Pragmatism, Neopragmatism, And Phenomenology - The Richard Rorty Phenomenon.pdf - Rorty - MKTK

c 1997 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

Review essay

Pragmatism, Neopragmatism, and Phenomenology: The Richard

Rorty Phenomenon

BRUCE WILSHIRE

Department of Philosophy, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ 08903, U.S.A.

What was it that Nature would say? – R.W. Emerson

The world does not speak. Only we do – Richard Rorty

Traditionally, the chief function of every civilization has been to orient its

members in the world. Time proven ways of getting about and surviving are

imparted ritualistically, ways of avoiding confusion, damage, disaster, ways

perchance of ﬂourishing. Revolutions of all sorts in the last four hundred

years have relentlessly disrupted or destroyed nearly all traditional maps of

the world and modes of orientation. The very meaning of “civilization” has

become problematical. As has “reason” and “reasonable.” To understand the

emergence of pragmatic modes of thinking in the last half of the last century

requires an understanding of the ground swell of crisis to which it is a creative

response. Also required is a grasp of the connections between pragmatism and

phenomenology. I then turn to a current literary phenomenon: Richard Rorty’s

so-called neo-pragmatism, and his assiduous avoidance of phenomenology.

Finally, a note about the ecological crisis, and how a deeper attunement to the

environment calls for a reappropriation of phenomenological impulses in the

earlier pragmatism.

Every traditional civilization aims to orient its members within their imme-

diate locality. This is true even when interpretations of local things and events

are in terms of a “spirit realm” or “alternate reality” – construals fantastic to

contemporary North Atlantic ears. Always a modicum of what we would call

“common sense” is discernable, e.g., a tree may be experienced as moving

under certain conditions and for certain modes of numinous consciousness,

butitisjust that tree, the one that is always found in the work-a-day-world

forty paces in front of the chief elder’s house. Without commonsensical

rootage in the local environment, elementary evaluations necessary for the

orientation and conduct of everyday life are impossible.

Now it is just this rootage that 400 years of revolutions of all sorts have

disrupted. Western industrialization uprooted vast populations from agrari-

Human Studies 20: 95–108, 1997.

BRUCE WILSHIRE

an forms of life in which time proven routines and rituals integrated with

Nature’s regenerative cycles gave life purpose and direction. Euro-American

science and technology produce marvels of aggressive movement that very

quickly overrun the world, dislocating and destroying countless civilizations,

and causing strain and dislocation within Euro-American civilization itself.

Technological advances outpace structures of interpretation within which they

can be evaluated.

Just a few examples of how traditional guidance systems, rules of thumb

and proverbs, become obsolete: “As right as rain.” But since the rain in many

sections is so acidiﬁed from burning fossil fuels that it kills ﬁsh in lakes

and streams, what is right about it? “Practice makes perfect.” But if steroids

injected in athletes allow them to outperform others who practice diligently

but don’t take them, what becomes of our maxim? A psycho-active pill may

eliminate grief over the death of a loved one. But what if this also eliminates

grieving and its traditional expressions, that closure that opens the way to

new birth? Breaking out of the life-ways that allow us to evaluate them, our

technological means of control may have gone permanently out of control.

The most cursory notice of the upsurge of modern European science and

philosophy in the 17th century reveals the abrupt departure from traditional

feelingful, orientation-laden, commonsensical local knowledge. Reach back

2000 years; contrast this to Artistotle. For all his sophistication and intellectual

power, he presupposed the commonsensical life-world of the time. To learn

about things is to make judgments about those characteristics commonly

thought to be essential to them, and about those accidental traits which may

be altered yet the beings remain themselves: e.g., their location in geo-cultural

space they happen to occupy at the time (if they are moveable beings), or their

mode of dress, for example, or their more or less passing emotional states –

but states typed, understood, and settled from time immemorial.

Contrast this to the skepticism of the 17th century scientist-philosopher

Descartes. He assumes that the world is not as commonsense describes its

traditional, myth-laden sensorial richness. (How can we trust the senses,

Descartes asks, when the sun merely appears to move across the sky, and its

disc merely appears small enough to be covered by a coin held before the

eye). For him the physical world is only as mechanistic mathematical physics

describes it: a vast collection of contiguous objects exhibiting only such

clinical and feelingless properties as extension, shape, mass, acceleration,

force. Having thus reduced and objectiﬁed the “outer world,” he turns “within”

and objectiﬁes a non-extended domain which he thinks is mind: private and

personal consciousness, a kind of container in which ﬂoat such personal

qualities as feelings, tones, colors, smells, sensations of various kinds, mere

appearances. No longer the moral, aesthetic, or spiritual qualities of things in

PRAGMATISM, NEOPRAGMATISM, AND PHENOMENOLOGY

the immediately apparent world, they are reduced to being psychical qualities

merely. The gain from this caustic way of thinking repays the loss, he thinks:

one certitude : I think therefore I am. At least he can know he is “a thing that

thinks.”

On every level or parameter – from the most abstruse domain of philosoph-

ical and scientiﬁc theory to revolutionary political, economic, and world-

historical events – modern European civilization shifts off its basis in local,

sensuous knowledge and traditional modes of feeling and evaluation. Kant

noted with alarm that two essential, intertwining strands of civilization –

science and morality – unravelled. If only the observations of mechanis-

tic science reveal the “external” world reliably, and badness or evil are not

observable properties of things, then the judgment, say, Rape is bad is not

really knowledge. It reveals nothing about who we essentially are as beings-

human who must ﬁnd our way and survive and perchance ﬂourish in the vast

world, but is merely a venting of our subjective negative sentiments – feelings

and preferences that we happen to have been conditioned to feel in a particular

culture, but that we might do without.

Try to imagine the inception of the 19th century: the French Revolution

reducing itself to chaos and despotism is just the most obvious disruption of

traditional local ways. That century opens with titanic efforts to reweave the

fabric of civilization, to conceive the world at such a primal, originative level

that science and technology and every other revolution can be reintegrated

with local knowledge and emotional-evaulational life – ways of living deeply

rooted in the history, even prehistory, of human survival and ﬂourishing on

earth. This is the matrix within which pragmatic modes of thought emerged

in the second half of the last century.

Schelling and Hegel launch a vast critique of European philosophy. They

realize that they root within its ﬂood plain; but its channel must be radically

deepened if its wandering currents are to be collected into one sustaining ﬂow.

We must, they think, get beyond seventeenth century “scientiﬁc realisms”

which take for granted bases of judgment that should be thematized and

superceded through reﬂection. Without this, civilization will continue to dis-

integrate – “facts” coming unhinged from “values” in endless “future shock”

– for we will not grasp intertwining principles of thought, action, feeling, and

being that are sustaining and orienting in any local environment.

Where does Descartes stand , what does he assume, when he objectiﬁes

the world in terms of mechanistic physics, takes an aspect of the world for

BRUCE WILSHIRE

the whole? And where does he stand when he objectiﬁes mind as a private

container full of physical entities, takes the psychical aspect of mental life for

the whole? Answer: he stands on the whole processual natural and cultural

world, and the whole communal minding and knowing of it within which he

was born, and in which he participates every instant, and which allows him

to make the objectiﬁcations, individuations, abstractions, and reductions that

he makes. He assumes the ordinary world in which we live, and this he does

not acknowledge.

Hegel in the nineteenth century writes that mind is not like a lens that might

fatally distort an “external world;” Descartes’ doubts are concocted, artiﬁcial.

For to imagine a world external to mind is already to use the mind! No, for a

world to be a world , an intelligible whole, minding must be something that the

world does. The world’s evolution is the development of its ever deepening

coming home to itself, its self-comprehension, as that energy which is mind

or spirit ( Geist ). As Schelling writes, it is “the holy and continuously creative

energy of the world which generates and busily evolves all things out of

itself,” comprehending them in the very process of evolving them. It follows

that truths, facts, concerning what satisﬁes the deepest human potentialities

and hungers, given our place in the evolving whole, are simultaneously values.

With Schelling and Hegel, local, rooted, sense experience and evaluation seem

to be rewoven with scientiﬁc research and cosmic speculation and reverence;

reason achieves a new ﬂexibility, resourcefulness, daring, and civilization

seems on the verge of recovery (at least in thought).

Charles Peirce, William James, and John Dewey – the paradigmatic Amer-

ican pragmatists – are inundated and deeply rooted in this so-called idealist

tradition. They cannot accept the notion of Absolute Mind or Spirit ( Geist ),

particularly as Hegel left it: the sanguine belief that since the universe is One,

there must be one Mind working in and through it all, and that we can enter

into this working and discover its continuously world-creating dialectical log-

ic – philosophizing a reverential act in which “we think God’s thoughts after

Him.” But – but – the idealists’ critiques of modern “realisms” are accepted.

To allow philosophical thought to make unexamined assumptions in order to

begin is to countenance partial views, aspects, and abstractions to pass as the

whole, and this is to abet fragmentation, disorientation, frightened and aggres-

sive restlessness. Particularly damaging is Cartesian dualism which pictures

Nature as a machine. How could we feeling beings, capable of tradition, ever

ﬁt into this? The very time in which Europeans used their mechanical model

PRAGMATISM, NEOPRAGMATISM, AND PHENOMENOLOGY

and their tools to overwhelm the globe, they lost all sense of being rooted

sustainingly in Nature, and all appreciation of indigenous peoples’ profound

contentments.

How is philosophical thought to begin authentically? It must somehow be

self-starting and self-validating. This can only mean that we must start with

where we actually ﬁnd ourselves here and now in the local environment.

We ﬁnd ourselves within the circumpressure of things as they appear to us.

Appearing things that can no longer be denigrated as mere appearances, for

they compose the primal tissue of meaning without which no other mean-

ing can be made, without which all deliberate inquiry, analysis, reﬂection,

research, and technology is impossible. And in fact when we describe these

appearances closely we see they hold within themselves connective tissue.

Any local environment presents itself within a horizon of the immediately

sensible – audible, visible, smellable, touchable – and every horizon points

both inwards at this and beyond itself to everything else – whatever exactly the

universe might be. The earlier pragmatism retained in broad outline organi-

cist assumptions: at all levels of analysis parts are parts-of-wholes, organs of

the whole organism, and their well-functioning is for the sake of the whole.

And organisms at all levels are wholes-of-parts that feed back into the parts,

feeding and sustaining them for their allotted time within the whole.

That is, 19th and early 20th century pragmatisms are simultaneously phe-

nomenologies, attempts to describe the primal birth of phenomena or appear-

ances within our experience in such a way that the basic categories for weaving

together and interpreting the whole world are discerned. For the original prag-

matists meaning and truth are “what works” in the sense that they function to

weave together aworld in our experience. We must believe whatever is nec-

essary to achieve this whole. Pragmatists’ idea of what “works” has been, and

in many quarters still is, misunderstood, because of a scandalous ignorance

of the history of philosophy, of the matrix within which their ideas grow.

The misunderstanding at its crassest goes like this: “Pragmatists believe that

meaning and truth are whatever makes you happy to believe.”

No, ideas have a life of their own, they are strands of activity that either

interweave with the rest of the world as they predict in their very meaning they

will, or they do not. How this happens to make us feel as individuals is irrele-

vant (unless the ideas are about our feelings themselves). Misunderstandings

of original pragmatism typically spring from Cartesian abstractions from the

whole experienceable world that forget this experienceable whole, and, with-

out grasping how any objectiﬁcation is possible, objectify and demarcate

minds as private individual containers with ideas and other mental contents –

like feelings of satisfaction – ﬂoating inside them.

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