Romanticism and Pragmatism

Richard Rorty and the Idea of a Poeticized Culture

U. Schulenberg

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137474193
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This interdisciplinary project is situated at the boundary between literary studies and philosophy. Its chief focus is on American Romanticism and it examines work by a number of prominent writers and philosophers, from Whitman and Thoreau to Barthes and Rorty.

Part I

Pragmatism and the Idea of a Literary or Poeticized Culture

Does it change one’s understanding of pragmatism when one sees it as a form of humanism? What exactly is the meaning of Richard Rorty’s notion of a poeticized culture? And how are the texts of the later Roland Barthes useful (an adjective he would have abhorred) when one tries to draw attention to the limitations of this Rortyan idea? In this part, I will seek to answer these three questions. Rorty and Barthes, in their profoundly idiosyncratic ways, criticize ambitions of transcendence and instead favor attempts at self-creation that leave no room for God or God-substitutes. Furthermore, these writers stimulate their readers to imagine a culture that would finally be capable of embracing secularization completely and would thus no longer be governed by any ambition of transcendence. Concerning Rorty’s position, Ronald Kuipers correctly points out: “[Rorty is] that twentieth-century thinker, par excellence, who takes up the torch of human self-reliance, who thinks we would be much better off without entertaining any notion of transcendence whatsoever. If nothing else, his work expresses the fervent wish that humankind will one day come to embrace life in a world ‘without God or his doubles’” (2013: 118). These sentences also imply that for Rorty, the desire to cross Plato’s dividing line between contingent and unreliable appearance and immutable reality has hindered humanity’s progress. F.C.S. Schiller and Barthes would concur with Rorty.

1

F.C.S. Schiller: Pragmatism, Humanism, and Postmetaphysics

In order to understand the implications of Richard Rorty’s notion of a genuinely postmetaphysical culture, one has to see how important the idea of humanism is for this kind of culture. On a more general level, one can state that the idea of humanism has played a crucial role for thinkers as different as William James, John Dewey, and Rorty. All three pragmatists, to varying degrees, call attention to the Protagorean idea that man is the measure of all things. Moreover, they urge their readers to confront the centrality of the following questions: In what way can pragmatism, as a philosophy of praxis, of creative action, and of experiences and consequences, be understood as a kind of humanism? How does it change our understanding of the task philosophy has to fulfill if man’s desires, feelings, purposes, needs, and interests are recognized as shaping and directing our approaches in epistemology and logic? What are the consequences of the insight that one cannot strictly separate logic and psychology? Furthermore – and this will preoccupy us throughout this study – one has to realize how pragmatism, humanism, postmetaphysics, and anti-authoritarianism are linked. A pragmatist humanism is a form of anti-authoritarianism insofar as it shows that man does not need to strive to be adequate to a nonhuman power; that is, he does not need to develop a way of thinking that, in its purity, objectivity, rationality, and neutrality, follows the imperatives of this nonhuman power. In a humanist postmetaphysical culture, man would no longer need the certainty, reliability, purity, and immutability of what is more than another human creation, and he would eventually show himself capable of fully understanding the implications of the idea that everything is man-made.

If pragmatism has a natural starting point it is man as he stands, the world of his experiences, the tasks that he has to confront in a world that was not made for him. Critiquing a priori philosophies and their ideal of timeless pure thought, pragmatism from James to Rorty argues that there are no nonhuman or transhuman truths and eternal moral principles, only the world of human experience in which man creatively and imaginatively acts to solve problems and achieve purposes and in which he, moreover, projects himself into the future by contemplating and calculating the consequences of his actions. Man constantly learns, changes, creates himself anew, regresses, fails in his endeavors, deals successfully with contingency, redefines his purposes, succumbs to his desires – in a detranscendentalized, rehumanized, and postmetaphysical culture, the conceptual tools for talking about the world of human experience can only be formed and invented in the world of human experience. What this also means is that the immanence of a pragmatist humanism constantly draws attention to the idea that in a fully realized postmetaphysical culture, man would appear as a maker. Man as the maker of (his) truths, principles, laws, and the sciences refuses to accept the alleged authority of something nonhuman and absolute, something that presents itself as more than another human invention.

Concerning the relation between pragmatism and humanism, the work of the English philosopher Ferdinand Canning Scott Schiller (1864–1937) is of the utmost importance. Schiller, who spent most of his professional life at Oxford University, developed his own brand of pragmatist humanism.¹ His idiosyncratic version of pragmatism, or what he also termed humanism, personalism, and voluntarism, was directed against the Anglo-Hegelianism of F.H. Bradley, T.H. Green, and others (this was also one of the targets of James’s critique). However, on a more general level Schiller sought to expose the weaknesses, shortcomings, and inconsistencies of forms of absolutism, Platonism, intellectualism, and monism. Throughout his career, Schiller was a rather isolated figure. As Robert Richardson nicely puts it: “He was undeniably brilliant, but his schoolboyish humor, his abusive personal attacks on philosophical opponents, and his eagerness to turn philosophical debate into a blood sport made him enemies” (2007: 452). Schiller developed his early version of pragmatism before having studied James, but later underscored how much he admired the latter as a philosopher and as a man. Schiller was a very prolific author. For our purposes, his two collections of essays, Humanism (1903) and Studies in Humanism (1907), will be our main concern.

Schiller’s thought is radically anthropocentric. In this chapter, I will discuss his notions of pragmatism and humanism, as well as his idea of the making of truth and reality. Furthermore, I will seek to elucidate why his texts are important if one tries to grasp the idea of a postmetaphysical poeticized culture. In The Pragmatic Humanism of F.C.S. Schiller, Reuben Abel summarizes Schiller’s position as follows:

The core of Schiller’s vision is the conviction that all acts and thoughts are irreducibly the products of individual human beings and are therefore inescapably colored by the needs, desires, and purposes of men. What we call knowledge, hence, is a growing and varying thing. It evolves, just as living things evolve, and for the same reason: human survival. The logic we use is not eternally fixed and absolute, but dynamic and changing. Man makes his truth, just as he makes his other values, beauty and goodness. […] If man is truly the measure of all things, as Schiller was fond of quoting from Protagoras, “non-anthropomorphic thought is sheer absurdity.” (1955: 7–8)

Particularity, individuality, pluralism, desire, growth, variety, evolution, survival, dynamism, change, and making – this pragmatist vocabulary indeed seems useful when discussing Schiller. I think that John R. Shook is correct in pointing out that there are “strong signs of Nietzschean influences” (2009: 45) in Schiller’s early work. It is also crucial to note that for Schiller, reality is in the Jamesian sense still in the making. In other words:

it should be pragmatically conceived as not yet complete, still in the process of growth, stimulated toward definite forms by human activity. Human creations are not merely rearrangements of pre-existing raw materials. All our creations, including knowledge, transform reality into genuinely novel things, thereby creating truly new realities and adding to the amount of being. (Shook 2009: 46)

This also means, of course, that imagination and novelty, which are important characteristics of a Rortyan poeticized culture, are also central to Schiller’s pragmatist humanism.

One of the best places to start a discussion of Schiller’s understanding of pragmatism and humanism is certainly his Preface to the first edition of Humanism. After elaborating on the changes or reforms that pragmatism would initiate in the fields of logic, science, ethics, and religion, Schiller begins the third part of this Preface by underlining that pragmatism is “not the final term of philosophic innovation” since “there is yet a greater, a more sovereign principle” (1903: xv). The latter he terms “Humanism” (1903: xvi). Humanism, as he makes clear, is strictly opposed to forms of abstract, technical, intellectualist, and otherworldly philosophy. Being convinced that humanism is an attitude that he shares with William James, Schiller contends that “the study of a humaner philosophy” is destined “to win the widest popularity” (1903: xvi). In his opinion, Protagoras’s aforementioned dictum that “man is the measure of all things” is “the truest and most important thing that any thinker ever has propounded” (1903: xvii). Later in his text Schiller expands on this:

To remember that man is the measure of all things, i.e. of his whole experience-world, and that if our standard measure be proved false all our measurements are vitiated; to remember that Man is the maker of the sciences which subserve his human purposes; to remember that an ultimate philosophy which analyzes us away is thereby merely exhibiting its failure to achieve its purpose, that, and more that might be stated to the same effect, is the real root of Humanism, whence all its auxiliary doctrines spring. (1903: xx)

It is crucial to see that for James and Rorty pragmatism is the broader term, and humanism denotes a special pragmatist attitude. By contrast, for the British pragmatist humanism serves as the broader term that is capable of subsuming other doctrines. Pragmatism, for Schiller, is a method, and it “is in reality only the application of Humanism to the theory of knowledge” (1903: 24). In his important piece “The Definition of Pragmatism and Humanism,” Schiller discusses seven central characteristics of pragmatism. The radical nature of his argument already becomes obvious in his explanation of the first characteristic. Radically rejecting traditional definitions of truth and the (Platonist) idea of a pure intellect, Schiller maintains that the predicates “true” and “false” are not timeless and transhuman, but are provisional indications of logical value used for specific purposes in specific situations. He goes further when he avers that these epistemological values are comparable to those predicated in ethical and aesthetic judgments. By refusing strictly to separate epistemology, aesthetics, and ethics, Schiller seeks to make clear that the theory of knowledge must no longer be regarded as offering the possibility of reaching a realm where man’s quest for certainty finally reaches its end. Truth not only depends on its consequences in the world of practice (there is no other); the actual working of the intellect can only be analyzed and understood by considering human ends and values. Consequently, Schiller defines pragmatism “as the doctrine that (1) truths are logical values, and as the method which systematically tests claims to truth in accordance with this principle” (1907: 7).

As we have already seen, one of Schiller’s bêtes noires is the idea of an abstract truth that is typical of Platonism, absolutism, and intellectualism. Truths, for the pragmatist, must have proven useful; that is, they must have been applied to real problems of actual knowing. Hence, Schiller offers as a second definition of the pragmatist principle “the truth of an assertion depends on its application” (1907: 8). This has to be seen in connection with the Schillerian contention that truths are rules for action. Truths have to be activated, as it were, they have to be used in order to become true, and rules have to be applied and must not remain abstract. According to Schiller, one should regard it “as the essence of the pragmatic method that (3) the meaning of a rule lies in its application” (1907: 9). In order to understand the next three characteristics one has to realize how central the notions of purpose and purposiveness are to Schiller’s pragmatist humanism. All mental and intellectual activity, all actual knowing, all experimental activity, to Schiller, is purposive. Warning against the abstraction of logic from psychology and showing himself to be influenced by Darwinian thought, he advances the idea that the purposiveness of the human mind can be seen in its capability of affecting adaptations that contribute to the welfare of the human organism. Thus, Schiller emphasizes “that ultimately (4) all meaning depends on purpose,” and he moreover insists on “the fact that (5) all mental life is purposive” (1907: 9, 10). This culminates in his sixth definition, where he maintains that pragmatism “must constitute itself into […] a systematic protest against all ignoring of the purposiveness of actual knowing” (1907: 11).

Does Schillerian pragmatism entail a certain metaphysics? In the context of his definition of the final characteristic of pragmatism, he points out that pragmatism “is not a metaphysic, though it may, somewhat definitely, point to one” (1907: 11). This metaphysic he terms “Voluntarism” (1907: 11). While pragmatism, as an epistemological method describing the facts of actual knowing, or as a method in the field of logic that is empirical, teleological, and concrete, might lead to voluntarism, Schiller also underscores that metaphysics “are in a manner luxuries” (1907: 11). In his seventh definition, he describes pragmatism “as […] a conscious application to epistemology (or logic) of a teleological psychology, which implies, ultimately, a voluntaristic metaphysic” (1907: 12).

In “The Definition of Pragmatism and Humanism,” Schiller speaks of pragmatism as a method governed by a certain “spirit,” and this spirit “is a bigger thing” (1907: 12) that he calls humanism. At the beginning of the third part of this essay, he formulates humanism pointedly as “really in itself the simplest of philosophic standpoints; it is merely the perception that the philosophic problem concerns human beings striving to comprehend a world of human experience by the resources of human minds” (1907: 12). An emphasis on the significance of the aforementioned Protagorean principle, as Schiller writes, might lead the philosophically uninstructed to surmise that pragmatists deny the existence and independence of the external world. As many pragmatists and neopragmatists after him have done, Schiller makes it clear that pragmatism does not deny the existence of the external world and that, moreover, it shares many of the assumptions of common-sense realism. However, a pragmatist humanism must insist “only that the ‘external world’ of realism is still dependent on human experience” (1907: 13). From our contemporary perspective (after the linguistic turn), we would tend to substitute “language game” or “vocabulary” for the (Deweyan) term “experience.” Yet, what ought to be of primary concern here is that a pragmatist humanism is compatible with what in discussions of Rorty’s brand of pragmatism has been called a nonreductive physicalism (going back to his essay of the same title). Most versions of pragmatism have been willing to admit that reality consists of physical objects in causal interactions with a physical environment and with each other, and that these objects have distinctive properties that can be measured and analyzed by the physical sciences. The world is out there, it can cause us to act, to reflect, or to feel, but we will never be able to reach it in its unmediated thereness. I will elaborate on this further below, but for pragmatists like Schiller and Rorty there is no way to gain access to reality as it is in itself, and no way to ground our experience or ways of speaking in the things themselves.

On Rorty’s account, pragmatists, striving to get away from traditional, Cartesian-Lockean epistemology, have to recognize the impact of Darwinism. According to Rorty, they “start with a Darwinian account of human beings as animals doing their best to cope with the environment – doing their best to develop tools which will enable them to enjoy more pleasure and less pain” (1999: xxii–xxiii). Clearly, this also concerns an aspect that is central to Schiller’s thinking and that we have not yet mentioned: namely, human satisfaction. This is the goal that philosophy should try to reach. Whereas absolutism, intellectualism, and monism mutilate human nature by developing the ideal of pure thought – that is, a mind that is free of its interests, purposes, emotions, desires, and volitions – Schiller’s pragmatist humanism demands “that man’s integral nature shall be used as the whole premiss which philosophy must argue from wholeheartedly, that man’s complete satisfaction shall be the conclusion philosophy must aim at, that philosophy shall not cut itself loose from the real problems of life by making initial abstractions which are false, and would not be admirable, even if they were true” (1907: 13). When Schiller vehemently critiques any kind of abstract, a priori philosophy, instead urging his readers to turn to the problems of man in the Deweyan sense and to regard “man’s complete satisfaction” as the telos of a genuinely humanist philosophy, the question arises as to why this British philosopher still has a use for the term “metaphysics.”

Schiller’s concept of metaphysics is rather unusual. It is in the final part of “The Definition of Pragmatism and Humanism” that he elaborates on this concept. First, he makes it clear that both pragmatism and humanism can, and should, be seen as methods. Neither necessitates a metaphysics. Methods are necessary for scientific progress, whereas metaphysics “are really luxuries, personal indulgences” (1907: 17). According to Schiller, metaphysics “is (i.e. tries to be) the science of the final synthesis of all the data of our experience” (1907: 17). One might state that for him metaphysics is the ultimate synthesis of the particular sciences. It is important to note that he contends that methods can be turned into metaphysics when they are accepted as ultimate. If one is wholly satisfied by a method, one might feel inclined to admit it as one’s metaphysics: “Both Pragmatism and Humanism, therefore, may be held as metaphysics” (1907: 19). While pragmatism, as we have seen, can be interpreted as deriving from a “voluntarist metaphysic,” humanism “may be affiliated to metaphysical personalism” (1907: 19).

For our purposes it is crucial to understand that for Schiller, metaphysics does not imply otherworldliness, transcendence, and the idea of a “prima philosophia”; that is, it is not synonymous with the desire to search for the certainty, purity, timelessness, reliability, and profundity of what would be more than another human creation. Even the notion of metaphysics is shaped by his pragmatist humanism. In other words, Schiller offers a subjectivized concept of metaphysics. He writes: “Every metaphysic, in point of fact, works up into its structure large masses of subjective material which is individual, and drawn from its author’s personal experience. It always takes its final form from an idiosyncrasy” (1907: 18). If metaphysics aspires to the whole of human experience, and if it considers its duty as to leave nothing out, “it must have this personal tinge” (1907: 18). Coming close to James’s notorious dictum that the “history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments” (1907: 8), Schiller claims that “a philosophy is always in the last resort the theory of a life, and not of life in general or in the abstract” (190...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Pragmatism and the Idea of a Literary or Poeticized Culture
• Part II From Finding to Making: Pragmatism and Romanticism
• Part III Ethics, the Novel, and the Private–Public Distinction
• Part IV Pragmatism, Race, and Cosmopolitanism
• Part V Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index