This course examines how the idea of "the modern" develops at the end of the 18th century in European philosophy and literature, and how being modern (or progressive, or hip) became one of the crucial criteria for understanding and evaluating cultural change. Are we still in modernity, or have we moved beyond the modern to the postmodern?
Postmodern Pragmatisms II
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From the course by Wesleyan University
The Modern and the Postmodern (Part 2)
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From the lesson
Postmodern Pragmatisms
After postmodern playfulness, or alongside it, we see the resurgence of the pragmatic impulse to return philosophy to real human problems.
Meet the Instructors
Michael S. Roth
So with Richard Rorty, you have a philosopher who's emphasizing that you
can't be irresponsible to a group of which you're not a member.
Right, responsibility and rationality also are always dependent upon the group
in which you are embedded, the vocabulary that you're speaking with the community
of which you're a member. Now, he puts this in the context of the
history of philosophy in the little essay I gave you to read.
insofar as he talks about the debate between Kantians, who were looking for
intrinsic human dignity, they're looking for human rights, they're looking for a
ahistorical distinction between morality and prudence.
These are the, the things we already talked about as opposed to the Hegelians,
who are really just looking at human dignity as as something that comes out of
being part of a community that something that comes out of participation without
appeal to impartial criteria. So Burdi says, if the Hegelians are
right, there are no ahistorical criteria to which we can appeal to justify our
moral decisions. So this is Hegel without foundations,
because, Hegel sometimes thought, or at least it appears he thought, that there
was a grounding to history, and that history just revealed this grounding or
this foundation. But for Rorty, what Hegel's great
insight. was, was that history is it all.
History reveals truth with a capital T. And for Rorty, the distinction is that
history goes on forever. This is really like Dewey says that
inquiry is, inquiry is endless, we just keep asking questions, we say something's
true when we want to pay some part of our inquiry a compliment, or we get lazy and
don't want to do any more inquiries, so we say, Okay, that's true.
But someone else is going to pick up the question.
Someone else is going to continue that history.
And for Rorty, that's the difference between the Hegelian and the Kantian,
its, for the Hegelian it's always about somebody else being part of the
community. Somebody else picking up the historical
threads, but there is no impartial criteria according to which you can judge
that activity, that, that, that historical change.
And so Rorty here talks about post-philosophy.
That is, giving up this notion that philosophy can be a referee, tell you
what kind work you're doing. Are you doing rational work, or
irrational, are you doing science, are you doing humanities, are you doing the
noumenal, or the phenomenal. Rorty says, away with all that.
He made that argument in a great book of history of philosophy called The
Philosophy in the Mirror of Nature. In which, he argued that philosophy was
constantly trying to say, which of the things we do, which of the things we say,
are closer to the real. He, he tried to show, I think he did
show, that, that notion of getting closer to the real.
Is, fundamentally flawed. and that what we have are more or less
useful ways of coping with the world, more or less adaptive strategies of, of
dealing with the world. And what matters, is how are, how we feel
we are being served by the tools we have, not whether those tools, match some
ultimate. reality.
and in terms of morality, that means that our morality is based on what will, we'll
accept [INAUDIBLE] called we intentions. That is morality is based on the groups
to which we think our ideas are relevant. The groups to which, which we think we
have some connection with. And morality is not a, here's the
fundamental part, [LAUGH] morality is not universal.
That's the departure from Kant, right? Kant said you can tell if something is
moral by understanding whether the maxim behind the action is, in principle,
universalizeable. Rorty on the other hand as like Sellars
says, morality is grounded or is uh, [LAUGH] grounded in community which means
it has no foundation. It is, morality a product of our
participation in community overtime. and that leaves philosophy out of the
game of finding foundations or finding the really real, the terms we've used in
this class. There is no really real.
and in that sense, Rorty is in the tradition of Nietzsche.
He's in the tradition of critical theory, but he also thinks that the communities
to which we pay allegiance now are ones we should try, strive to improve, rather
than to demolish because they have no foundations.
>> The less certainty we have the better, I think, and you know, it would
be best if all the general principles that we use to guide our actions were
left open for discussion. >> Certainty is not a goal of
intellectual life, and, or it shouldn't be.
>> So the day you need to reach a, a certainty you know [INAUDIBLE] , in order
to act on something, you have to [INAUDIBLE] determination.
>> You also, you'll have to have the courage to act without certainty.
And typically we don't have certainty. >> So what do we have?
We have just probability, argument. >> We make our practical decisions on
the basis of experience, the people we've run into, the books we've read.
Everything in our past lives. We don't make them typically on the basis
of principle. Nor should we.
>> Rorty had an enormous impact on contemporary philosophy.
he stirred up a lot of controversy because he was so rigorously against the
idea foundationalism. And he came from a background in analytic
philosophy, and he was able to show why foundationalism didn't make sense from
within analytic philosophy. At least he, he, he tried to show that
and analytic philosophers continue to respond to that challenge.
He helped reinvigorate pragmatism as a a school of thought that emphasizes inquiry
and practice, rather than foundations or ahistorical criteria.
the next thing that we're going to talk about today is Cornell West, who is is a
friend and, and, studied with Richard Rory, friend of Richard Rory's, and
studied with him. I remember being in a seminar with
Cornell West on Heidegger that, that Rory gave at Princeton and
Cornell West wrote a really important book about pragmatism and prophecy, or
the romantic prophetic tradition and has gone on to do much political and
philosophical work. What, what I want us to pay attention to
in Cornell West's work, is his attempt to go beyond the ironic deflationary parts
of Richard Rorty's contribution. And used his, West's attempt to use
pragmatism to invigorate a a political a radical political a critique of
contemporary American society. for him, for West, pragmatism, he says
is, is, is poised between a sense of tragedy and a sense of revolution.
West says, The relation of tragedy of revolution is intertwined with that of
tradition and progress. A prophetic pragmatism.
This is West's term for his kind of philosophy.
Prophetic pragmatism as a form of third wave left romanticism, tempers its
utopian impulse with a profound sense of the tragic character of life and history.
>> A romanticism thoroughly saturated the discourse of modern thinkers.
Can you [INAUDIBLE]? Can you make things whole?
Can you create harmony? If you can't, disappointment.
Disappointment is always at the center. Failure is always at the center.
Well, where'd the romanticism come from? Why'd we get into romanticism?
See, I don't [INAUDIBLE] romanticism. Well, remember what Beethoven said on his
death bed, you know? To learn, to look at the world in all of
its darkness and evil, and still love it. And that's not romantic Beethoven, this
is a Beethoven that string quartets, 1, 3, 1, the greatest, the greatest string
quartet ever written I guess in Classical music, but of course this is European
forms, Beethoven is a grand master. But the string quartets, you go back to
those movements, there is no romantic holiness to be shattered as in early
Beethoven. He's given up on that, you see.
So, this is where Chekov begins. This is where the blues starts.
When jazz starts, you think Charlie Parker's upset 'cuz he can't sustain a
harmony? He doesn't care about the harmony, he's
trying to complete his ride on the dissonance, ride on the blue notes, of
course he's got harmony in terms of his interventions here and there.
But why start with this obsession with wholeness, and if you can't have it, then
you're disappointed. And want to have a drink and Melancholia,
blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. No, you see, the blues, my kind of blues,
begins with catastrophe, begins with the angel of history and, and, and,
[INAUDIBLE] you see? It begins with the pileage of wreckage,
on one pile on another, that's the starting point.
The blues is personal catastrophe, lyrically expressed.
And black people in America and in the modern world given these vicious legacies
of white supremacy. It is how to do you generate an elegance
of earned self togetherness? So then you have a stick-to-it-ness in
the face of the catastrophic and the calamitous and the horrendous and the
scandalous and the monstrous. See, part of the problem, though, is
that, see, when you have a romantic project, you're so obsessed with time as
loss. And time is a taker.
Whereas as a Jacobian Christian, I want to stress as well, time is a gift.
And time is a giver. So that yes, it's failure, but you know
how good is a failure? That's a wonderful thing.
Rebecca can say you know, try again, fail again, fail better.
But why call it failure? I mean, why not say you have a sense of
gratitude that you're able to do as much that, as you did, you're able to love as
much, and think as much, and play as much?
Why think you needed the whole thing? You see what I mean?
This is even disturbing about America, and of course, America is a romantic
project. Superior diesel /g, city on the hill, and
all this other mess of lies, and so on. I said, no, no!
America's a very fragile democratic experiment predicated on dispossession of
the lands of indigenous peoples, and the enslavement of African peoples, and the
subjugation of women. Marginalization of, of gays and lesbians,
and it has great potential. But this notion that somehow you know, we
had it all, or will ever have it all, that's got to go, you know, push it to
the side. If you push all that to the side it tends
to evacuate the language of disappointment and the language of
failure. And you say, so okay how much have we
done, how I been able to do it? Can we do more?
[INAUDIBLE] we can't do more. It's like trying to break dance at 75,
you can't do it anymore. You are master at 16, it's over.
You can't make love at 80 the way you did at 20.
So what? Time is real.
>> This is very different from Rorty's register, I mean he's talking about
profound sense and utopian impulse. Rorty's, you know, much more temperate,
alright. He's much less dramatic.
West loves the drama and he, and he sees that its not just drama for him, it is
urgency. The pragmatic urgency to change the
world. But he wants to temper that, even West,
tempers that sense of urgency with a sense of tragedy, knowing that you can't
always make the world conform even to your best impulses.
In the reading that I've asked for you to find for this week West says that
prophetic pragmatism denies Sisyphean pessimism and utopian perfectionism.
That is, West is trying to steer a course between pessimism and perfectionism.
He wants to tap into Christian traditions as well as pragmatic traditions.
That he says, keep hope alive as a vehicle for energizing the will to change
the world. Not because we have the foundations.
But because we have aspirations, to make the world a, a better place.
Through, envisioning, radical change. What, what West does say is that you in
here he's firmly in this pragmatic and Rortian tradition, is you have to move
away from epistemology. Epistemology is not important to
philosophy, but it is the move away from epistemology says the swerve away from
epistemology is a reconception of philosophy.
As cultural criticism. Philosophy is becomes a form of cultural
criticism that West wants to link to democratic aspirations.
West also is, is it's important for him to say the denial of foundations is not a
denial of religion. That is, for West belonging to a
community of faith, can be an empowering act.
Even without a commitment to foundationalism I that's a hard one to to
articulate clearly, for me, because I think the I West is trying to say as, as
Rorty did. That it's all about the communities to
which you belong and, and West, as the community to which I belong, I, Cornell
West belong, is a, is a Christian community that has a radical utopian
impulse. And that's not necessarily a foundation
in the philosophic sense, but it's a grounding existential.
Commitment for West and that, as he says, doesn't just keep hope alive, but
actually keeps one sane in a world of enormous disappointment.
And I'll, I'll give you back to this to send you back to a clip now to hear West
talk a little bit about that. in, in a section of the documentary.
>> Let's put it this way. That for me, I mean philosophy is
fundamentally about our finite situation. You can define it in terms of beings
towards death, featherless two-legged, linguistically-conscious creatures going
between the [UNKNOWN] feces and bile, that will one day be the culinary delight
of terrestrial worms. That's us.
Beings toward death. At the same time we have desire, why we
are organisms in space and time, so it's desire in the face of death.
And then, of course, you've dogmatism, various attempts to hold on to certainty.
Various forms of idolatry And you've got dialog in the face of
dogmatism that, of course structurally and institutionally you have domination.
And you have democracy, you have attempts of people trying to render accountable,
elites, kings, queens, [INAUDIBLE], corporate elites, politicians.
You try to make these elites accountable to everyday people.
So philosophy itself becomes a critical disposition of wrestling with desire in
the face of death, wrestling with dialogue in the face of dogmatism and
wrestling with democracy, trying to keep alive a very fragile democratic
experiment, in the face of structures of domination, patriarchy, white supremacy,
imperial power state power, all those concentrated forms of power that are not
accountable to people who are affected by it.
[SOUND] >> So, one question that keeps coming
up, or a phrase, is this idea of the meaningful life.
Do you think this is philosophy's duty to speak on this?
>> A meaningful life? >> How to live a meaningful, is that
even how about, is that even an appropriate question for a class?
>> No, I think it is. no I think the problem of meaning is very
important now, Niahlism is a serious challenge.
meaninglessness is a serious challenge. Even making sense of meaninglessness is
itself a kind of discipline and achievement.
The problem is, of course, you never reach it.
You know, it's not a static, stationary Telos or end or aim.
It's, it's a process that one never reaches.
It's Sisyphean, you're going up the hill. Looking for better meanings, or grander
more ennobling, enabling meaning. Things but you never reach it.
you know, in, in that sense. You die without being able have the whole
in the language of romantic discourse.
[BLANK_AUDIO]
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