The Grace and the Severity of the Ideal
John Dewey and the Transcendent
261 pages
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6 x 9
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© 2002
In this highly original book, Victor Kestenbaum calls into question the oft-repeated assumption that John Dewey's pragmatism has no place for the transcendent. Kestenbaum demonstrates that, far from ignoring the transcendent ideal, Dewey's works—on education, ethics, art, and religion—are in fact shaped by the tension between the natural and the transcendent.
Kestenbaum argues that to Dewey, the pragmatic struggle for ideal meaning occurs at the frontier of the visible and the invisible, the tangible and the intangible. Penetrating analyses of Dewey's early and later writings, as well as comparisons with the works of Hans-Georg Gadamer, Michael Oakeshott, and Wallace Stevens, shed new light on why Dewey regarded the human being's relationship to the ideal as "the most far-reaching question" of philosophy. For Dewey, the pragmatic struggle for the good life required a willingness "to surrender the actual experienced good for a possible ideal good." Dewey's pragmatism helps us to understand the place of the transcendent ideal in a world of action and practice.
Kestenbaum argues that to Dewey, the pragmatic struggle for ideal meaning occurs at the frontier of the visible and the invisible, the tangible and the intangible. Penetrating analyses of Dewey's early and later writings, as well as comparisons with the works of Hans-Georg Gadamer, Michael Oakeshott, and Wallace Stevens, shed new light on why Dewey regarded the human being's relationship to the ideal as "the most far-reaching question" of philosophy. For Dewey, the pragmatic struggle for the good life required a willingness "to surrender the actual experienced good for a possible ideal good." Dewey's pragmatism helps us to understand the place of the transcendent ideal in a world of action and practice.
“The author tells us to ‘be prepared to be surprised by Dewey’ and in his hands, Dewey amply fulfills the promise. The book is a series of interwoven but discrete studies designed to intimate and tease out persistent transcendent themes in Dewey’s work.”—, History of Political Thought
“One can disagree with Kestenbaum’s rejection of naturalism without failing to see the value and originality of this book, which deserves to be read widely and carefully.”—D. Seiple, Union Seminary Quarterly Review
[PLEASE USE BLURBER’S FULL TITLE FOR ANY USE. DO NOT CUT!!!!!!!!]
“The status of Dewey scholarship has been increased immeasurably with this book. Informed by wide-ranging research on the sundry interpretations of Dewey’s thought, Kestenbaum rescues Dewey’s pragmatism from the stereotypical confines of instrumentalism and naturalism by locating a vibrant dynamic of transcendence in his works on ethics, aesthetics, and religion.”<
“The status of Dewey scholarship has been increased immeasurably with this book. Informed by wide-ranging research on the sundry interpretations of Dewey’s thought, Kestenbaum rescues Dewey’s pragmatism from the stereotypical confines of instrumentalism and naturalism by locating a vibrant dynamic of transcendence in his works on ethics, aesthetics, and religion.”<
“Despite other notable attempts to explain how in Dewey’s philosophy the ordinary and the mundane can, and often do, open out to the extraordinary, the supramundane, the transcendent, no one has succeeded, as Victor Kestenbaum has, in demonstrating all the ways that Dewey believed this could be accomplished. In prose at once acute and discriminating as well as vitally accessible, Kestenbaum shows that Dewey was out neither to de-divinize nor to re-divinize the world. Rather his religious project was to create space for realizing the ideal in thought as well as creative action.”<Giles Gunn, University of California, Santa Barbara
"An elegantly and engagingly written work. . . . Any reading of Dewey that so forcefully reminds us that human experience is a dramatic encounter of unfathomable depth . . . is a reading worthy of careful, critical attention. This book is not cleverly provocative; it is rather truly surprising, in the very best sense. Its value resides not so much in the insights it offers for reading Dewey's texts as in its impetus to confront . . . human experience in its potentially shattering force and irreducibly myriad forms."
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
1. Under Ideal Conditions
2. The Pragmatic Struggle for the Good
3. "In the Midst of Effort"
4. Humanism and Vigilance
5. The Rationality of Conduct: Dewey and Oakeshott
6. The Undeclared Self
7. "Meaning on the Model of Truth": Dewey and Gadamer on Habit and Vorurteil
8. Faith and the Unseen
9. Dewey, Wallace Stevens, and the "Difficult Inch"
Notes
Index
Acknowledgments
1. Under Ideal Conditions
2. The Pragmatic Struggle for the Good
3. "In the Midst of Effort"
4. Humanism and Vigilance
5. The Rationality of Conduct: Dewey and Oakeshott
6. The Undeclared Self
7. "Meaning on the Model of Truth": Dewey and Gadamer on Habit and Vorurteil
8. Faith and the Unseen
9. Dewey, Wallace Stevens, and the "Difficult Inch"
Notes
Index
For more information, or to order this book, please visit http://www.press.uchicago.edu
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Education: Education--General Studies
Philosophy: General Philosophy | Philosophy of Religion
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