12 6
PARTISAN REVIEW
son who starts as a replacement child, who should never have been
born: his older brother, John Dewey, was terribly burned by falling into
a pot of hot liquid, a big vessel, and then, when his parents wrapped
him in bandages, the bandages combusted, and he burned to death in
front of their eyes. In the same week, in solace perhaps, they conceived
another child, whom they named John Dewey, after the first one. He
lived in the shadow of having
to
live a life for others, a ll of his life, and
made a great life out of it.
Victor Kestenbaum:
I hope your book wil l help
to
balance the great dis–
service that has been frequently donc to Dewey, not beginning with, but
let's say exemplified by Richard Hofstadtcr in
Anti-Intellectllalism in
American Life.
He purports to show how Dewey's educational philoso–
phy contributed to anti-intc ll ectua lism, and says, hefore I do that, let me
give you an account of the esscntial argument of Dewey's philosophy of
education. This he proceeds to do in three paragraphs.
Jay Martin:
One thing that gives mc hope is that half of his works were
written after the age of sixty. And he wrote forty-eight volumes, so that's
a lot of work. When he is around seventy, he says, " I am beginning
really to see what I was after all this time." He was growing and grow–
ing continuously. The great work, I think, is his
Theory of Vall/ation,
a
logical theory of inquiry written toward the end of his life. At the end
of his life, at the age of ninety-two, he wrote a vast plan to rework the
whole history of his thinking. This is a great guy.
Igor Webb:
I just want to make an observation about why there are so
many memoirs, and
to
relate realism
to
shame. It seems
to
risk hanality
to
say that realism depend!> on the kind of plot which is optimistic and
maybe even positivistic, and certainly entangled with the Enlighten–
ment; and that our cxperience in the twentieth ccntury, in particular
since we were speaking so much of ./ewish expcriencc, has been
to
blow
all of that optimism, and all the failed gods of our century right out of
the water-and that one of our most powerful reactions
to
that is
shame. We are ashamed to have helieved, and we arc ashamcd, in par–
ticular, of what that bclief created, and we are ashamcd of our not being
able
to
act or to speak out in protest, and we are even ashamed vicari–
ously. And we hope
to
redeem ourselves hy expressing our shame, one
of the best means of which is thc memoir; and, of course, the exprcssion
of shame in the memoir, famously, includes shamelessness, which is a
piquant part of so many mcmoirs.
