Abstract

John Dewey is a philosopher who seems perpetually on the verge of rhetoric. He displays a continual interest in the necessity of communication for democracy, and yet he often remains vague (maddeningly so) as to what shape such communication should take. While this would seem to limit his usefulness for rhetoricians, the opposite has proven true. As scholars of rhetoric, we now find ourselves in the midst of a renaissance in studies of Dewey. Trained Capacities: John Dewey, Rhetoric, and Democratic Practice seeks to both consolidate the gains made by such scholarship and further encourage rhetoricians' interest in Dewey's work. Namely, the various authors in this volume concern themselves with treating Dewey's writings as contributions to a broader “democratic culture” (2) of which rhetoric is a vital, animating component. In doing so, they offer a collective argument as to why Dewey is, and should remain, a rich resource for rhetorical inquiries into democracy, treated here as both a practice and a way of life.Trained Capacities is divided into three sections, each dealing with an aspect of Dewey's scholarly work and his career as a public intellectual. The essays in the first section, “Dewey and Democratic Practice,” look to Dewey's engagement with the perpetually important yet problematic subjects of science, philosophy, and religion—“the architectonic assumptions of democratic practice” (20). William Keith and Robert Danisch lead off this section with “Dewey on Science, Deliberation, and the Sociology of Rhetoric.” They begin by arguing that “Dewey does not offer a rhetorical pedagogy, a way of practicing rhetoric,” which is no surprise to rhetoricians familiar with Dewey's work (28). Rather, they argue, Dewey's unification of scientific thinking and democratic deliberation provides a “sociology of rhetoric,” or “a systematic account of the theoretical and normative ways in which social structures, institutions, and forms of individual agency are both guided by and constituted by communicative practices” (28). For Keith and Danisch, Dewey supplies a way of discussing the structures through which rhetorical action is made possible in the first place. Publics who are facing problems must attend to the ways in which their specific structural contingencies delimit the available means for developing democratic practices and arriving at sound judgment. Keith and Danish's essay is rich with ideas, and sure to provoke further discussion amongst pragmatist philosophers and rhetoricians alike.Philosophy and Rhetoric readers will want to pay special attention to Scott Stroud's contribution to Trained Capacities, “John Dewey, Kenneth Burke, and the Role of Orientation in Rhetoric.” We found it to be one of the high notes of this edited volume in that it goes beyond “the account of rhetoric that Dewey held (or failed to hold)” in order to craft a “Deweyan pragmatist rhetoric” (48). This is a worthwhile project that has been under way for some time, but Stroud does something too few have done by bringing Kenneth Burke into the mix. The result is enjoyable and provocative. Deweyan rhetoric scholars will likely have intuited the linkages between Burke's notion of orientation and Dewey's understanding of habituation on their own, and it is this intuition that Stroud fleshes out for the book's readers. Stroud argues that Deweyan morality is situational and that Burke helps us understand how these situations are constructed linguistically via grammars of motivations and purpose. Individuals' responses to these situations are habitual, as they have already been oriented to them by the language of their respective communities. However, that does not guarantee that the individual's habituated responses are helpful—sometimes they are trained incapacities.Stroud suggests that our various trained incapacities call out for reorientations. He reaches beyond Dewey's preference for respect and civility and embraces Burke's notion of impiety. Drawing on Richard Rorty's understanding of the strong poet, Stroud suggests that the poet and the ironist are the artful critics most suited to addressing public moral dilemmas. Importantly, such artistic provocations are not undertaken for their own sake but rather (in keeping with a Deweyan pragmatist rhetoric) to answer actual problematic situations. Finally, in true Deweyan form, Stroud insists that these artful incongruities should take place experimentally if the project of moral reorientation is to result in moral development.Scholars have long been fascinated with Dewey's conflicting views on religious faith, and they go to great pains to demonstrate that his democratic faith was closely tied to his religious beliefs. Paul Stob's contribution, “Minister of Democracy: John Dewey, Religious Rhetoric, and the Great Community” extends this project. He begins with Dewey's response to William Jennings Bryan's discourse during the Scopes trial, noting Dewey's frustration with Bryan's “divisive, antagonistic, intolerant religious rhetoric” (66). Is there any room for such “fire spitting” in Dewey's Great Community? For Dewey, religious rhetoric should tend toward inclusivity, and its uses should be governed by the kind of society it is likely to produce. Stob argues that rather than dismiss religious rhetoric outright, Dewey appreciated the power of religious symbols as evinced by his own use of religious rhetoric. Stob contends that in using religious rhetoric himself, Dewey did not simply co-opt religious symbols but also infused “public culture with a new religious purpose” (68) and direction. Stob argues that Dewey's own rhetorical project—one characterized by religious dissociation and democratic faith—cemented his reputation as a minister of democracy. In the end, “Dewey's gospel, like Bryan's gospel, relied on judgments of sin and evil, of hope and deliverance, of community and communion” (80). The key for Dewey was to dissociate religiously infused language from the kinds of dogmatism that breed division and instead turn it to the work of creating the Great Community.Part 2, “Dewey and His Interlocutors,” is of particular interest to rhetoricians since it shows Dewey practicing the sort of democratic culture that the book as a whole works to theorize. Essays by Jean Goodwin, Louise W. Knight, Keith Gilyard, and Walton Muyumba treat Dewey's public interactions with the familiar figures of Lippmann, Addams, Du Bois, and James Baldwin, respectively. While these authors tread familiar ground, they nonetheless shed new light upon the close connection between Dewey's interactions with his various interlocutors and his subsequent public pronouncements. Across these essays the message is clear: “indispensable opposition” (as Goodwin figures Lippmann) is of vital importance to a democratic culture animated by rhetorical practice. Such opposition is no small matter, and these essays demonstrate the mutual influence necessary to sustain a democratic public. However, for those who pick up Trained Capacities with the hope of learning more about either rhetoric or Dewey's philosophy, it is worth noting that the essays in this section tend to focus more on the respective interlocutor than Dewey himself. Rhetorical theory and philosophy take a backseat to history—albeit history that is fascinating and very well written.One exception to this section's overt focus on history is Jeremy Engels's “Dewey on Jefferson: Reiterating Democratic Faith in Times of War.” Engels investigates Dewey's rhetorical uses of Thomas Jefferson for the purpose of affirming the necessity of democratic faith. It was through his invocation of the historical Jefferson, Engels argues, that Dewey attempted to build “an ontological, prepolitical foundation that would keep Americans from straying too far from the democratic cause and that would keep democracy itself from transforming into something else entirely” (94). Engels supports this claim by supplying a fascinating, though necessarily brief, genealogy of Jeffersonian tropes in American democratic theory (which surfaced in a variety of forms throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries). Engels's primary purpose in doing so is to demonstrate the importance of history, and its rhetorical translation into new situations, when responding to antidemocratic challenges. In Engels's telling, Dewey's democratic faith was beset by a “crisis of war and exception” (103) not unlike our own. He responded by turning to Jefferson's writings, seeing in them a moral foundation for a lasting democratic faith. The challenge for rhetorical theorists today is to understand “how best to render democratic faith to the jaded ears of a postmodern generation” (103), a particularly salient problem for citizens struggling with the prospects of a seemingly endless war on terror. No easy answers are given, but the lesson is clear: attending to Dewey's rhetoric of democratic faith better equips us, immersed as we are in our in our own conflict-laden politics, to confront the challenges of crisis and war that necessarily and tragically lurk at the margins of democratic culture.The essays in section 2 serve as a powerful reminder that Dewey's contributions to both democratic theory and rhetoric were at their most robust when they reflected his engagements with equally committed interlocutors. As Knight states, summarizing the outcome of Dewey and Jane Addams's disagreements over the First World War, “Addams had learned from Dewey and experience, and Dewey had learned from Addams and experience. Their debate over World War I illustrates how they applied their ideas of pragmatism to their own lives as well as a point made often in this book: that when, over time, debate turns into shared inquiry, there is mutual learning on both sides” (121).Though Dewey did not directly engage in rhetorical theorizing, his work nonetheless affirms the social necessity of rhetoric for the vitality of a democratic society. This point is particularly evident when we turn to Dewey's work on education, which is taken up in the third section of the book. Evincing concern for the ways in which Dewey's philosophy can be applied to rhetorical pedagogy, the essays in this section demonstrate that practice is the central link between Dewey's pragmatism and “experimental” methods of rhetorical instruction designed to inculcate democratic values. As Nathan Crick observes in “Rhetoric and Dewey's Experimental Pedagogy,” such an “experimental attitude … is not merely one facet of democracy; its cultivation within a public is the culmination of democratic social life itself” (186). In short, as students are given lease to test ideas through rhetorical interaction, their capacity for healthy skepticism, self-reliant inquiry, and other critical tools necessary for sustained democratic practices increase exponentially. As Donald Jones is quick to point out, encouraging this type of rhetorical engagement is no easy task for the teacher. Nonetheless, such an experimental attitude is necessary for the building and maintenance of a truly democratic culture.To be clear, Trained Capacities is not concerned with crafting a clear narrative in which Dewey's work is transformed into rhetorical theory, nor one in which Dewey is treated as a rhetorician. Rather, Trained Capacities moves beyond such strict binaries—“Dewey and Rhetoric,” or “Dewey as Rhetorician”—and instead treats his pragmatism, public engagement, and commitment to education as equally valuable components of an overarching faith in democratic culture. Central to, and constitutive of, such a democratic culture is the practice and teaching of rhetoric. It goes without saying that such a broad, sweeping project is bound to miss some things, to focus too much on others, and to appeal to a variety of readers from all over the intellectual spectrum. Even so, Philosophy and Rhetorics's readers will want to read Trained Capacities, which is a welcome contribution to studies of pragmatism and rhetorical theory. The individual chapters, each with their various strengths and weaknesses, work in concert to create the beginnings of a Great Community of Dewey scholarship.