Reply to Critics

plato knew that philosophy is not something we write; it is something we live. As Deweyans, we know philosophy is an ideal that emerges within experience as the highest possibility for dialogue. Insofar as a book appears as an extended monologue, it obscures the qualitative and transactive dimensions of philosophy as it is practiced. But sessions like these reveal that books are moments in a conversation, "perchings" in a dialogue that is forever in media res. I am deeply grateful to Bill Myers for organizing this panel, and for the generosity of Frank Ryan, Gregory Pappas, and Jim Garrison for having taken the time to read and think about this book. Each of them has served as a model for philosophical scholarship, and I am humbled and honored to have the opportunity to engage with them directly. They have challenged me in three distinct ways and have engaged with what I have written on separate plateaus of thought, at times revealing layers of which I was not fully aware. So I will do my best to respond to their concerns and develop our shared inquiry in their light. I will also own that my reading of Dewey is selective, and it is my attempt to work through a problem that materialized, as all problems do, in the course of ordinary lived experience.At Southern Illinois University Carbondale, where I attended graduate school, we offered a course called "The American Mind." The title was a provocation, so I applied to teach it one semester. It was a fantastic challenge to try to curate a selection of texts that would serve as an encounter with an intellectual tradition that eludes me as much as it informs me—after all, prior to college, I only knew that a "philosopher" is what becomes of the loser in the board game called Life. I did not know that there was something called "American philosophy" until I applied to study at SIUC.If philosophy is the way that a culture reflects upon itself, then in this book, I have tried to invite the American mind to lie down on the couch. Or, it might be more accurate to say that I have asked John Dewey, as the representative of American philosophy, how he might psychoanalyze such a mind. My hypothesis is that Dewey's theory of aesthetic experience, and the art that communicates and preserves such moments of intensified vitality, touches the deepest, but unspoken meanings that human beings encounter. This is where quality, the character of an event as a singular whole, the immediate aspect of an event that we feel rather than know, can be stabilized and communicated. If an interpretation can be made of the deep conflicts that have left philosophy at the margins of American life, I believe we would be wise to begin with our "dreams," with the creations of our imagination, the artistic products that reveal the felt dimension of our shared world.Many readers of Dewey choose to focus on his theory of inquiry, his recasting of the scientific method, and his instrumentalism as forming the core of his thought. This is an understandable approach; his work here is novel and corrects bad intellectual habits. However, for the purposes of this book, I have emphasized aesthetic experience, the role of the qualitative, and pursuit of meaning over the correction of practice in my interpretation. This is a controversial choice since it courts the irrational and the vague, but I believe that our neglect of these portions of experience prevents philosophy from reconnecting with American life.Frank Ryan is concerned about the extent to which I have cast the organism as porous, and that I have identified aesthetic experience as unconscious. I agree with Dr. Ryan's assessment that defining aesthetic experience as wholly unconscious would be a grievous error—and I hope not to have made it. There is a misleading ambiguity in the title of the book that might predispose the reader to suspect that I am claiming an equivalence, but what I intended to argue was not that aesthetic experience itself is unconscious, but rather that it is that phase of experience where the unconscious has a key role to play, and it is that mode of experiencing where we are most likely to encounter those aspects of the mind that are not available for our direct knowledge. Whereas Freud pursued dreams as the "royal road" to the unconscious, I proposed that a Deweyan might pursue aesthetic experience as providing the most valuable insight into the well-being of a culture. I cannot defend myself against Ryan's accusation that I have read organism and the environment as porous. I have conceived of interaction (or if we use Dr. Ryan's preferred term, "transaction") as entailing interpenetration. I own that I have done so, and that this is my way of interpreting and communicating with as much visceral impact as I can manage, how experience "reaches down" into nature (LW 1:5), and how we "use and incorporate the environment in which the latter has its say as surely as the former" (MW 14:15). To point to the fact that we are physically porous, that the environment enters into our bodies through pores and lung tissue and membranes, is not fundamentally different than to point to the fact that we are psychologically porous, that the environment influences our selective attention as we discriminate and communicate instrumentally. Through emphasizing the permeability of the self, I hoped to challenge the ontological preference to think of the self as an individual with a simple identity, a spectator who is internally self-related and externally related to everything else. In this, I follow the lead of my teacher Thomas Alexander, who has presented Dewey's thought as "eco-ontology" that "orients itself . . . in the key of wonder" and cultivates a "concern for discerning continuities" (Alexander 127). It is my belief that emphasizing an ontology that understands selves as "porous," or as internally rather than merely externally related to the environment, responds to the acute need to think ecologically and collectively rather than individualistically.Dr. Ryan also cites Richard Bernstein's criticism that there is a "deep crack" in Dewey's philosophy and worries about what is beyond the interface between the creature and its environment. But, from Dewey's perspective, that interface is precisely what nature is. Quality is of experience and it is the potentiality of experience. From that perspective, it is futile to insist on the necessity of such a beyond. And this is precisely what Dewey's metaphysics, in pursuit of the generic traits of existence, and his aesthetics, in pursuit of the qualitative values that constitute their "ends," is attempting to communicate. Bernstein, at least in the 1961 article that Ryan cites, does not recognize that "experience" and "nature" are nearly synonymous. He slips between reading "experience" as interaction and then reading it as sensation. It is also worth noting that the article Ryan cites was Bernstein's very first publication in a professional academic journal, and, at least by 2014, it is a position that seems to have considerably softened (Frega et al. 3–5).Dr. Ryan's correction of "interaction" to "transaction" is appreciated. Dewey used both words, but since I accept his preference of "cultural naturalism" to describe his own philosophy, I ought to respect his preference of "transaction" to "interaction." As far as I can reconstruct my own selection in this case, which never made it to the level of explicit awareness, I feared the pecuniary associations that "transaction" might provoke. I think "reciprocal" might now be a better way of characterizing what Dewey means.Finally, Dr. Ryan's reminder that experience is a circuit is always a good one. That I have emphasized the aesthetic phase of experience rather than the phase of inquiry that is associated with scientific work means neither that inquiry is absent in art nor that science does not include moments that we can truly recognize as aesthetic—only that the qualitative dimension of experience is the one that our culture notoriously struggles to attend. Experience, in its immediate and direct sense, must inform those products of secondary reflection, like those that philosophy provides. This is what is "brought to" experience. But immediate experience is nature in the primary sense of the word.Pappas is entirely correct that the danger of reifying the unconscious is a real danger. For one thing, we do not want to mistake a dynamic field with shifting boundaries for a "thing" that can be delimited, fully analyzed, and known to us. The goal of psychoanalysis is not to annihilate the unconscious by bringing it into conscious experience, but to make terms with it, to develop an interpretive practice for some of its tendencies, and to accept our interpretations as partial, hypothetical, and open to revision. To concretize it would be to commit the philosophic fallacy—an unavoidable mistake when we work from a static metaphysics. Instead, I would like to speak of "the unconscious" and "consciousness" in the way that we speak of "the precarious" and "the stable": these are aspects of experience that exist in a tensive relationship, and the philosophic value of our naming them is for the sake of the critical intelligence that interprets experience. In addition to the concern of reification, presenting "the unconscious" as if it were a pre-existent object sets up a binary between conscious and unconscious mind. This binary, like so many others that philosophers have exploited, introduces a rupture, a discontinuity in experience that seems intent on perpetuating itself.The question about Jung is one that I will have to contend with in a focused and careful way at some point. I am interested in Jung, but I think of him as an artist rather than a philosopher. One of Ricœur's concerns about Freud, which inspired him to identify Freud as one of the "Masters of Suspicion," was the extent to which he saw the psychoanalytic method of interpretation as constituting a threat to the "mytho-poetic core of the human imagination" (Ricœur 35). This is a core that I am also eager to uphold and defend, and I see that threat as coming not from Freud's method of interpreting dreams, but from his reduction of all poesis to the sublimation of an otherwise blind drive for pleasure—or survival in the later stages of his work. Jung, on the other hand, is swimming contentedly in the mythopoetic, and gives us a beautiful account of his own rich imaginings, but he didn't finish his analysis—his relationship with Freud ended in a rupture that he did not repair. The very good reason why analysts cannot practice psychoanalysis without successfully finishing an analysis of their own is because analysis is about repairing those kinds of ruptures.Pappas also wonders why it is not possible to use some other concept, perhaps "habit" or Ortega y Gassett's "La Vida." I appreciate and agree with Pappas that Freud's theory of the unconscious is laden with philosophical baggage and that we are better off thinking of "the unconscious" as a dimension of situations rather than of "the mind," if we take that mind as necessarily belonging to an individual. However, I still think that there are good reasons for retrieving the word and for doing what we can to free it from those blunders endemic to static metaphysics. Many critics of Freud, especially when they come from the American tradition, which is often concerned about the possible "binary opposition" as a precondition for psychoanalytic theory, forget that he also theorized a "pre-conscious," which we can also talk about as "subconscious," a word that sets off fewer alarm bells. But, whatever is "pre" or "sub" conscious can, in principle, be made conscious. And this is precisely what Freud was warning us against: some things enter into experience that nevertheless actively resist our conscious attention. This is why I use "the unconscious" instead of "those aspects and forces of lived experience of which we are less conscious," or "La Vida," as Pappas suggests. I think that we have to contend with the possibility that there is a portion of experience that exerts an influence but cannot be fully recovered. Some things might be lost. Some things might be beyond redress. I am not sure that "La Vida" helps us to understand the dynamics involved in trauma, genuine trauma, which interferes with memory and perception. Freud opens the possibility that there are wounds that are too deep to be healed.I have found the popular recognition of the existence of psychical trauma to be hopeful and productive, but it is not without its drawbacks. Recent discursive uses of "trauma" call to mind what Rancière referred to as "the absolute right of the victim" (198). In ethical terms, "trauma" means a wrong committed that establishes a right that eclipses all other rights. In the realm of aesthetic theory, it constitutes the unrepresentable horror that signals the end of art. In the worst case, "trauma" becomes any injustice that is committed or any severe unpleasantness that is suffered. But there are grievous injustices that deserve our attention that do not traumatize those who suffer the consequences, and there are traumas that have nothing to do with the breaking of a law or the perpetration of abuse. Trauma is often the result of an accident. An encounter with the precarious that demonstrates the extreme peril that I can indicate, glibly or philosophically or ironically, but cannot really express because it is actually the collapse of the possibility of meaning. My hunch is that the filtering of experience through technocracy or the reduction of value to the monetary are not themselves traumatic; they are responses to trauma. In most cases, we probably do not really know what traumatized us, but we can imagine, narrativize, or represent the wound all the same.Dr. Pappas also questions the nature of "the repression" that I am pointing to. This is a helpful line of inquiry, and the attempt to address it might help to assuage some of his concerns over the reification of the unconscious. In one sense, speaking logically, we might say that the unconscious is synonymous with the repressed, but that is to take the unconscious only in its descriptive and not its dynamic sense. The neglect of the body, of nature, of sexuality, of reciprocity, or of interconnectedness is not because we "repress" these things, but because we are afraid of accessing what is repressed. The repressed, Freud tells us, appears as a symptom, partially for the reason that it does not want to be discovered. The disappearance of quality from philosophy is symptomatic suffering, but what we are actually suffering from has, as yet, no name.I feel that I need to restate my gratitude for Jim Garrison's attention in his engagement with my project. I am blown away, emptied out, struck dumb by his response. To make my reply, I'll have to begin with what is interesting in the scholarly sense on my way to approaching what stuns me in the deep, human sense. Garrison echoes Ryan's reminder that "transaction" rather than "interaction" is the accepted language. For this reason, I am particularly grateful that Dr. Garrison has illuminated the connection between Rosenblatt and Dewey. This is delightful news to me, though I should not be at all surprised. "Compenetration" is a term I will gladly accept in the place of "transaction." But, above all, the effect that Jim's response has on me is to make my own work utterly alien and unbearably familiar. This is the same uncanniness that I now understand as the signal of an astute interpretation of my own unconscious.Paul Ricœur, whose work I mentioned earlier, wrote his book Freud and Philosophy without having any firsthand experience with psychoanalysis. Although I find his reflections extraordinarily valuable, I also find that, disconnected from concrete experience, they are also less credible. Considering this, I sometimes think of his critique of Freud as an attempt to mark out philosophical territory rather than a sincere effort to address a problem with broad implications for meaning. If this was the case, I did not want to repeat his mistake.Between defending my dissertation and seeking a contract to publish a monograph, I sought out my own analysis. It turns out that, in practice, the analyst cannot sustain a suspicious attitude toward the speech of the analysand. This would prevent the emergence of the rapport, which is the lived experience of the analytic relationship. But the analyst would not be an analyst if they did not bring something new to counter the analysand's understanding of themselves.The analyst hazards interpretations, many of which are rejected or revised by the analysand until a shared perspective is temporarily reached. But the successful interpretation of a dream, the "correct" reading, sucks the air right out of the room. It is uncanny, simultaneously an intimate thrill and an intrusion from without, because what is "me" and what is decidedly "not me" lose their separateness. What I have long rejected turns out to have been a constitutive force of my psychic life.Jim understood my own chapter better than I did. I am flattered, humbled, and deeply unsettled.It was uncanny. A read. It was the sort of thing that brings me up short and reminds me that I know so little about my own identity and my own position. My fifth chapter, upon which Garrison focused his comments, was actually the first to be written, and a version was presented at SAAP in Portland in 2016, revised for the dissertation I defended in 2018, published in the Pluralist in 2019, and slightly revised again for the book. Caché and Holiday's film "Strange Fruit" are encounters that demonstrated to me the fact that I am unaware of when, how, and why I have racist tendencies. I know more about American economic history, about western European imperialism, more about colonialism and genocide now than I ever have before, but the reminders that my present action is still influenced and informed by this past do not issue from "my" unconscious as I might prefer to think of it, as if it were a reservoir of insight that can be fathomed and divined in quiet, deep reflection. Evidence of my repressed racism issues from outside—from friends who tell me when I have failed to be sensitive, and from art products that retrieve symbols from dead and bloodless abstraction and return them to visceral, direct experience. Garrison reminds me that the unconscious, like the precarious, is an aspect of experience from which the philosopher is always attempting to flee. Wisdom involves accepting the reminders when they come.