Studies in Rhetoric & Communication

John Dewey on the Arts of Becoming

Nathan Crick

• Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781611172355
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Rhetoric
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

An innovative approach to Dewey's view of rhetoric as art, revealing an "ontology of becoming"

In Democracy and Rhetoric, Nathan Crick articulates from John Dewey's body of work a philosophy of rhetoric that reveals the necessity for bringing forth a democratic life infused with the spirit of ethics, a method of inquiry, and a sense of beauty. Crick relies on rhetorical theory as well interdisciplinary insights from philosophy, history, sociology, aesthetics, and political science as he demonstrates that significant engagement with issues of rhetoric and communication are central to Dewey's political philosophy.

In his rhetorical reading of Dewey, Crick examines the sophistical underpinnings of Dewey's philosophy and finds it much informed by notions of radical individuality, aesthetic experience, creative intelligence, and persuasive advocacy as essential to the formation of communities of judgment. Crick illustrates that for Dewey rhetoric is an art situated within a complex and challenging social and natural environment, wielding influence and authority for those well versed in its methods and capable of experimenting with its practice. From this standpoint the unique and necessary function of rhetoric in a democracy is to advance minority views in such a way that they might have the opportunity to transform overarching public opinion through persuasion in an egalitarian public arena. The truest power of rhetoric in a democracy then is the liberty
for one to influence the many through free, full, and fluid communication.

Ultimately Crick argues that Dewey's sophistical rhetorical values and techniques form a naturalistic "ontology of becoming" in which discourse is valued for its capacity to guide a self, a public, and a world in flux toward some improved incarnation. Appreciation of this ontology of becoming—of democracy as a communication-driven work in progress—gives greater social breadth and historical scope to Dewey's philosophy while solidifying his lasting contributions to rhetoric in an active and democratic public sphere.

What does it mean to say that rhetoric and democracy have an “ethics”? Traditionally the answers fall into one of two categories. On the one hand Kantian rationalism dictates that persuasive and political acts must follow from universal moral principles. In rhetoric one finds this ethics expressed most fully by Richard Weaver, for whom an “ethics of rhetoric requires that ultimate terms be ultimate in some rational sense” such that they achieve “an ordering of our own minds and our own passions.”¹ For Weaver the worst sin of rhetoric is to exploit circumstances through use of charismatic terms, and the worst sin of democracy is to slip into thoughtful demagoguery based on desire for short-term gratification. On the other hand Benthamite utilitarianism recommends that we judge the worth of any public behavior on the basis of its cumulative results, regardless of the motive. In rhetoric this attitude finds a home in the neo-Aristotelian tradition that grew out of Herbert Wichelns, in which rhetoric is “not concerned with permanence, nor yet with beauty. It is concerned with effect.”² From the effects perspective, universal principles are elusive and motives are hard to determine; better that we bracket such “idealistic” categories and get to work on the hedonistic calculus that measures the total sum of pleasures and pains.

Not surprisingly, these competing ethical standards are but further manifestation of the classical binaries between idealism and materialism, rationalism and empiricism, and realism and nominalism. Whereas one side denies the reality of flux and puts faith in the eternal, the other side dives headlong into the river in the belief that even the stability of the banks is but an illusion. The problem with such extremes is that they produce deafness and blindness respectively. To always act from principle, regardless of the circumstance, is to march steadfastly ahead despite cries of pain and appeals for sympathy. Yet to plunge into circumstances is to risk losing oneself in the swirl of motion and emotion such that the horizon never comes into focus. Ironically, then, both ethical perspectives are equally unethical insofar as they remain incapable of placing means and ends into a meaningful relation. By valorizing ends, the former keeps saying the same thing, but by denying ends, the latter has nothing to say. Meanwhile the operation of technological means continues its domination of society unabated.

If neither side provides a sufficient interpretation of ethics, they both grasp some aspect of necessity. For Dewey a more functional ethics requires the application of charitable continuity. “The theoretical value of the utilitarian position consists in the fact that it warns us against overlooking the essential place of the intellectual factor, namely, foresight of consequences,” he writes. “The practical value of the theory which lays stress on motive is that it calls attention of the part played by character, by personal disposition and attitude, in determining the direction which the intellectual factor takes.” Successfully combining these insights requires more than simply saying “both/and.” One must set them within a methodological whole. For Dewey that requires viewing ethics from the perspective of the entire act as it occurs as a process of judgment in which aspects of character, both individual and social, interact with environmental conditions over time. These acts must “involve awareness of what one is about; a fact which in the concrete signifies that there must be a purpose, an aim, and end in view, something for the sake of which the particular act is done.”³ For Dewey, then, ethical acts occur as a voluntary and purposive choices made in situations of doubt and crisis by agents who possess a relatively formed and stable character.

This definition incorporates but significantly alters the principles of the rationalistic and utilitarian positions. One the one hand, like the rationalist tradition, Dewey’s pragmatic ethics recognizes the importance of defining and seeking an ideal of the good. However, the good is defined not in terms of transcendent goals or fixed principles, but flexible ends and guidelines that grow out of situational conditions and are reflective of personal attitudes. On the other hand, like the utilitarian position, it measures the virtue of an act by its cumulative consequences. Yet it neither assumes a fixed “measure” of those consequences on an objective scale of pleasure or happiness, nor does it limit consequences to immediate gratifications. A genuine good is thus one that produces long-term beneficial consequences as measured by the needs and desires of a shared historical community. To possess a moral will is thus to possess “an active tendency to foresee consequences, to form resolute purposes, and to use all the efforts at command to produce the intended consequences in fact.”⁴ In other words a moral will is the ability to define a fitting end and determine the means that contribute to its consummation without undermining its longterm stability.

Only from a means/ends analysis can one distinguish the ethics of democracy from any other form of social organization. This is the emphasis of Dewey’s earliest writing on the subject, his 1888 “Ethics of Democracy.” In that work Dewey compared democracy with “aristocracy,” a term he used to characterize any society that “limits the range of men who are regarded as participating in the state.” The clear reference point for Dewey, at the time, was Plato’s Republic, but today it can equally stand for any regime that would profess noble ends but employ restrictive or oppresive means.⁵ His intent was to point out that both aristocracy and democracy in practice seek to achieve a form of social life in which individuals achieve self-realization within the context of a social whole. What makes them different, therefore, is the relationship between means and ends. “Personal responsibility, individual initiation, these are the notes of democracy,” Dewey explains. “Aristocracy and democracy both imply that the actual state of society exists for the sake of realizing an end which is ethical, but aristocracy implies that this is to be done primarily by means of special institutions or organizations within society, while democracy holds that the ideal is already at work in every personality, and must be trusted to care for itself.”⁶

It is vital not to misinterpret Dewey on this point; he is not simply repeating the ethical stance of classical liberalism in which the best society is one free from negative constraints. As he would later make clear, find “a man who believes that all men need is freedom from oppressive legal and political measures, and you have found a man who, unless he is merely obstinately maintaining his own private privileges, carries at the back of his head some heritage of the metaphysical doctrine of free-will, plus an optimistic confidence in natural harmony.”⁷ But even in 1888, when writing as a Christian idealist, Dewey still recognized the importance of creating individuals capable of personal responsibility and individual initiation. Democracy thus meant for him that “personality is the first and final reality” at the same time that it “admits that the full significance of personality can be learned by the individual only as it is already presented to him in objective form in society” and that the “chief stimuli and encouragements to the realization of personality come from society.”⁸ Dewey would later abandon the idealistic term “personality,” which was linked to a Hegelian teleology, but his basic point remained the same. By making the individual both the means and the end of democracy, it committed itself to investing its energies into creating individuals capable of possessing a moral will that achieves enough autonomy from dominant social forces that it is capable of reacting back upon those forces with intelligence and power.

By 1932, when his final treatise on ethics was published, Dewey had decided that four dominant virtues characterized democratic social life: wisdom, faithfulness, thoughtfulness, and conscientiousness. By wisdom, Dewey means the ability to subordinate the “satisfaction of an immediately urgent single appetite” to a more “inclusive satisfaction” such that, for instance, one does not win the battle and lose the war. By faithfulness, he means the willingness of a self to acknowledge “the claims involved in its relations with others,” thereby recognizing the possibility of indirect public consequences for others in any act done primarily to satisfy a private interest. By thoughtfulness, he means being solicitous “in the award of praise and blame” in order that one not snap to quick judgment of another based on isolated acts and limited evaluations. Lastly, by conscientiousness, Dewey means possessing the “active will to discover new values and to revise former notions.”⁹ This last virtue is the most challenging and the most democratic. For individuals can be wise, faithful, and thoughtful in most of their everyday dealings with others in any society that has achieved a degree of stability. Yet to discover new values or revise old ones—to enact, in other words, a transvaluation of values—is intrinsically to situate oneself within the realm of moral conflict that is anathema to all forms of aristocracy.

The implications of Dewey’s moral theory go further still; for wherever there is moral conflict, there is rhetoric. Rhetoric and democracy are thus bound together through the fundamental ethical imperative of the ontology of becoming—that the nature of our future selves, as individuals, cultures, and civilizations, is a product of the present choices we make and the future goals toward which we aspire as they have been inherited and altered from the past. Dewey observes:

Except as the outcome of arrested development, there is no such thing as a fixed, ready-made, finished self. Every living self causes acts and is itself caused in return by what it does. All voluntary action is a remaking of self, since it creates new desires, instigates to new modes of endeavor, brings to light new conditions which institute new ends. Our personal identity is found in the thread of continuous development which binds together these changes. In the strictest sense, it is impossible for the self to stand still; it is becoming, and becoming for the better or the worse. It is in the quality of becoming that virtue resides. We set up this and that end to be reached, but the end is growth itself.

What is true for the self is also true for society. The character of democratic society stands for the thread of continuous development that binds together the growth of individuals toward a common endeavor. What makes this growth democratic is its fundamental rhetorical tolerance for views that may seem, judged by the standards of the present, to be immoral. Dewey notes, for instance, that “history shows how much of moral progress has been due to those who in their own time were regarded as rebels and treated as criminals.” Given this fact, a democracy cannot view toleration as “just an attitude of good-humored indifference. It is positive willingness to permit reflection and inquiry to go on in the faith that the truly right will be rendered more secure through questioning and discussion, while things which have endured merely from custom will be amended or done away with.”¹⁰ With this process of bringing forth, amending, and doing away being a fundamental rhetorical activity, the tolerance of which Dewey speaks can only be a tolerance for rhetoric in all its glory and misery.

We are spiraling toward the basic principle of the ontology of becoming that will structure our understanding of rhetoric and democracy—that we understand the possibility of growth through continuity only by focusing on the moments of discontinuity within a shared environment that both force and allow for the moral choices that determine our future selves. Once again we find a similar emphasis operating in the work of Foucault. For him the history of thought is the history of problematizations—those moments that allow one “to step back from this way of acting or reacting, to present it to oneself as an object of thought and to question it as to its meaning, its conditions, and its goals.” And it is crucial for Foucault, as for Dewey, that these moments of problematization do not simply occur in the mind or come about solely because of language itself. According to Foucault, “For a domain of action, a behavior, to enter the field of thought, it is necessary for a certain number of factors [largely resulting from social, economic, or political processes] to have made it uncertain, to have made it lose its familiarity, or to have provoked a certain number of difficulties around it.”¹¹ The function of philosophy, for Foucault, is thus to bring about and reflect upon these moments of transformation to posit what might be and what might have been.

Clearly, however, this role has traditionally been reserved not for philosophy but for rhetoric. It was its infatuation with moments of crisis and transformation that made it so closely aligned in the Sophistical era of classical Greece with the spirit of kairos. Variously interpreted practically as “opportune moment,” “due measure,” or “right occasion,”¹² kairos, according to Carolyn Miller, “encourages us to be creative in responding to the unforeseen, to the lack of order in human life. The challenge is to invent, within a set of unfolding and unprecedented circumstances, an action (rhetorical or otherwise) that will be understood as uniquely meaningful within those circumstances.”¹³ As a god Kairos was originally portrayed as a young man with wings on his shoulder and heels balanced on the edge of a knife while holding a pair of scales. For Greeks living in an age in which triumph and disaster equally seemed probable in the next moment and in which their literal fate as victors or slaves might depend on a single decision, their worship of kairos was understandable. The rise of democracy simply made this principle applicable to the rhetorical discourse, as timely judgment and action became contingent upon timely advocacy and speech. As teachers of rhetoric, the Sophists understandably became the masters of kairos. According to John Poulakos, kairos was a “radical principle of occasionality”¹⁴ which emphasized that “speech exists in time and is uttered both as a spontaneous formulation of and a barely constituted response to a new situation unfolding in the immediate present.”¹⁵ Being masters of improvisation, the Sophists saw rhetoric a way of reacting almost instinctively to the slightest flux within a situation in order to best set the course of future events.

Attention to kairos makes rhetoric something different than other, more systematic forms of persuasion such as propaganda and discursive forms of power/knowledge, just as the social consequences of kairotic discourse make it incompatible with undemocratic forms of social life. Take, for instance, the following passage created by the Sophist Thrasymachus during the Peloponnesian War: “I wish I had been alive in the old days, when the younger generation could happily remain silent, since matters did not force them to make speeches and their elders were looking after the city. But since it is our fate to found ourselves alive now, at a time when we submit to others ruling the city, but endure its disasters ourselves, and since the greater of these disasters are due not to the gods or to fortune, but to those who are in charge, I have no choice but to speak.”¹⁶ The simple line “I have no choice but to speak” represents an ethical stance that recognizes both circumstantial conditions and moral responsibilities. Presumably one must speak because no one else has spoken appropriately to overcome the shared problem that faces them in the present. To speak in this situation thus mandates that one not only speak for but speak against—and, most important, that one must speak for oneself. This form of expression stands in tension not only with forms of propaganda, in which the individual only speaks on behalf of a organization and within the limits of a narrowly defined method and goal, but also with more dominant forms of social discourse, in which the individual merely reinscribes conventional power relations by conforming to the patterns of expression that constitute them.

That is to say, rhetoric attends to the particular situation as it relates to a more universal social context always in the process of transition and change. Wichelns is thus correct in observing that rhetoric is “the art of influencing men in some concrete situation,”¹⁷ but so too is Philip Wander correct in emphasizing how rhetoric always occurs within “an historical context” involving “the efforts of real people to create a better world.”¹⁸ Such perspectives are only seen to conflict when viewed through the many-headed dualisms of theory and practice that have ever forced upon us a decision to either stare at our feet or gaze up at the heavens. When viewed pragmatically, however, they each simply highlight differing facets of an action performed in historical time that emerges from the past, speaks to the present, and alters the future. Rhetoric, in sum, always exists in temporal relationship to crisis. It is thus a creature of drama, and as such it makes, dominates, rouses, and molds the personalities, movements, climaxes, spectacles, and actions tha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• CHAPTER 1: Rhetoric and the Ethics of Democracy
• CHAPTER 2: The Rhetoric of Inquiry
• CHAPTER 3: Rhetoric and Aesthetics
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author