The Authority of Life: The Critical Task of Dewey's Social Ontology

Abstract

In this article I will first reconstruct a Deweyan model of social ontology, based on the process of habituation. Habit ontology leads to a social philosophy that is not merely descriptive, since it involves a critical redescription of the social world. I will argue that a habit-modeled social ontology is critical insofar as it includes an account of social transformation and of the inevitability of social conflict. Such an understanding is based on a diagnosis of social pathologies of our form of life and includes an account of the experience of domination. Accordingly, it is described as a matter of an imbalance of recognition that embodies subjugating patterns and is seen from the critical perspective of freedom understood as emancipation from oppression. This leads to a reconstruction of the genesis of critical attitudes from life's processes of habituation, which leads to an extended naturalist account of social authority.

Grounding social criticism: from understanding to suffering and back

“…Although it is partly unclear what the exact definition of associated living is, Dewey tends to include in it some of the most common values and features of liberal societies like free intercourse, unhampered exchange of ideas, mutual respect, friendship, love, and so forth. "In short […] those modes of behaving which make life richer and more worth living for everybody concerned" (Dewey, 1973, p. 90; see also Testa, 2017b). Whereas associated living promotes a richer life, its opposite can be found in social suffering and especially alienation, which is "an antonym of associated living" (Dewey, 1973, p. 91).…”

“…Dewey has recently found place, for example, in Axel Honneth's (2017) attempt to revive the idea of socialism. Similarly, Italo Testa (2017aTesta ( , 2017b interprets Dewey in order to develop his own critical social theory. Arto Laitinen and Arvi Särkelä (2018), in turn, find inspiration from Dewey's work in their analysis of social pathologies.…”

Four conceptions of social pathology

“…xvii On the social-ontological implications of his naturalistic metaphysics see Dewey 1928/2008, on the socialphilosophical motivation behind his metaphysics see Särkelä 2017b. xviii Closest to something resembling a systematic processual account of the pathologies of social life probably come Renault 2016, Särkelä 2017band Testa 2017. xix Neuhouser 2016…”

“… 2. The ‘naturalistic vocabulary of social philosophy’, which is simply implied by the use of such concepts as ‘social life’ or ‘social pathology’ does not as such imply any ontological, ethical or methodological position under the banner of ‘naturalism’ but is often combined with explicit anti-naturalism. For a detailed discussion of social-critical naturalism with reference to John Dewey’s social philosophy, see Särkelä (2017b) and Testa (2017). For a discussion of the anti-naturalism typical of continental critical theory, see Ansell-Pearson and Protevi (2017). …”

Between normativism and naturalism: Honneth on social pathology

“…There are several naturalisms available to social pathologists who wish to use the concept literally. In fact, a naturalistic account of social pathology could, for instance, think of the organism in process‐ontological terms, or focus on other natural processes that can fail (populations, habits, or species), or just stick to social nature by, for example, conceptualizing “second nature” or “social life” more generally (Särkelä, ; Testa, ). Contrary to what Honneth (, pp.…”