Pragmatic Distinctions
Are individual self-creation and social justice reconcilable without rationalism?
Pragmatic philosophy, which aims to describe the “post-metaphysical” world, is characterized by its many denials of traditional, metaphysical distinctions. For pragmatists, the form-substance distinction of Plato, the mind-body distinction of Descartes, and the analytic-synthetic distinction of Kant dissolve into inconsequence, under relentless, philosophical questioning concerning what difference in practice such ongoing, theoretical distinctions might make.
The Plato-Descartes-Kant axis is the story of rationalism. It’s a long story, so today we are merely discussing an interesting twist. The strong, “distinction-denying” proclivity of pragmatic philosophy has a notable exception, which is that pragmatism continues to make the traditionally sharp distinction between the private and the public aspects of human culture.
The individual’s quest for economic, spiritual, and intellectual self-creation, finds itself in frequent opposition to the societal interest in solidarity, justice, and peace. This opposition has been a human concern for untold millennia. Surely, Neanderthal communities once faced this concern. Certainly, freedom vs. justice was not Plato’s invention.
For the pragmatist, if there is anything permanent or otherwise philosophically relevant about “the essence of human nature,” it is that by random mutation and natural selection, we striving humans are continuing to evolve as social organisms.
Universal human nature
The archetypal rationalist (the “metaphysician”) fundamentally believes that the contrasting interests of the individual and the community are reconciled by means of a permanent, unchanging, universal human nature. A dyed-in-the-wool, true rationalist seeks a timeless, conclusive argument that whatever fulfills a person’s “human essence” necessarily fulfills the community, and vice versa. We see this in the Platonic ideal of the honorable guardian, or in Catholicism’s faith in the communion of saints. We also see it in the unerring narcissism of Ayn Rand’s objectivism.
By contrast, a pragmatically-oriented philosopher would insist that there is no practicable, ahistorical commonality of human nature. It is dubious, for example, that any effective community of interest exists between the experiences and perspectives of a neolithic root-digger and a Renaissance sculptor. And whatever “human nature” a Roman widow and John D. Rockefeller might conceivably share, it is not philosophically relevant. So let’s not pretend that it is.
Habermas
Contemporary philosophy has a strong, liberal-rationalist viewpoint, as exemplified by Jürgen Habermas (1929 — ). The liberal-rationalist, like the metaphysician, claims that there is an immutable, ahistorical, and universal human nature. They believe that we are capable of applying the Enlightenment concept of Reason to this eternal, human nature, in order to determine inalienable, universal human rights. Habermas seeks an immutable, rationalistic foundation, from which universal ideas of social justice, justice as fairness, non-cruelty, and liberation may be conclusively deduced, regardless of the cultural or historical context. He would assume that Attila the Hun himself must yield to the force of such a well-grounded moral philosophy.
For laudable, political reasons, Habermas embraces a lot of “ism’s” — the foundationalism, essentialism, universalism, and ahistoricism of rationalism. The liberal-rationalist fear is that moral philosophy, unless it is based on the pretension of a permanent foundation, a solid argument, and sound conclusions, must decay into “relativism,” and thereby lead all of society inexorably down with it, into outright, totalitarian evil.
Hegel
The first modern crack in the rationalist armor was the historicism of Hegel (1770–1831). For historicists, human beings do not exist within a permanent, moral and intellectual stasis. We have a contingent nature — we are on a historically and culturally determined journey.
Hegel was still highly rationalistic because, although he did not believe in the immutable, ahistorical universality of human nature, he did believe that there was a “World Spirit” hovering over all of humanity and determining history. For Hegel, the relations between the individual and the community are seen as the inevitable unfolding of the unstoppable, teleological World Spirit of human history.
Peirce
After Hegel’s historicism, more cracks in the armor came from mathematicians (i.e. hyperbolic geometry and the incompleteness theorem) and from physicists (i.e. quantum mechanics and the uncertainty principle). Not surprisingly, the seminal figure of pragmatic philosophy was also a world-class scientist, Charles Peirce (1839–1914). Peirce worked for decades at the very edge of 19th Century gravimetrics, specifically, the geometric description of the Earth’s gravitational field and spatial orientation. (His academic career, however, was famously disastrous.)
For Peirce, “the Truth” is no longer based on the immutable certainty of a logical deduction, drawn from a rationally “existing” foundation (i.e. universal human nature, analytic judgments, “the mind,” World Spirit, etc.). Instead, pragmatically, the Truth is whatever the relevant community (i.e. scientists) come collectively and sincerely to believe is the truth of the matter (for example, that the Earth orbits the Sun).
Of course, having certainty in “the Truth” might rightly provide the comforts and spiritual repose, especially for people who are grieving or terrified. But for Peirce, who overcame 2,400 years of Platonic inertia, certainty is not the essence of truth.
Pragmatic philosophy is linguistic to the core. For pragmatists, the truth is formed out of linguistic descriptions, individual and communal. Throughout history, adaptive human behavior has been the function of such firmly attained, true beliefs. Human truth is described exclusively by human language.
Peirce’s philosophy was still rationalistic, however, to the extent that he espoused, like Hegel, that human inquiry must someday come to a teleological endpoint. Sooner or later, all reasonable scientists will come to believe unanimously in The Final Truth. Then all of society, duly impressed by the scientists’ authoritative pronouncements, will come to share a fully perfected truth — that is, an infallible “theory of everything” will have finally been “discovered.” At last, humanity has reached “the end of science” (or the end of history, or the end of philosophy) forever!
Rorty
Richard Rorty (1931–2007) is the most well known, contemporary pragmatic philosopher. He explicitly did not attempt to synthesize individual self-creation with social justice. In all of his major works, he described the individualistic and societal notions of truth as separate, linguistic “tools” which were “in as little need of synthesis as are paintbrushes and crowbars.”
As much as I respect Rorty, I regret his frequent claim that the individual and the societal aspects of philosophy are theoretically irreconcilable.
Human creativity (that is, our naturally selected obsession to adapt, if not to thrive — what Nietzsche melodramatically called “will to power”) stems from our logical ability and willingness to conjoin and synthesize original ideas.
My reply to Rorty’s version of a “distinction” is that human creativity is the “cross-over” idea, which embraces both individual self-creation and social justice. But that’s another story.
In any case, Rorty would say that humanity has barely scratched the surface of our philosophical and historical possibilities.
The “Ontological Gap”
Rorty’s lifelong denial of even the possibility of a synthesis of the individual and the societal may have been the consequence of his day job as a professional, analytic philosopher. Like Hume and Kant before him, Rorty explained the circularity that inevitably erupts whenever people attempt “to step outside of their own skins,” in order to observe intuitively the existence of a non-humanly created and perfectly authoritative, rationalistic “Reality.”
Whenever I jump outside of my skin, in order to “see” the rationalists’ world of reason clearly and distinctly, then the “me” that’s jumped also needs to jump out of its skin, so that I can also be completely objective about my objectivity, ad infinitum.
Rorty’s argument is that this all-too-obvious circularity results in “ontological gaps,” which over the millennia, have been conveniently “filled in” by philosophers, without any need for data. For millennia, rationalists have persistently offered notions that multiple, wholly separate realities must exist, such as the eternal forms and the earthly substance, or that “the mind” is the sole engine of knowledge, fully separate from the world of “the body,” or that logical judgments exist both analytically and synthetically.
It seems that as long as I’m careful, when I jump out of my skin, that I land in the Reality of forms, rather than plop back down into the Reality of substance, then I can know that, whatever it is I’m seeing, I’m seeing it with an absolute certainty of its truth, or so the metaphysician tells me.
(Rorty the anti-metaphysician can be wry, but sometimes Rorty is too polite. That is why, if you’ll excuse me, I’m being a bit rude. All this metaphysical “gap-filling” and rationalistic curve-fitting is unacceptable, voodoo ontology. It’s like playing God. When you think about it, it’s nuts.)
What’s next?
Rorty was a 20th Century, analytic pragmatist. His implicit challenge to 21st Century poets and philosophers, of all stripes, is that they gamely attempt to describe philosophical hypotheses that conjoin self-creation and social justice upon effective (pragmatic) criteria, without resorting to rationalistic and teleological phantasms. My forthcoming book, Creative Obsession suggests how philosophy’s historical chain of “ontological gap-filling” might be overcome by simple and disturbingly un-Platonic, ontological postulates.
Bibliography:
- Rorty, R., Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989) pp. xiii — xvi.
- Peirce, C. S., Philosophical Writings of Peirce (J. Buchler, ed.) (Dover Publications, 1955), pp. 23–41 [How to Make Our Ideas Clear].
- Hegel, G. W. F., The Philosophy of History (Dover Philosophical Classics, 2004).
