John Dewey and Confucian Thought , livre ebook

John Dewey and Confucian Thought
SUNY series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture

Roger T. Ames, editor
John Dewey and Confucian Thought
Experiments in Intra-cultural Philosophy
Volume Two
Jim Behuniak
Front cover: Roofline image taken by John Dewey in China.
Back cover: Image of John Dewey (Peking, July 5, 1921), courtesy of the Morris Library, Special Collections Research Center, Southern Illinois University Carbondale.
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2019 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Behuniak, James, author.
Title: John Dewey and Confucian thought / Jim Behuniak.
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, [2019] | Series: Experiments in intra-cultural philosophy ; Volume two | Series: SUNY series in Chinese philosophy and culture. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018033272 | ISBN 9781438474472 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438474465 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438474489 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Dewey, John, 1859–1952—Knowledge—Philosophy, Confucian. | Dewey, John, 1859–1952—Travel—China. | Philosophy, Confucian. | Philosophy, Chinese. | Philosophy, Comparative. | East and West.
Classification: LCC B945.D44 B39 2019 | DDC 191—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018033272
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Anton
Contents
List of Illustrations
Interlude
Dewey’s Chinese Dinners
Part I
1. John Dewey and Intra-cultural Naturalism
Dissolving the Blank Slate
Humanism and Intra-cultural Philosophy
Continuity and Common Sense
Culture and the “Return Wave”
Cultural Relations and Reconstruction
2. Education and Tradition
Learning ( xue 學 ) and Personhood
Dewey Arrives in China
Education and Its Reach
Learning and Thinking
The Dao 道 of Tradition
3. Custom and Reconstruction
Breakthroughs in China
Li 禮 and Custom
Toward a “Social Philosophy,” Part One
Custom and Reflection
Ren 仁 and Human Association
4. Pluralism and Democracy
Democracy vs. The Melting Pot
Guojia 國家 and the “Great Community”
Three Complimentary Studies
Toward a “Social Philosophy,” Part Two
Dewey Leaves China
Part II
5. Roles and Exemplars
The Analects as Virtue Ethics
Exemplarism and the Denotative Method
Role Ethics and Human Nature
Hitting the Mark ( zhong 中 )
Morality is Social
6. Humans and Nature
Naturalizing Heaven
Spiritualizing Nature
Understanding Human Nature
The Goodness ( shan 善 ) of Human Nature
Nature and Normality
7. Harmony and Growth
Family and Human Nature
The Norm of Harmony ( he 和 )
The Meaning of Growth
Family Experience and Non-Dualism
Culture and Adaptation
8. Integration and Religiousness
Integration ( cheng 誠 ) and Adjustment
Recovering the Forfeiture
Ideals and the Actual
Communion and the Human Spirit
Returning to China
Notes
Works Cited
Index
Illustrations Figure 0.1 Business card of the original “Shanghai Café,” date unknown. Figure 1.1 John Dewey and family arrive in Honolulu on January 17, 1951. Figure 2.1 John Dewey’s photograph of Confucius’ tomb in Qufu, Shandong, which he visited on July 13, 1921. The inscription on the stele reads “The Sage of Great Cultural Accomplishment.” Figure 2.2 Dewey in Beijing with his friend, Grace Wu, who ran a small school for girls from underprivileged families and helped to raise money to support them. According to Lucy Dewey, “She is certainly one of the saints of the earth.” Figure 3.1 Chinese caption reads (Right to Left), “Jiangsu Education Department Welcomes Dr. and Mrs. Dewey from the United States, Photo Taken May 10, 1920.” Figure 5.1 John Dewey , by Edwin B. Child, 1929. This painting, featuring Dewey with a statue of a Chinese sage, hangs in the Dewey Memorial Lounge on the campus of the University of Vermont. Figure 7.1 One of several photographs in John Dewey’s collection depicting the young people he encountered while travelling in China. Figure 8.1 Tao Xingzhi wearing the traditional Chinese clothing that he had come to prefer, date unknown. Figure 8.2 John Dewey in 1946 sitting under a Chinese scroll in his Manhattan apartment. This was the year that Dewey hoped to make his return trip to China.
Interlude
Dewey is still in China—learning, I hope, from the Chinese.
—Lewis Mumford to Patrick Geddes, May 5, 1921
Dewey’s Chinese Dinners
Tucked under the elevated local tracks at Broadway and 125th Street in Manhattan, Shanghai Café opened its doors in 1949. It was the first non-Cantonese Chinese restaurant to open in New York and remains widely remembered as one of the best Chinese restaurants that the city has ever seen. 1 Shanghai Café would be the first of many eateries to open near Columbia University by chefs who fled China in the years immediately following the Communist revolution. 2 By that time, the Cantonese were so well established in Chinatown that it was difficult for immigrants from other Chinese regions to gain a foothold in the district. 3 Thus, in the last few years of Dewey’s life, the area around Columbia became a hub for what were then known as “Mandarin” restaurants—basically any non -Cantonese Chinese cuisine.
Gradually, the Shanghai Café on Broadway and 125th came to be known as the “Old Shanghai Café” to distinguish it from its eponymous competitors. Dewey and his family dined there every Sunday night and Sing-nan Fen often joined them. Lawrence Cremin, one of Fen’s classmates at Teacher’s College, came to join these dinners by accident. As he explains:
Fen asked me quite unexpectedly one evening whether I would be willing to deliver a package for him to the Dewey apartment on my way home, and I said of course I would … I went on up and rang the bell and Mrs. Dewey came to the door and graciously accepted the package and asked whether I would like to meet Professor Dewey. I said it would be a privilege and was promptly ushered into the study, where Dewey was pecking away at an ancient typewriter, using two fingers. He looked up, smiled, greeted me warmly, said he was working on an article dealing with the improvement in his concept of interaction that the term “transaction” made possible, and then asked quite bluntly, “What do you think, Mr. Cremin?” It was one of those occasions when the lips move but the words have trouble coming out. The words did come, and the point is [that] we had a lively conversation for about a half-hour, in which at the age of twenty-three I was treated as an absolute equal … I shall never forget it.
From then on, Cremin was on the “Invite” list for Dewey’s Chinese dinners. “I must tell you,” writes Cremin, “that whatever the emphasis on the social and communal in Dewey’s writings, it was rampant individualism in that Chinese restaurant.” Eating was the main event, and Dewey did not defer to his underlings. “I may be the only person living who learned to use chopsticks fighting over fried rice with John Dewey,” reckons Cremin. 4
Dewey became adept at using chopsticks during his Asia trip, while also solidifying his affection for Chinese food. Prior to leaving San Francisco for Asia, he and Alice put in the requisite preparations. “Last Friday we went to Chinatown again for dinner so that Papa and Mama could get used to using chopsticks,” Sabino Dewey relates to Lucy. They are “doing fine,” he reports— “the food they don’t have to get used to it, as they are quite crazy about it.” 5 Before his Chinese audiences, Dewey would display his usual modesty: “I have to pay so much attention to the way I hold my chopsticks that sometimes I hardly know what I am eating.” 6 But he had mastered the technique well enough. “We have learned to eat with chopsticks very well,” Alice wrote from Japan, “and it is not a bad way.” 7

Figure 0.1. Business card of the original “Shanghai Café,” date unknown. Image source: https://www.chowhound.com/post/remember-shanghai-cafe-126th-broadway-196905#photo=1060802 .
Dewey’s first letter from China is all about food. “I will tell you something of what we had to eat,” he writes to his children. “On the table were little pieces of sliced ham, the famous preserved eggs which taste like hard boiled eggs and look like dark colored jelly, and little dishes of sweet shrimps, etc.” So the description begins. “We had chicken and duck and pigeon and veal and pigeon eggs in soup and fish and little oysters … nice little vegetables and bamboo sprouts mixed in with the others, and we had shrimps cooked and sharks fin and bird’s nest.” So it rolls to its conclusion: “For dessert we had little cakes made of bean paste filled with almond paste and other sweets.” 8
One month later, there would be the following to report: “I am going right on getting fat on delicious Chinese food.” 9 When Dewey travelled ahead to Nanjing in the spring of 1920, his daughter Lucy asked him not to “eat up all the food in Nanjing before we get there.