John Stuart Mill (1806-1873
CE) was born in London and influenced by ancient Greek, French, and
liberal thought. He is the founder of Utilitarianism and a champion of
progressivism, individual freedom, women’s rights, and the abolition of
slavery. His father wrote a history of India, and Mill was for a time
involved with his father in the British East India company, the
corporation that helped Britain maintain their economic hold over India.
Perhaps this influenced his progressive views on opposing racism and
sexism. Mill’s family was friends with the Bentham family, and Mill’s
father had Jeremy Bentham tutor Mill as a child. It was from Jeremy
Bentham whom Mill learned about Epicurus of ancient Greece, who taught
that the goal of individual and social life was not law or morality, but
happiness.
Mill
acquired his consequentialism (what John Dewey, whom we will study
today, calls ‘instrumentalism’) from Bentham, the progressive position
that morals, laws and principles are mere tools for the obtainment of
human happiness. However, it was Mill who found the word ‘utilitarian’
in a Christian text that used the term negatively. The more
conservative author of the text said that we should not be “merely
utilitarian” in our actions, following principles only when they lead to
happiness. Mill picked up the name from the text and developed the
thinking in line with Bentham, his mentor, becoming Utilitarianism’s
founding father and central spokesman. Mill applied this progressive
model of thought to logic, mathematics, economics and ethics. In all of
these subjects, he advocated rethinking basic principles and
assumptions based on the ongoing experiences of their usefulness.
For
Mill and Utilitarianism, the true is not true in itself but true
because it is useful for creating happiness and avoiding hardship. Any
truth, no matter how accepted according to tradition, is to be
questioned if it is not bringing about the long term and overall
happiness of humanity. Political laws, ethical morals, mathematical
rules, and scientific understandings are to be continuously examined and
developed such that they are best A) for the greatest number of people,
and B) over the longest period of time. It is wise and best to take
the social view and the long view. Apart from this, Mill argues there
is no objective truth to things. Rather, the objective of truth is its
beneficial use. If a certain logic or form of mathematics is useful,
proving itself a valuable tool that can be put to good work, then this
is the only proof that it is solid and sure.
Bertrand
Russell, the Logical Positivist discussed last time, attacked
‘instrumentalism’ and the idea that there is no truth to things other
than how they are used and for whom they are used. Both Russell and
Mill agree that the world has regular patterns, and that we use our
minds to form concepts of these regularities. Utilitarianism was a
powerful force in Britain against more traditional thinkers like
Russell, who was fighting back against Hegelian process theory and
Utilitarian ‘its whatever we want to do with it or make of it’ theory.
Russell believes that things are factually as they are, and we should
be objective to have true knowledge. A Utilitarian would say we can
arrange situations such that we have knowledge, but there is no single
truth, purpose or nature of things. For instance, Utilitarianism was
very useful for feminism, that there is no ‘true position’ of women but
it is however we position things such that we, including women, are as
happy and useful to others as possible.
In
the text Logic and Mathematics, Mill asks: if we admit that all is
induction (British Empiricism, which Russell embraces) then why do we
say there are “exact sciences”? We similarly say that there are ‘hard
sciences’. He argues that this is an illusion due to the fact that
objects of math are conceptions and thus imaginary, hence they have
perfect straight edges like an ideally straight line. A perfectly
straight line, the example he uses, with no width, like a point, cannot
exist outside of the imagination. It is a real being of the world, but
imaginary and not physical. Some, such as Russell, say without
perfection of a sort there is no math, science or knowledge possible,
but Mill argues this is silly as we have these things yet do not have an
instance of a perfectly straight line in the real world. Our concept
of a straight line is useful even if it is ideal.
Russell
argued that we can strip down or “whittle” to the pure straight edged
truth, but Mill argues that this merely helps us to focus our
observation and thinking but it does nothing to guarantee that our
knowledge is certain at all. We can ignore aspects of a thing to focus
on particular aspects or parts, but this does not successfully or
completely take these factors out of the picture, even as far as
relevance to the parts that are in focus. This is similar to
Heidegger’s concept of distancing, as well as the later work of
Wittgenstein. If we take a banana and put it in a lab, are we more or
less capable of seeing its truths there? If we create abstractions
about bananas with our minds, are these getting into the thing or away
from it?
Russell
wanted a first certain principle of noncontradiction to give us
certainty. Mill argues that there are no first principles of geometry,
mathematics or anything else. Mill argues that the ‘first principles’
are in fact simply generalized observations of real world situations.
Mill turns specifically to the two principles of noncontradiction and
the excluded middle with this skepticism. The principle of
noncontradiction, that a logical statement cannot be both true and false
at the same time, and the principle of the excluded middle, that a
logical statement must be either true or false at a given time, but not
both, are articles of faith, first founding principles, of Rationalism
and Positivism. Mill argues that these principles are in fact general
observations acquired from practice. We can see that belief and
disbelief oppose one another, that they are “oppositional mental states”
as Mill says, just as we can see that opposing stories often but not
always lead us to see that someone is mistaken or lying. Mill argues
that the two principles are merely useful generalizations, as are all
“true” concepts used by human beings whether scientists, philosophers or
common folk.
Critics
of Mill and Utilitarianism have pointed out an interesting problem and
paradox, what can be called “the bad as good example”. Mill addresses
this paradox, as do modern Utilitarians. Consider that everything bad
that happens can serve as a great example, and thus everything that is
bad can be considered good as a learning experience. While this does
not seem problematic in itself, it could lead an individual, institution
or culture to do bad on purpose in order to learn from it. The
Postpositivist Analytic philosopher Daniel Dennett uses three mile
island as an example. After the nuclear reactor there exploded, it led
to much better nuclear standards and restrictions. This might lead
someone to conclude that causing harm can be beneficial and affordable
if more good than the initial harm is the result.
Consider
animal testing, as well as the infamous Tuskegee Study. In 1932, the
US Public Health Service began studying the effects of untreated
syphilis in black men who believed they were receiving treatment but
were in fact guinea pigs, a study which lasted forty years until 1972
when its existence was leaked to the press. Consider Nazi scientists,
the most infamous being Dr. Mengele, the Angel of Death from Auschwitz,
who, in part inspired by American Eugenicists, did experiments on Jews,
including Jewish children. Mill and Utilitarians would of course reply
that such experiments do more harm than good if we take the long and
social view, as it would create a culture in which human life has little
value or respect.
Pragmatism
Pragmatism
comes from the ancient Greek word ‘pragma’, meaning act or deed. Like
Positivists, Pragmatists support science and verificationism, but they
also argue for fallibility and conceptual relativity. Fallibility means
that accepted truth could always be wrong, and conceptual relativity
means that our ideas, conceptions and explanations correspond and
conform to the real shared world, but only relatively, not absolutely or
objectively. Truth must be verified, but continuously, much as
Wittgenstein hoped to demonstrate to Russell as he searched Russell’s
room for a potential hidden rhino. For Pragmatists, the goal of
philosophy is not a system of truths, but intelligent practice.
Theories are maps, tools for solving particular problems, and they can
be used with relative intelligence or ignorance.
Pragmatists
argue that both realism and idealism distort our picture of how
knowledge works. Realists, such as Positivists, rely on correspondence,
whereas Idealists, such as Kantians and Hegelians, rely on metaphysics.
Against realism and much like Hegel and later Wittgenstein,
Pragmatists argue that there is no Kantian ‘thing-in-itself’ beyond our
conceptions to which our conceptions correspond. Anything to which our
concepts could compare themselves for verification is itself
conceptualized, so our concepts cannot be compared to a
pre-conceptualized world. Against Idealism and much like Nietzsche and
Heidegger, Pragmatists argue that there are no metaphysical rules beyond
our conceptions by which our conceptions are determined. Whatever
determines our concepts are themselves only conceivable as conceptions,
so our concepts should not be idealized as pure abstractions or
immutable rules.
Pragmatism
attempts to balance the Positivist faith in certainty with the
skeptical doubt of absolute truth. Genuine truth is obtained through
inquiry, though it is never absolute or ideal. This is sometimes
referred to as lower case ‘t’ truth versus upper case ‘T’ Truth.
Knowledge and theory evolve, and so our conceptions and our practice
involving these conceptions are always works-in-progress. In various
historical situations, there are particular justifications for belief
and particular justifications for doubt, and these are weighed wisely or
foolishly. There is similarity here with the insight of Nietzsche that
philosophy is a self-confession, a display of what one has done in life
and what one hopes to do.
Charles Sanders Peirce
(1839 - 1914 CE, his name pronounced ‘purse’ like the handbag, not
‘pierce’, like puncture) is considered the founder of Pragmatism. While
employed as a chemist, he made major contributions to philosophy,
linguistics, logic and mathematics. He met fellow founding pragmatist
William James at Harvard, and the two were the founding members of the
Metaphysical Club in the 1872. Peirce, James and the other club members
wanted to free philosophy from Continental metaphysics, influenced by
Hume, Berkeley, Kant and Hegel but in opposition to the metaphysical
framework of their ideas. As an undergraduate, Peirce slowly worked his
way through Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, reading a few pages a day.
Later, Peirce lectured on Logic at Johns Hopkins University, where
fellow founding Pragmatist John Dewey studied with him as his student.
Bertrand Russell, not a fan of Utilitarianism or Pragmatism, considered
Peirce to be the greatest of American philosophers. Karl Popper, a
philosopher of science we will examine next week, believed Peirce to be
one of the greatest philosophers to have lived.
James
credited Peirce with coining the term ‘Pragmatism’, though Peirce
credited Alexander Bain with the invention of its core idea, as Bain had
defined ‘belief’ as that upon which one is willing to act. This is
similar in ways to the Unity of Knowledge and Action of the Neoconfucian
Wang Yangming, the idea that if one does not act compassionately, one
does not in fact believe in compassion no matter how well one has
memorized Confucius’ Annalects. Note that this says nothing about the
abstract truth of the belief, but only that it is practically capable of
inspiring action. Peirce wanted to clarify philosophical thinking and
make it practical so it could engage in action rather than mere
metaphysical speculation.
Peirce
adhered throughout his work to his pragmatic maxim: “Consider what
effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the
object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects
is the whole of our conception of the object.” A maxim is a general
rule, one often good to follow, unlike an axiom which is an unproven
rule that should always be followed as it is assumed to be true. Like
Heidegger, Wittgenstein and Mill, Peirce argued that things are how they
are used and to what effect. Consequently, truth is not static and
abstract but dynamic and practical. Peirce argued that human truth is
always fallible, always opinion capable of being wrong, but that the
truth is objective and is discoverable. This is similar to John Locke,
the Empiricist who argued that human knowledge is incomplete but that
primary objective qualities do exist. This is the way Peirce balanced
his dogmatism and skepticism, as Pragmatism and fallibilism.
In
response to the work of Kant and Hegel, Peirce argued that there are
three universal categories of the mind. He used the concepts of
‘firstness’, ‘secondness’ and ‘thirdness’ repeatedly throughout his
work. Firstness is the vague and possible. Secondness is the distinct
and actual. Thirdness encompasses the first two as joined together,
similar to Hegel’s idea of the unity of the objective and subjective as
well as understanding and reason. Peirce saw communication and
representation as a fusion of the possible and actual, of the vague and
distinct. For instance, when we reason about mathematics or ethics, we
must inquire about vague abstractions such as the infinite and the good
based on distinct facts we experience.
Like
Heidegger and Wittgenstein, preceding them both and possibly
influencing them both (as the influence of Pragmatism on the two is
unconfirmed and debated), Peirce was interested in the use of signs,
such as Wittgenstein’s roadsigns and Heidegger’s turn signal. The sign,
what it signifies, and the interpretation of its signification forms a
triad. As for Heidegger and Wittgenstein, Peirce saw the
‘interpretant’, not the interpreter but the result of interpretation, as
social and not merely individual. As we learn to drive, we learn what
turn signals mean in the culture of driving. Peirce worked on a
typology of signs through which he hoped to better understand the
methods of human thought and logical argument.
William James
(1842 - 1910 CE) was a philosopher and psychologist, one of the first
to teach psychology classes in America. His father was a Swedenborgian
theologian, a believer in the unity of science and religion for the
understanding of human psychology and metaphysics, and James is most
famous for his work on the psychology of religion, author of the
influential book The Varieties of the Religious Experience (1902). His
godfather was the Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson, and James later
joined the Theosophical Society, early proponents of Buddhism and
esoteric spiritualism, very much the New Agers of their day and the
group from which Krishnamurti emerged. As Peirce’s friend from his
Harvard school days, James is credited with being one of the founding
Pragmatists. Later, he was a friend and colleague of Dewey, Russell,
Freud, and Bergson.
Like
Nietzsche, James suffered from many health conditions throughout his
life. He taught philosophy and psychology at Harvard for his entire
career. His students include Gertrude Stein, Theodore Roosevelt, W. E.
B. Du Bois and George Santayana. James was a strong supporter of
Pragmatism in philosophy and functionalism in psychology, both similar
positions. His functionalism influenced his view that religion is not
about the verifiable truth of beliefs but about their social function
and benefit. An opponent of Hegel, James argued that Hegelian
dialectics were an unhelpful system of metaphysics that was more
limiting than revealing.
James
argued that beliefs are true if they are useful. While, like a
Positivist, James argued that useful truth would be correspondent and
coherent, would fit together with the world and fit together with
itself, he argued, like a Pragmatist, that these are dimensions of its
usefulness, not categories that can be abstractly applied. The most
ancient of human beliefs were based on new discoveries and debatable,
yet in both ancient and modern times, he wrote, “Purely objective
truth...is nowhere to be found”. Entirely objective analysis is
impossible in a situation that is always in motion. James similarly
argued that consciousness is a stream, often referred to as “stream of
consciousness”, and so individual as well as social forms of thought are
never in an entirely stable place to take full account of themselves.
This is similar to Heidegger’s idea that the world is inarticulate
unless an area is of particular concern to us. For James, our thought
process is similarly a flow that we only articulate in part.
John Dewey
(1859 - 1952 CE) was a Pragmatist philosopher, functionalist
psychologist like James, and major influence on the reform of American
education. He is also well known for his aesthetic philosophy, his
philosophy of art and beauty, from his popular book Art as Experience
(1934). He taught both elementary and high school before deciding he
was better suited for teaching at the college level. As mentioned,
Dewey attended graduate school at Johns Hopkins, where he studied the
novel philosophy of Pragmatism under Peirce and obtained his doctorate,
his thesis titled The Psychology of Kant. He then taught at the
University of Chicago, where he focused on Pragmatism and the
development of education. He later left to teach at Columbia, a
university known, like Berkeley, for its progressivism, and he was at
one time the president of both the American Philosophical Association
and the American Psychological Association.
In
his book Democracy and Education, Dewey argues that an intelligent and
good society provides education and supports a diversity and plurality
of ideas and opinions. A prosperous democracy requires that public
opinion be informed and authorities held accountable. Dewey practically
(and pragmatically) invented everything that progressive educators
obsess about and make Noam Chomsky talk for extended periods of time.
Dewey
was a democratic socialist, angering some of his Marxist colleagues in
his disagreements with the philosophy of Marx and the practices of
Stalin. He even formed the Dewey Commission and went to Mexico in 1937
to clear Trotsky of Stalin’s charges of treason, finding Trotsky
innocent. Dewey lectured and traveled in China, excited about the
changes taking place in the country, though he argued that the change
should come through gradual reform driven by progressive education, not
violent revolution. In the Social & Political Philosophy class, we
talk about the split amongst groups of socialists and communists between
those who believe in gradual social positioning and transformation and
those who believe in immediate revolution, be it violent or nonviolent.
Dewey was definitely in favor of the former, though in China it was the
latter that happened.
Dewey
in his early years was committed to the philosophy of Hegel,
particularly British Neo-Hegelianism, the Hegelians who angered and
confused Bertrand Russell. Dewey called his particular form of
Pragmatism ‘Instrumentalism’, a term which Russell uses to refer to the
Utilitarianism of Mill and attack Pragmatism and Utilitarianism under
the same banner. I gave you Russell’s piece on Dewey next to Dewey’s
own The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy as it best frames the
difference between Positivism and Pragmatism. Russell was, like Dewey, a
socialist who tried to reform and liberalize education such that
humanity would evolve towards prosperity and peace. Russell writes that
he and Dewey agree on much, but he cannot agree with Dewey that the
goal of education and philosophy is not ‘truth’ but continuous inquiry.
In the Ancient Greek Philosophy class, we discuss the Pyrrhonian
skeptics mentioned several times in this class, and how the greek word
‘skeptos’ means ‘inquiry’. Skeptics believe in the discovery of truth,
but like Pragmatists they believe in the fruitfulness of the search
rather than the permanency of the results. This is not good enough for
Russell or Logical Positivism. Russell rightly says that Dewey, though
influenced by Hegel, did not believe that truth results in a final
Absolute, though it does grow and progress.
Russell
argues that sentences can be true given a culture that supports
particular language use. He uses the example, “Columbus crossed the
ocean in 1492”, which is true in English. If one translated it into
Arabic, Russell notes that the sentence would be false unless you
changed 1492 in accord with the Islamic calendar. Russell, the great
mathematician, fails to do the arithmetic here, and tell us that 1492
according to the Christian calendar is, for Muslims, 897. According to
the Islamic system, it is currently the year 1434, and 1492 has not yet
happened. Thus, for a Muslim, “Columbus crossed the ocean in 1492”
would be false.
Russell
says that Dewey’s idea of continuous inquiry is itself impractical, a
good charge to level against a pragmatist if it is true. Russell
considers the case of being asked whether he had coffee with breakfast.
Should we experiment, and try believing and saying we had coffee and
then try believing and saying that we did not, and see what the results
are? The experimentation would not end there, because we would then
have to see if believing that the results of this are the results or not
leads to good or bad results, resulting in an infinite regress. Just
as Mill responded to the paradox of the bad as good example, Dewey would
likely respond, similar to Heidegger, that we are thrown into a world
in which lying about having coffee would be assumed, from the flow of
our social practice, to be a fruitless place to search for good results.
Also, Dewey could argue that there is no end to inquiry, so the
infinite regress of the horizon without a final goal in sight should not
result in giving up our practice of inquiry.
Interestingly,
Russell connects Dewey’s Pragmatism to industrialization in America,
and then is surprised when Dewey, upset by Russell making this
connection, responds that Pragmatism should no more be connected so
simply with the obnoxious aspects of American industrialization than
Positivism should be connected with the interests of the British
aristocracy. Notice that Positivism is quite dogmatic, like the
persistence of the British aristocracy, and Pragmatism is quite
progressive, like the pace of American industry and commercialism.
Russell, an atheist, is afraid that Nietzsche’s individualism and
Dewey’s social practice leads to the “danger of cosmic impiety”, that
humanity believes itself to be God, capable of creating truth however it
wishes.
In
Dewey’s piece I gave you, written as World War I was happening, he
argues against both realism and idealism. Sometimes, truth must be
radically changed, so it should not be considered objectively real nor
metaphysically ideal. Dewey argues, as the bombs fall in Europe, that
it is time for a radical change for philosophy and its fundamental idea
of objective, complete and ideal truth. Unless it does this, it will
continue to be further alienated from modern times and the general
public. We should learn from the great philosophers, and then move
beyond them.
We
are shaped by our environment, but we can shape our environment, which
we do even if we try to close ourselves off from the world in a
“clam-like fashion”. This too affects truth and meaning. Much as the
Buddha, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche taught, existence is suffering,
desiring things in the world and suffering as a result, affecting the
world and being affected, and this is the price we pay for development
and progress. We should dwell in the openness of the future rather than
in the closure of the past, using hope to counter anxiety. In the
past, people held faith in the truth of religion, and in the present,
people hold faith in the truth of science, but the simple and
independent truths, the “given and finished facts” in which we had and
have faith are not found in our experience. Notice how similar this is
to Heidegger, who may have learned about Dewey and American Pragmatism
from a professor at Freiburg who was studying it at the time. Dewey’s
piece is written ten years before the publication of Being and Time. If
this is true, this would mean that Pragmatism was an influence on and
precursor to Existentialism, not simply similar to it. Dewey argues
that what we want is intelligence, Heidegger would say authentic
awareness, not closed articulated truths.
Dewey
argued elsewhere that many fall for what he called the “philosopher’s
fallacy”, thinking that the labels we apply to things are exclusive
categories. He used the example of body and mind, which Descartes
exclusively separated with his dualism at the very beginning of modern
European philosophy. ‘Body’ and ‘mind’ are not exclusively different
things, but labels used to solve particular problems. Wittgenstein
argues very similarly in his Philosophical Investigations, writing that
names are like physical labels and that many confuse this for a
metaphysical category. Dewey argued that in particular situations our
beliefs are unsettled, and then we attempt to reconcile our beliefs with
what contradicts them to resolve our beliefs and return to a settled
state. This is very similar to Hegel’s conception of dialectic and the
history of thought.
Also
like Hegel, as well as Comte, Dewey saw history unfolding in three
stages, and that he was lucky to be in the third and final stage. The
first stage is “self action”, in which things are thought to posses
their own powers in themselves, independent of other things, the
pre-scientific period. The second stage is “interaction”, in which
things are thought to posses their powers in terms of a complete and
closed system, the period of the European Enlightenment and the work of
Newton. The third stage is “transaction”, in which things are rightly
understood to possess their powers in their relationship to other
things, but without any complete system, stable essences, or objective
reality. Unfortunately, also like Hegel and Comte, all development
beyond the first stage happens in Europe, except that of the American
Pragmatists and Dewey himself.
Like
Comte, Dewey saw the European Enlightenment as a period still bogged
down in faith in metaphysics, but unlike Compte he saw this progressing
not to a unified system of the sciences but to an abandonment of any
belief in a unified objective system, progressing not to Positivism but
to Pragmatism. Dewey criticized Logical Positivism for dealing in
abstractions that are outside of the real world, incapable of reaching
the reality in which we live. For Dewey, Positivism merely believed
itself to have discarded metaphysics, but its faith in objective truth
and the complete unification of science is merely the substitution of a
new metaphysics for that of Newton, Kant, Hegel and the Enlightenment.
While Comte sees Positivism as advancing beyond the second stage, Dewey
saw Positivism as the final expression of the second stage, similar in
ways to Marx’s view of Hegel. Like Hegel, Dewey sees a unification of
objective and subjective truth as the final third stage, but unlike
Hegel, Dewey sees science as part of the European second stage, not part
of the pre-European first stage. In this, Dewey is sadly more
Eurocentric than Hegel, in spite of living a century later. At least
Dewey was involved in the organization that would later become the
NAACP, as well as marched for women’s rights.
As
mentioned last time, there was a surge of criticism that rose against
Positivism in the 1960s, which corresponded with a surge of new interest
in Pragmatism, sometimes called Neopragmatism, departing somewhat from
the work of Peirce, James and Dewey just as Postpositivism departed
somewhat from the work of Russell and the Vienna Circle. Two of the
most famous American Pragmatists are Richard Rorty and Cornel West.
Richard Rorty
(1931 - 2007 CE) was the most prominent philosopher of the Pragmatist
resurgence. He studied as an undergraduate at the University of
Chicago, but long after Dewey, who was in his final years at the time,
had departed for Columbia. In the 1960s, Rorty did work in the Analytic
Positivist tradition at Princeton, but later he turned to Pragmatism
and studied Dewey and the later work of Wittgenstein for inspiration.
In
his most famous work, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Rorty argued
that philosophy had been held back by the assumption that ideas mirror
nature, also called correspondence. If subjective ideas mirrored nature
accurately, they could be said to be objective. Rorty argued that this
picture was mistaken, and that philosophy and science use open evolving
systems of vocabulary and method that change based on their usefulness
and adaptability. Consider that we do not use our concept of apples the
way that we use apples. Whenever we reach for our concept, it is most
often there, and one can possess it for free though cannot eat it for
nourishment. Like Wittgenstein argued in his Philosophical
Investigations, we can mistakenly confuse our concepts for the things
themselves, but they are additional elements that form an open complex
network that also involves the things they represent and ourselves.
Like
Hegel, Rorty argues that society is an open conversation. Like
Merleau-Ponty and Lakoff, Rorty argues that human conceptions are based
in metaphors, and society becomes closed and oppressive when metaphors
are taken dogmatically. Just as many would accuse religion as taking
metaphors too literally, Rorty argued that philosophy (particularly
Positivism) and science had taken the metaphor of the mirror too
literally. When we come to see, as had Wittgenstein, that words and
concepts have their own forms, and are not simply mirrors of objective
reality, society will be more tolerant and peaceful.
As
I was researching and writing this lecture, I accidentally found a
piece in the Cambridge Companion to Heidegger by Rorty on the similarity
of Pragmatism, early Heidegger and late Wittgenstein. Rorty argues
that Frege and early Wittgenstein imposed the idea that there is a
closed structure for truth on Logical Positivism, but it was late
Wittgenstein who freed Analytic thought from this picture. Rorty says
that Wittgenstein moved from the idea that form is separate from
practice to Pragmatism, and that Heidegger, at the same time, moved from
the Pragmatism of Being and Time, of his early period, to the idea that
there is true primordial thinking beyond or beneath how it was
practiced in modern Europe, going in the opposite direction. Heidegger
became more radical, while Wittgenstein became more casual.
In
the Ancient Greek Philosophy class, we examine Aristotle’s “third man”
argument as Plato’s problem of his Parmenides. Rorty argues that
Wittgenstein saw a new form of this old problem in Russell’s attempt to
put types above sets, to fix the rules with a higher separate set of
rules. Much like Wittgenstein’s “child at the blackboard”, if rules are
not set in themselves, then no rule of the rules can be set in itself,
leading to an infinite regress. Interestingly, as Russell accuses
Dewey’s endless inquiry as leading to an infinite regress, Wittgenstein
saw that Russell’s rules of the rules results in a similar infinite
regress. We will never be able to fully describe our descriptions,
because this description would itself have to be described, and then
this, and so on. The Pragmatist’s answer to this, which Rorty argues
the early Heidegger, the late Wittgenstein and Dewey saw quite well, is
that our practices are never perfectly grounded, always open to change
and dependent upon a changing situation. Thus, as Sextus Empiricus the
ancient Greek Pyrrhonian would point out, our practices are grounded in
themselves and in each other, leading to continuous problems of infinite
regress and self-circularity.
In
his later years, Rorty focused on Continental thought, particularly the
work of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, and Derrida. Sadly, Rorty
finished his career at Stanford University (that’s not the sad part)
where he taught in the Comparative Literature department (that’s the sad
part). He joked that he had been made a “Professor of Trendy Studies”.
Like Judith Butler when she was at UC Berkeley, Rorty was not an
Analytic philosopher, and so there was no room for him in the philosophy
department. This is an incredible example of the domination of
American philosophy departments by Positivism, as both Rorty and Butler
are quite famous and well renowned. This is the reason why my friends
in the Rhetoric department studied the great works of Structuralism,
Poststructuralism and Postmodernism, while my friends and I in the
philosophy department studied nothing after Heidegger with the one
exception of Foucault, who lectured at Berkeley in the final years of
his life, the lectures published by UC Press. Foucault is the one
Poststructuralist philosopher that the two departments study in common.
Cornel West
(1953 - not dead yet), a Pragmatist, socialist, and activist, is one of
the most famous black American philosophers, along with bell hooks and
Angela Davis. West grew up in Sacramento, and then as a teenager in the
sixties became involved with the Civil Rights Movement. Graduating
from Harvard, he attended graduate school at Princeton, where he
continues to teach. Taught Neopragmatism by Rorty, West got his PhD in
1980, the year after Rorty published his Philosophy and the Mirror of
Nature. With Descartes, I mentioned that the brothers who wrote The
Matrix clearly were inspired by philosophy classes. West appears in
both the second and third Matrix movies, and gives philosophical
commentary as an extra feature for the box set.
While
West has many excellent ideas about black America, education and
economics, as well as an interesting Kierkegaardian
Existential-Pragmatic take on his own faith, which he calls Prophetic
Christianity, aimed at social criticism and progressive transformation
of society, we will focus on his Pragmatism for our purposes. West
argues that Pragmatists such as his teacher Rorty are “master mappers”,
demythologizing theory such that it can be put into practice by others.
While both Existentialists and Pragmatists are anti-foundationalists,
both are concerned with the grounding of truth even if that ground is
always shifting. Existentialists, like Nietzsche, are concerned with
creativity, while Pragmatists, such as Peirce, are concerned with
science.
West
quotes Rorty, who wrote that the strategy academics have for America
is, “You let us have your gifted children for our universities, where we
will estrange them from you and keep the best ones for ourselves. In
return, we will send the second-best back to keep you supplied with
technology, entertainment and soothing presidential lies.” West argues
that while the best minds that stay in academics are deeply concerned
with changing society and are uninterested in the hollow pursuit of
money, they also find their work to be disconnected from society. West
hopes that Pragmatism connected with activism has the best chance at
becoming visible outside the universities. If we focus on particular
changes for society like Dewey, we can remain engaged, be entirely
critical, and not worry about falling into absolute nihilism.
