Expert answer:Week 3 Philosophy as education and translation!
Answer & Explanation:philosophy as education.pdfPhilosophy as translation.pdfBOTH FILES ^^^Reflect: As you take notes on the two articles, think about the
importance of understanding the philosophy behind taking general education
courses and how your courses have taught you academic integrity, global
citizenship, and cultural sensitivity.Describe the implications Stanley Cavell’s ordinary language philosophy has
on democracy and education. Provide an example of ordinary language philosophy.
Examine the ideas of mutual reflection and mutual understanding as it
relates to cultural differences.
Share a learning experience of an ethical or moral lesson based on John
Dewey’s quote: “democracy must begin at home.” Explain how that experience has
influenced your level of integrity while receiving your education.
Support your claims with examples from required material(s) and/or other
scholarly sources, and properly cite any references.
Your initial post should be at least 250 words in length.
philosophy_as_education.pdf
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Journal of Philosophy of Education, Vol. 40, No. 3, 2006
Philosophy as Education and Education as
Philosophy: Democracy and Education
from Dewey to Cavell
NAOKO SAITO
In the contemporary culture of accountability and the
‘economy’ of education this generates, pragmatism, as a
philosophy for ordinary practice, needs to resist the totalising
force of an ideology of practice, one that distracts us from the
rich qualities of daily experience. In response to this need, and
in mobilising Dewey’s pragmatism, this paper introduces
another standpoint in American philosophy: Stanley Cavell’s
account of the economy of living in Thoreau’s Walden. By
discussing some aspects of Cavell’s The Senses of Walden
that suggest both apparent similarities and radical differences
between Thoreau and Dewey, I shall argue that Cavell
discovers rich dimensions of practice in Thoreau’s American
philosophy, ones that are overshadowed in Dewey’s
pragmatism: that he demonstrates another way of ‘making a
difference in practice’. Cavell, as a critical interlocutor of
Dewey, from within American philosophy, offers a way of
using language in resistance to the rhetoric of accountability
and in service to the creation of democracy as a way of life.
I shall conclude by suggesting that the enriched tradition of
American philosophy from Dewey to Cavell is to be found in
their promotion of philosophy as education and education as
philosophy.
I A NEW DEPARTURE FROM DEWEY’S RECONSTRUCTION IN
PHILOSOPHY
In Democracy and Education, Dewey discusses what he sees as the
inseparable relationship between philosophy and education:
If a theory makes no difference in educational endeavor, it must be
artificial. The educational point of view enables one to envisage the
philosophic problems where they arise and thrive, where acceptance or
rejection makes a difference in practice. If we are willing to conceive
education as the process of forming fundamental dispositions, intellectual
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and emotional, toward nature and fellow-men, philosophy may even be
defined as the general theory of education (Dewey, 1985, p. 338).
This captures the essence of Dewey’s pragmatism, declaring his
endeavour of reconstruction in philosophy—philosophy as problemsolving, philosophy for our ordinary living and, most importantly,
philosophy as education. Such a philosophy involves changes in our
dispositions and ways of action: philosophy must ‘make a difference’ in
practice. This includes the role of philosophy in serving democracy as a
way of life—the ongoing creation of a democratic community in which
the welfare of each individual is enhanced through free and equal
communication, and in respect for differences, as the valuable source of
mutual learning (Dewey, 1988).
Dewey marked a turning point in the history of American philosophy,
but his philosophy still needs to be reconstructed in response to the
demands of our times. Problems in education and the ways of solving
them today challenge Dewey’s idea and language of reconstruction in
philosophy, presenting new difficulties in the realisation of his ideal of
democracy as a way of life. ‘Making a difference in practice’ is commonly
understood today in terms of measurable outcomes and visibly clear
standards, sufficient to show immediate effectiveness and impact. The
language of education has come to be characterised by ‘accountability’.
Within such a narrowly conceived notion of practice philosophy is
considered useless, associated, so it is claimed, with ‘mere words’, with
‘abstract ideas’, and as offering nothing more than an ‘ideal model’. In the
global (and, ironically, Americanised) economy of today, the gap between
philosophy and practice is far wider than Dewey took it to be. This is so
even within the academy: a discipline that does make a visible difference
cannot, in the economy of higher education, so readily secure its funding.
It is in the light of this trend that Dewey’s pragmatism, as philosophy for
practice, needs to be reconsidered. Such a reconsideration must go beyond
conventional notions of applying theory to practice, as the latter can
surreptitiously assimilate the former to its territory. To avoid this danger
pragmatism must recount its terms so that it can release us from the
narrow horizons of our practical lives: it must look again at what counts in
order the better to account—to offer its account and to bring things to
account. Pragmatism needs to resist the totalising force of an ideology of
practice, one that distracts us from the rich qualities of daily experience.
In response to this need, and in mobilising Dewey’s pragmatism, this
paper introduces another standpoint in American philosophy: Stanley
Cavell’s account of the economy of living in Thoreau’s Walden. By
discussing some aspects of Cavell’s The Senses of Walden that suggest
both apparent similarities and radical difference between Thoreau and
Dewey, I shall argue that Cavell discovers rich dimensions of practice in
Thoreau’s American philosophy, ones that are overshadowed in Dewey’s
pragmatism: that he demonstrates another way of ‘making a difference in
practice’. Cavell, as a critical interlocutor of Dewey, from within
American philosophy, offers a way of using language in resistance to
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Philosophy as Education and Education as Philosophy
347
the rhetoric of accountability and in service to the creation of democracy
as a way of life. I shall conclude by suggesting that the enriched tradition
of American philosophy from Dewey to Cavell is to be found in their
promotion of philosophy as education and education as philosophy.
II WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO READ CAVELL’S THE SENSES OF WALDEN?
Just like Dewey, Cavell is an American philosopher who is engaged in the
task of reconstruction in philosophy. Citing a passage above from
Democracy and Education, Hilary Putnam acknowledges the contribution
made by Dewey’s idea of education for democracy in the reconstruction of
philosophy as education. It is in this context that Putnam detects a thread
running from Dewey to Cavell. He writes: ‘[Dewey] anticipated Cavell’s
identification of philosophy with education’ (Putnam, 1994, p. 223). More
recently, Putnam has returned to Cavell’s theme of ‘philosophy as the
education of grownups’ (Putnam, 2005). Here he discusses Cavell’s
sustained reflection on scepticism as one that itself ‘exemplifies’, and
indeed allows him and us to undergo, the process of philosophy as
education. Cavell, in his Wittgensteinian ordinary language philosophy,
transforms the sceptical question ‘Can we know other minds?’ from an
epistemological question to one that relates to the ‘refusal to acknowledge
the other as a person’ (p. 124). Cavell enables us to change our ways of
seeing human suffering as suffering, Putnam says, by envisaging it as a
‘normal pathology’, that is, as a part of the human condition (p. 125).
Discussing how he himself, in reading Cavell, came to recognise a fault in
his approach to scepticism, Putnam suggests there is something in Cavell’s
writing that effects a conversion in our ways of seeing by introducing a
sense of ‘vertigo’ (p. 119). What Cavell says is inseparable from how he
speaks, and hence: ‘To read Cavell as he should be read is to enter into a
conversation with him, one in which your entire sensibility and his are
involved, and not only your mind and his mind’ (p. 117).
Indeed while Dewey talks about education, education in Cavell is to be
found in his manner of speaking to us, here and now in his style of writing:
Cavell demonstrates an alternative way of ‘making a difference in
practice’, as it were from deep within ourselves. This is tied up with the
content of his philosophy, his reinterpretation of scepticism. Cavell’s
reconstruction in philosophy is conducted through his resistance to
philosophy’s ‘suppression of the human voice’ and through a turning of
language back to the ordinary, that is, through a regaining of intimacy
between our words and life (Cavell, 1983, pp. 32–33, 48). In his efforts to
recover the human voice in philosophy, Cavell rediscovers in Emerson’s
and Thoreau’s writings on the ordinary and the common, the rich sources
of American philosophy. Thoreau and Emerson ‘underwrite’ the task of
ordinary language philosophy (p. 32). In their work, Cavell finds another
way of demonstrating ‘political liability’, in what he describes as ‘the
politics of philosophical interpretation as a withdrawal or rejection of
politics, even of society, as such’; Thoreau’s Walden is an ‘act of civil
disobedience, a confrontation which takes the form of a withdrawal’
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(Cavell, 1983, pp. 49–50). In the eyes of Deweyans, Cavell’s emphasis on
reading and writing may look like an indulgence in literary and, hence,
‘apolitical’ activities. It may sound scandalous to call ‘political’ the act of
reading a text in ‘withdrawal’ from society. Cavell’s writing on Thoreau
thus offers interesting points not only of convergence with but of
divergence from Dewey’s idea of democracy and education. What does it
mean then to read Cavell’s text on Thoreau? The better understanding of
practice realised by Cavell may help us to recognise the way that the
charge of ‘mere words’ fatefully underestimates the inseparable connection between words and life.
The Senses of Walden is not simply a reinterpretation of Thoreau’s
Walden: it exemplifies Cavell’s project of reconstruction in philosophy, ‘a
revision of how we conceive philosophy, specifically in its relation to what
we conceive literature to be or to do’ (Cavell, 2005). His purpose of
writing The Senses of Walden is in a sense to make Walden more difficult
(Cavell, 2004; Standish and Saito, 2005, p. 214). As he puts this, ‘the
clarity and the discoveries in Thoreau’s always surprising intense prose
exemplify an intention to attend registers of experience that one will not
know whether to assign to philosophy or to religion or to literature or to
politics’ (Cavell, 2005). In resistance to conventional philosophy, Cavell
presents, with Thoreau, an alternative style of writing in philosophy—a
style that reclaims the human voice, and, that is, a distinctively American
voice that America has lost in its domination by professional philosophy;
this is a loss registered in the denial by that professionalisation that
Emerson and Thoreau are philosophers. While criticising the fallen state
of its democracy, Cavell tries also to retrieve the original ideal of the
foundation of America. Cavell wrote The Senses of Walden in a period of
some six weeks when the Vietnam War was nearing its denouement
(Cavell, 2004; Cavell, 2005). In this sense Cavell’s writing of the book
enacts the process of finding an alternative way in America’s relationship
with Asia. In Thoreau, so influenced by Eastern philosophies, Cavell finds
an alternative mode of thinking, sometimes of receptivity and silence.
Thus writing in and for philosophy is the process of ‘criticizing democracy
from within’, an alternative mode of ‘conversation in justice’ (Cavell,
1990, pp. 3, 27). This is not a matter of mere literary self-indulgence: the
political is internal to the writing, and the literary activity conditions
political participation (Standish and Saito, 2005, p. 220). Dewey says that
democracy must begin at home (Dewey, 1984, p. 368); Cavell goes down
deeper within home.
To demonstrate these points, I shall discuss in the following sections
some salient features The Senses of Walden.
III NOT MERE WORDS: THE ECONOMY OF LIVING, THE BAPTISM OF
WORDS AND THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE ORDINARY
Though there are diverse entry points to The Senses of Walden, the
interconnectedness of its themes mean that there is no obvious place to
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start. I shall highlight three main themes that suggest its common ground
with and its difference from Dewey’s pragmatism: the economy of living,
baptism in words and the phenomenology of ordinary experience. All
these themes show that words are not mere words but essential
components of practice.1
The economy of living
One of the criticisms made of the Japanese translation of The Senses of
Walden—the first translation of one of Cavell’s books into Japanese—is
that it is no more than a linguistic analysis of Emerson and Thoreau. This
statement shows the kind of assumption that is typically made about
Cavell’s writing: surely the title of its first chapter, ‘Words’, and of the
second, ‘Sentences’, show the reader that this is a book on semiology. In
reality The Senses of Walden presents us with a structure that transcends
the kind of dichotomous thinking that hides behind the charge of ‘mere
words’, a dichotomy that recurs between language and action, between
thinking and practice, between mind and body, and between the inner and
the outer.
‘Life’ and ‘the ordinary’ are central concepts in Dewey’s pragmatism.
‘[L]ife-situations’ or the ordinary context of living displace the foundation
of philosophy. The meaning of ‘life’ ranges from such daily activities as
using tools to the moral implications of democracy as a way of life.
Dewey’s emphasis is on action and bringing forth social changes. On the
one hand, Cavell’s American philosophy shares with Dewey this broad
framework of thinking; on the other, Cavell shows dimensions of ordinary
life that exceed what Dewey puts into words.
Cavell’s account of Thoreau’s economy of living provides a good
starting point for thinking what that excess consists in. The first chapter of
Walden is entitled ‘Economy’. It is filled with detailed descriptions of
clothes—of food and the hut Thoreau builds, of Thoreau’s labour in
building it, and of his hoeing of his bean field. Cavell reinterprets this as
an alternative notion of accounting and of the recounting of ordinary
practice. Philosophers have been engaged in questioning the necessary
conditions of knowledge, its logical necessity: for Cavell and Thoreau, in
contrast, the task of philosophy is to question anew the necessary
conditions of life (Cavell, 2004). As Cavell remarks, ‘the truth appears to
the writer, as if in a vision, a vision of true necessities, that the necessaries
of life are the means of life, the ways it is lived’ (Cavell, 1992, p. 73). In
Walden such economic terms as ‘account’, ‘interest’, ‘trust’, ‘means’,
‘spend’ and ‘investment’ recur. But behind their practical, economic
sense, these terms hold spiritual implications (Cavell 2004; Standish and
Saito 2005, p. 234). In Thoreau’s act of writing, recounting words in the
context of ordinary living means producing an account in and of words—
‘a document, with each word a warning and a teaching; a deed, with each
word an action’. Cavell finds Thoreau to be implying that ‘the lines
[should] be complete, omitting no expense or income, and that there
[should] be no mistake in the computation’ (Cavell, 1992, p. 30). As the
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analogy of hoeing in the bean field suggests, the labour of recounting
words is not simply a speculative process in the mind but is inseparable
from ways of living, from the movement of our bodies: hoeing symbolises
the ‘physical act of writing’ (p. 25).
Thoreau’s economy of living in the woods trades on the origin of the
term in the Greek oikos—that is, it concerns the building of a house, and
metaphorically, the building of the world as the house of words. Writing
for Thoreau and Cavell is in this sense an activity of rebuilding and
replacing the narrow construction of economic terms, the construction that
dominates our practical lives: it is an act of ‘win[ning] back from [the
circling of economic terms] possession of our words’ (p. 92). The
ordinariness of life involves one’s relation to clothes, food and housing as
its essential ground. It is not, however, limited to the use of instruments, to
learning the know-how of living, to utility. To see further what it means,
we need to examine more carefully how Cavell describes the role of words
in Thoreau’s economy of living.
The baptism of words
Emerson’s and Thoreau’s commitment to language suggests their
prescience of what was to become the motive of the ordinary language
philosophy of the 20th century, their own inquiry into the conditions for
knowledge and for living. These are thoughts adumbrated in Cavell’s
pondering of Emerson’s use of ‘condition’ (Cavell, 1990), which prompt
us to understand the way that saying (-dit) things together (con-) is
embedded in human condition (Standish and Saito, 2005, p. 226). What is
it that Cavell understands to be so much at stake in ordinary language
philosophy, in its insistence on the form of ‘When we say . . ., we mean
. . .’? Such a statement is in the first person, and it is plural. Its being first
person bears the weight of the individual voice—and, that is to say, the
commitment—of the speaker, while its being plural testifies to membership of a community (p. 220). To have a relationship with words, to use
them, is inseparable from ‘placing ourselves in the world’ (Cavell, 1992,
p. 53).
A main theme in Cavell’s idea of language is the recovery of the
‘autonomy’ of the self and language. Its starting point is the state of loss, a
state in which the self and the language conspire to lose each other. More
concretely, in religion and politics this is a state in which such words as
‘God’ and ‘freedom’ are used in vain. It is a fallen condition in which ‘we
do not let the words assess our lives, we do not mean what they could
mean’ (p. 63). This state of loss is a relationship in which words, the self,
objects and others have lost their autonomy under pressure of conformity.
To acknowledge, to confront this shameful condition is the starting point
in regaining the autonomy of language and the self. Hence, Walden is an
attempt ‘to free us and our language of one another, to discover the
autonomy of each’ (ibid.).
Cavell says that the mutual return of words and ourselves is expressed
by words’ ‘literality’ (ibid.). Literality here should, however, be
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distinguished from the ‘literary’: literality is a broad concept that connotes
the physical characteristics of language as well as its relation to
communication, thought and existence. To acknowledge the literality of
words is to accept the dimension of words whereby not only they but also
the world itself, others, constantly exceed the grasp of human knowledge.
This brings us back to Cavell’s position on scepticism—as related to ‘an
intimacy with existence, or an intimacy lost, that matched skepticism’s
despair of the world’ (Cavell, 1983, pp. 32–33).
A turning point from loss to recovery is to be found in the notion of the
‘father tongue’—‘a reserved and select expression, too significant to be
heard by the ear, which we must …
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