There is no state of leisure. Every inheritance must be earned anew . . . Imbeciles who parrot the teachings of science without imagination are trying to take what they have not earned, and the result is discouraging.
Kenneth BurkeFootnote 1
On 24 December 1979, the literary critic Kenneth Burke sat down to write a particularly difficult letter. His friend, the philosopher Richard McKeon, had lost his son to pancreatic cancer. “Condolences are so inadequate,” Burke wrote. “I can but say, lamely, how deeply I feel for you.” Unsure what to say next, he chose to write about work: publishing-house issues and the French philosopher Jacques Derrida. But whatever comfort this brought did not last long as Burke jumped without transition into an odd reminiscence. “My friendliest greetings to youenz,” he addressed the grief-stricken McKeon in a slang Burke often used in correspondence, “and my special solemn greetings to thee, dear frenn from quite some time back.” With this, Burke recounted a comical tale from when he and McKeon were young and living in New York. The two had been “carousing togidda” with the novelist Malcolm Cowley, enjoying the night save for one problem: Burke kept falling asleep. This left McKeon and Cowley to drag Burke around. Cowley's wife chastised him for his behavior. “You talk about being an insomniac,” she scolded Burke, “What kind of insomniac is this?” “I forget whether I told her,” he confessed, “but I did tell myself later when looking back: I fell asleep because, when precisely you two were pals in lugging me about, something somehow seemed resolved.” After his recollections, Burke signed the letter promptly and simply with “Ah, heck.”Footnote 2
Those familiar with US intellectual history will likely be more surprised by the fact that Burke was writing to McKeon rather than by what he wrote. Bizarre as his letter is, Burke and McKeon made an even odder couple of friends. Burke, who received his education in the cafés and lofts of Greenwich Village after dropping out of Columbia in his first year there, embodied the image of the bohemian intellectual. When he was not working odd jobs to make ends meet, Burke was writing fiction and criticism at his primitive farm in rural New Jersey. McKeon, on the other hand, took a different path. After earning his Ph.D. at Columbia in the 1920s, he spent much of his career from the mid-1930s until his death in 1984 at the University of Chicago, along with stints as president of the International Institute for Philosophy and as a United States delegate to UNESCO. McKeon was such a paragon of academic professionalism that he was subjected to caricature as the evil “Chairman of the Committee” in Robert Pirsig's 1974 novel Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Footnote 3
Beyond the juxtaposition of their backgrounds, the paucity of literature on Burke and McKeon serves only to bury their exchanges further. Intellectual historians have largely overlooked McKeon's career, save for passing references, and paid insufficient attention to the philosophic nature of Burke's writings. McKeon's best-known publication was the Modern Library Classics anthology The Basic Works of Aristotle (1941). This, along with his associations with the neo-Thomist president of the University of Chicago, Robert Maynard Hutchins, has earned McKeon the erroneous title of “Aristotelian.” For his part, scholars have tended to treat Burke's work as a conversation more about literary modernism than about broader philosophic concerns.Footnote 4 The result is that Burke's philosophy looks idiosyncratic, if not illegible. In short, Burke and McKeon appear as intellectual curiosities in historians’ accounts, if they appear at all.Footnote 5
Despite their apparent differences and the difficulties of characterizing their thought, Burke and McKeon shared a common end, one that both forged their friendship and linked them to American philosophy's best-known tradition: pragmatism. Each had come to the philosophy early in their intellectual developments. Like many other adherents, pragmatism's embrace of the perspectival, social nature of thought was alluring to Burke and McKeon, particularly since both took a keen interest in the arts. Seeking to explain the role of art in modern society, Burke and McKeon explored the various debates that surrounded modernist aesthetics in the 1920s. Dissatisfied with what both saw as the asocial, individualistic qualities of modernist thought, they came to believe in the importance of philosophic pluralism. The idea that while truth might be singular, its expression varied, pluralism focuses the philosopher's attention on listening to rather than refuting different intellectual perspectives. Among the traditions prevalent during the time, Burke and McKeon thought that pragmatism best expressed this belief in pluralism.
Yet Burke and McKeon often read more like critics than adherents of pragmatism. At the core of this appearance was their belief that pragmatism had failed to live up to its pluralistic potential. This was due to a series of faulty metaphors that contemporary pragmatists relied upon. During the middle decades of the twentieth century, American philosophers alleged a conceptual fidelity between democracy and science.Footnote 6 Pragmatists spearheaded this connection. It had been John Dewey, after all, who declared in 1909 “that the future of our civilization depends upon the widening spread and deepening hold of the scientific habit of mind.”Footnote 7 This belief echoed through the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. Although vague on the exact meaning of “science,” thinkers such as Sidney Hook, Morris Cohen, and Dewey himself claimed that the methods practiced by scientists were aligned with key democratic processes. As part of this discourse, philosophers drew analogies between the experimental empiricism of science and the public debates of democracy, claiming either that science protected democracy by keeping important civic values alive, that science was protected by democracy through a robust doctrine of rights, or some combination of the two. It was the philosopher's job to preserve this link.Footnote 8
Burke and McKeon challenged this connection between science and democracy, emphasizing pragmatism's aesthetic rather than its scientific insights. Beyond his discussions of science and democracy, Dewey had also applied his pragmatic philosophy to aesthetic issues in Art as Experience (1934), claiming that “works of art are the only media of complete and unhindered communication between man and man that can occur in a world full of gulfs and walls that limit community of experience.” Burke and McKeon agreed. For them, using science as a metaphor to capture the nature of democratic dialogue and debate mistook the nature of communication. Language was not an object that could be controlled like a physics experiment or studied passively in a petri dish under the microscope. Rather, terminologies—even scientific ones—contained within them attitudes that shaped interlocutors. “Words are not puppets,” Burke stated bluntly. “They also command.”Footnote 9 As such, words had agency, meaning that communication created worlds as well as described them. Language thus functioned more like art than like science for Burke and McKeon: it moved people rather than convinced them of matters. Pragmatism, the two believed, was well suited to understand this process. All it needed was a reformulation of its organizing metaphors, trading the language of science for that of art. As a consequence of this exchange, Burke and McKeon's thought was both deeply rooted in the tradition of American pragmatism and, ultimately, unrecognizable to it.
MODERNISM'S DISCONTENTS: ART AND PRAGMATISM IN BURKE AND MCKEON'S EARLY THOUGHT
Burke and McKeon's engagement with pragmatism began when they were both living in New York City during the 1920s and early 1930s. Each spent those decades stumbling around philosophically. Eventually, they bumped into pragmatism, as well as each other. But unlike other pragmatists before them such as Charles Sanders Pierce, William James, and John Dewey, Burke and McKeon came to the philosophy along a route traced largely through the arts rather than the sciences. This path through the arts, particularly aesthetics and literature, led them to embrace a unique form of pragmatism, one with a strong aesthetic bent.
Burke especially seemed prone to stumbling as he navigated his way to pragmatism. His early life, with its kaleidoscopic pattern of intellectual influences and bohemian spirit of rebellion, set the tenor of Burke's later work. He attended Ohio State University for one semester and then transferred to Columbia University in 1916 in order to escape what his roommate at the time, James Light, called the “clean, healthy liberal Protestant Philistinism” of the Midwest.Footnote 10 Consistent with his record at his previous institution, Burke dropped out of Columbia after only one semester, telling his mother that it was “time now for [him] to quit college and begin studying.” The family's money—and presumably Burke's time—would be better spent on an apartment for him in Greenwich Village so he could “write like a demon.”Footnote 11
His departure from Columbia's lecture halls, however, did not leave Burke alone in this endeavor. He later wrote in his sweeping metahistorical meditation, Attitudes toward History (1937) that “a man is necessarily talking in error unless his words can claim membership in a collective body of thought.”Footnote 12 While he came to speak in the idiosyncratic idiom of a seemingly self-made philosophic gadfly, Burke was true to his words. His education at the hands of the Village's blend of modernism was, as the Burke scholar Jack Selzer states, “truly Burkean in its individuality, truly Burkean in its ultimate acknowledgment of the social and situated.”Footnote 13 In the Village, Burke viewed the works on display at Alfred Stieglitz's 291 art gallery, debated politics with editors at The Masses, and discussed literature with the likes of William Carlos Williams, all the while working a variety of jobs that included an assistant editorship of The Dial. Like many others in the Village, Burke was indeed studying without the aid (or obstruction) of a collegiate atmosphere.Footnote 14
Unfortunately, this education produced discontents of its own. Although he was a major contributor to the modernist experimentation proliferating in Greenwich Village, Burke found its emphasis on the “autonomous” artist dissatisfying.Footnote 15 For Burke, the self was a socially constituted being, crafted through daily experiences and, not least, by communication with others.Footnote 16 His novel, Towards a Better Life (1932), placed these discontents on full display as Burke depicted a modernist artist slowly going insane as he found himself progressively more alienated from his peers, his past, and, ultimately, his present.Footnote 17
Seeking an alternative to modernism throughout the early 1920s, Burke dabbled with the conservative literary movement, the New Humanism. Centered around the works of literary critics Irving Babbitt at Harvard and Paul Elmer More at Princeton, the New Humanism asserted a dualistic notion of human nature borrowed from ancient Greek philosophy and Eastern religions, a belief in a culturally superior elite that could check the excesses of mass society, and a defense of tradition against its uprooting in the hands of modernists. At the movement's core, writes historian J. David Hoeveler Jr, “was the imperative need to recover permanent and universal values” for an age that had explicitly shunned both of these.Footnote 18
Turning to the New Humanism provided Burke with an outlet to explore alternatives to his dissatisfactions with modernism. In a 1922 review of More's The Religion of Plato, for instance, Burke sympathized with the author's attempt at “combating that specious logic whereby the gods can be looked upon as either non-existent or asleep, and which results in the characteristically Sophistic outlook on man as the measure of all things.”Footnote 19 But this appreciation was awkward at best and quickly faded. Although he was “yearning for grounded assumptions and fixed standards” at the time, Burke could not ignore the flux of historical and artistic change captured by modernistic experimentation.Footnote 20 On top of this, while the modernist conception of the self ignored social attributes, so, too, did Babbitt and More. By 1931, Burke advocated for forms of art that would capture the flux of subjectivity, supporting an aesthetic “return to inconclusiveness.”Footnote 21 The New Humanists’ vision of beauty, morality, and selfhood were simply too outdated for Burke's bohemian sensibilities.Footnote 22
As he searched for an alternative to literary modernism—and now to the New Humanism too—Burke found pragmatism. Writing to the editors of the Windsor Quarterly in 1934, Burke claimed to have “great sympathies with our indigenous philosophies of pragmatism.”Footnote 23 The proof for this was becoming apparent in his publications. Burke's major writings of the 1930s paid homage to important pragmatists, borrowing and developing key ideas from them. He cited Dewey's notion of “occupational psychosis”—the idea that training for one task usually makes a person ill-equipped to understand other jobs—approvingly in Permanence and Change (1935), drawing from the concept the insight that a “way of seeing is also a way of not seeing.”Footnote 24 Burke's next work, Attitudes toward History, built on this praise, beginning with an exegesis of William James that noted approvingly the psychologist-cum-philosopher's “awareness of the emotional overtones associated with his ideas.”Footnote 25
Pragmatism was the solution to Burke's modernist dilemma. For both Dewey and James, subjectivity was the product of social processes rather than based on some essential element of the self. Combined with its embrace of historical flux, pragmatism seemed to preserve the modernist emphasis on artistic experimentation while rejecting its glorification of the artist, which proved to be a good fit for Burke. So close was Burke's thought growing to key elements of pragmatism that when McKeon later suggested he read the works of George Herbert Mead, Burke exclaimed that he “was disgusted to find out that [Mead] had already, in his own way, ridden considerably my slogan about the ‘unending conversation,’” a key phrase that Burke used to explore the contingent and creative processes of communication.Footnote 26
Throughout this period of searching and confusion, Burke turned often to McKeon in order to gain his intellectual bearings. Burke and McKeon had remained friends since they met at Columbia during Burke's short-lived days as a student there. After Burke left the university, he took to consulting McKeon on philosophical issues. Writing to his fellow writer Matthew Josephson in 1921, Burke expressed his indebtedness to McKeon. “Strangely enough,” Burke reflected, “the one bright spot in my intellectual life is McKeon, whom I see once every couple of weeks.” McKeon, Burke continued, is “a consolation to me because he knows things.”Footnote 27
Burke's discontents with modernism were manifest in his relationship with McKeon. Unlike the protagonist of Towards a Better Life, McKeon appreciated the historical and socially embedded nature of thought. His dissertation, published in 1928 as The Philosophy of Spinoza, opened with an acknowledgment of these interpretative qualities. “The history of thought encounters dangers peculiar to it among historical disciplines,” noted McKeon; “one need not be a philosopher to recognize that the retelling of a man's philosophy must express still another philosophy.”Footnote 28 Sentiments such as these earned Burke's admiration. “Christ!” he complained to Josephson, “with all the wishy-wash of modern mouthing, it is positively invigorating to discuss what this man maintains and that man rebuts, wherein so-and-so is differentiated from so-and-so, how one thing can be divided and other things grouped.”Footnote 29 With this, the basic mold for Burke and McKeon's friendship was cast.
But McKeon, too, was undergoing a shift. His intellectual development through the 1920s and into the 1930s ran a parallel course to Burke's. While the static universalism of the New Humanism did not register among McKeon's interests, his early graduate days were marked by a disposition similar to his friend's flirtation with Babbitt's and More's work. McKeon attended Columbia for engineering before serving briefly in the Navy during World War I. Upon returning to his studies in 1919, McKeon discovered that his interests “had shifted to humanistic studies” and he went on to complete a master of arts degree in 1920.Footnote 30 His thesis examined Leo Tolstoy's, Benedetto Croce's, and George Santayana's theories of art and, as McKeon later reflected, was a “personal expression” of his temperament at the time. The younger McKeon had desired to craft a complete, certain, and systematic approach to philosophic problems, one that required “only a minimum of knowledge of the particular subject matter to which it was to be accommodated.”Footnote 31 Sadly, the mature McKeon quipped, he had “never since been able to achieve comparable scope of system or convenience of method, but experience with later generations of students [kept him] in contact with the later forms of that philosophy.”Footnote 32
While McKeon's thesis lacked the pluralism of his own mature philosophy, it did contain one theme that recurred across his intellectual development. Throughout the work, McKeon chastised philosophers such as Tolstoy, Croce, and Santayana for making the subjective aspects of life—such as emotions, tastes, and biases—“the sneering equivalent of the trivial.” These thinkers had failed “to learn the lesson of Spinoza: Things are interesting because we care about them, and important because we need them.”Footnote 33 Art was such a thing, being nothing less than “the realization of man and the end of life.”Footnote 34 Just as philosophers before them, McKeon's contemporaries failed to appreciate this point. A pessimistic atmosphere had descended on artists and intellectuals alike during the interwar years. Hopeful visions of progress had been shattered by World War I, leaving only a hangover from the “waning universal fervor that follows great ages.”Footnote 35 Diffuse and amorphous as this waning fervor was, it could be heard clearly in one plea. “A conscious cry of ‘Art for Art's Sake’ sounds the key note of an essentially inartistic age,” lamented McKeon of his time—the “inevitable result of an age that has outlived its visions.”Footnote 36 But McKeon was not willing to give up on art as his peers had. Echoing Burke's complaints about literary modernism over in the Village, McKeon asserted art's central value for thinking about—and, indeed, living in—society. “Not art for art's sake should be the cry,” he proclaimed in the thesis's final lines, “but art for life's sake.”Footnote 37 If society lacked a vision, who better to turn to than visionaries such as artists, poets, and novelists?
This desire for an expansive view of art was only reaffirmed by the philosophic debates that swirled around McKeon as he began his doctoral studies. Reflecting on his graduate career later in life, McKeon commented on how he had “backed into philosophy as a means of securing insight into the conflicts of theory and practice, of values and actions, which became increasingly prominent at the time of the First World War.”Footnote 38 A broader concern about “the relation of esthetic values to science and morality” had driven McKeon to his thesis topic. That project in turn impressed upon him “the need of new interpretations in arts and morals because of developments in science and technology.”Footnote 39 In particular, McKeon became intrigued by the role that different concepts of science played in “the determination of philosophic principles of scientific inquiry and social action.”Footnote 40 These problems dominated the agenda of interwar American philosophy. Split between various camps of idealists, who took values to be objective and beyond mankind's interference, and naturalists, who believed norms to be rooted in human behavior and thus empirically observable, philosophers vigorously debated the nature of morality.Footnote 41 Consensus on the problem proved elusive during the 1920s as both sides became entrenched. With intellectual rapprochement unlikely, idealists and naturalists worked to accumulate institutional influence, focusing on faculty hires and launching publications that would support their views.Footnote 42 With this state of affairs in mind, McKeon wrote that his discipline seemed to require “a new philosophic approach” to thinking about values.Footnote 43 So McKeon pressed forward—or backward, as he described it—with his studies, intent on working out an alternative approach to the conceptual hang-ups he saw preoccupying his peers.
A series of discoveries in graduate school at Columbia both aided these efforts and bolstered McKeon's earlier views on art. The first insight came while McKeon was rereading Cicero in 1921. Despite the fact that he had previously found the assertion to be “obviously false,” McKeon was struck by the Roman rhetorician's view “that all philosophies . . . are particular expressions of the same truth and that, in so far as they succeeded in expressing that truth, they differ only verbally.”Footnote 44 The pairing of Cicero's claim with one derived from another ancient thinker contributed to the softening of McKeon's opinion. Confronting Socrates’ claim in Plato's Protagoras that “the good is sometimes bad and sometimes good,” McKeon altered the assertion to read in his mind as “the true is sometimes false and sometimes true.”Footnote 45 In order to understand when the true was false and when it was true, philosophers first had to take note of the evolution and limits of their own philosophy. Only through studying how modes of thought have developed both logically and historically could a thinker understand how his or her truths came into being and how they relate to those of others.
These discoveries were supported by his mentors. McKeon studied under Frederick Woodbridge and John Dewey. Although their intellectual backgrounds differed—Woodbridge was a scholar of Aristotle whose notoriety, to the degree that it existed, came from his efforts to found the prestigious Journal of Philosophy, while Dewey was among the last of the original pragmatists and one of America's most visible public intellectuals—both imbued McKeon with an appreciation of philosophy's practical nature and its relevance to broader, nonacademic concerns.Footnote 46 McKeon later reflected upon the intellectual debts that he owed his mentors. Woodbridge's love of Aristotle taught the young McKeon “to find philosophical problems, not in the massive oppositions of systems and in the rival propositions certified by technical analyses, but in the simple occurrences of everyday life from which the dilemmas of philosophic disputation are derived.” Dewey's pragmatism, on the other hand, convinced him “to seek the significance of philosophic positions in the problems they were constructed to solve, to suspect distinctions and separations which remove the processes of thinking from the experience in which they originated, and to relate the formulation of problems and the discovery of solutions to the cultural influences which determined the manner of their occurrence.”Footnote 47 From these mentors, McKeon assembled an array of philosophic equipment intended to apply the practical sensibilities of his teachers to contemporary philosophical debates.
Dewey in particular influenced the young philosopher. This was on display in McKeon's entry for a volume published to honor his mentor's seventieth birthday in 1929. A brief intellectual history that examined concepts of “science” during the Middle Ages, McKeon's article was a subtle appropriation of pragmatism. He criticized historians who dated the existence of science to the scientific revolution of the sixteenth century, chiding the scholar who hunted “the records of the past for instances of the predictions of his own age.”Footnote 48 This overlooked the various meanings that “science” has taken as expressed through various conceptual languages over time. The methods and problems of medieval science were, unlike those of centuries to come, based on a “formal, non-genetic, non-historical” logic derived from Aristotle and reliant upon assumptions about the universe's divine purpose. Still, this scholastic reasoning was part of an outlook that contemporaries used to understand the world. “Doubtless,” McKeon admitted, this perspective has “in the course of history led into absurdities; doubtless there have been quacks who practised [sic] it; but the ancestry of science is involved in its speculations no less than in the practices of the technological tradition or in the advances of machines.”Footnote 49 Subtitled “A Prolegomenon to the Study of Mediaeval Science,” McKeon's article applied Dewey's experimental, empirical thinking to the history of science itself. Told in a fashion that would become typical of McKeon's writings, this narrative was not an account of “a turning from a false and inaccurate science” towards a correct one.Footnote 50 Rather, it was simply an account of a series of problems approached in a series of ways, each of which could be called “science.”
The outcome of these insights and encounters was a pragmatic approach to thinking. Truth lost its singular, monolithic qualities for McKeon. He came to think that “there is a sense in which truth, though one, has no single expression and a sense in which truth, though changeless, is rendered false in the uses to which it is put.” Not only did McKeon stumble upon this outlook on truth; he also found it to be an alluring insight despite its direct challenge to his “most fundamental convictions at the time.” He should have, McKeon reflected, thinking of his youthful philosophical temperament, “preferred to think of the development of philosophy, as knowledge, as a progressive evolution in which errors were detected and discarded and truths were accumulated and interrelated.”Footnote 51 But this was not to be the case. In McKeon's mind, the “problem of the one and the many” could not be hammered out of different philosophies simply by uncovering some overarching method that connected them all uniformly and neatly.Footnote 52 Intellectual controversies should be managed, not eliminated, as it was out of the contact of diverse perspectives that new approaches to common problems emerge. “[D]espite the impatience of practical men and dogmatists,” noted McKeon approvingly, “there is fortunately no way to halt the eternal philosophic dialogue about things, knowledge, and systems.”Footnote 53 In these insights, McKeon discovered his voice as a pragmatist.
McKeon used this voice to speak on Burke's behalf. In 1934, McKeon took a visiting professorship at the University of Chicago. This quickly turned into a thirteen-year tenure as dean of Humanities division.Footnote 54 Since Burke spent this time bouncing between editorial jobs to make ends meet, McKeon leveraged his own promotion to gain his perennially unemployed friend short-term teaching positions. Despite the monetary assistance this provided, these favors were apparently more for McKeon than for Burke. The bohemian thinker typically kept a critical distance from large institutions and McKeon lamented the “loss that the academic world had suffered when [Burke] turned [his] attention to practical matters and to propaganda,” an allusion to his friend's contribution to the communist-dominated First American Writers’ Congress.Footnote 55 McKeon suggested that academia could recoup these losses by having Burke teach a self-designed literature course.Footnote 56 After some negotiations, Burke acquiesced and decided to teach a course in 1938 exploring “the extra-literary factors that operate in giving symbolic structures their effectiveness,” which both aided him in drafting his next book, The Philosophy of Literary Form (1941), and allowed the two friends to sharpen their thinking about pragmatism together.Footnote 57
This thinking was aided by Burke and McKeon's eclectic mix of philosophic and artistic influences. McKeon's interest in aesthetics, combined with his studies in the history of philosophy, foregrounded the perspectival nature of thought. Evident in his treatment of medieval science, McKeon's understanding of the historicity of thought affirmed the essential pluralism of philosophy—that is, of the wide array of beliefs that could fit within any one idea. Likewise, Burke's troubles with modernism made clear to him similar insights. As Burke turned to pragmatism, he would look to render the philosophy even more experimental, more social, and ultimately more artistic—traits that the young Burke had learned to cherish through his assessment of modernism's possibilities and limits. Burke and McKeon, then, were coming to a key realization. Like any other idea that James or Dewey discussed, pragmatism was rendered true (or false) by events. As McKeon indicated in his subtle homage to Dewey, the pragmatic outlook must be applied evenly across intellectual endeavors—pragmatism included.
“A NEW ANGUISH”: SCIENCE, DEMOCRACY, AND AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY
Testing pragmatism's fitness for the age proved to be a major theme of Burke and McKeon's writings from the 1930s through the 1950s. While Burke and McKeon found intellectual affinities in pragmatism, both periodically expressed concerns over unresolved tensions in the philosophy. In Burke's case, his admiration for Dewey was mixed. Although Burke claimed that Experience and Nature (1925) and The Quest for Certainty (1929) “did a lot of eye-opening” for him, he found Dewey's discussion of moral philosophy unsatisfying.Footnote 58 In a 1930 review of The Quest for Certainty, Burke noted the difficulty of pragmatically creating values without tacitly having recourse to an unquestioned a priori. To base morality on “usefulness” as Dewey understood it—that is, on continued experimentation to determine the effectiveness of certain norms—merely privileged scientific knowledge over other forms of reasoning, elevating it to an unalterable, metaphysical, and therefore anti-pragmatic truth. In this way, Burke claimed, “The Quest for Certainty is an ideology of science.”Footnote 59
Instead of referring to scientific reasoning in this endeavor, Dewey would have been better served to leave his office at Columbia and stroll over toward Greenwich Village to observe its bohemian spirit. When practicing moral philosophy, Burke asserted, “the pragmatist is strongest when he is more like the artist than the metaphysician.”Footnote 60 Contra the latter's proclivity to see the flux of time and appearance as something to be overcome through the discovery of fixed postulates, the ideal artist of Burke's imagination reveled in this situation, inventing new morals out of the resources afforded to him by the world's ambiguity and uncertainty. To Burke, this second, more modernist, approach was clearly the better suited for pragmatism's fluid conception of truth.
McKeon's observations on pragmatism were milder than Burke's. But the fact that Dewey had been his graduate adviser did not stop McKeon from critiquing the elder pragmatist's marriage of science to democracy. “Few men have worked more persistently than Dewey to clarify the nature of the experimental method and to apply the attitude, method, and accomplishments of the sciences to moral and political problems,” McKeon noted.Footnote 61 While this line of thought had been responsible for some of his adviser's greatest insights, McKeon was unsettled by its implications, particularly among admirers of Dewey and those with a similar philosophic outlook. As the historian David Hollinger observes, McKeon worried that “the particular positions taken by John Dewey on problems in ethics and metaphysics would be uncritically accepted because they were so embedded in the amorphous rhetoric of ‘science and democracy.’”Footnote 62 McKeon, in short, was less concerned about Dewey's thought than he was about its reception. His mentor's critical edge was dulled by an intellectual climate that took terms like “science” and “democracy”—vague as they were—for granted as positive goods.
Pragmatism's own history helped to prompt McKeon's concerns. “Every perspective requires a metaphor, implicit or explicit, for its organizational base,” his friend had written.Footnote 63 In the case of pragmatism, these metaphors came largely from a scientific vocabulary. Pragmatists had always emphasized their connections with the sciences. With the aim of making philosophy more scientific, founders of the tradition such as Peirce and, to a lesser extent, James drew connections between their thought and the disciplines of biology, psychology, and statistics.Footnote 64 Dewey continued this project. His emphasis on the links between science and pragmatism was strong enough at times for these connections to become practically the sine qua non of the tradition. Once more, Dewey solidified pragmatism's commitment to applying science to broader, social concerns. In works such as The Public and Its Problems (1927) and Freedom and Culture (1939), Dewey drew moral implications from the methods of science. Although democracy depended on a litany of factors for Dewey, a proper education in and the application of science to human affairs was paramount.Footnote 65 With its focus on empirical observation, repeated experimentation, and validating results among a community of experts, the scientific method could help instill virtues that Dewey saw as essential to the functioning of a democratic society.
As the 1930s progressed, McKeon had good reason to worry that pragmatism's scientistic bent would grow stronger. During this decade, American philosophers began to engage with logical positivism. Developed by Moritz Schlick, Rudolph Carnap, and other, mainly German-speaking, thinkers in a group called the Vienna circle, logical positivism aimed to rid philosophy of topics deemed metaphysical and unscientific, such as normative concerns like moral and aesthetic theory. The scientific elements of this movement piqued the interest of American philosophers. In particular, thinkers acquainted with pragmatism drew connections between it and logical positivism.Footnote 66 John Sommerville, a philosopher at the City College of New York, noted logical positivism's “significant connections, some premeditated and some unconscious, with the pragmatic thought of James and Dewey.” Pragmatism and logical positivism both maintained, Sommerville claimed, a naturalistic outlook on epistemological problems, as well as emphasizing the centrality of science for knowing the world. In short, he noted, they had a similar “temper of mind.”Footnote 67 The philosopher of science Morris Cohen agreed with Sommerville's assessments, claiming in his 1937 book Logical Positivism, Pragmatism, and Scientific Empiricism that both traditions were simply “different emphases within a common movement.” Close enough was logical positivism's rejection of nonscientific philosophy to pragmatism's epistemology, argued Cohen, that the Vienna circle could be considered a “European cousin” of Dewey, James, and Peirce.Footnote 68 American philosophers, long eager to distance themselves from nineteenth-century moralists and affirm the scientific nature of their work, enthusiastically greeted the intellectual family tree that thinkers like Sommerville and Cohen used to link their native pragmatists to the logic-driven émigrés from Austria.Footnote 69 In this atmosphere, pragmatists were unlikely to take Burke's advice about dabbling in the Bohemian lifestyle anytime soon.
Despite the outward appearance of aloofness that scientific philosophers displayed towards normative concerns, they did maintain Dewey's belief in science's democratic virtues. Indeed, as pragmatism grew more scientistic during the 1930s, so too did it grow more ideological. The concurrence was not coincidental. Like Burke and McKeon, many of the scientific philosophers had witnessed the battles between naturalists and idealists in the 1920s over the nature of values. This conflict had persisted into the 1930s, taking on new, political dimensions as the specter of totalitarianism began to loom large. Scientific philosophers mustered pragmatism to attack those like the neo-Thomist philosopher Mortimer Adler and natural-rights theorist Leo Strauss who believed that values were rooted in a transcendent order, not experimental science. Adler and Strauss's commitment to fixed, metaphysical standards for values reminded scientific philosophers of totalitarian dogmas earning philosophers who formerly might have been deemed “idealists” the more nefarious title of “absolutists.”Footnote 70
Cohen captured the political views of scientific philosophers. “Liberalism,” he wrote, is “simply scientific method stubbornly at work on human problems.” What “scientific” meant was, at times, unclear even to him. But such ambiguities only enabled grandiose statements about science's ideological valence, allowing Cohen to declare that there existed an “intimate connection between scientific method and liberal civilization.”Footnote 71 Other intellectuals such as the sociologist of science Robert Merton, the anthropologist Margaret Mead, and the philosopher Ernest Nagel echoed Cohen, equating scientific method with democratic practices, claiming that the one supported the other.Footnote 72 Despite (or due to) its vagueness, “science” represented the non-metaphysical, empirically grounded basis for a democratic morality that naturalists in the 1920s had sought to advance.Footnote 73
The allure of “scientific democracy” proved particularly strong among pragmatists in mid-century America. Sidney Hook typified this trend. A student of Dewey's, Hook became his mentor's best-known and aggressive public defender during the 1940s and 1950s. He embraced Dewey's rhetoric of scientific democracy with a zeal that outdid even the master. Although during the 1920s and 1930s Hook had been a Marxist, the 1940s witnessed him tack to the right. From a critic of liberal democracy he transformed into one of its most polemical defenders, claiming that the ideology better encapsulated the open-minded, skeptical values of science than its left-wing rival did. “The ultimate commitment of a democracy,” wrote Hook, “must be a faith in some method by which these conflicts are resolved. Since the method must be the test of all values, it would not be inaccurate to call it the basic value in the democratic way of life. This method is the method of intelligence, of critical scientific inquiry.”Footnote 74 Hook lauded his teacher Dewey for recognizing this, noting that it was “not mere chance that the greatest philosopher of experimental empiricism—John Dewey—is also the greatest philosopher of democracy.”Footnote 75 There were, of course, major differences between Hook and Dewey. Whereas for Dewey the “scientific habit of mind” transcended liberalism—indeed, was a crucial tool in building alternative political visions—for Hook this temperament was wedded to it. Pragmatism consequently became an ideological cudgel in Hook's hands, bludgeoning Dewey's nuance in the process. With Hook, the uncritical acceptance of Dewey's work that McKeon had feared reached its zenith.
Intimate as the relationship between science and democracy may have been for thinkers like Hook, it was not exclusive. While the founding generation of pragmatists such as Peirce, James, and Dewey could rely on a political landscape where mostly liberals touted science, this was no longer the case in Burke and McKeon's time. Marxists, who had long heralded their approach to politics as scientific, now had a state of their own to defend, one that under Joseph Stalin's leadership attempted to organize scientists around this goal.Footnote 76 On the other end of the ideological spectrum, Nazi policymakers cloaked genocide in the language of racial “science,” basing their entire regime on these shaky premises.Footnote 77 Indeed even the meaning of “democracy” was not certain. “In international communication, where common influences are few and slight, all major nations profess to be ‘democratic,’” McKeon observed in 1957, pointing to claims on behalf of both the US and the USSR to defend “true” democracy.Footnote 78 Of course, what science meant to a National Socialist or democracy to a Soviet Marxist differed greatly from what Hook or Cohen meant when they invoked these terms. But this only created more problems. After all, McKeon wrote, “there are few subject matters that are not treated in a manner that passes as ‘scientific,’ few solutions that are not advanced with the authority of ‘science,’ and few techniques that have not adopted the terminology or claimed the characteristics of ‘scientific method.’”Footnote 79 Some definition of “science” was the basis for every sort of political process, many of which claimed some mantle of “democracy” during this period.Footnote 80 By the end of the 1940s what “science” meant was a problem rather than a postulate for democratic theory. Failure to confront these ambiguities left liberal democrats attempting to base normative theories and political practices on shifting grounds.
These points built on ones Burke had made. In analysis from his 1935 book Permanence and Change—analysis that McKeon found sound and convincing—Burke criticized the belief that scientific terminologies were “neutral”; that is, not the product of history and choice.Footnote 81 All speech, he argued, “is intensely moral—its names for objects contain the emotional overtones which give us the cues as to how we should act towards these objects.” Names as banal as “automobile,” Burke continued, smuggled into communication “a concealed choice (it designates not merely an object, but a desirable object).”Footnote 82 With science, the matter was no different, a line of analysis Burke pressed in his later work, A Rhetoric of Motives (1950). Annoyed by liberals who condemned fascist and communist science as “sinister” only to launch “[h]ead-on resistance” against those who questioned the “purity” of science in democracies, Burke critiqued their duplicity. He detected an intellectual sleight of hand behind this move. Science for the liberal, Burke thought, had ceased to be a method only. Rather, it was “a good and absolute.” Evidence for this belief could be found in the willingness of liberals to describe any preferred polity in “scientific” terminology. Thus science had become “circuitously endowed with the philosophic function of God as the grounding of values.”Footnote 83 Liberals enthralled by the natural potential of science to line up with democracy consequently overlooked the intersubjective nature of communication. The results, as Burke wrote elsewhere, were “discouraging.”Footnote 84
Such an oversight gave science undue authority to decide on issues such as morals and politics, matters that ought to be debated rather than determined. Without paying attention to how such an ambiguous term as “science” changed from context to context, a mélange of meanings had become attached to it. “[W]illy nilly,” Burke scoffed, “a science takes on the moral qualities of the political or social movements with which it becomes identified.” Saturated with hopes that science could provide a firm foundation for their moral philosophies, liberals had turned the meaning of science into a mire, an unstable mix of ambiguous yet incontestable values into which normative theories would sink. Left an open question for Dewey and his followers, then, was how exactly pragmatism could use scientific methods to justify democratic processes while still remaining pragmatic. In an age when movements of every ideological background claimed the mantle of science, assertions that it and democracy were intrinsically connected failed to convince Burke. “Hence,” surveying the recent global political landscape in 1950, he predicted that there would be “a new anguish, a crisis in the liberal theory of science.”Footnote 85
These sentiments reached their clearest articulation in a paper McKeon delivered to his peers called “Democracy, Scientific Method, and Action.” Given at a symposium held by the New School for Social Research on the question “Is Scientific Method Neutral to Democracy?” in 1943, McKeon's response was a firm it depends. In the abstract, McKeon identified a formal tension that those who held science and democracy to be natural allies often downplayed. Scientific methodology caused few problems for political theory when restricted from the domain of moral philosophy and ethics. But “when standards are standards of action, enforced by custom or law, there is a contradiction between the control which science might properly exercise and the freedom which might lead even to changes in what is held on scientific grounds.”Footnote 86 The connection between science and democracy, in other words, was not as seamless as scientific philosophers held it to be.
On this point, McKeon lingered, cautioning his contemporaries that relying on scientific metaphors to organize their political claims would only muddy the waters of democratic theory as well as create confusion as to what “science” meant.Footnote 87 He warned that the relation between science and democracy was open to interpretation since “what passes for democracy” can be “presented either as inconsistent with the demands of scientific accuracy and efficiency or as requiring certain modifications in the conception of science to make it useful in society.”Footnote 88 McKeon's conclusion was direct. “The means for arriving at agreement concerning practical problems are to be found, not in the tempting analogies of scientific method and democratic process,” he ended, “but in the rigorous differentiation between them.”Footnote 89 The meanings of “science” and “democracy” were simply too ambiguous for any claims attesting to their “natural” correspondence to work. Contingency and human agency—manifested in the processes of communication—created associations, both democratic and scientific, among mankind. Logic and experimentation alone could not.Footnote 90
In pointing this out, Burke and McKeon had identified a crucial blind spot in pragmatism. For all of their discussion about the links between action and thought, the classical pragmatists had failed to adequately explore the ability of words to act on humans. Dewey's critique of the “spectator theory of knowledge,” for instance, had raised the issue of language's relation to the world. Yet while Dewey showed how language was shaped by the world rather than a simple reflection of it, what he did not add was that the reverse, too, is true: that like art, words also shape the world—indeed, create worlds—by instilling in people attitudes toward it. While clear to Burke and McKeon, this dynamic was obscured from Dewey's view because of his reliance upon scientific metaphors in the organization of his thought. Due to their emphasis on experimentation with, and control of, nature, these metaphors framed language as little more than another tool in the lab, value-neutral and passive.
Pragmatism's pluralistic potential had been blunted because of this neutral view of language. Without appreciating how words form worlds, thinkers such as Hook, Cohen, and even Dewey held to a faulty model of communication that revolved around persuasion and proof, one that thought of opposing viewpoints as errors to be corrected rather than different perspectives to be understood. Yet if communication worked as McKeon and Burke thought it did then this task was a fool's errand. There was no “neutral” way to talk or write. Every way of describing how the world is also functions as a prescription of how the world ought to be. If intellectuals did not reckon with this dynamic, every effort at communication would quickly descend into conflict. As McKeon warned, “Controversy takes the place of dialogue when the philosopher whose position is reported and adjusted bursts into the conversation to restate what has been attributed to him and to rescue it from distortion.”Footnote 91 While the controversies that arose among academics were limited to the pages of journals, McKeon and Burke both understood that the ambiguity of having competing ideologies claim “science” and “democracy” as their own could, if not approached correctly, result in more than a war of words. It was philosophy's job, McKeon wrote, to prompt the “the cultivation of values which make the clash of principles fruitful rather than explosive.”Footnote 92
While skeptical that science-minded pragmatists would be able to handle this problem, Burke and McKeon did not spend the bulk of their works criticizing others. Persuasion, they knew, was more likely when a thinker presented alternative approaches to a problem rather than poke holes in popular solutions. This insight applied all the more to their context since cultural connections between science and democracy were so thick that the link between the two concepts had become nearly definitional. And as Burke noted, “You can't refute a dictionary. The only profitable answer to a dictionary is another one.”Footnote 93
THE UNENDING CONVERSATION: BURKE AND MCKEON ON THE PERFORMATIVE DIMENSIONS OF DIALOGUE
To reform pragmatism, Burke and McKeon drew from their earlier interest in aesthetics. As Burke had written in 1935, the “corrective of the scientific rationalization would seem necessarily to be a rationale of art.”Footnote 94 Twenty-two years later, McKeon echoed and explained his friend's sentiments. “The function of creative artists and thinkers,” he wrote, “is to discover the unexpressed values of the society in which they live and to express them creatively in forms which other members of society may experience.”Footnote 95 This process had a great deal in common with the process of communication. Indeed, so reliant were Burke and McKeon upon language drawn from arts such as rhetoric, poetry, and theater that the line between art and communication often blurred in their statements. For McKeon, the line disappeared altogether at times. “Values are brought to attention and operation by communication,” he noted, “and they exist only as expressed.”Footnote 96 As such, he added, “Communication is an art, and it must develop powers as well as achieve effects.”Footnote 97
What McKeon meant by art's—and, by extension, communication's—powers can be understood by Burke's use of the term in his first book, Counter-statement (1931). A volume of literary criticism written during the 1920s, Burke pondered the implications of the fact that one piece of art has multiple, often incongruent, effects, drawing inspiration for an entire aesthetic program from this observation. Artistic forms, in Burke's mind, were forms of life; or, in his words, “A form is a way of experiencing; and such a form is made available in art when, by the use of specific subject-matter, it enables us to experience in this way.”Footnote 98 In light of this, the value of art was simply its ability to prevent a society “from becoming too assertively, too hopelessly, itself.”Footnote 99 Thus, Burke wrote in underscoring its power, “Art's very accumulation (its discordant voices arising out of many systems) serve to undermine any one rigid scheme of living.”Footnote 100 In this context, the artist seeks to “adjust a vocabulary” to “stress such emotions and attitudes as favor the acceptance of the changes” salient in society at a given time, not in terms of “acquiescence” to these, but in the sense of cultivating an “openness to the factors involved.”Footnote 101 Through this openness, as Burke later wrote, art could become something more than “a specialist's art for some to produce and many to observe.” Rather, art would expand its meaning into “an art of living.”Footnote 102
Burke and McKeon's views on art fused with their outlooks on pragmatism. As Burke's invocation of art as a form of experience and a way of life suggests, Dewey's thought remained influential for him, despite his criticisms of the philosopher's scientism. Indeed, Burke saw in Dewey's writings on aesthetics glimmers of hope, indicating that even the pragmatist don had doubts about relying too heavily on the language of science. Reviewing Dewey's Art as Experience (1934), Burke praised the author for realizing the limitations of framing pragmatism strictly with scientific metaphors. “It seems to me especially significant that whereas Professor Dewey's ‘instrumentalism’ has been avowedly a philosophy of science,” noted Burke, “as soon as he approaches experience from the standpoint of art he feels called upon to grant the many grave cultural problems to which science has given rise.”Footnote 103 Building on this point, Burke wondered “whether the ‘experimental method’ itself is a sound basis upon which to erect a scheme of social solidarity . . . since it is essentially a technique individualistic in genius, providing a definite technique for doubting the beliefs of one's group.” But Burke harbored no grand illusions about ridding society of these impulses entirely. “[S]cience is with us,” he admitted, and so “we must accept it and shape it to esthetic ends.”Footnote 104 The artistic impulses of pragmatism that Dewey had discovered in Art and Experience were useful for this task.
McKeon concurred. For him, Dewey's pragmatism meant that philosophers must turn to art, not science. “The accomplishments of twentieth-century philosophy,” wrote McKeon in 1954, “are usually stated in these terms: we have corrected the bifurcation of nature and we have abandoned the spectator theory of truth.” While McKeon did not invoke him by name, these achievements were unmistakably his mentor's and they constituted a major shift in philosophy.Footnote 105 Today, McKeon explained, philosophers assume that to “act and to express require both body and mind (whereas bodies moved and minds thought in the seventeenth century), and the tests for our knowledge are consensus and consequences, which make unnecessary the separation of knowledge and subject matter (whereas in the nineteenth century principles depended on the forms of thought or on the regulates of nature).” These changes were not without their own challenges. Dewey's philosophy, McKeon argued, warranted contemporaries in believing that “we are in direct contact only with what we do and say and make, with language and operations.”Footnote 106 Such assumptions fundamentally altered the problems that philosophers faced since, in this model, language constituted the world rather than described it. “Philosophy no longer examines ‘things,’” McKeon explained. Rather, “philosophy is a communication and an operation, and, therefore, philosophy is itself an art.”Footnote 107 Insofar as philosophers could know it, the world was an artifice—a by-product of the words we use to describe it. In revealing the instrumental nature of knowledge, Dewey had also revealed the artistic nature of philosophy. For McKeon, this was his mentor's true legacy.
Burke and McKeon's pragmatism built on this legacy, drawing from their reflections on art to focus on the performative power of communication. Burke, for instance, throughout his writings kept returning to the work symbols could do to, not just for, users. This theme was particularly salient throughout Burke's three major books—Permanence and Change (1935), Attitudes toward History (1937), and A Grammar of Motives (1945)—that followed Counter-statement. In these works, Burke subjected communication itself to scrutiny, mapping its effects on human relations. People, he argued, both use words and are used by words. This dynamic causes problems since terminologies always block a person's perspective, limiting the number of valid interpretations for a situation and giving human thought a self-perpetuating quality.Footnote 108 The nature of language only made this problem worse. As he observed in A Grammar of Motives, language had an innate tendency toward abstraction since it has no essential connection to the world. Echoing James's discussion of “magic words” in Pragmatism (1907), Burke asserted that terminologies become organized around “god terms”: unquestioned assumptions that ground a system of thought.Footnote 109 “In this sense,” as Burke long held, “any new way of putting the characters of events together is an attempt to convert people, regardless of whether it goes by the name of religion, psychotherapy, or science.”Footnote 110 Tackling this evangelical tendency in communication preoccupied Burke throughout the 1940s and well into the 1950s.Footnote 111
To this end, Burke suggested that philosophers look to literature as a guide. He had begun to make this case at the end of Permanence and Change when the social challenges that science presented were more abstract. The “ultimate metaphor for discussing the universe and mans’ relations to it,” he had argued, “must be the poetic or dramatic metaphor.”Footnote 112 Due to its attention to the power of symbols, literature alerted philosophers to how their thought was shaped, and limited, by the very words they used. Poets and playwrights, Burke wrote in his next book, Attitudes toward History, reminded philosophers that all terminologies—be they literary or scientific—“prepare us for some functions and against others, for or against the persons representing these functions.”Footnote 113 Once philosophers began to understand this dynamic like their literary peers, they could cease trying to convert all other positions over to their cause and start to understand the plurality of perspectives that exist in the world.
McKeon picked up this line of thought. Rarely taken by invective prose, he disparaged the growing inclination among his fellow philosophers to treat the history of their discipline as “a museum of errors.”Footnote 114 Leveling an intellectual broadside at attempts to unify philosophy by rendering it more scientific, McKeon claimed that these efforts would harm rather than help inquiry. “Differences of methods, principles, purposes, and subject-matters,” he mused, “account at once for the richness of philosophical discussion and the impossibility of bringing it to an unambiguous termination.”Footnote 115 Schools of thought maintained their own conception of truth that grounded all their other claims. Consequently, not only was the attempt to hold diverse perspectives to a single standard of truth utterly futile; it was ultimately foolish. “Effective communication does not depend so much on defining terms and avoiding ambiguity,” McKeon asserted, “as on preserving fruitful regions of ambiguity and tolerance.”Footnote 116 It was both more realistic and more productive for philosophers to recognize, embrace, and engage the differences that occur between perspectives rather than attempt to circumvent them.Footnote 117 Anything less than this effort would result in bitter stalemate, not discussion.
Such stalemates were not limited to academic philosophy, a fact McKeon experienced firsthand when he served as one of the United States’ delegates to UNESCO in 1948. Tasked with exploring the intellectual foundations of international human rights, thinkers such as the Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain representing France, diplomatic historian E. H. Carr representing Great Britain, and legal scholar Boris Tchechko representing the Soviet Union gathered to discuss the matter in a symposium hosted by the organization. Such a conversation, McKeon soon discovered, was replete with pitfalls. “The problems faced in framing a declaration of human rights,” he wrote in his contribution to the proceedings, “are basically philosophic.”Footnote 118 Drawing up a list of rights that rival superpowers such as the United States and Soviet Union, as well as decolonizing nations such as India, could affirm proved relatively easy, McKeon wrote. It was coming to an agreement on the meaning of these rights that created philosophic headaches. “The differences” among parties, he explained, are found “in what is meant by these rights, and these differences of meanings depend on divergent basic assumptions, which, in turn, lend plausibility to and are justified by contradictory interpretations of the economic and social situation, and, finally, lead to opposed recommendations concerning the implementation required for a world declaration of human rights.”Footnote 119 These diverging interpretations left international communication imperiled insofar as nations spoke of the same concepts—human rights in this case—with very different implications in mind. McKeon's goal in such situations was deceptively simple: to keep the conversations between seemingly incommensurable perspectives going. To accomplish this feat might require skills more familiar to the art or literary critic than to the scientist: intricately mapping the philosophical traditions, minutely detailing the themes developed within these, and highlighting the problems these different perspectives were trying to solve.Footnote 120 As was apparent to him at UNESCO, a method to bring different perspectives into conversation had more than philosophical importance. It was a practical necessity, too.
As was typical, Burke was blunter than his friend about the practical importance of their aesthetic pragmatism. To signify the urgency of his and McKeon's project, Burke chose as the epigram for A Grammar of Motives, his sprawling analysis of the effects of communication on philosophy, the Latin phrase ad bellum purificandum: towards the purification—or end—of war. Like McKeon, Burke had come of age with the word “crisis” hanging over his head. From the Great War to the Great Depression, then from World War II to the Cold War, decades of ideological battles and global warfare had steeled Burke's aesthetic pragmatism. Indeed, as he wrote in a prologue for the twentieth-anniversary rerelease of Permanence and Change in 1953, the variety and severity of the political struggles that had swirled around Burke during the 1930s had driven his interest in language.Footnote 121 While the depression ended, Burke's sense of crisis did not. The “closely analogous ways in which thermo-nuclear power was developed in U.S.A. and U.S.S.R,” Burke wrote in the 1950s—transferring his concerns from economics to energy—suggested that the political differences between the two superpowers were less important than the way each framed those differences, as well as their common ability to destroy the world.Footnote 122 Thus “when things got toughest” he and McKeon “thought hardest about communication.”Footnote 123
In all this, Burke and McKeon may have spoken with language drawn from the arts, but they shared their fellow pragmatists’ abiding concern for the health of democracy. The difference was that whereas for Dewey or Hook democratic values sat ready for an inquisitive investigator to discover, for Burke and McKeon communication made the values that bind democratic communities together. Morals did not exist as live options prior to the process of their being discussed. At its best, McKeon wrote, philosophy “is an art of forming hypotheses, or of interpreting theories, or of communicating, making, and possessing values, or of producing man himself and his significant world.”Footnote 124 At its best, that is, philosophy knit together the discordant voices of an era into a fluent line of communication, maintaining that initial pluralism all along.
Burke captured the goal of his and McKeon's aesthetic pragmatism well in a story about a hypothetical unending conversation. “Imagine that you enter a parlor,” Burke set the scene:
You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally's assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress.Footnote 125
The image of communication as both unending and binding echoed through Burke's writings from his early complaints about modernism's conception of the autonomous artist, to his later studies on the role that “god terms” played in orientating philosophy. The literary critic Vincent B. Leitch captures the arch of Burke's thought nicely when he writes that “the quintessential movement of his mind was from textual analysis to human experience, from communication to community.”Footnote 126 Much the same could be said of the aesthetic pragmatism that Burke developed in conversation with McKeon.
CONCLUSION: FROM COMMUNICATION TO COMMUNITY
“Future historians who record what is being said and done today,” prophesied McKeon in 1957, “will find it difficult to avoid giving a prominent place to our preoccupation with ‘communication.’”Footnote 127 While this prediction captures the ambitions that animated his and Burke's project, it was a call that largely fell on deaf ears. Burke and McKeon's dialogue never lived up to its goal of transforming American intellectual life.
A few contemporaries did appreciate their project. One reviewer of McKeon's book Thought, Action, and Passion (1954)—a collection of essays exploring the history of “love,” “truth,” “freedom,” and “imitation”—lauded the author for taking the plurality and history of philosophy seriously. McKeon's approach, wrote the reviewer, “reveals that philosophies do not supersede one another like successive strata of fallen leaves.” Rather, he continued, “every reasonably complete philosophy gives a place to the same phenomena as every other, though placing the emphases very differently in different cases.” The implications of McKeon's attitude towards philosophy's past were clear. “In no case,” concluded the reviewer, “can the philosopher's task be simply that of refutation.”Footnote 128 Philosophers had to work to understand how key terms had developed through time and what they meant in opposing philosophies. Burke said much the same, according to Hugh Dalziel Duncan, a contemporary sociologist and admirer of the rhetorician's thought. In his 1965 introduction to Permanence and Change, Duncan noted how “Burke demands that we become masters of many perspectives in order that we may understand one perspective.”Footnote 129 Like James and Dewey before them, Burke and McKeon stressed an important truth about Truth: that it was best spoken about in the plural, not singular.
Yet despite a handful of positive commentaries, much of what contemporaries wrote about Burke and McKeon marginalized the duo's project rather than extended it. The most heated engagement came from Hook, who clashed with them both. In a series of essays in Partisan Review from 1938, Hook eviscerated Burke for being insufficiently anticommunist. Attitudes toward History, Hook wrote, was the result of “ill-digested reading” and latent Stalinism on Burke's part.Footnote 130 That Burke engaged with Dewey's work only further incensed Hook, who attempted to disassociate the two. “Dewey's emphasis upon critical scientific inquiry is incompatible,” he asserted, “with Burke's framework.”Footnote 131 Of course, there was an element of truth in this claim: Burke did think of his own project as incompatible with Dewey's scientism. This did not mean, however, that Burke rejected Dewey's entire philosophy. Such nuance was lost in Hook's own commitment to defending the link between science and democracy, as demonstrated by an equally polemical review of a volume McKeon had edited and contributed to. McKeon had argued that intellectuals should see potential in the fact that nations as ideologically different as the US and the USSR both claimed to defend democracy since this gave international discussions a common point of departure, even if the meaning of that term varied for each party. In response, Hook accused McKeon of peddling “double-talk about democracy,” Orwellian language that obscured more than clarified the ideological stakes at play.Footnote 132 Despite the two's best efforts to create a theory of communication suited to contemporary political concerns, believers in the science–democracy link did not want to hear what Burke and McKeon had to say.
This stifling of aesthetic pragmatism by scientific pragmatists received a boost from an unlikely source: Burke and McKeon's writing. “The greatest difficulty that confronts the reader of Burke is finding out what he means,” lamented Hook.Footnote 133 He was not alone in this impression. Most were put off by the prose that Burke and McKeon used to express their philosophy. “Unfortunately,” wrote a different reviewer of Thought, Action, and Passion, “the historical and philosophical insights contained in this essay, as in the others, are somewhat obscured by being embedded in a prose style which I can only describe as dense.” The reviewer concluded by noting that he doubted “the accuracy of the jacket blurb claim that Thought, Action, and Passion is for the ordinary reader.”Footnote 134 Such complaints were warranted. Even Burke and McKeon complained about each other's writing styles. “Jeez,” Burke complained to the rhetorician William H. Rueckert, after reading one of McKeon's papers, “my methodologic [sic] polysyllables are baby-talk” compared to his writing.Footnote 135 In turn, McKeon routinely ribbed Burke for his unorthodox prose, which ran the gamut from bizarre to Byzantine. “When a man writes a book treating the whole subject of communication, and then asks what it is communicating,” McKeon quipped when Burke asked him to read a draft of Permanence and Change, “it looks like a few of the old traps with latin [sic] names.”Footnote 136 Burke the bohemian, in other words, read more like Burke the Scholastic to McKeon. Ironically, for all their talk of communication, neither Burke nor McKeon had the “ordinary reader” in mind when they sat down to write.
It turned out that academic readers did not have Burke and McKeon in mind either. As a result of their reception, Burke and McKeon's texts found their institutional homes in rhetoric and literature departments rather than circulating more broadly in the discourses of social and political theorists.Footnote 137 Even movements that shared similar concerns with Burke and McKeon largely overlooked them. For all of its attention to the performative aspects of language, for example, the linguistic turn that transformed social theory in the 1970s and 1980s paid little attention to Burke and McKeon's project. Despite their interests in literary criticism and aesthetics, intellectuals such as Richard Rorty and Judith Butler did not reach for copies of A Grammar of Motives or Freedom and History in order to remake philosophy.Footnote 138 Instead, they looked toward the recently translated works of French and, to a lesser extent, German intellectuals such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Martin Heidegger. Indeed, even Rorty, with his goal of revitalizing pragmatism, ignored the works of Burke and McKeon—the latter of whom had been his professor at the University of Chicago—and chose to combine his reading of Dewey in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) with a blend of European post-structuralism.Footnote 139 In the process of making such combinations, theorists of the linguistic turn tended to ignore the processual nature of communication—if not the entire matter of communication. As the historian Daniel T. Rodgers writes, this gave the social theory produced by these thinkers an asocial, fragmented quality.Footnote 140 Words meant many things for post-structuralists; it was just not often that they meant “community.”
Thus the future historians McKeon spoke of never came to write the history that he expected. There is no reason why historians today should continue this oversight. Analyzing the intellectual common ground that Burke and McKeon shared reveals a different picture of pragmatism's development. Rather than dependent on a discourse linking science to democracy, Burke and McKeon's pragmatism refocused the tradition around the arts. Building on Dewey's work, particularly his writings on art, Burke and McKeon consequently used their aesthetic version of the philosophy to do what their fellow pragmatists aimed to do: strengthen democracy. By viewing communication as an art—that is, as a process in which symbols had the power to create new identifications between adherents to incommensurable perspectives—rather than a science in which persuasion and proof were paramount, Burke and McKeon hoped to instill in their fellow intellectuals a new attitude toward dialogue, one that might help lessen ideological tensions wherever they occurred.Footnote 141 In this effort, a vibrant and rich variant of pragmatism emerged, one that drew out the tradition's underdeveloped aesthetic impulses and remains for scholars to rediscover. For as Burke and McKeon understood well, conversations are never-ending, even if their interlocutors have been silenced for decades.
