A strong poet's perspective on richard rorty

Abstract

Dewey was a strong poet in the ironic sense Rorty borrows from Harold Bloom.! My paper started as an attempt to prove this by showing how the poetic dialectic of Bloom's strongest poet William Blake resembles that of Dewey. Lacking space I'll content myself with a few elipitical comments connecting the two. Strong poets make connections others miss, and poetic dialectic destroys dualisms. Richard Rorty sees self-creation and human solidarity as "equally valid, yet forever incommensurable. ''2 Dewey's dialectic dissolves this dualism. In doing so it helps us out of the kind of educational difficulties noted by Rene Arcilla, Alven Neimen, and Lynda Stone in their contribution to this symposium. I will briefly explore three moments of Dewey's poetic dialectic. They are his metaphysics, his dialectic of the actual and possible especially as it relates to labor, tools and language, and his dialectic of self and society. Readers of Maxine Greene's The Dialectic of Freedom will recognize much of what I have., to say. 3 Like most critics Rorty faults Dewey's metaphysics while failing, as almost everyone does, to even mention what it is about. Dewey's dialectic is composed of contrary but complimentary unified dialectical pairs: As against this common identification of reality with what is sure, regular and finished, experience in unsophisticated forms gives evidence of a different world and points to a different metaphysics. We live in a world which is an impressive and irresistible mixture of sufficiencies, tight completenesses, order, recurrences which make possible prediction and control, and singularities, ambiguities, uncertain possibilities, processes going on to consequences as yet indeterminate. They are mixed not mechanically but vitally like the wheat and tares of the parable. We may recognize them separately but we cannot divide them .... Such facts have been celebrated by thinkers like Heraclitus and Lao-tze .... They have rarely been frankly recognized as fundamentally significant for the formation of a naturalistic metaphysics. 4 Dewey's is not a foundational metaphysics. Dewey believed that we are participants in an unfinished and unfinishable universe and not spectators of a finished universe. Dewey's metaphysics could not be about some cosmic arch~ eternal essences, ultimate identities, or immutable categories. In no way does Dewey offer an ontological metaphysics. For Dewey, essences, identities, and categories exist, but, like biological species, they endure although they are not eternal, fixed, and final. We live in a contingent universe wherein action is necessary if we are to continue as well as celebrate our existence, and tragedy is real. In order to live we must create more meanings. We must be poets in the