ating the so-called neo-conservatives. These radicals, however, are a very minor concern, at least when compared with the clear and present dangers presented by the American Communist Party in 1939. So the vast bulk of both men's energies might have gone into reminding their fellow-cit-izens of how bad things were in America before the Progressive Movement and the New Deal—before the beginnings of what we are now being asked to anathematize as "big government."

Hook and Dewey would have viewed the intellectuals who are urging us to take the United States back to where it was in 1900 with the same contempt with which they viewed the apologists for Stalin. Both men were intensely patriotic Americans—caught up in the romance of the American democratic experiment, intensely aware of themselves as the heirs of Jefferson and Emerson, Lincoln and Whitman, Eugene Debs and Jane Addams. Today's "neo-conservatives" would seem to them to be betraying everything that once made America an example to the world.

Pragmatism, considered as a set of philosophical doctrines about truth, knowledge, and value, is neutral between democratic and anti-democratic politics: no inferential links run from these doc-trines to a concern with human suffering, or to a hope for greater social and political tolerance. But inference is one thing and motivation another. Dewey would never have bothered to formulate his philosoph-ical doctrines had he not thought that their effect might be to break the grip of older ways of thinking upon his fellow-citizens and to encourage them to undertake ever-more radical social experiments. Hook would not have called Dewey "The Philosopher of American Democracy" (the title of the last chapter of this book, an allusion to Dewey's use of that phrase to describe Emerson) had he not been convinced that Dewey's pragmatism could be used as a tool to expand human freedom.

The affinity between pragmatism and political liberalism can be seen most clearly, perhaps, in the insistence, by those who now use liberal as a term of scorn, that we need to "return to tradi-tional values" and that we need "moral absolutes." Dewey and Hook would have

treated this as Aesopian language, as a disingenuous way of saying: don't think about how to diminish unnecessary human suffering, don't worry about how to change things so as to make people happier and freer, don't try to experiment. They would have seen the rhetoric of "tra-ditional values" as a disguise for selfish unconcern.

It may be that Dewey and Hook wit-nessed, as Alan Ryan suggests in the title of his recent book, "the high tide of American liberalism." But if this is so, then America has lost its soul. Dewey and Hook were important philosophers, but their greatest importance was as exem-plary Americans: Americans who, in the final words of this book, "still had hope for what America may yet be."

Patrick Romanell

Null-length critical study of the natu-alistic movement in the United

States of America, from John Fiske to John Dewey and since, remains to be writ-ten. Meanwhile, the current renewal of interest in naturalism as a general philos-ophy with metaphysical import represents a radical shift from the protean analytic movement that dominated our academic philosophic scene until recently and that should have been exactly called "glosso-analytic" (from glossa, meaning "lan-guage" in Greek), on the ground that it deliberately reduces its whole anti-meta-physical function of philosophy to the analysis of language, its uses and abuses.

Whether openly acknowledged or not, the guiding principle implicit at least in contemporary American naturalism is what Morris R. Cohen explicitly termed

Patrick Romanell is a visiting scholar in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Arizona. He is one of the leading exponents of philosophical natu-ralism.

Notes

1. Those who wish to consult more recent treat-ments of Dewey should look at three books that tes-tify to a recent rebirth of interest in his thought and influence: Robert Westbrook's magisterial intellec-tual biography, John Dewey and American Democ-racy (1991); Steven Rockefeller's John Dewey: Religious Faith and Democratic Humanism (1991); Alan Ryan's John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism (1995).

2. See Morton White's Toward Reunion in Philosophy (1956) for what is still the best account of the gradual reconciliation of Deweyan naturalism with logical empiricism, a reconciliation facilitated by Quine's criticism of the analytic-synthetic dis-tinction, and by Wittgenstein's scorn for his earlier conviction that logic is "something sublime."

3. Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy (in The Middle Works of John Dewey, vol. 12), p. 94.

4. Here I am adopting an interpretation of Dewey that would be contested by other commentators. I argue the issue in exchanges with James Gouinlock, Thelma Lavine, and others in Rorty and the Pragmatists, ed. Herman Saatkamp (1995). •

"Everything so far lends weight to our overall assessment of

American naturalism as a tenable philosophy, except for one

important matter, namely, its incomplete analysis of life's conflicts, the very stuff that

human life is made of, basically and ultimately:'

The Significance of American Philosophical Naturalism

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(after Schelling) "the principle of polar-ity." The naturalistic principle of polarity may be succinctly defined as the general method of analysis that reinterprets mutu-ally exclusive concepts in philosophical discussions as distinguishable yet insepa-rable poles (aspects or phases) of their particular subject matters that comple-ment each other. To illustrate, once the polarity principle is applied to the Grand Debate between British empiricism and Continental rationalism, it necessarily fol-lows that their respective methodological concepts of sense experience and reason are no longer to be treated partially as sep-arate cognitive criteria at interminable war with each other, but, instead, as comple-mentary phases of the same basic method of natural science, without which no reli-able knowledge of nature is possible.

In other words, the flagrant flaw in the empiricism-rationalism controversy from Descartes to the early Kant is that both parties involved were barking up the wrong tree by reducing the pivotal prob-lem of scientific methodology in early modern European philosophy to simplis-tic alternatives. On closer examination, the American naturalist's anti-reductionis-tic principle of polarity turns out to be an instrumental principle of complementar-ity, strictly speaking.

Turning from the methodological to the metaphysical and social significance of American philosophical naturalism, its leaders and followers are committed to a functionalistic and possibilistic theory of nature: Nature is as nature does and undoes. However, as should be expected, there are many variations on the general theme of nature among the American nat-uralists themselves, but this is not the occasion to go into such details. Suffice it to state briefly what nature in relation to human beings is and is not from a natural-istic standpoint.

Positively stated, nature may be con-ceived as the tantalizing power that, on the one hand, keeps prompting us, as striving animals by birth, to pursue all kinds of interests (harmonious or clashing), only to disappoint us sooner or later by interfer-ing somehow, ironically enough, with our perfectly natural goal to succeed in actu-ally fulfilling them as desirable objects of value whenever possible and justifiable. Negatively stated, nature (like the Petrine

God) is no respecter of persons and makes no odious comparisons between people, be they male or female, black or white, Jew or Gentile, rich or poor, high or low on the totem pole. Such offensive compar-isons are not the product of that unique part of nature called human nature, but rather the outgrowth of one's particular culture, which fortunately is subject to human control in that one can ultimately choose to behave otherwise, socially and morally.

The humanistic and social implications of a thoroughly naturalistic theory of nature should be quite obvious from what we have just said, but what is not so obvi-ous is their significant relevance to some of the current divisive problems in American life. To appreciate the relevance of those implications to such problems, we must return to the naturalist's comple-mentary principle of polarity and apply it, by way of illustration, to the important issue of educational multiculturalism at the present time. Applied thereto, the con-sidered response of the American philo-sophical naturalist to the dispute over the place of multiculturalism in education may be put concisely as follows: Cultural unity without multicultural diversity suf-fers from barrenness, the latter without the former suffers from narrowness. Signifi-cantly, our national motto a pluribus unum ("one out of many") expresses the same thing, politically. Thus, American culture today needs to satisfy the complementary demands of both unity and diversity in order to develop to its fullest extent.

Everything so far lends weight to our overall assessment of American natural-ism as a tenable philosophy, except for one important matter, namely, its incom-plete analysis of life's conflicts, the very stuff that human life is made of, basically and ultimately. Actually, the incomplete-ness in question is not solely an omission on the part of contemporary American naturalism as a whole, but is traceable to the entire history of Western philosophy.

As the present writer elaborated else-where on the reason for a formal tripartite typology of moral conflicts, human con-flicts are countless in content, but tradi-tional morality and standard works in ethics, as a rule, have oversimplified the very concept of moral conflict itself by wrongly assuming (explicitly or implic-

itly) that all conflict situations are ulti-mately reducible in form to the good-ver-sus-bad (or, right-versus-wrong) type con-stituting the customary Problem of Evil (in the broadest sense, including obstacles and difficulties of all sorts). Even when the ethical primacy in typology shifts to the better-versus-worse (or its equivalent) type of conflict constituting the harder comparative Problem of Better, as evident in the melioristic systems of ethics (e.g., Aristotle's "golden mean" theory of the virtues, British utilitarianism, American pragmatism), the conflicts themselves are logically reducible in polar form to the good-versus-bad type. For, in a conflict situation between better and worse involv-ing choosing between a greater and a lesser good, that is between goods of unequal value, such as John Stuart Mill's comparison "better to be a Socrates dis-satisfied than a fool satisfied," the former becomes the good thing to be, while the latter the bad one. In any event, what is missing expressly in traditional and melioristic systems of ethics is a third and final type of conflict: good-versus-good (that is, one good versus another good of equal value) constituting the tragic Problem of Good. It is precisely the unfor-tunate omission of this irreducible type of conflict and problem, the analysis of which is almost always absent in ethical discussions, that is responsible for the incompleteness already alluded to in American naturalistic philosophy.

From Aristotle on, there has been much confusion over the meaning of tragedy in the life of drama and, by extension, in the drama of life. Apart from the ever-popular confusion of tragedy with natural disas-ters and fatal accidents, authors on tragedy have virtually confused the tragic with the pathetic, the Sophoclean Antigones with the Shakespearean Othellos, respectively. As a consequence, tragedy is confused with the problem of evil in aesthetics and, by extension, gets identified with the problem of evil in metaphysics.

An influential source of the identifica-tion of tragedy with the metaphysical problem of evil is found in a most telling paragraph from John Dewey's Experience and Nature (1925, p. 45) on the precari-ousness of existence. Tacitly assuming there that the traditional identification of

Winter 1995/96 43

tragedy with the problem of evil in aes-thetics holds for its more general counter-part in metaphysics, Dewey concludes: "The problem of evil is a well-recognized problem, while we rarely or never hear of a problem of good." Now, despite the fact that Dewey himself was, of practically all the American naturalists, the most keenly aware of the complexity of life, his own focus on the metaphysical problem of evil had the regrettable effect of depriving him of seeing that the proper domain of tragedy is not the problem of evil in meta-physics, but the intrinsically precarious and not so rare problem of good in ethics.

The problem of evil in ethics mani-fests itself in two opposite conflict situa-tions in life. Whereas a pathetic situation is one where evil overpowers good, an epic situation is one where good over-comes evil. By contrast, a tragic situation (to restate at greater length) is a conflict-of-value situation where the type of con-flict, being one between (at least) two objects of value (goods, rights, duties, ideals, claims, interests) that are equally valuable but mutually exclusive, is unavoidable, irreconcilable, and hence irresolvable, because the choice of one of the incompatible objects of value at issue is made at the expense of the other. In a word, the logic of tragedy inexorably spells the inevitability of sacrifice and failure but, even so, a tragic failure is entirely different in worth and conse-quence from an ordinary one in daily life, let alone from a pathetic one.

To get a better grasp of what makes a situation really tragic, let us consider as a test case the plight of a conscientious physician who is obliged by circum-stances beyond his or her control to become a conscientious liar. According to Kant, telling a lie is always uncondition-ally wrong, and a conscientious liar would be a contradiction in terms for him. Nevertheless, Kant's absolute prohibition of lying takes into account only one alter-native of the tragic predicament of the physician who, in treating an apprehen-sive patient suffering (say) from a termi-nal illness, is unavoidably torn between two mutually exclusive but equally justifi-able choices: to follow either the Kantian injunction against lying to any person or the Hippocratic one against doing harm to any patient. When a physician in such a

trying antinomic situation opts for the Hippocratic alternative by lying to his or her patient re diagnosis, he or she does so for moral reasons dictated by the medical profession. Needless to add, there is still a huge moral difference, of course, between a conscientious liar and an unconscien-tious one. Incidentally, Mill's utilitarian recourse to a "common umpire" to reach a compromise, when there are conflicting obligations at stake, is of political and legal significance, not strictly moral.

With the notable exception of Miguel de Unamuno, the perceptive Spanish pre-existentialist who, however, went over-board by reducing the multidimensional-ity of life to the tragic sense of life, a plausible explanation for the undue neglect of its tragic side in Western philo-sophical thought might be that people as a whole hate to admit the uncomfortable possibility of there being any problems in life incapable of solution. At any rate, if we may then take an educated guess as to why American philosophy in general and American naturalism in particular have, on the whole, paid little serious attention to the tragic dimension of life and to the Problem of Good that goes with it, per-haps the reason lies in the historical fact that, except for the more and more ques-tionable Vietnam War, Americans as a people have been living in an epic world of continual successes for more than three centuries: from the supposed landing of the Pilgrims on Plymouth Rock in 1620 to the actual landing of our astronauts on the moon in 1969.

The epic spirit of the American people is clearly evident from their overall approach to problems of evil as obstacles to overcome successfully. Their spirit is embodied perfectly not only in the char-acteristically epic slogan "We Shall Overcome" of the Black Revolution a generation ago, but also in the accompa-nying epic vision of the Great Society reflected in President Lyndon B. Johnson's domestic policy involving the Four Wars: war on poverty (economic evil); war on crime (social and moral evil); war on ignorance (educational evil); war on disease (medical evil). As is well known, his foreign policy during the Vietnam crisis did not include a fifth war: war on war (military evil), for which reason, in retrospect, he suffered

politically. All in all, the epic approach to life dominant in this country, thriving in most of the past on one success story after another, leaves no room for the ago-nizing type of suffering and failure that results in the Problem of Good and con-stitutes the complexity and tragedy of human life.

The ancient Greek materialists used to speculate on the collision of the atoms, but it does not take any speculation to realize that the tragic collision of interests is a fact of life in the dramatic episodes of persons and peoples throughout a consid-erable part of human history.

To sum up, historically viewed, philo-sophical naturalism from its pre-

Socratic to its American varieties in the twentieth century belongs to the oldest tradition in Western philosophy. Inasmuch as this venerable tradition would have much more relevance and strength if it were to develop an adequate analysis of the tragic side of life, the most significant contribution that a thorough-going critical naturalism can make, at present, may well consist precisely in teaching the success-oriented people of America in particular that the disconcert-ing clash of life's equally good things brings unavoidable failure in its train from time to time, as a consequence of which there is no real solution to the tragic choices at stake, let alone a quick or happy one. To be sure, one can appeal to Aristotle's medico-naturalistic concept of catharsis as an immediate emotional outlet for the spectators of a tragic story. And yet, the ultimate lesson to be learned from such a story is that the tragic fate of its protagonists in the artistic world could eventually be our own fate in the real world. In the final analysis, paradoxi-cally, the touted consolation of tragedy is truly no consolation.

In conclusion, since problems of evil and problems of better are resolvable in theory at least, it is indeed fortunate that the tragic problems of good are the only type in human existence that have no solu-tion in principle. The sooner American philosophical naturalism recognizes them candidly as insoluble by nature, the sooner it can address them appropriately for the benefit of humanity's endless pur- suit of wisdom. •

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