At the end of Gregory Pappas’s John Dewey’s Ethics: Democracy as Experience, Pappas is drawing a distinction Dewey often made between his experience-centered moral philosophy and non-empirical moral philosophies. These are just too good not to list verbatim, and I have to confess as I am researching the book on Levinas and Scheler, these 9 points have been circulating in my mind in very different ways (The problem is how one might do political theology with Kingian beloved community with a finite God of American proessive naturalism, or if the changes in the Divine somehow effect what is given in the phenomenological ethics of Levinas and related to Pappas’s efforts: If democracy is the ideal of moral community and beloved community is, according to me, the ideal our democratic community should take, then what is the relationship between how Dewey’s democratic ideal relates to the personalist-laden beloved community?). Pappas just states these claims a lot more clearly than even Dewey himself (which is also why this book is so good on Dewey’s ethics). Appearing at the end of the book in Chapter 9 from pages-156-161, the first point is:
- “Many of the debates among ethical theories center on whether it is certain acts, traits of character, rules, goals, motives, feelings, or obligations that provide the basis for distinguishing morality from other aspects of life. For Dewey, all of these elements are integral to moral experience, since they are found in the context of a situation. The basis for distinguishing morality from other dimensions or modes of experience is the subject matter, problems, and pervasive quality of situations. There is no criterion that is antecedent to the sheer having of these experiences. Hence, in principle, anything in experience can be experienced as having moral significance and can also be continuous with other ways of immediately experiencing the world (aesthetically, politically, religiously). The locus of moral experience is a present situation, thought of as a qualitative whole that is susceptible to dramatic structure, that is, one with patterns, rhythms, and phases. Situations are the ultimate context of our problems, inquiries, ideals and resources” (157-158).
It’s here that the Deweyian naturalism and ontological continuity is a problem for phenomenology. It’s not a problem for the immanent processive God. Instead, Levinas’s infinite demand of the Other constitutes the pre-cognitive and pre-theoretical space of the situation prior to and independently of any situation. For this reason, my project is that persons are of infinite value, and it’s that one piece of Levinas and Scheler that ties into and binds this insight into a religious register that Dewey seeks to naturalize here. In this way, there is at least one element of phenomenological givenness that we must treat as logically and transcendentally prior to a philosophy of that qualitative whole. Thus, the infinite value of persons streams forth from them and into the entire whole of what persons can experience, but I disagree that the situation is the ultimate context; it is the recognition of persons’ and their ultimate value that conditions the rhythms and patterns of the immediate whole. The natural side of ethics is the sociality and relations in which its possibility streams forth.
Given that Levinas and Scheler, are nonnaturalists about the phenomenologically given, the Deweyian may object that I’ve simply exaggerated an element of qualitive immediacy and its content to constrain how all other situations should be regarded. The rejoinder to the Deweyian lies in categorizing why Levinas’s insight into the face-to-face encounter works the way he describes. A personalist may say that since persons experience the world as mediated through what they are that life and the immediate whole are already suffused with value, but in agreement with the Deweyian, neither the personalist nor the Levinasian need be a straightforward Quinean ontological naturalist. Instead, we may be Jamesian processive naturalists, which is in line with how I also read Dewey.
The phenomenological facts that are immediately known or regarded as self-evident are the irreducible content of experience, and we need neither reduce phenomenological facts to Quinean naturalist facts, nor do we need to be transcendental phenomenologists and wish naturalism away tout court as some Husserlians are apt to do. Values pop up as part of the pre-theoretic and pre-cognitive life of what it means to be a person “personning”, and it’s here that Scheler helps. Scheler’s phenomenological description can be regarded as a description that elucidates both subjective and intersubjective life as a natural part of the processes of human cognition from within the boundaries of experience and the relationality that experience entails. For it is not the parts of a relation that need explained as either transcendental phenomenological fact of a nonnatural variety anymore than a naturalistic reductionism of a physical fact. What matters most are the qualitative immediacy and content of the relation itself and the two double-barreled terms of the physical-pole of that relation, the mental-pole of that relation, the interpretive act that originates in that relation giving rise to a new relation, and so on.
The fact that the value of persons is inexhaustible is part of how persons exists as embodied subjects that are in constant relation with the world around them. In this way, values are a feature of the natural universe produced by personal existence in embodied subjectivity that first feels the push and pull of the cosmos, society, and situations. Neither the cosmos, society, or situation are completely external and outside that relation anymore than the facts of what a person is feeling and believing can be completely separated from the external to be only internal. Both the subjective life and the life of objects in the world are a product of their constant conjoining. If we permit this infinite value of persons to be continuous with the world as the world itself is a product of a God continually engendering its existence in an Emerson-like immanence, then the God-world relationship is a larger person that, like us, produces values that call out to us, even if we lose sight of the God-World/Divine-World ground relationship. We can be called to them since persons, values, and the divine are ontologically continuous together. In this way, religions as wisdom traditions offer some values that seem to return to us again and again for that in those relations we have with the universe, God, humankind, and natural living animals as non-human persons.
The metaphors of fluidity, water, and mixtures is more appropriate than the traditional God of Augustine and Neoplatonism who is outside space and time, ontologically divided and separated out from that which is made. That’s why the metaphor of artisan is employed to imply the separated, implying an asymmetric relation of Creator higher than created that is reinforced by King on high ruling over that which is not as high. Already one can see the ontological implication of hierarchy, the really-real and unchanging are part of the power stand over and against everything in the sensible world. Paternal metaphors for God imply this asymmetry, not so much of ontological separation, but the power that reinforces that separation. A reality versus appearance distinction is introduced in Greek thought and the Hellenization of Christian thought employs that Platonic-like dualism that sharply divides religion from the truths of science rather than seeking out an empirically-friendly understanding of reality that avoids introducing the damaging effects these binary oppositions introduce into our thinking and acting.
The Horizon and The Fringe 