It’s been awhile since I’ve spent much time with philosophy. It feels equal parts strange and good to be back.
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I wrote awhile ago — way back in February, in the Before Times (time has dilated these past few months) — that I planned to inquire into what I called my oversimplified pragmatism, hoping to learn what safeguards pragmatists envision against the unethical use of “what works.”
I finally sat down and started the first of the two books I planned (and still plan) to read: Michael Bacon’s Pragmatism: An Introduction.
This post is meant to be first in a series — the “Notes and thoughts” series — in which I process what I read. (I say “meant to be” because I’m not the best with follow-through… we’ll see how far I get.) Neither notes nor thoughts are intended to be complete, in part because I’m not a philosopher (I have neither the patience nor the training), and in part because I am mostly interested in how a pragmatist might answer the question: what do we do when “what works” stops working?
So… here goes!
As would be expected, both the Preface and the Introduction provide an overview of pragmatism’s history and themes. This notion of themes is important because pragmatism is not a coherent set of tenets, but a “deeply contested tradition” with some more or less “shared commitments”:
- “objectivity” is historically contingent, but that doesn’t make it any less objective;
- knowledge has no foundation, and that’s okay — it doesn’t need one; and
- philosophy should be connected to everyday life.
Bacon presents the history of pragmatism as having three basic eras. The first era is classical pragmatism — where it all started, back in the late 19th century, with three important figures:
- Charles Sanders Peirce, who developed the “pragmatic maxim,” which states that the meaning of a concept is a matter of its effects. For Peirce, this was mostly limited to the natural sciences; as far as I can tell, he never accepted William James’s move to expand his ideas beyond the realm of science.
- William James, who (as I said) expanded the pragmatic maxim to incorporate moral, religious, and aesthetic concerns. He was interested, among other things, in reconciling the natural sciences and religious belief.
- John Dewey, who emphasized that humans operate within the world, rather than disinterestedly observing it. As I understand it, he saw this as embracing Darwin’s insights and breaking from previous philosophical thought.
The second era involves an “eclipse narrative” — the generally accepted narrative that posits a gap in which pragmatism is said to have lain dormant, from Dewey’s death, in 1952, until Richard Rorty revived it in 1979. According to this narrative, pragmatism was eclipsed by analytic philosophy and, especially, logical positivism. However, Bacon contests this narrative, arguing that many of the analytic philosophers dealt with similar themes as the pragmatists, often explicitly, and thus kept the tradition in play.
The third era is the current one, contemporary pragmatism. This begins, as mentioned above, with Richard Rorty — with the 1979 publication of his book, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.
Rorty — a bit radically, even for a pragmatist — argued that humanity is “responsible only to itself,” and resisted creating any “God-surrogate” (e.g., science) to take the place of religion. He’s known (I remember him for this) for emphasizing the role of language, going so far as to suggest that science should be seen as a literary genre. (A lot of the allergic reaction to Rorty may come from oversimplifying his arguments, though… I’ll learn more when I get to that chapter.)
There are several other important thinkers in this phase, most of whom I haven’t heard of. (In my original post, I said I expected the book to half-remind and half-teach me about the major players and their interests, but it looks like it will be 5% reminding and 95% teaching….) But it looks like Rorty is at one end of a spectrum, leaning toward a postmodern relativism.
At the other end of the specturm, leaning toward truth and objectivity, is Jürgen Habermas.
I’d not realized that Habermas would be identified as a pragmatist, in part because I encountered him in the context of the Frankfurt School, with their focus on power and discourse; and in part because I remembered his interest including a more “transcendental” bent than I’d expect from pragmatists.
Either way, Bacon suggests that contemporary pragmatists navigate positions that are more or less between Rorty and Habermas.
I spoke with a couple friends, back in the Before Times, about my recent struggles with pragmatism. Neither of them was surprised, as they see pragmatism as a… well, an insufficient philosophy. Both their responses echo this paragraph from Bacon:
An objection levelled at pragmatism from a variety of directions is that it allows for nothing over and above that which serves particular interests and answers particular problems. Pragmatists focus on the contingencies of human practice, denying the availability of a transcendental standpoint from which we might judge the worth of those practices.
I get it. But these objections are precisely what attract me to pragmatism. So I’m interested in figuring out how various pragmatists address these objections — and whether those answers make any sense to me.
This is the first in a series of posts in which I explore the philosophical tradition of pragmatism.
Why would I do such a silly thing? I’m pursuing questions that I raised in Post-truth pragmatism: when “what works” stops working.
And if you want to see the series (however far along I am), here’s a collection of posts about this book, as well as a collection of posts in the larger series. (The two lists will be the same until I start a second book, if I ever do….)
[UPDATE: I changed the title (I decided that the format I’d chosen for the titles within the series were boring and too long). I also made some minor edits to clarify which part of the book this post referred to.)