Modern Socratic Dialogue and Resilient Democracy: Creating the Clearing for an American Bildung

Abstract

Michael Hogue's American Immanence draws from some of the fundamental features of American philosophy: philosophy is not alienated from life, but rather, part and parcel of the structure of our experiences, a way of living. His notion of “resilient democracy” is particularly representative of this tradition of thought. Resilient democracy is, first of all, an ethos, grounded in “the collective experience of uncertainty and animated by the living desire to bring about a more beautiful world.”2 This ethos is an associational, relational one, and it is democratic because, for Hogue, it must be “empathetic, emancipatory, and equitable,” assuming that each member of the association can be enriched by other members” (AI, 172–73). Vital to this democratic ethos is its anti-foundational politics; we start not with an immutable reality, but rather with the vulnerable reality of our actual, political, experiences (AI, 176). We start with where we are, not where some abstract ideal demands we should be. Democracy, for Hogue, is not just a certain political ideal for which to aim, but rather a way of being, a way of life. Dewey writes: A democracy is more than an associated form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience. . . . These more numerous and more varied points of contact denote a greater diversity of stimuli to which an individual has to respond . . . They secure a liberation of his powers which remain suppressed as long as the incitations to action are partial, as they must be in a group which in its exclusiveness shuts out many interests.3Throughout this paper, I use “democracy” in this sense; as a way of life, as a relational ethos, not as any particular political system.As a way of life, democracy is both the process—the struggle—and that which we aim for. This feature of democracy is similar to the structure of Bildung, in which self-cultivation is both the process and the product.4 For example, for Wilhelm von Humboldt, an individual is in “continuing activity,” whose powers are never stagnant; humankind is always progressing, an infinite object.5 This is an end-in-view, not a fixed end.6 Humboldt “did not formulate a catalogue which prescribed what a person should know, what a person should read, what a person should have heard, what a person should have concerned himself with, so that one can say: this person has Bildung.”7 For Humboldt, Bildung is “the development of the capacities of the individual into a harmonious whole.”8 This paper, in part, looks at Hogue's resilient democracy as a cultivation of both the individual and the group, as Bildung of both self and culture. In particular, the individual and culture that are being cultivated are relational, grounded in an emancipatory, equitable, and empathetic ethos, with a democratic way of life.Similar to the traditional Bildungstradition, education plays a vital role in this kind of democratic cultivation. If our end-in-view is a democratic society, then the method to reach that end must also be democratically ordered. Myles Horton put it best: “When you believe in a democratic society, you provide a setting for education that is democratic.”9Modern Socratic Dialogue (MSD) is a particular method of philosophical dialogue that engages in and cultivates the ethos of resilient democracy. It cultivates empathy (in listening), pluralism (difference is accommodated and incorporated) and equity (insofar as no special knowledge is required), and anti-foundationalism (participants approach the conversation with epistemic humility, not trying to grasp a Truth as the ground of knowledge, but rather work together to form a common truth that comes out of their situatedness). These are all traits of Hogue's resilient democracy, and all traits of an American Bildung, our self-correcting vulnerability, a way of being that replaces an unattainable ideal without sacrificing amelioration.Much like the tradition it addresses, this paper is layered; it is polyphonically pluralistic in method and structure. The many voices of this paper are first stratified and folded in together, growing together in difference and unity, just as the voices in a Modern Socratic Dialogue are meant to do. I focus on 5 main elements: 1) resilient democracy as part of the American tradition of philosophy as a way of life, 2) the history of Bildung, especially its reliance on freedom and social bonds, 3) “American Bildung,” crafted through the works of Hogue, Du Bois, Anzaldua, Anna Julia Cooper, and other American philosophers, including its contrasts with Germanic Bildung, 4) philosophy and democracy as ways of life in America, and 5) how the Modern Socratic method, especially as espoused by philosopher and activist Leonard Nelson, can help us achieve an American Bildung.In American Immanence, Michael Hogue uses the works of John Dewey, William James, and Alfred North Whitehead to provide a new account of democracy, and a new account of theopolitics, for a new way of living. In particular, Hogue addresses the problem of American Exceptionalism and seeks to form a new theory that addresses the “Anthropocene paradox”: in short, the end of viewing humans as separate from nature (AI, 17). Historically in the United States, Africans, African-Americans, Black Americans, Indigenous Peoples, women of all races and ethnicities, and anyone who did not fit within the “standard” norm of “American” were relegated to the world of “animalistic nature.” The Anthropocene paradox is and has been related to the way underrepresented minorities in the United States (and elsewhere) have been socially and morally categorized.10 Hogue's entire theory of “American immanence,” his reliance on Dewey, James, and Whitehead, is to establish an ontology of human beings as internally related to each other and their environment. Our world is, in other words, “a world of relational experience” (AI, 19).Hogue's theory of “resilient democracy” is my main focus. As he explains it, “resilient democracy is a grassroots theopolitics committed to the practices of democracy as a way of life” (AI, 156). Note that “democracy” is not being used here as a specific form of political governance; rather, democracy is a way of life. There are two elements of Hogue's theory that I want to emphasize: 1. democracy as a “politics of uncertainty,” (AI, 175) and 2. the associational ethos of democracy.As a theory entrenched in traditional pragmatism, Hogue's version of resilient democracy is grounded in the anti-foundationalism of classical American thought. This anti-foundationalism includes a rejection of “certainty” as such; Hogue himself writes, “democracy and certainty are antithetical” (AI, 175). Epistemic foundationalism assumes a “first principle” or some immutable reality that is antecedent to the knower; this assumption separates the knower from the known, thought from action, “true reality” from the world of the knower. Such foundationalism, taken for so long as a plausible theory of knowledge, constantly contradicts the world of the knower. As Hogue points out, “A foundationalist epistemology is insufficient for our experience as embodied and relational, to our creatural and contingent vulnerability, and to the systematically entangled nature of our political realities” (AI, 176). Our experiences simply are as embodied and relational creatures.11Foundationalist epistemology, ethics, politics, ontologies, and so forth, do not start with where and how we are. As Hogue elaborates, by treating starting points/first principles as immutable for all of time, “foundationalist reasoning externalizes the differences of historical context, social location, and embodiment. But insofar as democracy is a continuous struggle to widen the circle of empathy . . . democratic deliberation and democratic community must include these and other kinds of differences” (AI, 176). Just as epistemic foundationalism posits an antecedent truth as the “standard” for our experiences to correspond with, so too does political foundationalism work backwards: from antecedently held political beliefs to the idea of political life. In other words, political foundationalism works from beliefs or concepts that were never part of political life to asserting these beliefs as what we should aim for.12As creatures that are part of a precarious world, we seek certainty—certainty in values, certainty in politics, certainty in beliefs. Thus, philosophically (in the Western world), we found ourselves committed to an impractical foundationalism. The alternative to this foundationalism is democratic uncertainty. As Hogue points out for us, we need democracy because our lives and our worlds are fundamentally uncertain, and we need a way of life that reflects that. In other words, “Democracy is a vulnerable politics for vulnerable creatures in a vulnerable world in a cosmos without a center” (AI, 178).The “associational ethos” of democratic resiliency is grounded in the “collective experience of uncertainty and animated by the living desire to bring about a more beautiful world” (AI, 171). As an ethos of democratic living, however, we must realize that associational ethos is formless; there is no fixed form for democracy and association itself is not inherently democratic. Associational ethos is democratic when it requires, at the level of individuals, a responsible share according to the activities of the group to which one belongs, and participating in values the group sustains. At the level of the group, we must liberate the potentialities of members of the group in harmony with common and shared interests. As Hogue states, “A democratic ethos encourages people to actively participate in defining a community's purposes and value and strives to ensure that the goods and benefits of the community are equitably enjoyed” (AI, 171). Rather than political foundationalism, which provides the ideals for which we strive antecedent to the community, democratic anti-foundationalism—with an animating democratic ethos—sees the community's purposes and values as coming out of the community. An associational ethos is democratic when it is empathetic, emancipatory, and equitable (AI, 172); it presumes that individuals have something to contribute to each other and to the whole, that members can be enriched by other member's participation, that empathetic work of identifying and emancipating human capacities is a communal responsibility, and the coordination and equitable enjoyment of interests and goods of common life are an ongoing struggle and a blessing (AI, 172).The ethos of the community reconstructs the reality, rather than receives an antecedent, immutable “Reality.” In a resistance to certainty, this ethos stems from an ontological view of the universe as unfinished, (AI, 91) and this ethos, as a way of life, is an ethos that will never be finalized but always be vulnerable. The “power of the people,” after all, is never fully secure (AI, 172). However, equally important is resilience. Resilience stems from ontological vulnerability; complex systems, when they reach a breaking point, “seed and fertilize’’ new systems that emerge (AI, 164). For Hogue, democratic resilience is the infinite adaptability of democratic living based on its interrelational vulnerability.My contention is that, when cultivating an American Bildung, we must start where we are, not seek some transcendent reality; our process for the Bildung must reflect the very culture it seeks to cultivate. In this instance—American Bildung—the culture by its very nature is vulnerable, uncertain, and never finalized. An American Bildung is not a struggle for some ideal; rather, it is the struggle itself, a self-correcting and resilient vulnerability that is always in process, with no transcendent ideal as its product.Before the Germans had their Bildung, the Greeks had their paideia and the Romans had their civitas. And, though separated by time, geography, and culture, what Bildung, humanitas, and paideia all share is the idea that individual improvement occurred through education, and pointed to the ideal of human perfection that separated us from animals—and, as stated earlier, this stark separation between humanity and animality had harsh social and moral consequences for minority populations. As Jennifer Herdt writes, both paideia and Bildung “point to an ideal of human perfection and a process of formation that realizes that ideal,”13 and, of the Roman ideal of humanity, “Humanitas, like paideia, was invoked to distinguish the fully human from the vestigially human.”14 Embedded in the Greek and Roman ideals of humanity was a justification for Greek and Roman rule, respectively: “Humanitas, in other words, was deployed expressly for the purpose of justifying Roman rule. Humanity did not preclude conquest. Rather, it dictated the appropriate way to rule the conquered.”15 He (and it was almost always a “he”) who was fully human—whether through the process of paideia or through being civilized by Roman law—was also justified in conquering those who were less than human. Of course, culture as justification for both “perfect humanity” and the conquest of other nations did not end with our “ancients.” To create an “American Bildung,” then, we must be assured that it 1) does not separate a kind of “perfected humanity” from the rest of the natural world, and 2) cannot justify colonialism and the racism and genocide that so often accompanies it.Additionally, this “ideal” should not arise from some stagnant, antecedent notion of what humanity should “end” as, but rather should both come from our processes of living and give us a goal for living better. Recall—as stated earlier—that even for Humboldt, humanity has an end-in-view, not a fixed end; humanity is in infinite progress. The ideal set forth in this paper—a democratic way of life (not a political system)—is both the process and the product of relationality, and also is not a fixed end. Hence, the term “American Bildung”; a Bildung—self and civic cultivation—that arises from uniquely “American” ideas of democratic living, which includes education as a form of cultivation (as even traditional Bildung emphasizes). Looking at Anna Julia Cooper's notions of human cultivation and perfectibility, alongside the work of Humbodt, provides us with an alternative (Black, activist, feminist) view of human development that helps us avoid issues embedded in traditionalist accounts of such issues.Despite the fact that this paper moves away from traditionalist accounts of “cultivation” (those which end in human exceptionalism), we will begin with a traditional philosopher: Wilhelm von Humboldt. However, the framework for Bildung that Humboldt provides will be supplemented—“filled in”—with the work of Anna Julia Cooper to show an American theory of cultivation and education, while still working within the conceptual structure of freedom and social bonds.Humboldt had perhaps the greatest influence in Western thought on the relationship between education and cultivation, and any paper on the topic would be remiss to exclude him. His notion of Bildung includes a tension between self-formation, education, and culture. Bildung, as both culture and self-cultivation, contains within it both a civic and an inward conception. Bildung as civic refers to the necessary social bonds and political activity of the one who achieved inner harmony. As inward, Bildung is an end-in-itself; it is the process of self-cultivation and inner harmony—a free process—that occurs in relationship with the world but occurs for its own sake.16 This tension between freedom and social bonds, however, is not a dualism; rather, it is more of a dialectic, a give-and-take, a push-and-pull between the individual and the world. The individual develops her capacities into a harmonious whole; however, this self-formation cannot occur in isolation. We must engage with the world and allow our senses to engage with the world. As Herdt points out, this means that self-formation is not just a private pursuit; requiring engagement with the world allows us, as the self-forming individuals, to transcend Bildung as a merely private, self-interested pursuit.17 As she writes, “Engagement with the world, then, preserves the pursuit of Bildung from becoming a kind of narcissistic self-cultivation.”18In The Limits of State Action, Humboldt presents the necessity of social ties in the “true end of Man”19—the “highest and most harmonious development of his powers to a complete and consistent whole.”20 He writes, “And indeed the whole tenor of the ideas and arguments unfolded in this essay might fairly be reduced to this, that while they would break all fetters in human society, they would attempt to find as many new social bonds as possible. The isolated man is no more able to develop than the one who is fettered.”21We can see from even such brief passages that both freedom of the individual and social ties are required for the “true end of Man.” For Humboldt, education especially requires free activity.22 Freedom in the development of the individual comes in the form of state non-interference in the educative processes. Civic development can only occur as a consequence of individual self-cultivation. Should the university fulfill its highest end, then the State, too will find its ends fulfilled.23 State interference with education provides an ulterior motive to the formation of the individual, which limits the development of human nature.24Humboldt meets the first criterion of Bildung in restricting the powers of the State in educational institutions. The second criterion—social bonds—is met in the educational system itself, most notably in the University of Berlin. Humboldt “endeavored to establish the educational system itself, with the University of Berlin at its pinnacle, as the institutional setting in which the free interchange of varied personalities can occur.”25Anna Julia Cooper—Black feminist, educator, teacher, activist—provides a different conception of human cultivation, a conception that, if we are creating a uniquely American, inclusive, and democratic Bildung, we must also look at. Cooper focused particularly on the experiences of Black Americans, especially in regard to labor, wealth, and education. Of particular import to this project is what Carol Wayne White refers to as Cooper's “politics of radical relationality,”26 and such relationality's connection to Cooper's notion of human development and perfectibility.Cooper's words on human cultivation are, in some ways, unlike other theories—European or European-American—of perfectibility. To begin with, Cooper offered a Black, feminist voice to the conversation. Additionally, she used a naturalistic interpretation of humanity to argue for Black rights—including the right to equal education—and liberation. In combining naturalistic arguments for Black liberation with her theory of human perfectibility, Cooper undermined “traditional” (white) notions regarding the inferiority of other races and cultures; something in contrast with, say, Hegel—who argued that racial differences were natural, that Africans have no culture of their own27—or Ernst Haeckel, who used ecology, evolutionary theory, and linguistics to advocate for a hierarchy of races.For example, in A Voice from the South, Cooper argued that it is not Black Americans who are lesser, but rather, such views of Black Americans are debased and distorted. If Black Americans struggle, it is because of social constructs and racism. Only with human progress will these views be eliminated. White writes, “During her time, and keeping with her evolutionary imagery, Cooper believed an evolved humanity necessitated the elimination of these distorted views of black humanity. . .”28 The problem, in other words, is not with Black humanity; the problem is with the white view of such humanity. For Cooper, inequalities are “ill-formed social constructions,” not natural parts of human agency or striving.29 Black striving for self-fulfillment is natural; such striving is, in fact, universal. In “What Are We Worth?” Cooper writes that the desire for growth, for development, is universal: “. . . the one ideal of perfect manhood and womanhood, the one universal longing for development and growth, the one desire for being, and being better, the one great yearning, aspiring, outreaching, in all the heartthrobs of humanity in whatever race or clime.”30 Every soul, she writes, has the right to “its own highest development.”31The ultimate “test” of educational systems, government institutions, religions and creeds is whether these systems create humans: The world will always want men. The worth of one is infinite. To this value all other values are merely relative. Our money, our schools, our governments, our free institutions, our systems of religion and forms of creed are all first and last to be judged by this standard; what sort of men and women do they grow?. . . You propose a new theory of education; what sort of men does it turn out? Does your system make boys and girls superficial and mechanical?32Education was of particular import to Cooper; Black Americans, for far too long, were viewed only as sources of menial labor. Such views of Black humanity—as nonexistent, in a sense—reduced Black Americans to nothing other than mechanical bodies to produce for white consumerism.33 Education was an opportunity to meet that natural desire for self-fulfillment, that desire to be fully human, that is present in every person. As Kevin Cedaño-Pacheco relays, Cooper was interested in education both on the individual level, and on the “metaphorical level” as the “development of the race as a whole”; “for Cooper, education names the whole act of producing human beings and communities.”34 Education and self-development are not just individual endeavors. Education would be a tool to erode racial inequities, a tool that improved all of humankind, a tool that racially uplifted;35 education was “the preparation of the learning adult to serve as a torch-bearer for human betterment.”36 Cooper herself states this quite clearly in “College Extension for Working People”: “Leadership is the college man's duty to society . . . Service is his slogan, and brotherhood in his vocabulary is limited only by the world's need and his own enlightened resourcefulness. He feels that he owes all and is glad to give all for universal betterment.”37 Education is necessary for free, self-reflexive, individual development, but with that development comes a responsibility to others, and a responsibility to human improvement.Humboldt's traditional structure of Bildung provides a framework for Cooper. Both the freedom to self-fulfill and grow—the right to self-development, a “self-respecting freedom”38—and the social bonds that shape this malleable humanity, are present in Cooper's own Black, feminist notion of human development. Unlike others in the tradition, however, Cooper uses this kind of freedom and social bonds along with evolutionary theory to argue for Black self-fulfillment and achievement. The common idea of human “perfectibility” is no longer used to separate “(European) humans” from the “savages.” Rather, she turns the argument on its head, so to speak. One might argue that though Cooper's thought is similar to others of her time—regarding the relation between education and the development of humankind—her thought also diverges from the norm; she focuses particularly on the most marginalized of society—Black Americans (particularly women) who are unlettered, working-class, and poor—and on the embodied relations that create the social conditions of suffering.To be foundational components of an American Bildung, freedom and social bonds must be interpreted and applied through a very particular American identity, an identity that is not just restricted to that of white, European heritage and thought. We have seen an example of this in the previous section on Humboldt and Cooper. And yet, the question of American identity, or what it means to be American, seems to be a puzzle never solved. “There is no country called America,” Michael Walzer begins his essay “What Does It Mean to Be an ‘American?’”39And, as Walzer points out, when it comes to the United States, things get even more fuzzy. Citing Horace Kallen, Walzer points out something rather obvious once noted: no one in particular inhabits the United States (not after past and current Native American genocide, and First Nation peoples have their own names for their histories and cultural identities): “It never happened that a group of people called Americans came together to form a political society called America,” (“American,” 636). There is no ethnic “United Statesian.” Anybody can come here (in theory). There is nothing about the adjective “American” (which, for better or worse, has become nearly synonymous with “U.S. citizen”) that reveals anything about race, ethnicity, or religion. “American” is empty.Patriotism to the homeland, Walzer states, is assumed in other nations, but not in America. As a “nation of immigrants,” America is not a nation spoken of or thought of as a “fatherland,” “motherland,” or “homeland.” The United States is “a country of immigrants who, however grateful they are for this new place, still remember the old places. And their children know, if only intermittently, that they have roots elsewhere. They, no doubt, are native grown, but some awkward sense of newness here, or of distant oldness, keeps the tongue from calling this land ‘home’” (“American,” 634). The United States isn't the United States because it got its name from a collection of its people. Rather, it works the other way around: “The people are Americans only by virtue of having come together”40 (“American,” 636).“American” is anonymous, especially ethnically anonymous (“American,” 637). Of course, this is nothing new. Du Bois stated this anonymity of “American”—and the price it demands—in The Souls of Black Folks: “One ever feels his two-ness-an American, a Negro, two souls; two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body . . . He would not Africanize America . . . He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism . . . ”41 People are Asian-American, African-American, Haitian-American, Mexican-American, but very few declare themselves as German-American or British-American; they are just American. Walzer's “anonymity of America’’ might as well be “white America is anonymous,” because it can be. If we take away hyphens, if we assimilate, we are free of our ethnicity and become lost in the anonymous wash of plain old Americanism. As Walzer puts it: “But, free from hyphenation, he seems also free from ethnicity” (“American,” 637). Some might call this assimilation into the great “melting pot,” along the lines of what Orosco calls the “Anglo-Saxon conformity model”: “This model holds that there is a fixed cultural core to US American national identity, and immigrants who want to live in the United States must leave behind their Old World identities and adopt or mimic these new values.”42 Of course, these values to be mimicked were Anglo-Saxon customs and traditions. For many, the “melting pot” dream is a barely veiled nightmare: “assimilationist ideas suggest a racial group is temporarily inferior,”43 and that the dominant group, once they take the “inferior” group into the fold, will “save them.”This brief look at Walzer's article reveals just how complicated the question of what it means to be American is, and shows us some of the problems we must address, so we can avoid them, in a different account of “American”: 1.An account of American culture cannot rely on any melting-pot or assimilationist ideology. As previously stated, this assimilationist goal is based in the ideology of cultural supremacy, where “whiteness” is supreme and “saves” via obliteration of the culture that has assimilated. Such a view treads firmly in the path already set by history, a path that justifies and defends colonialism as “good for the oppressed.”2.An account of American culture must not be teleological in a traditional sense. This does not mean that American culture or thought does not have hope for progress. The distinction I am making here is between a “final end” that is seen as an antecedent cause for culture (both civic and individual)—an end to which growth is merely a means—and the process or growth itself as the final end.44 Perhaps we can call this refined version of telos an “American telos,” where the process itself is the end, and thus the end forever is process and uncertain (like Hogue's resilient democracy).3.The “American telos” cannot be based on achieving some national culture or ethnic fulfillment.45 Recall, as Walzer pointed out, there is no “ethnic core” to America. By contrast, there are thinkers who qualified Bildung with national ethnicities, and we must take care to avoid such thinking. For example, Heidegger's “Self-Assertion of the German University” demonstrates a telos built around an antecedent notion of the “essence” of a people.46 Each social bond is centered around something essentially and ethnically German, linked to national destiny. However, as Walzer points out, “America has no singular national destiny—and to be an ‘American’ is, finally, to know that and to be more or less content with it,” (“American,” 653).Ultimately, Walzer commits to “American” as pluralism: Michael Walzer . . . also sees America in terms of an irreducible pluralism, an association of citizens, a union of ethnic, racial, and religious groups, individuals and groups with varying identities and the freedom to choose which aspect of their identity they wish to emphasize in what context and for what purpose. However, Walzer also argues that the adjective “American