SOURCE: "Democracy and the Individual: To What Extent is Dewey's Reconstruction Nietzsche's Self-Overcoming?" in Philosophy Today, Vol. 41, No. 2, Summer, 1997, pp. 299-312.

[In the following essay, Sullivan finds similarities between Dewey's esthetics and the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche.]

The mere combination of the names of John Dewey and Friedrich Nietzsche in the title of an essay might offend some readers. Many of the scholars of American pragmatism I have met view Nietzsche as just one more of those Continental, postmodern philosophers whose work, while perhaps stylish and currently en vogue, contributes little of value to philosophy because the issues with which they concern themselves in no way connect with the lives of the most people. The reaction of many scholars of Continental philosophy I know to American pragmatism has been to dismiss it as concerned only with "utility" narrowly conceived, e.g., with the usefulness of an idea for making money, ensuring that parking places are available at work, securing good health care, etc.¹ I do not want to suggest that members of the two philosophical camps are always or necessarily antagonistic toward one another—certainly there are some who find the intersection of Continental philosophy and American pragmatism to be fruitful.² Nonetheless, the relationship between scholars of American pragmatism and Continental philosophy is often cool, if not, at times, openly hostile.

Thus to claim, as I will here, that Dewey and Nietzsche have much in common and, furthermore, that the work of Dewey continues and perhaps even improves upon that of Nietzsche probably seems at best provocative, at worst ridiculous.³ After all, the principal aim of Dewey's work seems to be to support and promote everything Nietzsche abhorred: a humanistic, liberal democracy that has the goal of helping humans find ways to eliminate suffering in their lives. As an acquaintance at a recent meeting of the APA remarked, connecting Nietzsche and American pragmatist William James might be plausible, but not Nietzsche and Dewey. A friend and Nietzsche scholar even went so far as to claim that Dewey's pragmatist is Nietzsche's "last man."

Indeed, with only a glance, Dewey's program of pragmatic democracy does appear much like that of the "levelers" described by Nietzsche in Beyond Good And Evil and the "last," or "ultimate," man described by Zarathustra:

These falsely so-called "free spirits"—being eloquent and prolifically scribbling slaves of the democratic taste and its "modern ideas"; they are all human beings without solitude. . . . What they would like to strive for with all their powers is the universal green-pasture happiness of the herd, with security, lack of danger, comfort, and an easier life for everyone. . . .⁴

The earth has become small, and upon it hops the Ultimate Man, who makes everything small. . . . "We have discovered happiness," say the Ultimate Men and blink. They have left the places where living was hard: for one needs warmth. . . . They still quarrel, but they soon make up—otherwise indigestion would result.⁵

The levelers and last men are primarily characterized by their inability to overcome themselves. They shun the danger, pain and turmoil of the sacrifice of themselves that is necessary for the birth of the Übermensch. They are not strong enough to produce greatness out of themselves, and so they make virtues out of their weakness and call rest, peace, and security humanity's ultimate happiness.⁶

If it is true that Dewey's pragmatism excludes self-transformation and extols the "virtues" of uninterrupted calmness and security, then Dewey indeed offers the democratic ideals of the last man. However, as we will see, Dewey's pragmatist is much closer to Nietzsche's free spirit than to the last man, and Dewey's promotion of democracy need not obscure this connection. The democracy that Nietzsche rejects is not the same democracy that Dewey endorses.⁷ Dewey's democratic pragmatism is characterized by what Dewey calls reconstruction, and reconstruction, particularly as applied to the self, is a type of self-transformation remarkably similar to the selfovercoming described by Nietzsche.⁸

My exploration of the connections between Nietzsche and Dewey will be composed of the following four parts. First, I will briefly review Nietzsche's self-overcoming, followed by a more detailed examination of Dewey's reconstruction.⁹ Then I will explore the similarities of Dewey's reconstruction and conception of the self as organism and Nietzsche's self-overcoming and conception of the self as body. Finally, I will return to the topic of democracy and find that the question of the irreconcilability of Nietzsche and Dewey's differences regarding democracy turns on the issue of Nietzsche's individualism. If a philosopher who is a "cultural physician" conceives the individual as atomistic (as Nietzsche appears to do), then it is possible for him or her to "cure" the culture by aristocratically caring for just a few individuals. However, if one conceives the individual as having fluid boundaries between it and others in its society (as Dewey does), then the cultural physician must democratically try to cure all individuals in the culture. If Nietzsche's individual is not atomistic (and, I will argue, we should hesitate to conclude that it is), then Nietzsche must abandon his aristocratic approach for a (Deweyan-style) democratic one so that his goal of great cultural health in the West might be reached. Dewey's democracy is not necessarily opposed to, but instead can be seen as complementing and even improving upon Nietzsche's philosophy of self-overcoming.¹⁰

NIETZSCHE AND SELF-OVERCOMING

To understand self-overcoming best, we must remember that for Nietzsche, the self is bodily and multiple—or, rather, because the self is bodily, it is multiple. To claim that the self is the body is not to say that "spirit" and "consciousness" do not exist, but rather that they are (merely) out-growths and instruments of the many drives and affects of the body and thus are secondary to the body.¹¹ Through these instruments, the body organizes and simplifies its plurality to produce conscious thought. Or, we might say, conscious thought is precisely the organization and simplification of plurality, one particular perspective of the body and its multiplicity.¹² The multiplicity of the body is unified, but this unity is not the elimination of multiplicity.¹³ Rather, the body produces a functional unity, a temporary organization of itself in the form of an alignment of its drives that will be renegotiated again and again. We may continue to talk of the "soul," but only if we acknowledge that it is no mysterious immortal essence but instead the changing "social structure of the drives and the affects,"¹⁴ that is, the behaviors of and relations between the various bodily instincts.¹⁵

The shifting plurality of the "unified" self helps explain how self-overcomingis indeed self-overcoming. Selfovercoming is the "law of life:" "all great things bring about their own destruction through an act of self-overcoming."¹⁶ To bring about one's own destruction means that self-overcoming is not done to one by something other but is something done to oneself. One destroys what one is now to make possible the creation of the new. That which must self-overcome will be the power that fuels its self-overcoming. Because the self is a plurality and not merely the one drive or affect that dominates and gives the self its "character," the self contains within itself the possibility of a reorganization of drives, producing a new configuration of the "soul."¹⁷ For example, our old values are the very means by which the new will be produced.¹⁸ It is our herd-like virtues, such as chastity, poverty and humility, that can provide the energy and discipline that make possible their own self-overcoming.¹⁹

The possibilities for reconfiguration of the "unity" of the self are infinite, and thus self-overcoming is never complete. In Zarathustra's words, "life itself told me this secret: 'Behold,' it said, T am that which must overcome itself again and again."²⁰ While self-overcoming is a goal that Nietzsche holds out for those who are strong enough for it, it is not a goal in the sense that it can ever be finally and completely achieved. It is not something to be done once only, but rather again and again. This is why life tells Zarathustra that it is both a goal and "conflict of goals."²¹ Self-overcoming conflicts with the idea of goals because it interrupts all goals by requiring that they eventually self-overcome, i.e., sacrifice themselves for other, new "goals."

DEWEY AND RECONSTRUCTION

While Dewey never uses the term "self-overcoming," he sounds remarkably similar to Zarathustra in Art as Experience when Zarathustra speaks of the role of Untergang in self-overcoming.²² Dewey writes:

There is... an element of undergoing, of suffering in its large sense, in every experience. Otherwise there would be no taking in of what preceded. For "taking in" in any vital experience is something more than placing something on top of consciousness over what was previously known. It involves reconstruction which may be painful.²³

According to Dewey, reconstruction is a transaction between self and world in which there is a "yielding of the self'²⁴ to that which is "taken in." In and through experience, the self remakes itself and, in the process, its environment is remade as well.

To further our understanding of Dewey's notion of reconstruction, we must first realize that for Dewey, the self is an organism made up of habits and impulses. Impulses are "blind dispersive burst[s] of . . . energy,"²⁵ "something primitive, yet loose, undirected, initial,"²⁶ which push us in various and often conflicting directions. They are much like what Nietzsche refers to as the body's plurality of drives and affects and are that which we and Nietzsche often call "instincts." Dewey prefers "impulse" to "instinct" because he believes the latter is too heavily laden with the connotation of necessary and definite organization, which impulses do not have. Impulses can be organized and unified, but in and of themselves, they are chaotic and purposeless.

Habits are that which provide impulses with direction; habits are the acquired patterns of activity that organize the energy of impulses. Already we can see that, for Dewey, just as "impulse" means something different from our usual use of the word, so does "habit." Habits are much different from "bad habits," and they are not, as we often think, restricted to repetition and routine. Habits are dispositions to ways that an organism responds to its world.²⁷ For example, when I sit down in a chair, my body responds to the chair with a particular posture, say, slumping. This posture is a readiness to act in a certain fashion whenever I am presented with a situation that calls forth a response from me and thus is one of my habits.

We should note two important points in conjunction with this example: first, my bodily posture is not a conscious response to my world. Habits are more the style that an organism has than specific acts it chooses. Second, while many habits, such as slumping, are physiological, habits are mental as well. People have particular methods or styles of thinking about life, approaching and solving problems, and so on. But this second point must not be construed as affirming a firm distinction between body and mind, the physical and the mental. Like posture, thinking is a particular way an organism organizes impulses and replies to its world. Human rationality is not something located in a realm apart from habit and the body. It is "embedded" in the organism in that it is the organism's attainment of a harmonious organization of its many impulses and habits.²⁸ It is our failure to realize rationality's relation to habit that has produced our tradition's division of mind and body. To claim that thought is a habit not only eliminates a sharp mind-body distinction, it also insists that much of our thought is not conscious. Certainly conscious thought exists, but it is only a small fraction of the thinking that humans do. Habits, both of the body and thought, are that which fund our conscious thoughts and ideas. This means that a way of thinking that is not ingrained in habit is ineffective and will be betrayed by thinking methods that are so ingrained.²⁹

We can see this point most clearly in the above example of body posture and, in particular, how I might change my posture. We tend to assume that my failure to sit up straight is a failure of reason or "will power." But Socrates was wrong when he said that to do the good, all one needed was knowledge of the good. Conscious knowledge of what good posture is, is not sufficient for the attainment of good posture. By itself, it will help me sit differently for a while, but differently as "only a different kind of badly."³⁰ After a brief spell of my different kind of poor posture, such as awkwardly over-arching my back in order to (over)compensate for my tendency to slump, I will likely revert to my usual bad way of sitting (i.e., slumping). The key to achieving good posture is not to consciously think my way to good posture but to find an act that keeps me from falling into my usual bad posture and that initiates the development of a new, improved posture.³¹ That is, I must find a way to change my habits to change my bad posture. To understand just how habits might be changed and thus how the self might reconstruct itself, we need to look more closely at the relationship of habit to impulse in the human organism.

I have said that impulses are the raw energies that are organized by our habits. As these raw energies, impulses are also that which makes the change of habits possible. "Impulses are the pivots upon which the re-organization of activities turn, they are agencies of deviation, for giving new directions to old habits and changing their quality."³² The impulse of fear, for example, may become either cowardice, bravery, skepticism, respect for authority, or something else, depending on the way that fear is woven together with other impulses and existing habits.³³ But how exactly is impulse the impetus for change if habit is always organizing impulses in its own image?³⁴ That is, if my habits have developed such that I always become cowardly when scared, how can my impulse of fear help give that habit "new direction?"

We seem to have stumbled into a vicious circle in which impulses, once habituated, work only to further reinforce one's habits. How can habits change if "habits once formed perpetuate themselves, by acting unremittingly upon the native stock of abilities?"³⁵ To see our way out of this circle, we must understand that the self is not an atomistic, but a culturally constructed self. When Dewey defines habit as a readiness to act in response to the world, he is in effect claiming that there is no self separate from the world in which it exists. Dewey compares habits to physiological functions like breathing and digesting not only to emphasize the importance of the body in his account, but also to argue that habits emerge as a product of the interaction between organism and environment. For example, bodies take things from their environment (food), which are integrated into and transform the body (nourishment), and the body in turn releases things back into the environment (excrement), which are used to transform the environment (fertilizing the soil, which produces more food). Likewise, "breathing is an affair of the air as truly as of the lungs," which means that "habits are ways of using and incorporating the environment in which the latter has its say as surely as the former."³⁶

By "environment," Dewey not only means things like food and air. Because society and culture are human environments no less than nature is, a human organism's interaction with its physical environment is always social and cultural. An individual's habits affect social customs, and social customs, which are "widespread uniformities of habit,"³⁷ in turn shape the personal customs and habits of individuals. Thus, because the self interacts with its environment, new material is always "entering" the self, disrupting and challenging the established self. When the organism is in a fairly stable, unchanging environment, habits can indeed become ruts in which change is nearly impossible. But when the organism finds itself in a new or unusual situation, the old habits no longer function smoothly as they did in the old situation, and the organism's peaceful coordination of impulses and habits is thrown into disarray. It is at this point, in the midst of tension, conflict and confusion, that growth and change can occur. The organism must create new patterns by which to organize its impulses, new ways of responding to its environment, which disrupt old habits and lay the groundwork for new ones. These new habits, in turn, contribute to the shaping and reshaping of larger patterns, or customs, that exist in the organism's cultural environment.

We should not confuse the interdependency of self and environment with a determinism of the self. While voluntarists might charge that the Deweyan self is determined by its environment's construction of it and thus unfree, in fact, "the self acts as well as undergoes, and its undergoings are not impressions stamped upon an inert wax but depend upon the way the organism reacts and responds."³⁸ The relationship between self and environment is that of a creative cycle. Change in the environment motivates change in the organism, which (because the organism is part of and not set apart from its environment) changes the environment in return, which stimulates yet more change in the organism, and so on. This cycle is best represented by the figure of a spiral since the organism never returns to exactly the same "place" it was before a cycle of change began.³⁹ The interaction between organism and environment produces a new organism and a new environment. While we have been emphasizing one half of the cycle—the reconstruction of the organism—we cannot fully or adequately understand self-reconstruction unless we include the other half—the reconstruction of the environment. For Dewey, reconstruction is at once the reconstruction of the self and the reconstruction of society.

SELF-TRANSFORMATION IN NIETZSCHE AND DEWEY

For Dewey, the self is a plurality of impulses, organized and unified by its conscious and unconscious habits and constructed by means of interaction with others. The self becomes artist, sculpting herself through her transactions with her environment: "it is the office of art in the individual person, to compose differences, to do away with isolations and conflicts among the elements of our being, to utilize oppositions among them to build a richer personality/'⁴⁰ Yet, as is the case for Nietzsche, the created unity of the self does not eliminate the self's multiplicity. According to Dewey, selfhood is always in the making because of "the relative fluidity and diversity of the constituents of selfhood."⁴¹ "There is no one ready-made self behind activities," and in fact, "any self is capable of including within itself a number of inconsistent selves, of unharmonized dispositions."⁴² The embodiment of the Deweyan organism ensures that the organism is always a plurality, and the unity of the Deweyan organism occurs as a temporary harmony of impulses and desires that will be interrupted and reconfigured.⁴³ Like a good artist, the "good" self is one who blends plurality and unity such that her "work" has the capacity "to hold together within itself the greatest variety and scope of opposed elements."⁴⁴

As the earlier image of the spiral suggests, self-reconstruction includes a continuity between the old self and the new self, just as self-overcoming does. It is out of an organism's old habits that new ones are created.⁴⁵ As we have seen, to create new habits is to reconfigure the plurality of impulses of the self, allowing for new expressions of impulses through new organizations of them. An organism does not "magically" create new habits that have no connection to the old. That we often think change occurs in this way is evidence of our stubborn insistence upon the "free will."⁴⁶ Habits, not free will, effect change. Without a corresponding change in habits, any decision made by the "will" is ineffectual. In that sense, habits are our will.⁴⁷

Nor should we think that because impulses are fresh while habits are sometimes stale, impulse by itself effects change. A particular combination of habit and impulse must be in place for change to occur because habits without impulses are too rigid and impulses without habit are too chaotic to effect self-reconstruction. "Impulse is a source, an indispensable source, of liberation; but only as it is employed in giving habits pertinence and freshness does it liberate power."⁴⁸ By themselves, impulses are unintelligent, merely "a surging, explosive discharge."⁴⁹ They may instigate change, but it is habit that must carry out the hard work of making the change.⁵⁰ It is only when channeled, directed, "sublimated" that impulses can become creative and intelligent forces that furnish the dynamic to carry out an organism's projects.⁵¹ The image of the spiral is also helpful for our understanding of selfreconstruction because it indicates a process without end. Reconstruction, like self-overcoming, is not a one-time procedure. It has no final goal of completion because to be alive is, to use imagery common to both Dewey and Nietzsche, to be continually growing, putting out new "leaves" and dropping the old.⁵² To what end is this growth? For Dewey, as for Nietzsche, the "end" of growth is growth itself; there are no final, fixed ends, no point at which the organism is finished changing and reconstructing itself.⁵³ "If it is better to travel than arrive, it is because traveling is a constant arriving, while arrival that precludes further traveling is most easily attained by going to sleep or dying.⁵⁴

Dewey insists that such "traveling" is important for human organisms and, furthermore, that welcoming such adventures is the sign of a particularly healthy and vibrant organism. Our account of reconstruction has been incomplete up to this point because it has implied that "traveling" occurs only because an unstable environment throws a reluctant organism onto the highway of reconstruction. Unfortunately, it is true that many people undergo self-reconstruction only because their environment forces them into it. And because so much of many people's lives is dull, uninterrupted routine, many people grow very little. Because they are still physically alive, we must acknowledge that a minimal amount of reconstruction does occur in their lives.⁵⁵ But since "the process of life is variation,"⁵⁶ it is not too much of an exaggeration to say that on the continuum of life, they are very near the end that is (literal and figurative) death.

It is these reluctant "travelers" that are very similar to Nietzsche's last man. They want sleep, peace, and rest. Conflict, turmoil and upheaval are viewed by them as only extremely painful disruptions and never also as opportunities for new growth. Strife is something to be avoided at all costs, not something to be welcomed for the change that is made possible by it. But not all avoid self-reconstruction. The main difference between those who shun and those who welcome reconstruction is in the type of habits that each has. Habits can be either unintelligent and routine or intelligent and artful.⁵⁷ The former are enslaved, stuck in old ruts. They are mechanical, inflexible and stubbornly resist any sort of change. The latter, on the other hand, are flexible and plastic. Much like Nietzsche's free spirits, those with artful habits see resistance, obstacles, and the resulting tension within themselves as enriching elements and moments.

As is the case for Nietzsche, the artist and the scientist are models for and often instances of Dewey's free-spirited pragmatist.⁵⁸ Their creativity and experimentalism are styles of living and thinking—habits—that ideally all organisms would have in all aspects of their lives.⁵⁹ In learning habits, these organisms have learned the habit of on-going learning and growth.⁶⁰ Dewey, like Nietzsche, refers to the child when describing what he hopes humanity might become: "for certain moral and intellectual purposes adults must become as little children."⁶¹ While Dewey's uses of the figure of the child may be more literal than Nietzsche's, Dewey also finds in the child a type of life in which originality and playfulness have not been tamed or transformed into seriousness.⁶² According to Dewey, childhood "remains a standing proof of a life wherein growth is normal not an anomaly, activity a delight not a task, and where habit-forming is an expansion of power not its shrinkage."⁶³

However, Dewey's use of the imagery of childhood does not signal a brand-new beginning for the organism in which the organism is free to adopt any belief or habit at will.⁶⁴ The organism is never a "clean slate" on which a new picture is painted. Recalling that old habits are the material for the creation of new habits, to insist upon change is not to abandon the past for the future but to insist, upon the alteration of the past in order to make possible the future.⁶⁵ Dewey's pragmatist is a questioning experimenter who lives knowing that when "we once start thinking no one can guarantee where we shall come out,"⁶⁶ but she also realizes that habits are the medium through which change occurs. At any one time, some habits must be taken for granted in order for the organism's project of self-questioning to be possible.⁶⁷ Total plasticity of the self does not turn the pragmatist into a more free, more spontaneous adventurer but instead into chaotic, ineffectual pulp.⁶⁸

Zarathustra, on the other hand, tells us that the child is "a new beginning" and "a first motion,"⁶⁹ suggesting that for Nietzsche, the self overcomes herself entirely all at once. Many of Nietzsche's other descriptions of the free spirit make it easy to think that his experimentalism calls everything into question at the same time. In The Gay Science, the free spirit is one who, having not just left behind but destroyed the secure land she once stood on, is now afloat on the ocean, amazed and excited (as well as somewhat scared) at the vast openness of her new seas.⁷⁰ In that work, Nietzsche also tells us that the degree that one needs something firm to believe in is an indication of one's weakness.⁷¹ Even more striking is the description of the habitual as a net of spider webs in Human, All Too Human. These webs, which we have spun around ourselves, turn into cords that choke and bind, so much so that we are dying because of them. For that reason, the free spirit "hates all habituation and rules" and thus rips apart the net that surrounds him.⁷² And Nietzsche's admonition against getting trapped by some belief or conviction is repeated later in his passage on "stuckness" in section 41 of Beyond Good and Evil, as well as in several passages in The Anti-Christ.⁷³

These various passages suggest another, related difference between Nietzsche and Dewey. Nietzsche's free spirit not only welcomes the turmoil that accompanies self-overcoming, she seems deliberately to disrupt any tranquillity in her life in an effort to ensure that she never becomes stuck. Any need for security appears to mark one as a member of the herd and thus is something to be overcome. Unlike Nietzsche's free spirit, however, Dewey's pragmatist does not seem to seek out turmoil. This is explained by Dewey's claim that life is very difficult for organisms if there is no structure or stability in their world. Because the world is precarious, unstable and thus provides little stability apart from human control of it, humans seek out the stable, organized and unified.⁷⁴ In the midst of the turmoil of self-reconstruction, what is sought after is not ongoing fluctuation but the restoration of the stability of self and environment, habit and impulse. And in the midst of such stability, in which activity and belief are confident and undisturbed, the human organism tends merely to "march on," enjoying his uninterrupted life.⁷⁵

The pragmatista restriction of experimentation and her appreciation for security may make her seem more like a member of the herd than a free spirit, but only until we remember the positive role that Nietzsche tells us habit plays in his life, and thus, presumably, in the life of a free spirit. After explaining that he loves brief habits but hates enduring ones, Nietzsche says that "most intolerable, to be sure, and the terrible par excellence would be for me a life entirely devoid of habits, a life that would demand perpetual improvisation."⁷⁶ Walter Kaufmann is correct when he says that this passage indicates that Nietzsche holds that "some stability and temporary equilibrium are needed to permit the concentration of all mental and emotional resources on the most important problems."⁷⁷ Questioning everything all at once would not produce a playful irreverence but instead a chaotic anarchy. To have perpetually to improvise means that one never has the luxury of a directed focus, which is what makes all projects and creations possible.

While we often think of the artist as one who creates in a frenzied, uncontrolled moment of inspiration, Nietzsche tells us that her creation is made possible by strict and subtle obedience to a "thousandfold laws," which order and give form to the creation.⁷⁸ Those "laws" are the artist's habits. They are the order and pattern that the artist gives to her creation, not as a result of conscious decision (hence our use of the term "inspiration") but because they have become the way by which the artist handles her brush, her paints, her values, and her virtues. In the midst of creating, she does not, indeed must not question those particular laws for they are that by which her creation is possible. Without those laws, vulgarity, not artistry is the result. "This is the first preliminary schooling in spirituality: not to react immediately to a stimulus, but to have the restraining, stock-taking instincts in one's control. .. . All unspirituality, all vulgarity, is due to the incapacity to resist a stimulus."⁷⁹ To recognize the need for laws or habits is not to say that they are never to be questioned. Nietzsche, like Dewey, grants nothing permanent immunity to questioning. But, like Dewey, Nietzsche does qualify the experimentalism of free-spiritedness: we cannot question everything at once.

There is no Archimedean point for either philosopher. The creative free spirit as much as the creative pragmatist must have a place of stability within her fluid and shifting self from which she can "move" herself. But this place of stability is no more permanent for Dewey than it is for Nietzsche. While restoration of the stability of the self is a "goal" for the pragmatist, it is not a final goal because it is soon surpassed by the next unsettling of the self. Stability and security are important to the pragmatist, but only as part of the whole of rhythm of life, which is a movement from disruption to recovery, to disruption again, and so on.⁸⁰ By itself, "love for security, translated into a desire not to be disturbed and unsettled, leads to dogmatism,"⁸¹ not pragmatism.

Does this then mean that Dewey's pragmatist, like Nietzsche's free spirit, has "a desire to be disturbed and unsettled" and thus seeks out turmoil? Dewey is ambiguous on this point. We have seen why it seems that the pragmatist does not have such a desire. Significantly, Dewey characterizes "scrupulous" thinking (as distinct from "ordinary" thinking) as thinking which "takes delight" and "enjoys" disruption,⁸² which implies that pragmatism welcomes but not necessarily pursues strife. However, he also claims that the artist "cultivates" "moments of tension and resistance" and that the scientific person "does not rest in [resolution]" but "passes on to another problem using an attained solution only as a stepping stone from which to set on foot further inquiries,"⁸³ which suggests that the pragmatist does deliberately bring upheaval into her life.

I will not be able to resolve this ambiguity here. While Nietzsche and Dewey may differ in their views on strife, because they both value and promote an openness and questioning attitude toward even that which is most precious to us, the difference is perhaps one of degree only. Both appreciate the important role that both upheaval and stability play in life. Without periods of turmoil and chaos, the self would never remake itself and thus would stagnate and die. And without periods of harmony, the self would never be able to concentrate its energies into its projects, making creation impossible. Albeit, perhaps with different emphases upon self-destruction, both Nietzsche and Dewey establish a balance in the self and in the process of self-transformation between strife and calm, chaos and harmony, plurality and unity.

NIETZSCHE, DEWEY, AND DEMOCRACY

In exploring the connections between Dewey's reconstruction and Nietzsche's self-overcoming, I have suggested that there are great similarities between the two philosophers' visions of what humanity could become. Like Nietzsche, Dewey presents continuous self-transformation as a "goal" for human beings. Dewey's pragmatism is about growth and the creation of meaning and value in life, not about mere practicality, efficiency or commonsensical business practices, as it is often misunderstood to mean.⁸⁴ Dewey, as much as Nietzsche, holds out hope for the regeneration and transfiguration of Western culture through the greatness of individuals.⁸⁵

However, in Nietzsche's case, we must add that selfovercoming can be a "goal" only for certain individuals because, according to Nietzsche, the masses are too weak to self-overcome. In fact, most people are so sickly that Nietzsche has already declared them virtually dead: too weary to die and thus living on in sepulchers.⁸⁶ Because a "pathos of distance which grows out of the ingrained difference between strata" is crucial for those who would self-overcome,⁸⁷ the sick should care for the sick, leaving the healthy ones free to pursue their "great health." To associate with the rotting corpses of the herd is for the free spirit to risk becoming fatally ill herself.

The sickliness of most people explains why Nietzsche's books are written only for the very few, that is, for fellow free spirits.⁸⁸ Nietzsche explains that "all the nobler spir its and tastes select their audience when they wish to communicate; and choosing that, one at the same time erects barriers against 'the others.'"⁸⁹ In contrast to the exclusivity of Nietzsche's audience, the audience for Dewey's books is everyone. This is not to say that Dewey's books were not written for academic philosophers—many of them were—but rather that they are addressed to everyone in that all people have the potential for self-transformation. While Dewey admits that much of us avoid self-transformation and thus might even grant that some of us are closer to dead than alive,⁹⁰ every person is at least minimally capable of self-reconstruction. The difference between Dewey's and Nietzsche's intended audiences is an important one. "Books for all the world are always foul-smelling books,"⁹¹ according to Nietzsche, and thus from his perspective, the fact that Dewey does not limit his audience only seems to prove that Dewey's philosophy of self-reconstruction is tainted by the uncleanliness of the last man. Dewey's appeal to everyone is irreconcilable with Nietzsche's aristocratic disdain for the herd, making reconstruction and self-overcoming, for all their similarities, crucially different.

To be fair to Dewey, it must be acknowledged that reconstruction is not meant to reduce all to the level of the lowest but to lift even the lowest to the level of the experimental and daring pragmatist. In that sense, Dewey's democracy is a democracy of aristocrats. But this means that Dewey has transformed aristocracy into a club to which all can belong. Thus, Deweyan aristocracy eliminates the hierarchical distance between types of people, something that Nietzsche insisted was necessary to generate the tension needed to propel humanity upward into the greatness of the Übermensch. There seems to be no way to avoid a fundamental clash between the Catholicism of Dewey's reconstruction and the elitism of Nietzsche's self-overcoming.

The issue of Dewey and Nietzsche's different views of human nature is at heart a conflict between the social philosophy of the former and the individualism of the latter. While Dewey wanted to change social institutions so that individuals could transform themselves, Nietzsche thought free spirits had a future only if they separated themselves from society. When the issue is recast in this way, however, it becomes clear that the fundamental difference between Dewey and Nietzsche's ideas about self-transformation is in their differing conceptions of individuality. As we have seen, for Dewey, the individual is transactional, not atomistic. Instead of the "old" individualism that strictly divides the individual from society, Dewey's "new" individualism holds that the boundaries between the individual and society are always fluid.⁹² If Nietzsche's concept of individuality is fundamentally atomistic, then the differences between self-overeomingand reconstruction are indeed irreconcilable.

Nietzsche's endorsements of an "old"-style, radical individualism are too numerous and well known to repeat here. There is little in Nietzsche's corpus that explicitly encourages us to label his individualism "new."⁹³ However, perhaps implicit in Nietzsche's demand that we go beyond dualisms such as good and evil is an acknowledgment of lack of fundamental opposition between the dualism of individual and society. Also, Nietzsche's claim that a self is primarily a body implies at least a minimal commitment to a transactional self on his part if it is true that the body is only able to live and grow by means of its interactions with its environment. Furthermore, as Nietzsche's comments about the artist demonstrate, Nietzsche's call for a return to the body is not a demand that we "return to nature" in the sense of a "return" to an unbridled, "raw" world of instincts.⁹⁴ This suggests that Nietzsche does not subscribe to a sharp nature-culture division, which means he would agree with Dewey that the body never interacts with a purely "natural" environment. Thus Nietzsche's emphasis upon the body might ultimately translate into an implicit claim that the human body must and does interact with its social, as well as physical environment in order to live. If so, the boundaries between the individual and society cannot be rigid, impermeable ones for Nietzsche. This is not to claim that Nietzsche himself held that the boundaries are not rigid. Rather, it is to say that, given Nietzsche's emphasis upon the body, the boundaries should not be considered rigid. Whether Nietzsche fully thought through the implications of his "return to the body" will not be established here. However, if we think through his emphasis upon the body, we must abandon "old"-style, atomistic individualism.

While much more needs to be said in support of these suggestions and, in particular, the last claim, I will not be able to pursue the question of the nature of Nietzsche's individuality further.⁹⁵ However, we have reason to wonder if Nietzsche's individualism is closer to the "new" variety than his explicit remarks on the individual suggest. If Nietzsche's individual is transactional rather than atomistic, then Nietzsche must broaden the audience for his work if self-overcoming is to have a chance at success. Poor soil will only produce unhealthy plants. If one's social and cultural, as well as physical environments are important components in an individual's self-transformation, then they need to be as rich, vibrant, and diverse as possible. The environment becomes richest only if all the individuals in it are growing, enriching and transforming themselves. The more thriving individuals there are in society, the more rich the social environment for each individual. A rich environment offers individuals, in the form of other individuals, the greatest "diversity of stimuli" to which they must respond, thus promoting the greatest amount of disruption and subsequent growth on their part.⁹⁶ If the boundaries between Nietzsche's individual and society are fluid, then Nietzsche's refusal to include all people as candidates for self-transformation only depletes the soil in which his free spirit grows.

Dewey's philosophy is a social one not because he does not value the individual and not because he is too weak to maintain a height for his pragmatist to look down upon the masses, but because the pragmatist can only reach such heights if those around him attain them too. Democracy, for Dewey, is just such a community in which social structures are such that they encourage and even enable all to attain such heights. Dewey's democracy is like the spiral described above, in which growth of individuals leads to growth of the culture which produces even greater growth of individuals, and so on. And the spiral includes all individuals, even the weak "herd." Of course, if the individual is atomistic and thus must begin the process of self-transformation purely on her own, the weak individual will not have enough strength to do so and thus must be written off as a hopeless case. But if one holds that the self is transactional, no person necessarily need be considered incapable of reconstruction. Granted, changing habits such that growth itself is a habit will be difficult and take time, but changing social structures so that they encourage rather than discourage critical inquiry will begin the process of the spiral of change.⁹⁷

Whether Nietzsche can embrace Dewey's democracy ultimately becomes a question of the construction of the self for Nietzsche.⁹⁸ However, even if Nietzsche's individuality is atomistic, we have reason to believe that the democracy that Dewey promotes is not the "foul-smelling" democracy that Nietzsche scorns. As Dewey scholar Thomas Alexander puts it, Dewey's "democratic community takes itself experimentally and therefore artistically and intelligently."⁹⁹ Because of its experimentalism, Dewey's democracy perpetually disrupts and ideally eliminates the comfortable, unchallenging happiness of the last man. As Dewey puts it, "to 'make others happy' except through liberating their powers and engaging them in activities that enlarge the meaning of life is to harm them."¹⁰⁰ Dewey's democracy is so radical in its emphasis upon the continual growth and self-reconstruction of the individual that we can embrace it as a continuation of Nietzsche's own ideas about what a vibrant and flourishing culture should be. And if we reject atomistic individuality, Dewey's philosophy can even be considered an improvement of that of Nietzsche. Because Dewey explicitly acknowledges the interaction between individual and society, he is able to address both halves of the cycle of reconstruction. Rather than focus solely on changing the individual so that humanity might have a transformed future, Dewey gives us a double-barreled approach to transformation by demonstrating that change can and should start at once on the part of the individual and society.

No doubt Nietzsche and Dewey differ in many ways not addressed here and in which Deweyans might well profit from Nietzsche.¹⁰¹ However, the striking similarities between self-overcoming and reconstruction have shown us that exploration of the intersections of their work can be fruitful. Dewey once wrote that "ultimately there are but two philosophies. One of them accepts life and experience in all its uncertainty, mystery, doubt, and half-knowledge and turns that experience upon itself to deepen and intensify its own qualities."¹⁰² Reconstruction, as well as self-overcoming are examples of the philosophy Dewey describes. We could say that Dewey's pragmatist has recovered from the death of God because she welcomes the free-spirited experimentalism with life that comes from a rejection of our tradition's quest for certainty. For that reason, Nietzscheans should recognize a kindred spirit in Dewey's pragmatist.¹⁰³

NOTES

¹ Ted Honderich, ed., The Oxford Companion to Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995) notes a similar reaction to pragmatism on the part of Continental philosophers in the dictionary's entry on "pragmatism" (p. 712).

² See, for example, Vincent M. Colapietro, "The Vanishing Subject of Contemporary Discourse: A Pragmatic Response," The Journal of Philosophy 87 (1990): 644-55; Victor Kestenbaum, The Phenomenological Sense of John Dewey: Habit and Meaning (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1977); Mark Okrent, Heidegger's Pragmatism: Understanding, Being, and the Critique, of Metaphysics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988); Richard Rorty, "Overcoming the Tradition: Heidegger and Dewey," The Review of Metaphysics 30 (December 1976): 280-305; Sandra B. Rosenthal and Patrick L. Bourgeois, Mead and Merleau-Ponty: Toward a Common Vision (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991); R. W. Sleeper, "The Pragmatics of Deconstruction and the End of Metaphysics," in John J. Stuhr, ed., Philosophy and the Reconstruction of Culture (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), pp. 241-56; John J. Stuhr, "Can Pragmatism Appropriate the Resources of Postmodernism? A Response to Nielsen," Transactions of the Charles S. Pierce Society 29 (Fall 1993): 561-72; Michael A. Weinstein, The Wilderness and the City: American Classical Philosophy as a Moral Quest (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1982), especially chapter 7; Cornel West, "Nietzsche's Prefiguration of Postmodern American Philosophy," boundary 2 9 (Spring/Fall 1981): 241-69; Michael Zimmerman, "Dewey, Heidegger, and the Quest, for Certainty," Southwestern Journal of Philosophy 9 (Spring 1978): 87-95.

For discussions of the particular question of whether Nietzsche's epistemology and conception of truth are pragmatic, which I will not address in this essay, see Alfred L. Castle, "Dewey and Nietzsche: Their Alethiology Compared," Southwest Philosophical Studies 3 (April 1978): 25-29; Ken Gemes, "Nietzsche's Critique of Truth," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 52 (March 1992): 47-65; Max O. Hallman, "Nietzsche and Pragmatism," Kinesis 14 (Spring 1985): 63-78; Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche's Notebooks of the early 1870's, ed. and trans. Daniel Breazeale (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1979), pp. xxxi-xxxviii, and footnote 38 on page 17; George J. Stack, "Nietzsche's Influence on Pragmatic Humanism," Journal of the History of Philosophy 20 (October 1982): 369-406; John T. Wilcox, "A Note on Correspondence and Pragmatism in Nietzsche," international Studies in Philosophy 12 (Spring 1980): 77-80; John T. Wilcox, "Nietzsche's Epistemology: Recent American Discussions," International Studies in Philosophy 15 (Summer 1983): 67-77.

³ I have found only one instance of such a suggestion. See David Michael Levin, The Body's Recollection of Being: Phenomenological Psychology and the Deconstruction of Nihilism (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985), p. 230. Levin discusses Dewey's progress beyond Nietzsche (only) in the area of education.

⁴ Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1968), p. 44, emphasis in original. Hereafter cited as BGE. I will cite section numbers for all of Nietzsche's works except Thus Spoke Zarathustra, for which I will give section and page numbers.

⁵ Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Viking Penguin, Inc., 1969) 1:46. Hereafter cited as TSZ.

⁶ Friedrich Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals I, passim (in Basic Writings of Nietzsche). Hereafter cited as GM.

⁷ Stuhr, "Can Pragmatism Appropriate the Resources of Postmodernism?" p. 569.

⁸ My focus on the reconstruction of the self and selfovercoming of the self is not meant to imply that these concepts apply only to the self. Both concepts relate to much more in the work of Dewey and Nietzsche (e.g., society, morality and values); however, in this essay I will focus on their application to the self.

⁹ The reason for my unequal treatment of Nietzsche and Dewey in these first two sections is that I assume a contemporary audience more familiar with Nietzsche than Dewey.

¹⁰ At least, upon Nietzsche's philosophy prior to 1888, Nietzsche apparently rejected the notion of self-overcoming in the preface of his 1888 work The Case of Wagner (in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, p. 611). Nietzsche writes there, "If I were a moralist, who knows what I might call it [his fight against "Wagnerizing"]? Perhaps self-overcoming.—But the philosopher has no love for moralists. Neither does he love pretty words." However, whether this indeed means that he rejected self-overcoming is not clear since he goes on to describe his fight as a demand "to overcome his time in himself" and a requirement to "take sides against everything sick in [himself]" (ibid.)—descriptions which sound like a warring, destructive and creative multiplicity overcoming itself. In any case, Dewey's self-reconstruction can be profitably connected to Nietzsche's self-overcoming as described prior to 1888 in his main works.

¹¹ TSZ 1:61-62; Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1974), §333. Hereafter cited as GS.

¹² Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will To Power, ed. Walter Kaufmann, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, 1967), §518. Hereafter cited as WP.

¹³ Eric Blondel, Nietzsche: The Body and Culture, trans. Sean Hand (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), pp. 206-08.

¹⁴ BGE §12. See also WP §§490, 492.

¹⁵ For more on Nietzsche's self as embodied and multiplicitous, see Walter A. Brogan, "The Decentered Self: Nietzsche's Transgression of Metaphysical Subjectivity," The Southern Journal of Philosophy 29 (1991): 419-30; Daniel W. Conway, "Disembodied Perspectives: Nietzsche contra Rorty," in Nietzsche Studien, vol. 21 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1992), pp. 281-89; Michel Haar, "Heidegger and the Nietzschean 'Physiology of Art'" in David Farrell Krell and David Wood, eds. Exceedingly Nietzsche: Aspects of Contemporary Nietzsche-Interpretation (New York: Routledge, 1988), pp. 13-30; David Michael Levin, The Body's Recollection of Being (New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985), pp. 34-35; David Owen, "Nietzsche's Squandered Seductions: Feminism, the Body, and the Politics of Genealogy," in Keith Ansell-Pearson and Howard Caygill, eds., The Fate of the New Nietzsche (Brookfield, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 1993), pp. 189-209.

¹⁶ GM 111:27, emphasis added.

¹⁷ This also means that the self contains within itself the possibility of disorganization, chaos and decadence.

¹⁸TSZ 11:139.

¹⁹ GM 111:8. This is not to say that Nietzsche simply rejects these qualities when encouraging their self-overcoming. Rather, through their overcoming as ascetic virtues, they can become conditions for the strength and fruitfulness of the Übermensch.

²⁰ TSZ 11:138.

²¹Ibid.

²² See ibid., 1:44: "What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal; what can be loved in man is that he is a going-across [Übergang] and a down-going [untergang]. .. . I love those who do not first seek beyond the stars for reasons to go down [untergehen] and to be sacrifices: but who sacrifice themselves to the earth, that the earth may one day belong to the Superman [Übermensch]."

²³ John Dewey, Art as Experience in John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925-1953, vol. 10, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale and Edwardsville, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989), pp. 47-48. Hereafter cited as AE. While one of Dewey's main goals in this passage is to demonstrate that viewing artwork is just as creative and active a process as the production of a piece of art, his comments, and indeed the entire book, do not apply to the experience of viewing artwork only. They apply to all of experience because all of experience is a reconstructive interaction between self and world.

²⁴Ibid., p. 59.

²⁵ John Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct, in John Dewey: The Middle Works, 1899-1924, vol. 14, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale and Edwardsville, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988), p. 65. Hereafter cited as HNC.

²⁶Ibid., p. 75, note 1.

²⁷Ibid., p. 32.

²⁸Ibid., p. 136; John Dewey, Experience and Nature in John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925-1953, vol. 1, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale and Edwardsville, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988), p. 61. Hereafter cited as EN.

²⁹ HNC, p. 49.

³⁰Ibid., p. 24.

³¹Ibid., p. 28. For more on the relation of body and consciousness in Dewey's thought, see Bruce Wilshire, "Body-Mind and Subconsciousness: Tragedy in Dewey's Life and Work," in Philosophy and the Reconstruction of Culture: Pragmatic Essays after Dewey, pp. 257-72.

³² HNC, p. 67.

³³Ibid., p. 69.

³⁴Ibid., p. 88.

³⁵Ibid., p. 88.

³⁶Ibid., p. 15.

³⁷Ibid., p. 43.

³⁸ AE, p. 251.

³⁹Ibid., p. 19. Dewey uses the image of a spiral in HNC, p. 225.

⁴⁰ AE, p. 253.

⁴¹ HNC, p. 96. Dewey talks at length of the (re)creation of the self in the chapter "The Moral Self," in Ethics in John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925-1953, vol. 7, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale and Edwardsville, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989), pp. 285-310. Hereafter cited as Ethics. See also John Dewey, "Experience, Knowledge and Value: A Rejoinder," in John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925-1953, vol. 14, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale and Edwardsville, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), pp. 70-71.

⁴² HNC, p. 96. See John Dewey, The Study of Ethics: A Syllabus in John Dewey: The Early Works, 1882-1898, vol. 4, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale and Edwardsville, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1971), pp. 311-12 for a discussion of identity issues relate to a plural self in which internal struggle occurs. Hereafter cited as Early Ethics.

⁴³ For the role that imagination and faith play in effecting the unity of the self, see John Dewey, A Common Faith, in John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925-1953, vol. 9, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale and Edwardsville, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989), pp. 14, 23.

⁴⁴ AE, p. 184.

⁴⁵Early Ethics, pp. 312-13.

⁴⁶ Nietzsche is also critical of the "free will"; see, e.g., BGE §§17-21. As is the case for Dewey, Nietzsche's emphasis upon the plurality of the drives and affects of the body and his account of the intellect as (merely) an instrument of the body works to disrupt our tradition's notions of agency by eliminating the "free will." Of course, this is not to say that Nietzsche (or Dewey) is a determinisi or that agency of all kinds has been eliminated. Rather, for both Nietzsche and Dewey, agency becomes bodily, instead of disembodied.

⁴⁷ HNC, p. 32.

⁴⁸Ibid., p. 75.

⁴⁹Ibid., p. 108.

⁵⁰Ibid., p. 176.

⁵¹Ibid., p. 108. Much like Nietzsche, Dewey talks of undirected, sublimated and suppressed impulses on ibid., pp. 108-09. And Nietzsche would agree with Dewey that transforming oneself into an Übermensch is not about an undirected release of animal drives and instincts, which would be a sensualism far removed from the ordered form-giving of the artist (see BGE §188; TSZ 1:71).

⁵² HNC, p. 204; BGE, §44.

⁵³ HNC, p. 159; Robert L. Holmes, "John Dewey's Social Ethics," The Journal of Value Inquiry 1 (Winter 1973): 274-80.

⁵⁴ HNC, p. 195. Cf. TSZ 1:56-58, 1:71-73.

⁵⁵ Since Nietzsche would not be willing to grant that members of the herd undergo even a minimal amount of self-overcoming, this point differentiates his selfovercoming from Dewey's self-reconstruction. I will return to this difference in the final section of this paper when I examine the two philosophers' conceptions of the individual.

⁵⁶ AE, p. 173. See also John Dewey, Democracy and Education, in John Dewey: The Middle Works, 1899-1924, vol. 9, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale and Edwardsville, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980), pp. 54, 56. Hereafter cited as DE.

⁵⁷ HNC 48, 51, 55. See also DE 57.

⁵⁸ For Nietzsche, the scientist can be just another version of the ascetic ideal (GM III, passim; GS, 344). I refer here to Nietzsche's "gay scientist," who has called his remaining piety—the will to truth—into question.

⁵⁹ AE, pp. 21, 148.

⁶⁰ HNC, p. 75, note 1 ; DE, p. 50.

⁶¹Ibid., p. 47.

^>62 HNC, pp. 70-72; AE, p. 294; cf. TSZ 1:55.

⁶³ HNC, p. 71.

⁶⁴ EN, pp. 169-170.

⁶⁵ HNC, p. 168.

⁶⁶ EN, p. 172. See also ibid., pp. 188-89.

⁶⁷ HNC, pp. 30-31.

⁶⁸ HNC, pp. 72, 125; Early Ethics, p. 312.

⁶⁹ TSZ 1:55.

⁷⁰ GS, §§124, 343.

⁷¹Ibid., §347.

⁷² Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), §427. Hereafter cited as HATH. See also ibid., §§483, 629-38.

⁷³ See, for example, Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols/The AntiChrist, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Viking Penguin, 1968), §§54-55. Hereafter cited individually as TI and AC.

⁷⁴ See AE, pp. 19-20; EN, chapter two; John Dewey, The Quest for Certainty, in John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925-1953, vol. 4, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale and Edwardsville, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988), p. X and chapter one (hereafter cited as QC).

⁷⁵ HNC, p. 127.

⁷⁶ GS, §295.

⁷⁷Ibid., note 18.

⁷⁸ BGE, §188.

⁷⁹ TI, p. 65,

⁸⁰ HNC, p. 125; AE, pp. 19-20.

⁸¹ QC, pp. 181-82.

⁸²Ibid., p. 182.

⁸³ AE, p. 21.

⁸⁴ Mary L. Coolidge, "The Experimental Temper in Contemporary European Philosophy," Journal of Philosophy 52 (1955): 493; Sidney Hook, "Pragmatism and Existentialism," The Antioch Review 19 (1959): 155.

⁸⁵ Wilshire, "Body-Mind and Subconsciousness," p. 261. Cf. Richard Rorty, "Nietzsche, Socrates and Pragmatism," South African Journal of Philosophy 10:3 (1991): 63.

⁸⁶ TSZ 11:156. See also GM 1:12.

⁸⁷ BGE, §257.

⁸⁸ Nietzsche is explicit on this point in HATH, which is subtitled "A Book For Free Spirits."

⁸⁹ GS, §381.

⁹⁰ See John Dewey, Individualism, Old and New, in John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925-1953, vol. 5, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale and Edwardsville, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984), pp. 52-53. Hereafter cited as ION.

⁹¹ BGE, §30.

⁹² While it is true the category of the individual is given very little role to play in Dewey's early work, by the time of his middle and late works, the asymmetry between the social and the individual had been balanced out (see Abraham Edel and Elizabeth Flower's Introduction to Ethics, pp. xviii-xix). The individual plays an important role in Dewey's mature philosophy for it is the locus of change for our culture (HNC, p. 62; Ethics, p. xix).

⁹³ He does comment cryptically in The Will to Power about the "false dogmatism regarding the 'ego': it is taken in an atomistic sense, in a false antithesis to the 'non-ego'" and "the false autonomy of the 'individual,' as atom" (WP, 786).

⁹⁴Cf. Laurence Lampert, Nietzsche and Modern Times: A Study of Bacon, Descartes, and Nietzsche (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), p. 342.

⁹⁵ See Haar, "Heidegger and the Nietzschean 'Physiology of Art,'" and Mary Elizabeth Windham, "Nietzsche's Philosopher of the Future as an Ethicist: Experimentalism in Ethics," International Studies in Philosophy 24 (1992): 115-24, for arguments that Nietzsche's individual is not isolated from the world in which she lives. For an example of the view that Nietzsche's body-self does remain separate from the world, see Arifuku Kogaku, "The Problem of the Body in Nietzsche and Dogen," trans. Graham Parkes, in Graham Parkes, ed., Nietzsche and Asian Thought (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 224.

⁹⁶ DE, p. 93.

⁹⁷ ION, p. 74.

⁹⁸ For an argument for the compatibility of Nietzsche's self-overcoming and (a non-Deweyan) democracy that is very different from the one that I have presented, see Aharon Aviram, "Nietzsche as Educator?" Journal of Philosophy of Education 25 (1991): 226-31. Aviram claims that it is precisely Nietzsche's individualism that allows his philosophy to complement the goals of democracy.

⁹⁹ Thomas M. Alexander, John Dewey's Theory of Art, Experience & Nature: The Horizons of Feeling (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987), p. 273.

¹⁰⁰ HNC, p. 202.

¹⁰¹ The difference of "tempo" is the most obvious one and one which Nietzsche would find very important. Dewey's writing has been described as "swimming through oatmeal" (Alexander, p. xii)—hardly the brisk and playful allegrissimo of Nietzsche's work. The different tempos of their work are probably related to the different audiences intended for it, a suggestion that I will not be able to pursue here. See BGE, §§27-28 for instances of Nietzsche's views on tempo and style.

¹⁰² AE, p. 41.

¹⁰³1 wish to thank Phillip McReynolds and Brian Domino for their helpful suggestions and comments and Miami University for its support of this project through the award of a Summer Research Grant.