Pragmatism and Privilege in the Practical Arts
This paper examines the legacy of Deweyan pragmatism and its role in shaping the cultural status of the practical arts. It reveals how the success of pragmatism in overturning classical antipathy towards the crafts is overtaken by scientism. Dewey’s scien
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Pragmatism and Privilege in the Practical Arts
The current social status of the artisan is a legacy of the standing of the crafts in ancient Greece. The ability to know in archaic thought relies upon the artisan’s skill in uncovering a world in which the truth can be likened to a hidden adversary. Homeric forms of truth, as depicted in epics of discovery are enacted within a hierarchy of clearly defined social roles. For this reason the socially codified skills of the archaic artisan poet are deeply implicated in the portrayal of knowledge. Classical thought, however, overturns the concept of knowledge as a practical pursuit in favour of knowledge pursued as a form of abstract thought. Nonetheless the classical pursuit of knowledge remains a socially codified activity. It is an activity exclusive to aristocratic amateurs. Only the aristocracy possess sufficient economic independence and leisure to be entrusted in satisfying the condition of knowledge as a noble and disinterested ideal. Thus the contemporary association between the power of abstract thought and superior mental resources, commonly drawn in education today, originates in ancient Greece as a profoundly social relation.1 Not least because of its classical legacy of privilege John Dewey challenges the dominance of abstract reasoning in his goal of restoring practical action to the forefront of human intelligence. In his critique of the classical division between the virtue of thought and the falsity of labour Dewey seeks in conferring new intellectual status on the crafts and trades. Dewey argues that the social oppression of the Greek artisan is “purely and unfortunately” responsible for subverting the development of scientific technology during the classical period, and for delaying its development in Western culture (Hickman 1992, p. 36). In a radical inversion of classical orthodoxy Dewey asserts that it is the practice of the artisans, rather than sophists in fourth century Greece, that is paradigmatic of intellectual thought.
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The TER/SAT measures for competitive university entry in North America.
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2017 N.C.M. Brown, Studies in Philosophical Realism in Art, Design and Education, Landscapes: the Arts, Aesthetics, and Education 20, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-42906-9_17
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17 Pragmatism and Privilege
At the core of Dewey’s proposal is his notion of “ends in view”.2 The concept of ends in view is at once ontology, ethics and epistemology. “Ends” for Dewey are the active representation of an ongoing engagement with live events. Authentic ends are experienced and made intelligible by their enactment within local contexts. Ends are not universals forecast teleologically through contemplation. Ends may only be treated as formal abstractions in retrospect as reflections on the experience of practical experience. The existence of ends is coextensive with their endurance as an ongoing cycle of reflexive (“in view”) interactions between humans with their environment. The truth of ends is tested in their referen
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