Abstract
In this article, I propose a link, or at least a family likeness, between two great traditions, Dewey's pragmatism and continental phenomenology and hermeneutics, held together by an overlapping epistemological and ethical outlook. My argument is based on a tripod of terms: situation, experience, and reconstruction. I start by describing ‘situation’ as the a priori condition for having experiences: there simply has to be a situation for sensing, thinking, and making decisions to take place. My next point is that experiences are necessarily place bound, local, and everyday phenomena. Experiences are relational in the sense of a subject who relates to the (material) world and to significant others—the subject not as an isolated ego, but as being-with-the-other. The link between experience and reconstruction may not be so obvious to us. But it is Dewey more than anybody else who has made a case for democracy as a political reconstruction of our everyday experiences. There is a connection between his epistemological and ethical outlook, and political action as part of an education for a democratic life. (Published: 2015-11-03) Citation: L. Lovlie. “John Dewey, Phenomenology, and the Reconstruction of Democracy.” Nordic Journal of Pedagogy and Critique, Vol. 1, 2015, pp. 1–13. http://dx.doi.org/10.17585/ntpk.v1.104
Highlights
In this article, I propose a link, or at least a family likeness, between two great traditions, Dewey’s pragmatism and continental phenomenology and hermeneutics, held together by an overlapping epistemological and ethical outlook
The new formalism is abstract in the literal sense of a thinking that has severed its precious links to the lived world of teachers and students
This, the broken relation between the individual and society, is a theme broached in Dewey’s Individualism Old and New, written on the eve of the Great Depression in 1929 and foreshadowing the current reign of elitist governmentality and neo-conservative populism. How does this tally with Dewey’s phenomenology, if there is such a thing? I shall develop my answer in three steps, under the main headings of situation, experience, and reconstruction
Summary
In 2007, my essay ‘The Pedagogy of Place’ was published in Nordisk Pedagogik. One of my arguments was that pedagogy in the wide sense is basically earthbound, territorial, and local*as an intentional activity, it literally takes place somewhere in the home, in our kindergartens, in our schools and universities, in our workplace, and in our leisure activities. He puts situation before the individual in the logical order: the situation emplaces the person and so it is the place or locus that determines the onset and course of individual experiences This view, worked out around 1900, is repeated in his Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (1939) where he introduces the idea of ‘a universe of experience’ as embedded in situation The juxtaposition of the ‘phenomenology of situation and experience’ (my terms) and the reconstruction of liberalism in terms of a ‘method of democracy’ (Dewey’s term) may help us recreate the idea and practices of democracy as processes of conjoint action in our schools and universities, in non-government organisations, and volunteer associations. Let us first have a closer look at ‘situation’ as used by Dewey in relation to phenomenology as the study, literally, of that which appears in experience
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