4]).54 The definition is important for putting in place several features to which we will return, including the character of the unseen, the meaning of having our destiny controlled, and the sense in which an object is entitled to obedience and reverence. After cataloguing a multitude of ways historic religions have defined the unseen he remarks: “There is no greater similarity in the ways in which obedience and reverence have been expressed” (CF [LW9:5]). If this is so, why believe that choice and diversity in matters regarding the object of people’s piety and faith have ended (CF [LW9:6])? In highlighting the fact of pluralism, his point is not to reject the definition, but to reconstruct its content so that it can potentially be reflected throughout the various domains of life.
But Dewey’s emphasis on pluralism does not intend for individuals to abandon, as some believe, specific religious institutions, beliefs, and rituals.55 Instead, he focuses our attention on the absence of a necessary connection between specific beliefs and pious allegiance or faith. In every instance in which Dewey discusses institutions as being an encumbrance to religious experience, he is speaking of the configuration that imposes a necessary connection. Thus he writes: “I am not proposing a religion…. For the moment we have a religion, whether that of the Sioux Indian or of Judaism or of Christianity, that moment the ideal factors in experience that may be called religious take on a load that is not inherent in them” (CF [LW9:7]). For him, as he explains in the early part of that chapter, religion has, at least in the West, been historically understood “as a special body of beliefs and practices having some kind of institutional organization” (CF [LW9:8]). And again, “the adjective ‘religious’ denotes nothing in the way of a specifiable entity, either institutional or as a system of beliefs” (CF [LW9:8]).
Admittedly, all of this suggests that he wants us to rely as little as possible on the institutions of religion. But Dewey speaks in this categorical way because he does not want to confuse a specific stance or attitude that he is describing with a specific tradition, which might then lead to the conclusion that one religion exhausts the meaning of piety or faith. This is especially so given that in the West most traditional religions, in his view, often identify the unseen with a supernatural being (CF [LW9:19–20]). For Dewey, the result of this identification is that the description of what counts as religious experience falls to the level of unquestioned fact, cutting individuals off from the possibility that beliefs, institutions, objects, and the like that do not receive supernatural warrant may still invoke pious allegiance or faith. Indeed, this is one of the reasons he writes A Common Faith. His point is simply to say that there is a distinction between piety and faith as virtues, on the one hand, and the object to which they are attached, on the other. For him, we should not conflate the two, lest we find our common lives unnecessarily transformed into religious factions.56
To understand piety and faith as virtues means something very specific, which Dewey describes two years earlier in his Ethics. As before, he notes that the conditions of modernity prevent beliefs and frames of reference from sinking to the level of phenomenological fact. This much he says when speaking of the difference between customary and reflective morality, where the latter embodies the critical perspective of inquiry or epistemic self-reliance. The distinction between customary and reflective morality fits appropriately with an account of identity formation that was once exhausted by a relatively static set of specific commitments and institutions, but that now emerges across a wider and more contingent range of practices and obligations.
In customary morality it is possible to draw up a list or catalogue of vices and virtues. For the latter reflect some definite existing custom, and the former some deviation from or violation of custom. The acts approved and disapproved have therefore the same definiteness and fixity as belong to the customs to which they refer. In reflective morality, a list of virtues has much more tentative status. Chastity, kindness, patriotism, modesty, toleration, bravery, etc., cannot be given a fixed meaning, because each expresses an interest in objects and institutions which are changing. In form, as interests, they may be permanent, since no community could endure in which there were not, say, fair dealing, public spirit, regard for life, faithfulness. But no two communities conceive the objects to which these qualities attach in quite identical ways. They can be defined, therefore, only on the basis of qualities characteristic of interest, not on the basis of permanent and uniform objects in which interest is taken. (E3 [LW7:255–256] [original emphases])
As moral virtues, then, piety and faith can be understood only on the basis of the traits constitutive of the relevant interest, rather than on the permanent existence of some object in which the interest lies. In one sense, this makes formal any account offered of piety and faith. The critic will undoubtedly say that it is here Dewey empties the meaning out of these terms. But this formal description, in his view, can be accepted only under the qualification that faith and piety must always be embodied. In other words, individuals show pious allegiance to x and they have faith in y; filling out what x or y means will most certainly require more details and a narrative about the specific individuals and communities under question, but piety and faith in life would be incomplete without some articulation of the objects to which they refer. As he did in “Religion and Our Schools,” Dewey intends in A Common Faith to warn us against inscribing the emblem of sacredness on existing beliefs, institutions, and traditions, because to do this undermines pluralism and critical revision, distorting the character of piety and faith under modern conditions. Once piety and faith are distorted in this way, we are not too far from antidemocratic politics.
In the context of what Dewey says in A Common Faith and in other works, such as “Religion and Our Schools” and The Quest for Certainty, where he takes up the term, “piety” serves an integrative function between self and world that deepens our sense of the actual. “Faith” extends that function to the very contours of identity, unifying the self in relation to an ideal. As we shall see in a moment, for Dewey faith is a belief that x should be in existence, a belief whose content is so inclusive as to harmonize the disparate features of the self and its context. This unification of the self, unlike the mere integration with the larger horizon that is made possible by the actual, is the result of the imaginative function of inference. Faith is not only a projection of possibilities, but more precisely a utopian vision that unifies the self psychologically and orients the self forward in action. This difference between piety and faith is one of degree. The latter is primarily where Dewey locates religious experience.
We should keep in mind then that the concern about piety, as Dewey understands, is a more general argument about the past, the ground upon which we stand as it has been built up by previous generations, in which institutions of religion are but one part. The concept “past” is another way of speaking of what Dewey refers to in another context as “the actual”; it has a temporal quality denoted by past experiences that are funneled directly into the present.57 So to speak of the actuality of a tradition, relationship, belief, etc. is also implicitly to refer to its historical career. If this is so, surely the forward-looking quality of inquiry is bound to seem problematic. Those individuals who wish to give due homage to the past find themselves, according to a certain reading of Dewey’s account of inquiry, robbed of this ability. This is particularly challenging in the context of religion. Individuals who feel this way are inclined to be troubled by the following formulation by Emerson: “No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker with no Past at my back.”58
But in Dewey’s view, a past that infuses and aids one in negotiating the present is no past where that means historically antecedent and substantively irrelevant. So for him, a past that aids is what we call a living tradition or a habit. It means that the tradition though antecedent in its temporal formation is still substantively relevant in the present, and is thus actualized. This is what he means when he says that the logic of piety “compels us to inquire how much in religions now accepted are survivals from outgrown culture,” where “outgrown” means that the “conception of the unseen powers and our relations to them” is not “consonant with the best achievements and aspirations of the present” (CF [MW9:6]).59
All of this helps us make good sense of the precise language Dewey’s uses in defining piety. His account is almost identical to the one his fellow naturalist George Santayana offered some decades earlier in his work of religious naturalism, The Life of Reason (1905–1906). It is worth citing them both, beginning with Santayana:
Piety … may be said to mean man’s reverent attachment to the sources of his being and the steadying of his life by that attachment…. This consciousness that the human spirit is derived and responsible, that all its functions are heritages and trusts, involves a sentiment of gratitude and duty which we may call piety. The true objects of piety are, of course, those on which life and its interests really depend: parents first, then family, ancestors, and country; finally, humanity at large and the whole cosmos.60
The fact that human destiny is so interwoven with forces beyond human control renders it unnecessary to suppose that dependence and the humility that accompanies it have to find the particular channel that is prescribed by traditional doctrines…. For our dependence is manifest in those relations to the environment that support our undertakings and aspirations as much as it is in the defeats inflicted upon us…. Natural piety is not of necessity either a fatalistic acquiescence in natural happenings or a romantic idealization of the world. It may rest upon a just sense of nature as the whole of which we are parts, while it also recognizes that we are parts that are marked by intelligence and purpose, having the capacity to strive by their aid to bring conditions into greater consonance with what is humanly desirable. (CF [MW9:18])
What both of these passages indicate is that a tradition or authority is often a conversation across time that has at its core the following question: How are we to understand this thing which partly makes us? Our reliance on it helps us negotiate, manage, and cope—to fashion the kinds of people we wish to become and the world we long to inhabit. It is a steadying of our life, as Santayana says. Intelligence and purpose work in conjunction with nature, or, as Dewey says in referring to its differentiated form, those relations to the environment. Piety may thus have as its object an undifferentiated but grand appreciation for nature, the whole of which we are but parts, or a more sober differentiated reverence for specific relationships and institutions that comprise nature.
In this context Dewey acknowledges that we are encumbered. Or to put it in the form of a question: In his view, if these relationships did not exist, could we render ourselves, not to mention our future, intelligible? He answers in the negative: “I do not for a moment suppose that the experiences of the past, personal and social, are of no importance. For without them we should not be able to frame any ideas whatever of the conditions under which objects are enjoyed” (QC [LW4:217]). He says again in A Common Faith: “The determining factor in the interpretation of the [religious] experience is the particular doctrinal apparatus into which a person has been inducted” (CF [LW9:10; cf. 6]).
In whatever garb it is wrapped, tradition provides a narrative of experience that controls our destiny by virtue of giving us resources to frame ideas of what makes something an appropriate object of allegiance. The source of control is the interpenetration between the background—that is, the narrative of experience—and the present, the nature of which illuminates the latter. This suggests, at least as Emerson, Dewey, and Santayana understand the matter, that what we are to make of our inheritance is intimately bound up with how it functions in living one’s life. But when our past collides with the inescapable present, when it no longer flows fluidly into the movement of life signaled by the problems we confront, we must then ask the difficult but necessary question: Is such a past still a live option? The initiation of experimentation indicates that there is some part of our past that is no longer living. I say “part” because Dewey is very clear that if the past “were wholly gone and done with there would be only one reasonable attitude toward it. Let the dead bury the dead” (DE [MW9:221]).
With this definition, Dewey infuses piety with the reflective and critical power of inquiry. Inquiry’s functioning is therefore defined by the way in which piety orients individuals to the past. As Santayana says: “In honouring the sources of life, piety is retrospective.”61 Piety is thus the kind of moral virtue that is attentive to relationships of dependence. Here we are reminded of the importance of practical wisdom to inquiry, as discussed in the last chapter. The relationship between the two reveals that the agent is psychologically funded over time with resources (i.e., past experiences, previous obligations and commitments, etc.). When one displays wisdom, we imagine that that person has experienced much and learned how to use that experience in the service of life. Such a person lives with the past, but not in it; traditions aid her on her journey, but never wholly determine her destination point. Such individuals agree with “Emerson … that consistency should be thrown to the winds when it stands between us and the opportunities of present life” (HNC [MW14:72]). So Dewey is clear that authority in life is necessary, but it must also be answerable to life’s demands.
The moment we make the objects of pious allegiance answerable, we can no longer see them through the lens of blind deference. In fact, he believes this is often the problem with traditional religions: “In the past men have sought many symbols which no longer serve, especially since men have been idolaters worshiping symbols as things” (HNC [MW14:226]). Here, the past becomes a burden, crippling the imagination and arresting action. In this context, Dewey explains, when individuals begin to question, they are seen as “sacrilegious and perverse” (ROS [MW4:173]; cf. CF [MW9:27]). Those who part company with Dewey would have to believe that blind deference is healthy. Such claims would need to prove that somehow a circumstance in which objects are entitled to pious allegiance without explanation regarding their place in the functioning of one’s life aids rather than undermines the critical capacities needed to sustain our social and political lives. But if we are going to make arguments in favor of this point, Dewey contends, we will have to do so without lapsing into dogmatic fundamentalism or private estheticism.
Instead, piety involves an evaluative moment of attunement—a taking stock of resources in relation to one’s life and fortune, a linking of the past to the present to extend the reception and meaningful content of the present. In other words, piety involves an appraisal of what is ready-at-hand. This is what Dewey means in the passage cited much earlier from The Quest for Certainty where he says of piety that “respect and esteem will be given to that which is the means of realization of possibilities” (QC [LW4:244]; cf. HNC [MW14:19]). If faith “looks to the end toward which we move,” remarks Santayana, “piety looks to the conditions and the sources of life.”62 This does not misdescribe the forward-looking dimension of inquiry, but claims that what gives texture to inquiry is its movement within the already flowing stream of an individual’s life.
But if Dewey is attempting to recast the meaning of religion as he cites it from the Oxford English Dictionary, it is unclear what exactly the unseen can mean in his naturalistic account. He gives us a clear idea of what he means with the following remark: “The idea of invisible powers would take on the meaning of all the conditions of nature and human association that support and deepen the sense of values which carry on through periods of darkness and despair to such an extent that they lose their usual depressive character” (CF [MW9:11]). What allows the periods of darkness and despair to lose their depressive character are the experiences and resources that feed directly into and are continuous with those moments. Dewey refers to these experiences and resources as the unseen because they are undifferentiated. In being undifferentiated, they resist complete articulation. To say it differently, he is referring to funded experiences that infuse and underwrite identity, and from which we form a more complete self-description of ourselves as particular individuals or give language to the objects of piety. This is precisely why when he refers to all conditions of nature and human association in the passage above, he is careful to qualify and contextualize. The conditions of nature and human association are those by virtue of which we render our lives meaningful. Articulation of the values that carry on through darkness and despair, then, can only take place through self-description and the defining of specific objects of piety, even as we acknowledge that no one condition of nature or human association falls to the level of an unquestioned fact.
Dewey is drawing our attention to an important political conclusion—signaled in the prior section of this chapter—that he solidifies in the context of A Common Faith. This amplifies the emphasis on pluralism and extends the value of the relationship between inquiry and piety. To begin, how should we understand the use of religious commitments in public discourse to justify or undermine political proposals? On one reading, in public debate the practice of appealing to religious commitments in support of a set of political proposals implies pious allegiance. Those who would stand in opposition to existing proposals on the political table are considered as engaging in bad faith, subject to all kinds of retributions on the part of both the divine and individuals who share the commitments that inform those proposals. Dewey willingly concedes that this is logically coherent. As he says in his Ethics on this very point: “Individuals trespass, deviating from these established purposes, but they do so with the conviction that thereby social condemnation, reinforced by supernatural penalties inflicted by divine beings, ensues” (E3 [LW7:184]). This remark has a parallel in the last chapter of A Common Faith where Dewey speaks of communities once strongly animated by belief in supernaturalism:
In earlier times … supernaturalism was, therefore, a genuinely social religion as long as men’s minds were attuned to the supernatural. It gave an “explanation” of extraordinary occurrences while it provided techniques for utilizing supernatural forces to secure advantages and to protect the members of the community against them when they were adverse. (CF [LW9:46])
The formulation of the passage is crucial: supernaturalism was a genuinely social religion, indicating general agreement regarding background commitments. His point, however, indicated by his earlier emphasis on pluralism, is that no such agreement exists in the context of modern democracy, and therefore cannot be taken for granted epistemically or as we engage each other in public discourse. “To most of us in the United States,” he says earlier in that chapter, “such a situation is … a remote historic episode” precisely because religion no longer occupies the “social centre of gravity” vis-à-vis “associations … for educational, political, economic, philanthropic and scientific purposes” (CF [LW9:41, 42]).
How, then, are we to engage each other politically, especially in cases where theological communities still exist within a democratic framework? For Dewey, we need to acknowledge that why some set of policy proposals should be entitled to pious obedience needs to be discursively negotiated—that is, rhetorically crafted and therefore made explicit. This simultaneously acknowledges the absence of agreement on the underlying commitments.
In this regard, Dewey appears to be in agreement with John Rawls, especially in his “political, not metaphysical” mode.63 But Dewey’s position does not entail that one’s religious commitments be excluded from public debate. The reason for this is that we would find it difficult to explain why some religiously inclined individuals have entered public debate when their reasons for doing so cannot be part of the debate itself. Those who wish to employ such reasons but are prohibited will undoubtedly view this as an infringement on the ethical content of their identity that is otherwise protected by freedom of religious expression. More important, Dewey is less interested in the source to which one appeals in advancing claims precisely because he understands one’s narrative of experience to be an essential resource in filling out the content of inquiry. As such, he avoids the problems that afflict the rationalist core of Rawls’ outlook—a position that, because of its emphasis on “public reason,” finds itself specifying the source to which one must appeal in public argument and thus overdetermining political debate.64
From a Deweyan perspective, public reason is an obstacle to inquiry’s functioning. For him, and in contrast to Rawls, the only claim an inquirer can advance is that where the reasons for advocating a position involve appeal to religious commitments, we must do so responsibly and prudently. As Stout remarks on just this point: “It means, for example, that in most contexts it will simply be imprudent, rhetorically speaking, to introduce explicitly theological premises into an argument intended to persuade a religiously diverse public audience.”65 But notice that this is an argument situated in the domain of politics, rather than an attempt to purify it through the stipulation of criteria because one lacks the courage political life demands.
One immediate retort is that Dewey’s argument shuffles in an implicit connection between democratic fallibilism and religious commitments that is untenable. This is because it paints a political world likely to remain uninhabited by “True” believers of the “Faith.” As Ian Shapiro writes (with a different target in mind), this view of discursive negotiation works only for those “fundamentalists who also count themselves as fallibilist democrats. That, I fear, is an empty class, destined to remain uninhabited.”66 Shapiro’s target in this context is Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson’s Democracy and Disagreement, but I believe the criticism, which presents itself as an empirical claim more realistically attuned to the political and religious landscape, can equally be extended to Dewey. If I am correct, how might he respond?
The problem that Shapiro raises is an important and difficult one that cannot be easily dispensed with, not even within Dewey’s writings. Yet we should wonder if the problem itself is as clear as Shapiro states it. After all, when Shapiro uses fundamentalism, he seems to think that it necessarily entails a commitment to dogmatism. And this is how we tend to think of the term in our everyday discourse. In this view, any attempt to draw a connection between inquiry and piety will appear simply utopian at its best and unintelligible at its worst. If this is so, one would expect more extensive political and, indeed, violent sectarian conflicts in the United States. But given all of our political disagreements in the United States, both in Dewey’s time and ours, religious conflicts have rarely captured the political imagination to the disadvantage of democracy (rather than a particular election). Indeed, even some Christian fundamentalists, for example, willingly concede the inherent fallibility of their reason and so inability to completely understand the claims of scripture, even though scripture remains fundamental to their engagement with the world. The reason for this, we might say, is precisely what Dewey is identifying—namely, absent significant background agreement on religious commitments, coupled with humility regarding the limits of one’s knowledge, religious accommodation and negotiation can have greater currency in political matters. Perhaps then the class of fallibilist democrats is not as uninhabited as Shapiro thinks.
Once again, Dewey’s argument about modernity is not that religious commitments can no longer be deployed or that somehow they are presumptively irrational, but that a theological framework no longer serves as a unifying background from which we advance our claims. As such, this heightens the necessity of giving and asking for reasons in public discourse. This does not deny that conflicts, even religious ones, will occur, but it does suggest that such conflicts can exist within a democratic framework. As Dewey writes:
Democracy is the belief that even when needs and ends or consequences are different for each individual, the habit of amicable cooperation—which may include, as in sport, rivalry and competition—is itself a priceless addition to life. To take as far as possible every conflict which arises—and they are bound to arise—out of the atmosphere and medium of force, of violence as a means of settlement into that of discussion and of intelligence is to treat those who disagree—even profoundly—with us as those from whom we may learn, and in so far, as friends. (CD [LW14:228] [emphasis added])
So we tend not, as Shapiro assumes, to collapse fundamentalism and dogmatism—a collapse that would most certainly weaken attempts to resolve conflicts through an exchange of reasons. For if we did, we would tend to see our opponents as enemies that we must resist at all costs lest our souls be damned, rather than see them, as Dewey suggests, as fellow citizens with whom we ought to negotiate. Since the former is not the case, then something of the latter must hold sway.
To be sure, conflicting claims emerge and need to be negotiated, but this does not happen in a linguistic and conceptual bubble. As indicated in both this and the last chapter, in Dewey’s view, self-understanding emerges as part of a more complex and layered field. This means that uncontested terrain may be discovered to assess the merits of conflicting claims. We referred to this earlier as an implicit solidarity; Dewey uses the phrase “a more comprehensive point of view.” This does not mean for him that we find epistemically neutral beliefs, since he concedes that these are also formed in the intersubjective, discursively redeemable context of practical action. His claim is that when inquiry is functioning, we will often find a set of commitments ancillary to the problematic context that need to be made explicit so as to provide points of entry into the issue in question. Incompatibility among beliefs does not mean incommensurability among worldviews, and it is the primacy of the former in modern times that renders the project of democracy not only intelligible but viable.
FAITH, IMAGINATION, AND THE IDEAL
Having considered at some length Dewey’s views on piety, we are now prepared to examine the other feature of A Common Faith, namely, faith. When he takes up this topic he discusses two different things: first, its psychological function, and second, its moral dimension vis-à-vis the external environment. Regarding the first of these, Dewey remarks that its religious impact signifies:
[C]hanges in ourselves in relation to the world in which we live that are much more inclusive and deep seated. They relate not to this and that want in relation to this and that condition of our surroundings, but pertain to our being in its entirety…. There is a composing and harmonizing of the various elements of our being such that … it is a change of will conceived as the organic plentitude of our being, rather than any special change in will. It is the claim of religions that they effect this generic and enduring change in attitude. I should like to turn the statement around and say that whenever this change takes place there is a definitely religious attitude…. The idea of a whole, whether of the whole personal being or of the world, is an imaginative, not a literal, idea. The limited world of our observation and reflection becomes the Universe only through imaginative extension. (CF [LW9:12–13, 14] [original emphases])
Precisely because agents are constituted amid the flux of existence, realizable through the unfolding of practical action, they remain psychologically incomplete. After all, to speak of the primacy of habits in the life of the self only signifies the self’s relative stability over time, but this in no way constitutes, in Dewey’s view, a unified or fixed identity. A unified self implies a comprehensive picture of the whole of reality and one’s life therein, undistorted or unobscured. The “organic plentitude” of our being is an appropriate phrase in this instance; it implies that the teleological structure of action is continuous with the environment. “The self,” he says, “is always directed toward something beyond itself and so its own unification depends upon the idea of the integration of the shifting scenes of the world into that imaginative totality we call the Universe” (CF [LW9:14]). Hence the last sentence speaks of the imagination as extending current observation and reflection—a form of expressive freedom, we might say—so as to project what the unknown might be were it present.
Dewey does not explain precisely how the imagination works in A Common Faith, and so we must look elsewhere. In his major work on aesthetics, Art as Experience, which he publishes during the same year as A Common Faith, he writes the following: “Art is thus prefigured in the very process of living” (AE2 [LW10:30]). For him, we confront our lives in the way an artist confronts a canvas stained with color. There is a picture of life to complete, ends and purposes to be stipulated, sought after, and reached, that makes the life we live our own. The simple point is that the process of socialization does not exhaust identity formation. But the ends, as Dewey says, are “presented only imaginatively” (CF [LW9:14]). What exactly this means he suggests in his account of the conflict that the artist undergoes, although this claim is not confined to this example:
One way of stating it concerns the opposition between inner and outer vision. There is a stage in which the inner vision seems much richer and finer than any outer manifestation. It has a vast and enticing aura of implications that are lacking in the object of external vision … the matter of the inner vision seems wraith-like compared with the solidity and energy of the presented scene. The object is felt to say something succinctly and forcibly that the inner vision reports vaguely, in diffuse feeling rather than organically. The artist is driven to submit himself in humility to the discipline of the objective vision. But the inner vision is not cast out. It remains as the organ by which the outer vision is controlled, and it takes on structure as the latter is absorbed within it. The interaction of the two modes of vision is imagination; as imagination takes form the work of art is born … [the artist] finds himself obliged to go back to objects if his speculations are to have body, weight, and perspective. (AE2 [LW10:273])
Here he captures the dialectical relationship between vision and context, in which the end or ideal to be reached occurs through a transmutation and extension of experience. The imagination reconstructs and extends experience, thus giving a more complete representation of ends than is suggested by the environment in which we find ourselves. The reconstruction is not merely of discreet happenings—the present situation—but more dramatically, the funded nature of the present so that the end product of the imagination has a career both in the present and in what precedes it. As Dewey remarks: “For while the roots of every experience are found in the interaction of a live creature with its environment, that experience becomes conscious, a matter of perception, only when meanings enter it that are derived from prior experiences. Imagination is the only gateway through which these meanings find their way into [the] present” (AE2 [LW10:276]; cf. CF [LW9:33–34]).67 Through the use of the imagination, we are simultaneously acknowledging that the possibilities of identity and context are “unrealized in fact [but] come home to us [imaginatively] and have power to stir us [practically]” (CF [LW9:30]). “The experience enacted,” he continues in Art as Experience, “is human and conscious only as that which is given here and now is extended by meanings and values drawn from what is absent in fact and present only imaginatively” (AE2 [LW10:276]). This makes the suggested telos an object for testing. This much he says in his essay “What I Believe” of 1930: “Faith is a tendency toward action,” and in being so, it “can be tried and tested only in action” (WIB [LW5:267, 278]).
As these passages indicate, Dewey applies the inferential dimension of inquiry discussed in the last chapter to the very psychological makeup of the self. The implication is that the existing contour of identity and context and its transmutation by the imagination vividly display departure and destination points that control action. “[I]maginative experience,” he says, “is what happens when varied materials of sense, quality, emotion, and meaning come together in a union that marks a new birth in the world” (AE2 [LW10:272]). This new birth is not the realization of the ideal end or whole self as such, but what results from pursuit of such ends.
But given what Dewey says about the self in the context of modern conditions, why make harmony, complete psychological integration, a goal at all? In answering this question we should keep in mind that religious faith functions to create adjustment between self and its context, and a pervasive imaginative harmony that affects the contours of identity and directs actions. This means that the particular ideals that Dewey has in mind which animate us are of such a nature that they render us harmonious and integrate us with the environment. “I should describe this faith,” he says, “as the unification of the self through allegiance to inclusive ideal ends, which imagination presents to us and to which the human will responds as worthy of controlling our desires and choices” (CF [LW9:23]). So the formal account of faith that he offers conditions the objects to which it attaches in a very specific way. He amplifies the remark several pages later: “The unity signifies not a single Being, but the unity of loyalty and effort evoked by the fact that many ends are one in the power of their ideal, or imaginative, quality to stir and hold us” (CF [LW9:30]).
In the context of the question above, this means that the commitment to harmony flows from a vision of the self whose complete unfolding in time would settle the existential and practical demand of action. “The religious attitude signifies something that is bound through imagination to a general attitude. This comprehensive attitude, moreover, is much broader than anything indicated by ‘moral’ in its usual sense” precisely because it completes the demands of the moral life (CF [LW9:17] [original emphasis]). I say “completes” in this context for several reasons. First, the social world gives our actions moral import. The extent to which we are agents and patients implies a constant attempt to manage the world of practical action. Second, the religious attitude, as Dewey describes it, thus stipulates ideals, regulative to be sure, by virtue of which the moral life is fulfilled. In other words, the far-reaching character of the religious attitude outstrips the term “moral” in its usual sense, which, as I read Dewey, seeks to settle this or that specific problematic.
We can deepen this account by turning to the second of the two themes, namely, the moral dimension of religious faith.
The intimate connection of imagination with the ideal elements in experience is generally recognized. Such is not the case with respect to its connection with faith. The latter has been regarded as a substitute for knowledge, for sight. It is defined, in the Christian religion, as evidence of things not seen. The implication is that faith is a kind of anticipatory vision of things that are now invisible because of the limitation of our finite and erring natures. (CF [LW9:14–15] [original emphasis])
From Dewey’s perspective, however, faith is not, as traditionally conceived, about the immanence of an ideal whose realization is hampered by our natures. In that account, the ideal becomes reified and the meaning of faith is obscured. The ideal is reified in the sense that it cannot undergo revision in the light of the experiential dimension of self-formation. Questions about how an ideal conditions action, or why some ideal as opposed to another ought to guide conduct and belief, are cordoned off from the practice of giving and asking for reasons. It would follow from this view that the relationship Dewey envisions between inquiry’s reason-giving character as discussed in the last chapter and faith is ruled out of hand.
Dewey’s claim is that even as ideals are stipulated on which our faith hinges and as something toward which we strive, they are revisable by virtue of their impact on practical action. This is why our relationship to ideals need not be idolatrous.68 Ideals have the character of being ultimate ends, to be sure, but not in the sense wherein that term implies unassailable knowledge of what human nature demands. They are “ultimate” in Dewey’s view because they adequately serve to control and guide all secondary actions. But an appropriate stipulation of ideals never loses sight of the reflexive dimension of practical action—that is, in which secondary actions retrospectively inform commitment to ideals, disclosing the fallibilistic and experimental quality of the entire project of ideal formation. So even as ideals work to effect a transformation in action, the resulting change in experience becomes an evaluative moment to assess the viability of and warrant for those ideals as something that ought to guide life. It is this dynamism the gives the teleological character of life a flexible and internally differentiated character.
More significant, in the traditional view, the value of faith often hinges on the credit of its supernatural author. As Dewey explains: “Faith was once almost universally thought to be acceptance of a definite body of intellectual propositions, acceptance being based upon authority—preferably that of revelation from on high” (WIB [LW5:267]). So faith by this description at once becomes commitment to an ideal whose realization is blocked by our nature. But the ideal nonetheless demands intellectual assent because of its author. This is precisely why religious faith is traditionally embodied in assent to “a body of propositions [and] … reasons” that enter to “demonstrate the reasonableness of giving such credit” to a supernatural author (CF [LW9:15]).69 Here once again questions about its appropriateness are rule out of hand. But as with piety, Dewey rejects the necessary connection: “The actual religious quality in experience described is the effect produced, the better adjustment in life and its conditions, not the manner and cause of its production” (CF [LW9:11] [original emphasis]).70
Insofar as we understand these claims, they signal the radical nature of Dewey’s experimentalism. This returns us to the discussion initiated in the last chapter regarding the various dimensions of inquiry. As I indicated there, given the formal description of inquiry, it would be necessary to return to the relationship between belief, evidence, and context in order to understand precisely inquiry’s internal dynamism. The issue is particularly important since Hilary Putnam insists that Dewey is “less sensitive than [William] James to the limits of intelligence as a guide to life,” where this means that commitment to a belief, theory, or ideal is not primarily about a sufficient or preponderance of the evidence we may have to support it.71 Genuine experimentalism involves, in Putnam’s view, both risk and courage—an existential imprimatur.
Putnam has in mind two different cases that we need to separate. On the one hand, he wants to say that Dewey’s insistence on the importance of inquiry to action is not attentive to instances where two competing moral choices equally pull on us, thus requiring a leap of faith. On the other hand, Putnam’s criticism is operative in cases where individuals are acting in the service of theories, the full reasons for which are still to be garnered in experience.72 If I understand him correctly, in both cases the underlying issue to which Dewey seems less sensitive than James is simply this: reasons for choosing between two moral claims or belief in theory x is not wholly about evidence—and, if it were, it is unclear how a decision, not to mention progress, could ever take place in an uncertain world. For our purposes, I want to bracket the first case, coming back to this more explicitly in chapter 4.
The second case and the underlying problem present a formidable objection to Dewey’s account of inquiry. But Putnam’s reading seems to unnecessarily place James and Dewey at odds, the result of which when applied in the context of A Common Faith misdescribes altogether Dewey’s understanding of the relationship between faith and inquiry. After all, the inferential dimension of inquiry requires, as emphasized in chapter 2, a leap into the unknown. Precisely because Dewey redefines the relationship between theory and practice, he is able to extend Aristotle’s insight regarding contingency via Darwin to all domains of human action. Experience in toto thus constitutes an experimental domain. So while the warrant for the leap is grounded in an existing state-of-affairs and evidence, the reason for taking the leap is not exhausted by evidence presented for its accuracy. There is little doubt that this is what Dewey means:
But belief or faith has also a moral and practical import…. Apart from any theological context, there is a difference between belief that is a conviction that some end should be supreme over conduct and belief that some object or being exists as a truth for the intellect…. Reflection, often long and arduous, may be involved in arriving at the conviction, but the import of thought is not exhausted in discovery of evidence that can justify intellectual assent. The authority of an ideal over choice and conduct is the authority of an ideal, not of a fact, of a truth guaranteed to intellect, not of the status of the one who propounds the truth. Such moral faith is not easy…. Moral faith has been bolstered by all sorts of arguments intended to prove that its object is not ideal and that its claim upon us is not primarily moral or practical, since the ideal in question is already embedded in the existent frame of things…. They have failed to see that in converting moral realities into matters of intellectual assent they have evinced lack of moral faith (CF [LW9:15–16] [original emphasis]).
In this passage he separates the claim that we have faith in an ideal because of evidence of its existence from the claim that our faith in an ideal should have command over our conduct and beliefs despite evidence needed to justify our devotion. To be sure, the existing state-of-affairs is important, for our faith is liable to become fantasy if not tempered by experience. This is precisely why reflection may be involved in arriving at ideals. But in making faith rely on evidence we obscure the work imagination effects, since the ideal longed for is not in existence. More critically, it undermines the courage that faith in the ideal demands, since in being realizable through imagination its specific impact on action is most uncertain.
What Dewey is drawing our attention to is that the traditional account merely begs the question which the test of an ideal in experience seeks to answer—namely, why this ideal ought to command our attention (cf. PD [MW11:41–49]). So, in his view, the weight we accord ideals, the authority they exercise over us, is not exhausted in discovery of evidence that may underwrite intellectual assent. This is simply to say that while ideals are emergent from experience via the imagination, their authoritative role in action ultimately runs ahead of evidentiary support or external authorization into “a world of surmise, of mystery, [and] of uncertainties” (AE2 [LW10:41]).73 As he says, the “imaginative presentation of ideals … has been the means of keeping alive the sense of purposes that outrun evidence and of meanings that transcend indurated habit” (AE2 [LW10:350]). This is precisely what makes faith difficult and courage necessary.74 Indeed, James says as much in his 1882 essay, “The Sentiment of Rationality”: “[F]aith is the readiness to act in a cause the prosperous issue of which is not certified to us in advance. It is in fact the same moral quality which we call courage in practical affairs.”75 Contrary to Putnam’s reading, Dewey and James are in agreement.
If we apply the foregoing discussion once more to the definition cited from the Oxford English Dictionary, we hit upon Dewey’s reconstruction. We have already considered the way in which an ideal commands allegiance and guides our action. But we have said very little explicitly about his reconstruction of the unseen. He provides the description with his account of the ideal: “An unseen power controlling our destiny becomes the power of an ideal…. For all endeavor for the better is moved by faith in what is possible, not by adherence to the actual. The outcome, given our best endeavor, is not with us” (CF [LW9:17]). The controlling factor, unlike with piety, is not the past as such, but the uncertain future. This means we can only wait patiently, with humble expectations that, because our judgments have been fortified by critical reflection and the resources of the communities to which we belong, our effort will be rewarded in experience. But beyond this, the rest belongs to fate.
For present purposes I hope to have shown that Dewey’s description of piety and faith—his religious naturalism—is part of a much larger conversation about what a democratic ethos demands. But if this account is correct, it is important to observe that his conception of inquiry, which has been operative throughout, provides a point of orientation that is contextually sensitive, imaginatively rich, and discursively open so that the ends of inquiry are subject to assessment and revision. The result of this last claim partly works to humble the agent of inquiry—a fact that is not usually associated with Dewey’s philosophy, but which I have argued for both here and in the previous chapters. For him, such an orientation is necessary in the absence of epistemic certainty under conditions of pluralism.
What are the implications of this description for understanding the ways in which inquiry can navigate our ethical and democratic life? Within a horizon marked by the intellectual acceptance of pluralism, the intersubjective development of identity, and the necessity of articulating a vision of democracy that does not privilege experts in managing our collective lives, inquiry must become a strategy, as I believe Dewey intends, that specifies more clearly the normative content of a well-functioning political order attentive to the ethical well-being of its citizens. This raises a complicated set of issues that dovetail with concerns relating to conflict and democratic legitimacy, and also points directly to those scholars who would have us believe that Dewey has nothing insightful to say on these matters. As we shall see in the next two chapters, there is much in Dewey worth our attention.
The issue to which we turn immediately concerns our discussion in both this chapter and previous chapters. It relates to the normative resources within our self-understanding that serve as a compass in managing our moral lives. Here we come back to Hodge and Weber. If pluralism defines the modern horizon because there is no nonhuman objective or sacred background, does this not imply a crisis in normative evaluation? Dewey’s discussions of the constraining and freeing aspects of practical action in chapter 2 and the meaning of democratic self-reliance in this chapter were all attempts to address this question. But in all instances the answer was embedded in other, more important matters pertaining to the place of contingency in Dewey’s philosophy and his specific understanding of the religious dimension of experience in the context of democracy. Chapter 4 will allow us to respond directly to the matter by attending carefully to Dewey’s attempt to describe the moral life as an emergent property of our social psychology. In doing so, he disentangles the pluralism issue from the supposed crisis in normative evaluation. He can thus say with James, “Whether a God exist, or whether no God exist, in yon blue heaven above us bent, we form at any rate an ethical republic here below.”76 I take John McDowell to assert the same point when he remarks that “the ethical is a domain of rational requirements, which are there in any case, whether or not we are responsive to them.”77 This is simply to say that human agency is always already normative. For him, the issue is not whether we will be moral agents, but rather with what skill we will exercise that agency and refine the reflective and perceptual capacities it includes.