Pragmatism and Poetic Agency

The Persistence of Humanism

Ulf Schulenberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000469103
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Pragmatism is a humanist philosophy. In spite of the much-debated renaissance of pragmatism, however, a detailed discussion of the relationship between pragmatism and humanism is still a desideratum. It is difficult to understand the complexity of pragmatism without considering the significance of humanism. At least since the 1970s, humanism, mostly in its liberal version, has been vehemently attacked and criticized. In pragmatism, however, a particular understanding of humanism has persisted. Bringing literary studies, philosophy, and intellectual history together and establishing a transatlantic theoretical dialogue, Pragmatism and Poetic Agency endeavors to elucidate this persistence of humanism. Schulenberg continues the thought-provoking argument he developed in his previous two monographs by advancing the idea that one can only grasp the unique contemporary significance of pragmatism when one realizes how pragmatism, humanism, anti-authoritarianism, and postmetaphysics are interlinked. If one appreciates the implications and consequences of this link, then one is in a position to see pragmatism's antifoundationalist and antirepresentationalist story of progress and emancipation as continuing the project of the Enlightenment.

Part 1 Friedrich Nietzsche and the Pragmatists

1 “Only We Have Created the World that Concerns Man!” Nietzsche, Naturalism, and the Idea of Creativity

DOI: 10.4324/9781003214205-3

Why does Plato blush? Does he finally understand how presumptuous – and, at the same time, dangerous – the idea of a “true world” is? In other words, the question arises as to whether Plato eventually has come to appreciate the damaging consequences of the appearance–reality distinction. The ideas or forms, the divided line, the power of the philosopher-kings, and his treatment of the poets – maybe Plato not only realizes the presumptuousness of his idealism but at the same time senses or predicts the attraction of future humans to the “bon sens and cheerfulness” of which Nietzsche speaks in “How the ‘True World’ Finally Became a Fable” (TI). In this “Fable,” Nietzsche tells “The History of an Error”; that is, he tells a story of progress that begins with Platonism and Christianity (as Platonism for the people), continues with Kantianism and positivism, and ends with “Plato’s embarrassed blush” (TI, “World,” 5). The final chapter of this story depicts a world whose metaphysical foundations have finally crumbled, a completely de-deified world in which the human subject appears as creative maker, and a world in which processes of humanization and naturalization no longer leave room for the notion of a “true world.” However, in his fable, Nietzsche goes even further when he underscores that with “the true world we have also abolished the apparent one” (TI, “World,” 6). Nietzsche’s naturalistic critique of metaphysics and theology radically rejects the appearance–reality distinction and introduces his readers to the notion of a genuinely postmetaphysical culture. Striving to de-deify nature and naturalize humanity, he describes a world without beginning, origin, end, telos, substances, essences, foundations, and presence.

Nietzsche’s naturalism, this stimulating mixture of nominalism, historicism, antifoundationalism, antiessentialism, and holism, rejects the existence of supernatural entities, the notion of immutable being (as presence), and the idea that it is possible to contemplate the world from an extra-natural point of view. Theorists as varied as Dewey, Gadamer, Kuhn, Derrida, and Rorty have taught Nietzschean lessons: we will never achieve, and do not need, epistemological certainty; the immutability and purity of being have never been real; instead of a God’s-eye view, we have the subject who is always already in a perspective, who is always in a context and in history; and instead of trying to converge to the antecedently real and true and being adequate to the real, the human subject ought to understand the full implications of the development from finding to making.

Nietzsche’s philosophy of becoming, with its emphasis on particularity, contingency, history, and man-made conventions and rules (or normativity), seeks to convince one that the imperatives and demands of metaphysics and ontotheology have been damaging to the progress of humankind. His new philosophy argues that the subject does not have to answer to the world; that is, it had better stop considering the idea of human answerability to something nonhuman.¹ However, the new poet-philosophers not only will refuse to obey the commands of something nonhuman but also will never imitate and will criticize any attempt to call attention to the significance of antecedently formulated criteria. Instead of claiming that our rational beliefs and sentences ought to be world-directed and ought to correspond to reality as it really is, we should understand the far-reaching implications of one of Nietzsche’s most dangerous suggestions: “Wir erst haben die Welt, die den Menschen etwas angeht, geschaffen!” (FW, 301); “Only we have created the world that concerns man!” (GS, 301). In this chapter, I wish to explain the meaning of this sentence. I will do this in two steps. First, I will discuss Nietzsche’s naturalism. Second, I will endeavor to elucidate why his naturalism prepares the ground for a philosophy of creativity or making.

1.1 Nietzsche's Naturalism

Nietzsche’s philosophy is radically postmetaphysical in nature. It critiques the idea that something supernatural or transcendental might shape one’s thoughts and actions.² Whereas Platonism and Christianity were governed by dichotomies such as appearance–reality, subject–object, and becoming–being, Nietzsche’s anti-dualism urges one to develop a new way of thinking. His critique of metaphysics – that is, his attempt at a radical de-divinization – wants to put us in a position where we are no longer “able to see any use for the notion that finite, mortal, contingently existing human beings might derive the meanings of their lives from anything except other finite, mortal, contingently existing human beings” (Rorty 1989: 45). The world is out there, but it does not tell us how to speak. It is out there, but it is not a conversational partner. It does not confirm the correctness of our sentences and beliefs; moreover, it does not help us in our attempt to create forms of normativity or rules for the never-ending process of giving and asking for reasons. We are biological entities, equipped with language and embedded in cultural and historical contexts, who have to cope creatively with our environment. Furthermore, after the death of God, the subject has to cope with its aloneness. After the reduced significance of metaphysics, it slowly dawns on the modern subject that its most important characteristic is its creativity. Not only does the subject understand that in a detranscendentalized culture the conceptual tools for talking about the world of practice can be invented and formed only in this world of practice (there is no other), but it also appreciates to what degree it has created its own world. The modern antifoundationalist and humanist story of progress and emancipation, from Vico, Nietzsche, William James, and F.C.S. Schiller to Dewey and Rorty, demonstrates that our attempts at understanding the world should no longer be dominated by the appearance–reality distinction, the desire for the really real, the correspondence theory of truth, or the desire to discover the universal conditions of human existence or the permanent, ahistorical context of human life.

Nietzsche mentions the death of God for the first time in section 108 of The Gay Science: “God is dead; but given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown. – And we – we still have to vanquish his shadow, too.” This death of God is Nietzsche’s starting point, and he sees the endeavor to “vanquish his shadow” as his main task.³ In other words, with the death of God, the metaphysical need is not simply erased, and metaphysical and ontotheological categories and concepts still dominate humans’ thoughts. As a naturalist and historicist nominalist, Nietzsche detects God’s shadow in supernatural entities, immutable principles, theoretical abstractions, the need for epistemological certainty, the notion of an absolute ontology, and the natural sciences’ desire for truth and the really real. His naturalism also critiques forms of positivism and scientism. Contrary to W.V. Quine’s suggestion, naturalism is not necessarily synonymous with scientism.⁴

One of the most important passages of the Nietzschean oeuvre can be found in section 109 of The Gay Science. From this passage, it also becomes obvious how closely linked sections 108 and 109 are. Nietzsche here speaks of the necessity of completing the “de-deification of nature” and of “naturaliz[ing] humanity”: “When will all these shadows of God cease to darken our minds? When will we complete our de-deification of nature? When may we begin to ‘naturalize’ humanity in terms of a pure, newly discovered, newly redeemed nature?” (GS, 109). Whereas Platonists and Christians established a firm link between God, eternal truth, and moral goodness and justified this link by means of dualistic thought, Nietzsche strives to convince us that after the death of God we ought to accept the idea that humans are part of the natural world. They have the same ontological status as other creatures. However, because of their use of language and their creativity, they have other possibilities of self-creation and self-overcoming. The notion of the death of God offers Nietzsche the possibility of developing his critique of European thought, from Plato and the Christians to contemporary forms of metaphysics, and his naturalism directs attention to the fact that modern culture, contrary to its self-understanding, is still governed by otherworldly ideals or by what he also terms “the ascetic ideal” (GM, III).

Nietzsche’s naturalism always returns one to the world of practice, in which humans as natural creatures are situated at a particular time and place.⁵ In this “world of life, nature, and history” (GS, 344), metaphysical and transcendental entities, principles, and abstractions, together with their binary oppositions, are critiqued and finally rejected in favor of that which has hitherto been anathematized. Christoph Cox expands on the relation between the death of God and the Nietzschean revaluation of formerly criticized features and approaches as follows:

In the wake of this “death,” Nietzsche calls for a revaluation of all those features of natural life previously maligned by theology and metaphysics: sensation, instinct, and affect; change, temporality, and history; contingency and conditionality; procreation, nutrition, growth, decay, and death; psychology, physiology, biology, and sociology; and so forth.

(1999: 71)

Instead of the epistemological ideal of certainty and firm foundations, the ontological ideal of a pre-given world, and the Christian ideal of transhistorical moral standards, Nietzsche’s naturalized humanity would eventually understand the contingency of language, self, and community (think of Rorty’s Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity in this context). Furthermore, humans would realize that the strict separation between the natural and the extra- or supernatural, and the attempt to prioritize the latter over the former, has been man-made and thus can be revoked.

The new philosophers or postmetaphysical theorists, as Nietzsche contends in Beyond Good and Evil, must try “to translate man back into nature; to master the many vain and fanciful interpretations and secondary meanings which have been hitherto scribbled and daubed over that eternal basic text homo natura […]” (230). Peeling off those layers of metaphysical and theological interpretations centering on the human subject’s unique capacities and capabilities, a Nietzschean naturalist and genealogist will constantly emphasize that one cannot grasp the complexity of metaphysics without considering the significance of dualistic thinking. In this context, it is interesting to see that the early Nietzsche, in “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense” (1873), radically questions the notions of causality, correspondence, and expression with regard to the subject–object dichotomy and instead underlines the “aesthetic way of relating” between these poles:

[…] for between two absolutely different spheres, such as subject and object are, there is no causality, no correctness, no expression, but at most an aesthetic way of relating, by which I mean an allusive transference, a stammering translation into a quite different language. For which purpose a middle sphere and mediating force is certainly required which can freely invent and freely create poetry.

(1999: 148)

The later Nietzsche would insist not only that this “middle sphere” offers humans the possibility of “freely invent[ing] and freely creat[ing] poetry” but also that they will appreciate that a vocabulary using the subject–object dualism has never been anything but poetry in the first place.

As I have mentioned above, one of the primary targets of Nietzsche’s naturalism is the appearance–reality distinction.⁶ According to Nietzsche, the traditional philosopher constantly tried to make the natural and historical world, the world of practice, look bad. He

invents a world so as to be able to slander and bespatter this world: in reality he reaches every time for nothingness and construes nothingness as “God,” as “truth,” and in any case as judge and condemner of this state of being.

(WP, 461)

As Dewey would later argue in The Quest for Certainty, the Platonist philosopher holds that one can have firm beliefs only in a stable and predictable world. This real world is contrary to the natural and historical world of becoming, contingency, particularity, and action. Truth cannot be reached in this world where humans work, creatively invent new forms of practice, play roles, succumb to their desires, and rely on their senses and their intuition. As Nietzsche points out:

The history of philosophy is a secret raging against the preconditions of life, against the value feelings of life, against partisanship in favor of life. Philosophers have never hesitated to affirm a world provided it contradicted this world and furnished them with a pretext for speaking ill of this world.

(WP, 461)

It is precisely this “secret raging against the preconditions of life” that Nietzsche’s naturalism critiques. In his opinion, the Platonist philosopher’s hypostatization of reason has to ignore the latter’s origin in the empirical world (which is the only world humans have). He goes even further by stressing that we “have no categories at all that permit us to distinguish a ‘world in itself’ from a ‘world of appearance.’ All our categories of reason are of sensual origin: derived from the empirical world” (WP, 488).

Nietzsche repeatedly makes clear in his texts that he traces the dichotomy of the real world or the world of truth vs. the apparent world or the world of illusion back to what he terms “value relations” (“Werthverhältnisse” – this also played a crucial role for Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche). We humans think that we have to be stable in our beliefs in order to thrive, to progress, and to preserve our species. Consequently, those desired conditions of stability and predictability, which ensure our preservation, have over time mutated into “predicates of being”:

“The real and the apparent world” – I have traced this antithesis back to value relations. We have projected the conditions of our preservation as predicates of being in general. Because we have to be stable in our beliefs if we are to prosper, we have made the “real” world a world not of change and becoming, but one of being.

(WP, 507)

Logic and the categories of reason, for a naturalist like Nietzsche, are man-made instruments that offer human beings the possibility of creating their world. Together with many other instru...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsement Page
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part 1: Friedrich Nietzsche and the Pragmatists
• Part 2: Pragmatism, Poetic Agency, and Race
• Part 3: Theoretical Encounters
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index