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Notes
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, trans. Peter Winch (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 16e. Wittgenstein himself once tried his hand at architecture, helping to design a house for his sister Gretel, and liked to draw this analogy to his unorthodox approach to philosophy. See Ray Monk’s excellent biography Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (New York: The Free Press, 1990).
Emerson introduces the notion of “the gleam of light” in his seminal essay “Self-Reliance,” while Dewey, speaking directly of Emerson, discusses it in Construction and Criticism (1930), The Later Works, Volume 5, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984). Saito thus speaks of a “recessive, Emersonian dimension in Dewey’s pragmatism” (p. 3).
An excellent companion volume to The Gleam of Light in this regard is Victor Kestenbaum’s The Grace and Severity of the Ideal: John Dewey and the Transcendent (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2002).
It might have been helpful at this juncture if Saito had said more about the field structure of consciousness in Dewey and his related notion of “dramatic rehearsal” (including its bodily dimension) vis-à-vis the reconstruction of habit.
Dewey’s mostly amateurish poetry, while never intended for public consumption, testifies to a rather deep sense of the tragic. See The Poetry of John Dewey, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1977).
Saito gladly reports that Israel Scheffler, Hilary Putnam, and Cavell served in this capacity for her.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. William H. Gilman (New York: Penguin Books, 1965), p. 258.
Stanley Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 13–16.
Dewey, “I Believe,” Later Works, Volume 14, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988), pp. 91–92, emphasis added.
Dewey, Art as Experience, Later Works Volume 10, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987), pp. 207–208.
These issues surface in a slightly different context in my John Dewey, Robert Pirsig, and the Art of Living: Revisioning Aesthetic Education (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). See also Richard Shusterman’s Practicing Philosophy: Pragmatism and the Philosophical Life, (New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 104–110.
Cavell’s own perfectionist work often takes the form of self-exploratory “autobiographical exercises,” as he calls them. See, for example, A Pitch of Philosophy: Autobiographical Exercises (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994).
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Granger, D.A. Naoko Saito, 2005, The Gleam of Light: Moral Perfectionism and Education in Dewey and Emerson, Foreword by Stanley Cavell. Stud Philos Educ 27, 475–480 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-007-9077-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-007-9077-8