Is Thoreau More Cosmopolitan Than Dewey?

Abstract

In 1921 John Dewey published an article on “mutual national understanding” based upon his real experience of encountering foreign cultures in Japan and China (“Creative Democracy” 228). The article echoes his democratic spirit of learning from difference beyond national and cultural boundaries. The vitality of his American philosophy and its potency in a global context are still evident today. Some of the recent research on Dewey is plain enough evidence of this (Hickman; Hansen). Neither fixed within national ground nor appealing to any universalist cause in the process of continuing growth, Dewey encourages us to become cosmopolitan, going beyond cultural differences and national boundaries. By inheriting what Dewey has left us, this paper critically re-examines the viability of Dewey’s philosophy today in the context of a debate on cosmopolitanism and global citizenship in American philosophy. It tests his claim that understanding different cultures should be a pre-condition for our becoming cosmopolitan. To take up this task, I want to confront Dewey with another voice of American philosophy—that of Henry David Thoreau as revived by Stanley Cavell. Thoreau tends to be absent both in Dewey’s writings themselves and in those of Deweyan scholars. What does this absence imply? What does the silenced voice of Thoreau suggest when one looks at Dewey’s line of argument regarding cosmopolitanism? In searching for answers to these questions, this paper explores what lies behind this absence. I shall re-read Thoreau’s Walden, via Cavell’s ordinary language philosophy, as offering an alternative mode of becoming cosmopolitan—beyond the dichotomous framework of cosmopolitanism in words and cosmopolitanism in action. It will show us how our endeavor to