Self and Society: Central European Pragmatist Forum, Volume Four. (Value Inquiry Book)

Self and Society Central European Pragmatist Forum, Volume Four

VIBS Volume 207 Robert Ginsberg Founding Editor Leonidas Donskis Executive Editor Associate Editors G. John M. Abbarno George Allan Gerhold K. Becker Raymond Angelo Belliotti Kenneth A. Bryson C. Stephen Byrum Harvey Cormier Robert A. Delfino Rem B. Edwards Malcolm D. Evans Daniel B. Gallagher Andrew Fitz-Gibbon Francesc Forn i Argimon William Gay Dane R. Gordon J. Everet Green Heta Aleksandra Gylling

Matti Häyry Steven V. Hicks Richard T. Hull Michael Krausz Mark Letteri Vincent L. Luizzi Adrianne McEvoy Peter A. Redpath Arleen L. F. Salles John R. Shook Eddy Souffrant Tuija Takala Emil Višňovský Anne Waters James R. Watson John R. Welch Thomas Woods

a volume in Central European Value Studies CEVS Emil Višňovský, Editor

Self and Society Central European Pragmatist Forum, Volume Four

Edited by

Alexander Kremer and John Ryder

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2009

Cover Design: Studio Pollmann The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence”. ISBN: 978-90-420-2621-6 E-Book ISBN: 978-90-420-2622-3 © Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2009 Printed in the Netherlands

Central European Value Studies (CEVS) Edited by Emil Višňovský, Slovak Academy of Sciences Affiliate Editors Jaap van Brakel, University of Louvain, Eckhard Herych, University of Mainz. Assistant Editors Arnold Burms (Belgium), Herman Parret (Belgium), B.A.C. Saunders (Belgium), Frans De Wachter (Belgium), Anindita Balslev (Denmark), LarsHenrik Schmidt (Denmark), Dieter Birnbacher (Germany), Stephan Grätzel (Germany), Thomas Seebohm (Germany), Olaf Wiegand (Germany), Alex Burri (Switzerland), Henri Lauener (Switzerland).

Other titles in CEVS Josef Seifert: What is Life?: The Originality, Irreducibility, and Value of Life. 1997. VIBS 51 Kathleen J. Wininger: Nietzsche’s Reclamation of Philosophy. 1997. VIBS 54 Caroline Joan (Kay) S. Picart: Thomas Mann and Friedrich Nietzsche: Eroticism, Death, Music, and Laughter. 1999. VIBS 85 Josef Šmajs: Evolutionary Ontology: Reclaiming the Value of Nature by Transforming Culture. 2008. VIBS 195

CONTENTS Foreword by Joseph Margolis

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Preface by Alexander Kremer and John Ryder

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ONE TWO

SELF AND HISTORY Sense of Self, Sense of Reality: A Peircean Approach in a Globalizing World Ramón Rodríguez Aguilera William James’s Social Understanding of the Self James Campbell

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THREE Dewey and Steinbeck on the Individual and Community Richard E. Hart

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FOUR Dewey and the Lost Individual Donald Morse

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SELF AND SOCIETY FIVE

The Social Character of Obligation in Dewey’s Pragmatic Ethics Michael Eldridge

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SIX Publics and Products: Reassembling the Social Larry A. Hickman

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SEVEN

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Social Cooperation as Civic Virtue Juan Carlos Mougán Rivero

EIGHT Personal Identity of an Intersectional Self Kathleen A. Wallace NINE Education and Social Change: Gorky, Dewey and Fabian Socialism Lyubov Bugaeva

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Contents

SELF AND POLITICS TEN

Towards a Pragmatic Reconstruction of International Institutions: Traveling Selves and Epistemic Cosmopolitanism 121 Thomas C. Hilde

ELEVEN Genocide’s Aftermath: Reflections on Self and Responsibility Armen Marsoobian

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TWELVE American Philosophy and Foreign Policy John Ryder

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THIRTEEN

Social Control, Self-Control and Norms: a Pragmatist Approach Emil Višňovský

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FOURTEEN The Political Self in Modern Democracy: Individual Liberty and Personal Rights versus Republican Virtue and Communitarian Responsiveness 173 Gert-Rüdiger Wegmarshaus SELF AND NEOPRAGMATISM FIFTEEN Community, Individuality, and Experience Dorota Koczanowicz

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SIXTEEN Richard Rorty’s Interpretation of Selfhood Alexander Kremer

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SEVENTEEN On the ‘Logic’ of Rorty’s Imaginative Liberalism: Utopia, Solidarity, and the Private-Public Distinction 201 Miklós Nyírő EIGHTEEN A Koala’s Face, A Pig’s Slaughters, and Rorty’s Conception of Self and Society Radim Šíp

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INTERVIEW NINETEEN An Interview with Richard Rorty Alexander Kremer

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About the Editors and Contributors

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INDEX

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Foreword Joseph Margolis Pragmatists are still rather heady—unprepared, perhaps even bewildered—by the news that pragmatism has begun a new career. They were plainly caught off guard by its revival in the closing decades of the last century, triggered largely by the import of Richard Rorty’s having identified himself as a postmodernist pragmatist and by his running dispute with Hilary Putnam, who willingly marked himself as a more orthodox proponent of a pragmatism more indebted to James and Dewey than to Peirce, but in any case strongly opposed to Rorty’s deconstructive tendencies. The doctrinal allegiances hardly matter now. What matters is the recovery of the daring of the classic beginnings of pragmatism centered—as Rorty and Putnam have emphasized—on the stubbornly problematic nature of the standard questions of meaning and truth in the context of a viable life, and the sense that life itself is a flux, not a chaos. Pragmatism had run its course in the 40s, seemed to have come close to the end of its string. Rorty’s declaration signaled a loss of confidence in the zeal of analytic philosophy itself—a distinct sense of a profound misreading of its own powers. Putnam countered but was caught short with too much of the baggage of the old hegemony and not enough of a viable compromise to show the way to a fresh beginning. His Carus Lectures, for instance, ended in an intolerable “internal realism” and his strongest statement, in Reason, Truth and History, seemed to rest on an untenable Grenzbegriff, which Rorty saw at once would never stand. Each treated the other as implicitly committed to an untenable relativism, where relativism might have appeared more reasonable than the extreme views each espoused. In any case, now, in the first decade of the new century, pragmatism has taken fire throughout the Eurocentric world (and beyond), with a willingness to morph into new forms hospitable to the local philosophical histories of the societies thus contacted that had no developed allegiance to the special loyalties of a parochial American world. I have myself felt in a most personal way the enthusiasm of the resurgence of pragmatism in the Slavic world, which champions a level of intellectual liberation of a rather thrilling sort. Better than naïve, I would say, fresh with a kind of hope the Americans might themselves wish to warm their minds by. At the moment, the conferences that are springing up like wild flowers in Slovakia, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Spain, Finland, Germany, Italy, Britain, Brazil—to name a few of the livelier sites—mingle a nostalgia for the classic authors and a need to hybridize the recovering culture in a way that is almost deliberately experimental. The work that’s emerging shows every sign of bringing into play a run of new forms of discipline that could hardly have been generated from America alone and is clearly prepared to abandon the

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partisan loyalties of the past. Which is all to the good, since the energies of late American pragmatism spanning, say, the interval from the fifties to the seventies and eighties was distinctly out of touch with the strongest currents of Eurocentric philosophy. I think the lesson must be a general one. The philosophical energies of the Western world have been feeding on recycled nourishment for a long time now. They’ve honed their talents in a technically impressive way, but they’ve lacked a new vision for a long time. Evidently the new breed wanted cannot be produced by brute will alone. It must be fostered with some quiet care. It’s not a gift to be passed on; it’s a hybrid possibility. The clue I recommend is a political one. We cannot produce the convincing strains that are needed without enlisting the best powers of the new soil. The Americans are fond of invoking the democratic model. (Some of the papers in the present collection make this perfectly clear.) But even democracy will take diverse forms in diverse soils (as American foreign policy has yet to learn). The new energies are unlikely to come from pragmatism’s original soil, except as American philosophers may have learned to absorb the dawning visions of pragmatism’s new hosts. Dewey and James and Peirce would have found the stubborn fixities of post-classic pragmatism more than a little strange. How could their own daring be transformed into a canon? From the side of the custodians of the American doctrine, you must enlist the alien traditions you never knew before. There’s the innovation behind the present collection. Not merely a movable feast of Americans performing in new cities, but a mingling of the homegrown and its adventurous possibilities abroad. Pragmatism was never a finished doctrine. It couldn’t have been. But it hardly engaged its natural opponents during its first hegemony. And so it dwindled into near-oblivion. The trouble is, nearly every large movement that dominated Western philosophy in the last century has lost its vigor and now finds no replacement on the horizon. So pragmatism’s revival is a second chance, unearned perhaps but possibly more promising than the failed fixities of its rivals. That is what I suppose the new enthusiasm signifies: a conceptual flexibility that avoids the scientisms of the analysts and the anti-naturalisms of the continentals, and through it all remains committed to the most generous vision of humanity it can conceive. It gains ground from the exhausted assurances of its opponents, and we ourselves are witnesses to its brief reprieve. But what the philosophical world will make of it has still to be spelled out by its newest adherents. It will have to find a common thread that can negate the one-sided transient victories of all the recent movements that are all but defeated now—including the remembered forays of its own insufficient past. I find it impossible to keep myself from speculating—in the briefest of ways—about the central themes of pragmatism’s evolving second (or third) future. I think it will have to recover a deeper mastery of the meaning of the

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innovations that span the work of Kant and Hegel, which together usher in the whole of “modern” modern philosophy. For one thing, all that is meant by the trifurcation of pragmatist, analytic, and continental inquiries is historically grounded in the same sources, which make them legible to themselves and one another and still inspires the best work that attends to the questions of truth, meaning, and knowledge that motivated the original work of the early pragmatists and the main themes of Western philosophy to this day. The analytic/pragmatist discussion has pretty well come to a stalemate—not quite to the extreme skepticism Rorty tendered as the successor form of pragmatism itself, but certainly something quite close to it that needs to be addressed head on. For a second, according to my own preferences, pragmatism joining with whatever movements in whatever creative union we may devise, will have to explore the neglected conceptual resources of historicity and evolution (linking, say, Hegel and Darwin), perhaps inventively enough to restore a sense of the fruitfulness of epistemology’s importance. I think the touchstones of pragmatism’s past may fairly be said to include the following issues: the flux of the world; the early forms of the pragmatic theory of meaning; fallibilism and the finite/infinite continuum of science and inquiry; the human being as itself a sign (perhaps the principal sign) of and in a thoroughly semiotized or semiotically transformed natural world; and the explication of the endlessly evolving complexities of the democratic vision of human possibility in accord with the doctrines just mentioned. Success enough in the near future must, I think, count on the isolation and engagement of the strongest currents of congenial thought in all the movements that pragmatism might hope to co-opt or penetrate or be penetrated by. As I see the matter, the single most inclusive undertaking that might bring all of this together in a pointedly productive way would feature the analysis of the cultural world and the relationship between physical nature and human culture. It’s a startling fact that the analysis of the cultural world has been remarkably neglected in both analytic and pragmatist philosophies, even where the materials and issues of that world are favored in our inquiries. Continental philosophy, hermeneutics in particular, has never failed to acknowledge its primacy. If pragmatism could reach a sustainable, mutually enriching exchange with hermeneutically-minded philosophies, whether hermeneutic in the classic sense or neo-Kantian or phenomenological (as, in a close comparison between Peirce and Cassirer), it would greatly strengthen philosophy’s sense of the validity of pragmatism’s reprieve. These are of course terribly abbreviated suggestions. But they do begin to mark what we should be thinking of in considering how to redeem pragmatism’s new opportunity. You may disagree and I would certainly support your right. But then what I offer is at least a target of opportunity of the right sort.

Preface Alexander Kremer and John Ryder The Central European Pragmatist Forum (CEPF) was founded in 2000 as a mechanism with which to bring together American and European specialists in American philosophy. The value of doing so was and continues to be based on two observations. The first is that over the past several decades there has been sustained, occasionally growing, interest on the part of European scholars in the history of American philosophy in general and American pragmatism in particular. It is in the interest of the scholarship undertaken by European specialists that they be as conversant as possible with the work being done in the US itself, and there is no better way to do that than to have the opportunity to meet and talk with American specialists in the field. The second observation is that though in general it seldom happens, it is in the interest of American specialists in American philosophy (or history, or literature, or culture…) to be familiar with how their subject matter is understood abroad. It is therefore as valuable for American scholars to meet and speak with their European counterparts as it is for Europeans to become familiar with the Americans. With all of this in mind it was decided that the CEPF would host a conference every two years that would be an attempt to create something of an international community of scholars of American philosophy. The first Pragmatist Forum was held in Stara Lesna, Slovakia in 2000, the second in Kraków, Poland in 2002, the third in Potsdam, Germany in 2004, and the fourth in Szeged, Hungary in 2006. The meetings are all small by design, with fifteen American and 15 European scholars. It lasts for a week, all participants give presentations, and all presentations are plenary sessions. In other words, the conferences are occasions for leading specialists in the field to listen to one another and to discuss issues germane to the field. The fifth Pragmatist Forum was held in Brno, Czech Republic, in May 2008. The organizers and participants in the CEPF have been fortunate to be able to publish selections from each of the CEPF conferences. The current volume consists of selected papers from the Fourth Central European Pragmatist Forum that took place in Szeged, Hungary in May-June, 2006, hosted by the University of Szeged. The theme of the Szeged meeting was Self and Society, and the papers that comprise the volume address issues that in some way deal with the theme, some more directly than others. The editors have organized the conference papers in five sections: I – Self and History; II – Self and Society; III – Self and Politics; IV – Self and Neopragmatism; V – Interview with Richard Rorty. Each section consists of papers that elaborate various dimensions of the topics.

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The papers in Section I, Self and History, focus on the traditional pragmatist approach to the self. Ramón Rodríguez Aguilera argues that today we have a special need for a confluence of personal identity and our socio-cultural situation. He assumes that the interdependence of self and society is getting stronger and stronger in a globalizing world. According to his view, “an appropriate and well orientated Self does require some social commitments for a desirable, peaceful life, embracing at present (potentially) the whole human community; the life and death of others cannot be completely indifferent to one’s meaning of life, when we all share a world in common.” Aguilera points out that C. S. Peirce’s philosophy can provide the framework for such an approach today. Peirce convincingly argued that individual persons are constituted through their identification with a community. In addition, “in our current historical moment the emergence of such a cultural or social community, first conceived by Peirce as a semiotic community, is a major task.” “Interdependence” is also central notion for James Campbell. He is concerned above all with William James’s social understanding of the self. In analyzing James’s views in The Principles of Psychology, Campbell shows us how James distinguished the “I” and the “me,” and then he explains the constituents of the “me”: “the material Self,” “the social Self,” and “the spiritual Self.” We have as many different but connected selves within us as we have relations to our material and spiritual features and to other human beings and communities. In showing “me” in situations of self-evaluation and the conflicting aspects of “I” and “me,” Campbell persuades us that American Pragmatism offers us an understanding of the human self that is both embodied and social. The human individual has emerged through a complex process of problem-solving that was carried on by ancestors of an increasingly social nature. James’s volume, The Principles of Psychology, helps us to understand this evolutionary process. He helps us, in particular, to understand how our sense of self – of self-identity, of self-worth, and of self-improvement – is tied up with our life in community. In his descriptive psychology, much more than in his ethical and political thought, James presents an understanding of the self as a social being. Richard E. Hart compares John Steinbeck’s and John Dewey’s views about the relationship between individual and community. He stresses the point that the interconnectedness of these two poles is inevitably important for both American “Johns.” However, for both “Steinbeck and Dewey the various relations between individual and community have to be characterized in terms that are both fluid and dynamic. Neither adheres to a firm, unbending manner of explaining the nature of the relations and interactions.” There are differences regarding consistency of their views, but essentially they had the same standpoint in this respect. It is also among their similarities that both Steinbeck and Dewey were influenced by evolutionary science and the fundamental concept of ecology.

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“Both American ‘Johns’ it turns out have a great deal to tell us about the nature of individual and community relations.” Don Morse returns to John Dewey’s original intention that our pragmatist task is not to “practicalize” intelligence but to intellectualize practice. Such an interdependence and interconnectedness is beyond question in Dewey’s philosophy. Pragmatism provides detailed theoretical arguments for recognizing that society helps to shape the self, but this is not the real question according to Morse. “Yet when the theoretical arguments are all laid out, and when all is said and done, the more pressing issue is a concrete one – what types of selves are shaped by what types of societies? How can we use this knowledge of social self-definition to improve the kinds of selves we become?” Dewey has shown us in Human Nature and Conduct and Individualism Old and New, where he wrote about the “lost individual,” that an inadequately democratic society can shape only lost individuals, and such individuals in turn reinforce such a society. Morse argues thatas a concrete instance of this fact, one can say that American society shapes the self into a lost self. This is the exact situation that pragmatism must work against, preventing the social misshaping of individuals as happens to Americans today. American individuals, lost, detached from any stable social framework, are at the mercy of external forces. They are confused and bewildered, open to suggestion, unable to form a self-directing public. It is a dire situation. There is a lesson here, I suspect, for pragmatism. It must resist becoming the new scholasticism. Rich in theory, it must nonetheless remain true to its practical roots. Pragmatism must use its theoretical insights to illuminate concrete problems. The papers in Section II on Self and Society concentrate explicitly on the very rich relationships between the two. Michael Eldridge expresses his concern that pragmatic values would not provide one with sufficient leverage to oppose such moral evils as slavery in the United States prior to the Civil War or the Nazi holocaust. One needs objective values to counter conventional moral practice. Dewey and Mackie’s rejections of fixed ends and objective prescriptions are unacceptable forms of social relativism. Dewey the pragmatist was unconventional in his ethical thinking. That a historicist can adopt unconventional ethical norms should not be unthinkable, but apparently it is for some. They can only conceive of ethical norms as given or found. They cannot regard one’s (or their predecessor’s) constructions as being action-guiding when the action required is unconventional. Yet in this paper Eldridge offers examples in Dewey’s and Mackie’s thought that the conventionalist critic would not regard as either a fixed end or an objective prescription. Dewey thought, for example, that it was a significant implication of the scientific approach for our common practice that it showed us how to be a self-correcting society. By adopting an experimental, collaborative approach to deliberation we would be able to modify our dysfunctional practices. To accuse him of being convention-bound is to reject Dewey’s “life-long effort” to “make our present beliefs, attitudes,

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and institutions more intelligent than they would be otherwise.” We can as individuals and a society self-correct. Eldridge holds that we are not bound to the way things are at any given time. Larry Hickman analyzes the interesting similarities between Bruno Latour’s and John Dewey’s understanding of the social. Given the fact that “pragmatism” is a very loose term that has many meanings, Hickman says that Dewey was a pragmatist in the limited sense of the theory of meaning that he shared with Peirce and James. However, his functionalism, geneticism, instrumentalism, and experimentalism all had to come into play if his pragmatism were to be applicable within the spheres that he wished it to be. Having registered that caveat, Hickman proceeds with a suggestion that the work of Latour advances the work of Dewey in interesting and admirable ways. He shows that Dewey’s account is remarkably similar: There is no fixed society or social structure, and there is no atomic individual. Individuals form publics and are in turn informed as a part of Latour’s ‘cascade of transformations.’ An individual may be (and probably is) a member of many overlapping publics, some of which may even be working at cross-purposes. Publics come and go. They come into existence as required, they are transformed as a consequence of changing conditions, including interactions with other publics, and they pass out of existence when the conditions that called them into being are no longer present. In short, “both Dewey and Latour reject the essentialism that is often apparent in traditional accounts of the social. Both emphasize the functionalinstrumentalist nature of social entities.” According to Hickman, both are deeply pragmatist in the mentioned narrow sense of “pragmatism.” Carlos Mougán’s paper aims to show how Mead’s philosophical anthropology and Dewey’s political philosophy provide the basis for an understanding of social cooperation as a civic virtue and as a normative model for democracy. After his thorough analysis he emphasizes the point that cooperation can become a civic virtue only if it gains a moral content. Social cooperation acquires ethical meaning when it serves central values of democracy such as freedom and equality. K. A. Wallace is interested in the view of the self, inspired by Buchlerian metaphysics, as a self-process having both a gross or total self-process dimension and a cumulative, cross-sectional dimension of the self-process, what she calls the imminent self. This view allows for a conceptualization of the self as constituted by its history, as having spatio-temporal spread and as constituted by plural relations. It has resources to account for the identity of a relationally constituted self and of a self over, or rather through, time, and for conceptualizing the notion that it is a whole self that is present at any time and that has a unity of relations with its earlier and subsequent temporal dimensions. If the idea of a relationally constituted self that is its history is to be taken seriously as an ontology of the self, Wallace says,

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then the self cannot be thought of in static terms, or in merely physical, that is bodily or biological, or psychological terms. In her paper on the Russian writer Maxim Gorky’s novel Mother, the founding novel of Socialist Realist literature, Lyubov Bugaeva argues that there is an influence on Gorky that has hitherto been unnoticed. While in the US in 1906 Gorky met and corresponded with William James, and spent a good deal of time with John Dewey. Bugaeva’s analysis of Mother demonstrates the degree to which Gorky was influenced by ideas, especially of the self, education and social change, drawn from James and Dewey, as well as from the Fabian Socialists John and Prestonia Martin Section III, Self and Politics, is devoted to a variety of political values, institutions and problems. Thomas C. Hilde concentrates on the institutional dimension of global governance. Global institutions, from treaties to sets of norms and methodological axioms, are built upon an outmoded conception of the self and its epistemology. This older conception posits a rational, selfinterested benefit-maximizing individual. The influence of this conception is broad. One major influence is found in the assumptions regarding global agreement (or disagreement) on pressing collective action issues. In international agreements, for example, much of the analytical and procedural work assumes that state and individual actors reflect the old conception of the self. The analytical focus is thus largely placed on the problem of why a state or other entity would agree to limit its own self-seeking when interacting with other states and international entities. In other words, compliance with agreements in tension with assumed motivations to cheat becomes the focus problem. In a speculative mood, the paper suggests that a fuller account of a descriptively richer and more ambiguous self - the “traveling self” - as well as what Hilde calls “epistemic cosmopolitanism” could provide a more complex and more contemporary understanding of normatively evolving international institutions. Armen Marsoobian wants to understand genocide as thoroughly as possible on the basis of Dewey’s and Mead’s pragmatism. Starting with the recent controversies in the historical debate about the Armenian genocide he raises several intellectually challenging philosophical and historiographical problems. Taking Dewey’s relational notion of the self as a point of departure, he analyzes the phenomenon of genocide from the points of view of its concept, public declarations, circumstances, perpetrators and victims. Marsoobian points out how good history trumps bad philosophy, and how good philosophy can aid history. He puts his ultimate point this way: “In conclusion, what I have sketched above about the nature of genocidal intentions and the suffering of genocide victims is only by way of a beginning in my attempt to understand the concept of genocide. For it is only through such an understanding that the evil of genocides past can be repaired and of genocides future be prevented.”

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John Ryder concentrates on the possible implications of American pragmatism and naturalism for foreign policy. He is asking the question what a reasonably thoughtful and consistent pragmatist would do if in a position to make foreign policy. Two of Ryder’s presumptions are, citing Dewey, that “philosophy recovers itself when it ceases to be a device for dealing with the problems of philosophers and becomes a method, cultivated by philosophers, for dealing with the problems of men,” and citing Timothy Garton Ash, that “it is a great mistake, made by many Europeans, to assume that America’s moralistic rhetoric of freedom is merely a cloak for self-interest…Americans were Wilsonian long before Wilson.” Ryder provides an extremely wide and thorough philosophical, historical and political overview of the problem’s background, he analyzes Dewey’s concept of democracy in relation to other theories of democracy, and shows us the methods and possibilities of a pragmatist foreign policy. It is clear for him that “because of its commitment to a deep and thorough form of democracy, a pragmatist foreign policy will not be easy to implement, especially in the US in the current political environment. Many things would no doubt have to change before it would become possible. Nonetheless, there are many reasons to think that pragmatism has a good deal to bring to foreign policy, and that a nation would be well served by a foreign policy conceived on pragmatist principles.” Emil Višňovský is interested in a pragmatist approach to the relations between self and society via social norms and normativity. After a general description of the social role of norms, Višňovský examines Mead’s and Dewey’s concepts of norm. Having recognized the lack of a special pragmatist theory of norms and normativity, he tries to create a propedeutic of a detailed pragmatist theory of normative community and participatory democracy with the help of F. L. Will and Beth Singer. Gert-Rüdiger Wegmarshaus’ paper analyses two distinct concepts of the political self and their significance for contemporary, modern democracies: the liberal-individualistic concept of the political self and the republican-communitarian self. Tracing the emergence of the liberal self in the Europe of early modern times, the text addresses the shortcomings of the liberal understanding of politics and society, among which is a considerable split between the political elite and the people, resulting in a low involvement in politics from the side of the ordinary citizen. Turning to the republicancommunitarian political self, the paper demonstrates the significance of a more participatory understanding of politics, inviting citizens to take care for the “res publica,” to show commitment to the commonwealth, and to develop forms of political inclusiveness. The comparison of both concepts of the political self reveals strengths and weakness alike: John Rawls’ understanding of the liberal self stresses individual rights along with justice based on the equality of opportunity, an approach that is well suited for the plurality of modern society. Nonetheless, the republican-communitarian understanding of the

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political self highlights how citizens are at the same time socially embedded, thus inviting political responsiveness. In a liberal society the freedom of the individual is unconditional; but individual liberty should be complemented by civic mindedness and it should be sustained by a political participation that benefits the individual self and the community. Section IV, Self and Neopragmatism, focuses on the self from the point of view of Richard Shusterman and Richard Rorty. Dorota Koczanowicz points out that the problem of personal identity in contemporary culture has been widely discussed in philosophy and elsewhere in the humanities. This discussion has provoked a change in thinking about human beings and about their place in society. The question Koczanowicz wants to be answered is whether it is possible to have a harmonious society of autonomous individuals. In her opinion a new understanding of the self as an existence that grows in time without any premises, or a priori known substantial features, has enabled philosophers, humanists, and social scientists to use the category of “narration” in their work. Narration as well as life is a time structure that flows from beginning to end with some hope of fulfillment. From this perspective, science does not hope to find an objective, true reality independent of language and mind. To understand is rather to put experiences and events into an adequate narration. Koczanowicz shows us that in Rorty’s and Shusterman’s reception of “the aesthetics of experience” we can notice the influence of pragmatist ethical theory. For both philosophers, pragmatism is an important point of reference, but it is far more obvious in Shusterman’s version than in Rorty’s. “It is clear,” she says,that one of the founders of pragmatism, John Dewey, worked out the non-foundational idea of ethics, placing an emphasis on individual responsibility. Thus, when Rorty and Shusterman refer to pragmatism, they concentrate on only one of its aspects. In its Jamesian form, pragmatism stresses the role of self-realization and individualism; but other versions of pragmatism emphasize the important role played by community and social bonds. These two tendencies exist in pragmatism, and this is one cause of the inner tensions in this theory. The best example of this is Mead’s division of “me” (social part of personality) and “I” (creative part of personality). We can say that Rorty as well as Shusterman derive their ideas from pragmatism, but each of them explores only one thread. We go from one extreme to other, and in this way the question asked by the ancient Greeks about the possibility of harmony between a person and society remains alive. Alexander Kremer is interested in Richard Rorty’s philosophy. It is well known that Rorty, a promising analytic philosopher, changed his mind in the early 1970s and became a neo-pragmatist thinker who knew well not only the American but also the European philosophical traditions. By describing some of his main philosophical views (truth, language, relative separation of publicprivate, etc), Kremer first provides the framework of Rorty’s interpretation of

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selfhood, and second he shows how Rorty understands the contingency of the self, the self as the “Center of Narrative Gravity.” It is also clear for him that this narrative identity of the self is “nicely integrated with the rest of Dennett’s system and thus a fortiori with Davidson’s system.” In his article Miklós Nyírő reconstructs several aspects of Rorty’s postmodern version of liberalism, and intends to show how far his philosophical, neopragmatist views are motivated by these political assumptions. Examining Rorty’s national utopia reveals that he advocates a morally reformed democracy achievable by the restoration of social hope and fraternity. Global egalitarian utopia, however, requires a cosmopolitan, global alternative to the ethnocentricity of such fraternal feelings, namely, solidarity. The explication of the possibility and conditions of global solidarity within the circumstances of pure historicity and contingency points to the central role of imagination (rather than that of reason) as the capacity for recognizing the only common feature of human beings beyond their linguistic individualization, that is, suffering. One of the enumerated consequences drawn from such argumentation is that Rorty’s famous private-public distinction is necessitated precisely by the issue of suffering, the basis of solidarity. In his attempt to situate Rorty’s imaginative liberalism, Nyírő highlights its opposition to the representationalist and rationalist features of the Enlightenment, being a project of completing the Enlightenment’s de-divinization process, of securing responsible human selfreliance. In his paper Radim Šíp points out the weaker aspects of Richard Rorty’s great philosophical ideas. According to Šíp, the weakness is a consequence of the postanalytic tradition derived from Sellars and Davidson that handles experience as something opaque and unimportant. The tradition overly stresses language and discourse. In this respect, Rorty is not the heretic he has been taken to be. He continued in the broader tradition established by analytic philosophy as well as by phenomenology and hermeneutics. At the end of his text, Šíp attempts to show that this limitation influences in a negative way the conception of the interrelation between self and society. He also argues that this tradition cannot adequately explain where an innovation might come from, that is if we are really determined by the language of society. Section V is devoted to an interview with Richard Rorty. This final part is a special contribution from Alexander Kremer who took the interview with Rorty on December 20, 2005. This was perhaps Rorty’s last interview, or in any case one of the last interviews, before his unfortunate death on June 8, 2007.

SELF AND HISTORY

One SENSE OF SELF, SENSE OF REALITY: A PEIRCEAN APPROACH IN A GLOBALIZING WORLD Ramón Rodríguez Aguilera In an age in which national and local cultures are flowing into the current of ongoing globalization, and given the dynamic of the spreading technological culture, personal identity is also at stake, and it should be re-established in tune with the logic of this historical situation. The main purpose of this paper is to suggest the need for a confluence of these two realities: personal identity and the socio-cultural situation. I assume, in effect, that an appropriate and well orientated self does require some social commitments for a desirable, peaceful life, embracing at present (potentially) the whole human community; when we all have a world in common, the life and death of others cannot be completely indifferent to one’s meaning of life. For this purpose, (1) I will argue that a normative personal identity necessarily requires an objective sense of reality, and inherently a sense of social community; (2) I will point out the social and cultural conditions in which this personal identity has some guarantees of being developed; and (3) I will point to one familiar and restricted case of a historical situation in which such a reciprocity of personal identity and social and cultural conditions can at least be glimpsed, as a clue for facing the future with responsibility, and hence with a critical sense of history, giving reasons for our expectations and decisions. Surprisingly, the philosophy of Charles S. Peirce (1839-1914) may provide the framework for this approach today. First, because he convincingly argued how individual persons are constituted through their identification with a community (both person and society understood here in their normative dimension). And second, because in our current historical moment the emergence of such a cultural or social community, first conceived by Peirce as a semiotic community, is a major task. 1. Knowing the Self, Knowing the Universe: The Common Validity of Two Differentiated Experiences. All experience takes root in our life, and from there an immediate intelligibility of some aspects of the world emerges. In knowledge about the universe, and

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about our life, there is a first moment, a first component of intuitive perception, inseparable from our identity as persons and as members of a society. This is the main reason for using in the title of the paper the expression “sense of” with respect to both self and reality. I do not mean to say that the whole of experience ultimately depends upon this first perception (feeling, binding), considering the fact that abstract descriptions are merely subordinate in the constitution of knowledge. In using this terminology, I also indirectly exclude the empiricist illusion of believing that the irreducible intimacy of each person implies a particular kind of knowledge by intuition (a peculiar “sense of self”), more certain and contraposed to the more remote “knowledge about” others and about “external facts.” But there is no such logical contraposition: any knowledge arises within an intentional “consciousness” directed towards an outward object, and it is finally knowledge by inference. It was precisely Peirce who first made clear that the proper structure of the process of cognition, emerging within an organism in contact with its surroundings, is inferential, and it should follow the form of a “syllogistic” and “final” process, proceeding from a premise to its conclusion, whether or not the thought is the object of a conscious reflection. The first perceptual input (sensory immediacy or direct acquaintance), therefore, does anchor our body in nature, but is only the initial stimulus for every kind of experience and knowledge, not a peculiarity of our self-knowledge. (We will return to this Peircean idea that the same logical or inferential structure underlies self-controlled conduct and self-correcting reasoning). “Consciousness of something” and “self-regulated conduct” are then the two interconnected conditions for having an adequate sense of self, an objective self-knowledge, or, in the conception of George Herbert Mead, “an idea of me”: the way in which the person is aware of himself as an object, or, more precisely, as an apprehended object. The sense of self presupposes, then, the power for reflexive self-reference and an appropriate knowledge of ourselves; we know ourselves because we have a living sense of reality and an active capacity of self-control. There are thus two kinds of knowledge differentiated in their objects, but with a similar validity: the cognition of the universe, or “the consciousness of objects” in general, and the more restricted and more particular knowledge of ourselves, let us say, our “self-consciousness.” How, then, are the two related? Let us notice first of all that consciousness, or cognition in general, is not a first-moment occurrence, not an immediate and instantaneous impression, but a temporal result. We become conscious of any object, including ourselves, after a continuous interaction of our organism with the environment. Therefore, self-consciousness, in particular, does not arise from a self-evident intuition or introspection, and it is not, indeed, reduced to any form of pure sensation or self-perception. It is, in fact, a result of a unifying and hypothetical conception;

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the result of a temporal and general perceptual awareness of an independent and “external” thing. As an object of cognition, we are one special case of the facts of the world within our reach. An immediate and direct intuition, however, would not have produced any objective apprehension; on the contrary, it would have broken the real continuity in time of our self, i.e. the series of our successive self-expressions, connected always with other things and events. From a conceptual view point, then, our general sense of reality is clearly a wider feeling and includes, as a part, a possible sense of our own self. In conceiving things, we conceive ourselves; the relation to oneself occurs within the relation to the world. But, from a genealogical perspective, nevertheless, our general conceptions, knowledge and ideas are also manifestations of ourselves, because they are primarily body-mind occurrences and they are constitutive feelings of our life. The first certainty was the discovery of a scientific epistemology (“without subject”); the second one, the central conviction of an existential epistemology. This common and interconnected knowledge (objective and fallible, in both cases) about the universe, and about our body and person (i.e., “the I”, or “the me”), would be, in addition, impossible without language (without signs in general), and without social communication and experimental verification. Knowing is always a semeiotic and a social event, in Peirce’s formulation; it is conceptual self-consciousness, we might say, in a Hegelian mood. In fact, “signs” decide, first of all, the intentional integration of the processed information of the brain by applying or referring the conceptions of person to any possible and concrete object. For this reason the representational (linguistic) mediation of our knowledge is also needed in order to express as thoughts the two kinds of experience already distinguished: the experience of the universe in general, and the experience of me. In this way, only articulated propositions claim objective validation or future verification, avoiding fiction, illusion, or confusion in consciousness. Now, presupposing that consciousness and cognition arise in the dynamic relation between an individual organism and its environment, and making explicit that this process is finally expressed in propositions, it should also be noted that there is, however, a marked difference between these two kinds of reflective experience, both emerging in a continuous flow of mental images, from “a stream of consciousness,” to use the metaphor of W. James: (a)The evolutionary process of becoming selves, necessarily incarnated in a singular body, is a first-person perspective, but it is intrinsically dialogical and connected with social structure and social values. It is at work in the regulation of our own life (desires and will combined), and in the capacity of sharing feelings and emotions with others (“empathic

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RAMÓN RODRÍGUEZ AGUILERA identification”), in the recognition of the “others” as persons, implicit in institutions and social order. (b)The general process of knowing facts of the world (including material relations and natural laws) presupposes the adoption of a third-person perspective. Although it is also a social fact, it is relatively safe from ideological prejudices and social pressure, because many of its objects can be considered separated from the social conduct of people.

In the first case, the object of our attention (i.e. our own life) will disappear after our death, and consequently our knowledge as far as it belongs to our identity will also perish. In the second case, the objects of the universe will probably persist after our experience is gone, and our knowledge about them can be transferred to other minds. Let us focus, then, upon the first reality, the conception about ourselves, the process in which our experience is a constitutive part of the object of our experience. Theoretically, the “me” is the final achievement of a maturation or learning process of any individual ego able to take the role of the “generalized other,” i.e., the attitude of the whole community internalized. This stabilized reflection accompanies, through time, the conduct and the responses of individuals: i.e. they are present in the spontaneity of actions and reactions of the “I” to the environment. When I say “it is me who has written this paper,” my testimony shares the same view of any other having looked at me writing this paper some time ago; both views are placing my person in space and time, in the world. Interestingly, for Peirce this happy coincidence between the first and third person perspectives is not a spontaneous achievement, but a learned interpretation. The child first becomes aware of being a self after making a mistake, when some of its judgments are denied by others, and, then, the revealed error can be explained only by supposing a self which is fallible. In fact, we all really know who we are because we are taken by surprise by the effects of our actions, the answers to our affirmations, the judgments of others about us. Only after overcoming comparisons, perplexities and doubts, are we able to make a reasonable inference and have a fallible idea of our selfhood. The general objectivity of truth is generally obtained through the compulsive reality of external facts, never ceasing to surprise us. Writers know well how difficult it is to write about themselves if not through fiction, because our sensations and self-evidences, far from being transparent, can be equally true or fallacious, for the same price. We all normally disagree about our identity and the identity of others; the discrepancy is no more scandalous because an educational taboo inhibits frequent public expressions about our self-appraisal and esteem. But we do reach an easier consensus about our respective moral or legal attributions, and about our responsibilities, than about our identity evaluation.

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In societies in which the community as a whole (the power, or social classes or castes) acts coercively on its members (on their beliefs and/ or decisions), the internal conversation of the individuals can scarcely be articulated. If this soliloquy consciously appears, it does not find an easy outlet for expression, either verbal or practical, in order to cope with the external world. In other words, under this external pressure the genesis of an authentic “me” is likely frustrated because the coincidence between my own reference to me and the reference of the other to me never finds a common path. Probably, in those historical situations, some “I” may feel that it is a normal human being, without any neural damage, a worthy member of the community with full rights, but the other members of the society may deny that, and behave generally towards this person as inferior, pitiful or even not properly human. In these cases (for example in closed and racists societies, Christianity before the liberal Reformation, or modern dictatorships) history shows a failure of the social self of most individuals because of the fatal discrepancy between their own social expectations and the actual recognition they receive. Individuals are, then, trapped in the dilemma of living closed into their inwardness, or being submitted to and alienated from others (as mere objects of cognition or a mere instrument of action). These subjected people cannot imagine a future and ideal self (a “second person”, latent in them) that could be confirmed in future interaction with others. In their inner speech, body and mind do not move as one in the process of naming the surrounding word because from outside any possible dialogue between the I and the “thou” is broken; this “thou” is the coincident value of a possible future “me” and any possible real “you” in a dialogical interaction. However, the frustration of social selves (because of the lack of a dialogical recognition among the members of the society) does not completely hinder the general process of human thought. In spite of a spontaneous discontent and a possible unrest of the freest minds, the society in general could have some level of literary, scientific and technological development. This growth of knowledge does encounter, however, some internal limits insofar as the communication between minds is impeded through censure, shortage of material means and institutional cooptation and disorder. Here is one of the reasons moral skepticism, as an attitude, is more frequent and widespread than epistemic skepticism, and why the historical emergence of modern science and a significant community of inquirers could both coexist within a rather dubious moral community such as a political dictatorship, or in an individualistic and dehumanized capitalism. Nevertheless, Peirce, in a mood reminiscent of Schiller, stressed the continuity of the moral community and the community of inquirers: in both kinds of skepticism there is in fact a failure of knowledge, in a broad sense. But in moral failure the communication

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between the two minds breaks down because of the lack of common feelings, values or qualitative insight. From this point on I will take all this psychological and sociological knowledge, so briefly outlined, as a conventional acceptance of our day without further defense. Indeed, with the old precedent of the Socratic moral revolution (the discovery of the autocracy of the soul, the internal capacity of seeing goodness, willing it and acting accordingly), there is in fact a long tradition in social thought stressing the idea of social tolerance, political democratic liberalism and interactive communication as necessary conditions for a proper development of personal identity. The personalities achieved are in fact striving for a conciliation between the judgment of the “I” (as an agent) and the judgment referring to “me” (by myself or by others), and, in the end, for the realization of their own meaning of life as active members of a historical community. But there is something genuinely new in our contemporary world, which started, precisely, with the constructive alternative of Peirce to Cartesian epistemology as a whole. I must emphasize the fundamental novelty of Peirce’s approach. After the last great exaggeration in the post-modern atmosphere following the already exaggerated subjectivism of the nineteenth century, the actual formulation of social tolerance as a dialogical interaction (inspired here by Peirce and Mead) represents indeed a new claim for objectivity, not only beyond the Socratic and the medieval discovery of the soul, but also beyond the liberal and individualistic autonomy of the “subject.” By contrast with this long tradition regarding the self, conceived primarily as a defense against external social impediments, we maintain today, or ought to maintain, a more positive conception of the sociality of the self, and consequently a more explicit correlation between a normative social community and a normative personal identity; both, certainly, ought to be constructed critically, with arguments, in a “dialogical” or “semiotic” process. We should point to at least one more contemporary example of this trend towards objectivity and factuality in the conception of the self, and its intrinsic aims and self-affirmation. I have in mind the historian of political ideas Isaiah Berlin, frequently presented as an “underminer” of a radical Enlightenment; was this his intellectual purport? He understood social values in general, and liberty in particular, as a significant modification of the psychological expressions of the 19th century, the notion of absolute self-determination of liberals and nationalists. In the 20th century, on the contrary, a more conditional conception of liberty was accessible to the humanistic knowledge of the social sciences. In this regard, his remarkable formulation of the “two concepts of liberty,” the “negative” and the “positive,” is quite consistent with an explicit semiotic conception of self. The political concept of liberty in Berlin essentially grasps the interactive process between the individual right to limit public authority (avoiding domination and intimidation) and the right of individuals

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to control and participate in the constitution of power and in its distribution. He was himself a clear illustration of the difficulty of the factual interaction of these two concepts of liberty: the new despotism of communism and the Nazis’ destruction of liberty deformed and corrupted the meaning of positive liberty (as an international or a nationalist ideology), and the abuses of laissezfaire capitalism, partially corrected by the New Deal, were also a deformation of negative liberty (the abandoning of needy citizens). Consequently, liberty should be understood both as a social value and as an accessible fact connected with many other circumstances; in fact it should be understood as an individual capability and also a social possibility for acting and living. Individuals develop their own identity not just looking inward into themselves. Let us note that Peirce, long before Berlin but more clearly emancipated from the empirical nominalism of the social liberal J. S. Mill, discarded discontinuous self-perceptions and spontaneous attributions as illusory. The object of our intentional mental states (wishing, willing, and believing) should be tested by inference as external or independents facts, and not just abandoned to the sole power of self-examination through internal speech and individual jurisdiction; our moral ends are open to the considerations of others, without flouting the laws of logic. After this objectivistic approach, it has continually been confirmed that an extreme, individualistic affirmation easily engenders a false self-sufficiency, and the segregation of particular groups (“tribes”, nations, communities of believers), sharing values in radical discrepancy with other communities. In short, a realistic sense of self is thus constituted within a sense of reality; it is a means for obtaining a full sense of reality and a consequence of having achieved an extended sense of reality. Both steps of a living sense or intellectual dispositions involve logical inference from facts; all of them derive in a straight line from psychological sensation because, ultimately, there is only one active self-organizing world and a common method of experience, whether in the physical or psychological sciences. However, the split between the inward and the outward dimension of my life as a real discontinuity is nothing but a culturally induced attitude and learned belief. Only under some cultural and political circumstances does continuity and concordance tend to be true; basically, when judgments are backed by observation, perceptual experience is communicable and confirmable, and personal certitudes are self-regulated rather than imposed as public certainties. The persistent social tendency toward solipsistic individualism and social particularism depends, then, upon social order and a false conception of the sociality and cultural dimension of human nature; different ways of life could, in principle, merge into a system of imperfect cooperation and an open learning process (individually and collectively), avoiding to a certain degree violence and self-destruction. As individuals, we retain in principle the neural capability

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for finally becoming persons capable of putting ourselves, with a sympathetic understanding, in the place of any member of the whole human community, without any exclusion. In this possible case, strong characters and personalities would not necessarily clash with each other; but the goals and motives of their actions are not spontaneously integrated in the different aims of the human community as such. This integration is the product of a cultural construction; social reformers and modern philosophers have promoted a sense of community and objectivity against absolute individual certainty and against social factions, sects, and corporative egoism. This social goal, however, is not only an issue of the (collective) order of social institutions, or a simple effect or function of social mechanisms and social harmony, but also an inter-subjective or interpersonal creation. Language (and the semiotic system in general) has been finally revealed to be not a mere instrument of communication and expression but a constitutive milieu of thought, reasoning and humanity. Coherently, the force of law (the political system), and the pressure of the free market (the economic system), ought finally to be put under the control of some normative cultural conditions. The external point of view toward the law is, in effect, anchored within the internal view of private citizens who conduct their own actions, integrating motivations and consequences; the free market interest cannot be cut off completely from the perspective of public and communal benefit. Now, after having verified for centuries the limitations of the political economics of capitalism and the limitations of the force of constitutional law in the social task of developing well ordered societies and developed individuals, the remaining question could be posed as follows: is the compatibility of a valid or good understanding of the self (or life) and a valid or good understanding of reality (universe and human history) only an issue of good social order, or basically a problem of liberal tolerance? Obviously, this is not merely a sociological issue. I will argue that in order to avoid the current “clash of cultures,” life and politics do not wait for logical reasoning, but a process leading towards a reasonable convergence of opinions does require a normative sense of community, and a critical or “scientific” method in the way of thinking; it does not require a vague cultural criticism. 2. A Return to Peirce as Founder of a Global Liberal and Semiotic Community In general terms, the philosophy of Charles Sander Peirce, who passed away in the disruptive year of 1914, was in his time neither well received nor well understood, and it has still been neither productively assimilated nor practically developed. In the following generation, Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) did not consider his evolutionary metaphysics at all. For Russell such a vision did not have a clear meaning and was associated with the romantic optimism of the

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previous century, completely out of place after the radical historical change of the first third of the 20th century. Sometime later, Karl Popper (1902-1994) replaced the metaphysics of Peirce, wherein nature includes values, with the logical and formalistic fallibilism of one indeterminist and open Universe in which life and knowledge happen to emerge; judgments of fact were indirectly verified, not confirmed, and, in parallel, judgments of value were merely justified by reasons. In general, the influential logical positivism of the 20th century militated against the “objectivistic idealism” of Peirce, principally because the decisive method of empirical verification (“testing and observing now”) was opposed to the pragmatist purpose of meaning (“testing in an endless future”). Meanwhile, the social philosophical importance of Peirce was almost completely neglected during the analytical decades, and the concept of “logical socialism” was finally interpreted (by Apel) rather as an epistemic transcendentalism; not as a realistic overcoming of modern individualism. Nevertheless, the most recent re-evaluation of the philosophy of Peirce indicates a new interest in his work as a social theorist, with an increasing systematic application of his epistemological and ontological ideas to social issues. Let us point quickly to the philosophical implications at work. In spite of his right-wing conservatism and his ideological equivocations, his semiotic conception of thought and logic (and, consequently, the interpretation of culture and self), presupposes, indeed, a radical egalitarian view of society and an ontological naturalism compatible with current empirical investigation in all fields. In an idealistic language, he recognized the continuity of the psychical-physical world, and the inclusion of human thought and physiology in nature’s mind. Therefore, social relations, i.e. the economic and political, were implicitly understood as the “the mutual actions of bodies,” i.e. as a connection mediated through communicative signs and information. Against insinuation and prejudices, it should be emphasized from the beginning that Peirce is not at all a collectivist, but a rigorous critic of individualism. The free self is not understood as an absolute consciousness and a self-sufficient will, but as a person able to merge his ideals with those of the community. Neither was he an enemy of the undivided and coherent sense of self: the possible growth and creativity of each individual with its possible diverse “selves,” and the effectual liberty of everyone, are always guaranteed within the objective validity of all experience. Following, in this regard, the path of Socrates, the Stoics and Spinoza, as well as Buddha (freedom from personal interest), liberty is conceived as a real fact in the universe, in a continuity of being. The human capacity of self-control is subsumed under a logical argument, i.e., an illative and logical process from antecedent or premises to consequences or conclusions. Liberty then is neither beyond natural law, in a Kantian or transcendental sense, nor a stationary adjustment

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to nature, in a Stoic sense, but a dynamic process of growing and “making life more reasonable.” Why, then, have the objectivistic, naturalistic and historicist implications of Peirce´s social philosophy been so persistently overlooked? History is never completely transparent to logical explanation, and neither is the history of ideas, but we can give some hints. Due to the historical dislocation of 1914, and the loss of faith in historical progress throughout the 20th century, the philosophy of science, focusing on mathematics, physics and ordinary language, has in general excluded sentiments, values and normativity from cognizability and being. Even at the end of this positivistic hegemony social philosophers as distinguished as Rawls or Habermas still do not explicitly include mathematical and natural scientific reasoning in their ways of thinking; instead of beginning with a hypothetical inspection of premises, they reform tradition and ideas; instead of focusing attention on the material relation among real facts, i.e. premises and conclusions, they give reasons for arguments. Consequently the sense of reality, objectivity and normativity suffer. Their main concern is not good reasoning in general, but rather the congruence or compatibility of what is good and right, two differentiated dimensions of normative action or practical reason; observations and investigation are primarily linked to social facts, for example life plans, the good life, happiness, justice or political goals; validity and consensus about these issues depend mainly on the vital interest and on the persuasive rhetoric of the interlocutors, not on the truth of perceptual judgments, and not on observable results. For both thinkers, though they pay attention to social reality, values are indeed still considered in great measure “subjective,” because cognizability and being are still not synonymous in their system. Let us be a little more specific. The political liberalism of Rawls is an expression of the autonomous person of Kant and Mill, i.e. a kind of transcendental correction of utilitarianism; and it could be finally understood as a generalization of the social conditions of the judicial system under capitalism and political self-determination. Habermas, who is ambivalent between Kant and Hegel, accepts Peirce´s criticism of the intersubjective conception of the process of communication (and the pursuit of the truth), partially as an alternative to the individualistic philosophy of consciousness, and partially because it potentially includes in a democratic schema the philosophy of history, a comprehensive vision of the socio-historical dynamic. Both social philosophers, and, to some extent also the so called linguistic pragmatists, need to be resituated in an updated general philosophy because, in fact, politics and social actions deal with more dimensions of reality, let us say, than institutions or votes. Actions occur indeed within the universe and are intrinsically normative, connecting facts with ideals in every area, from medicine or education to the

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conservation of nature or city planning; the subjects of politics are not only human rights, duty, war or insecurity. In other general philosophies, after Russell’s or Popper’s inspiration, the analytical contraposition between the world of facts and the world of values has made the future of humanity difficult to handle because it frustrates ethical reasoning in general and its intrinsic relevance in social thought: “subject” and life have not been included in the structure of experience. In this way, good arguments and efficient actions do not fit easily; science and wisdom should form a continuous part of the same experience. In sum, social philosophy should be integrated in a new philosophical program, but in which one? The pragmatist conception derived from Peirce also distinguishes scientific inquiry, which is more reflexive, from practical concerns or vital matters, which are more instinctive. But in any case, conceptions or thought always have practical bearing on action and are amenable to practical experiments; direct observation, utility and practical effects do not define the truth of the conceptions or the objective significance of concepts. He clearly discards metaphysical dualism and dissociation: society was part of nature, and human life a continuous and open process with the environment; humanity and culture were a constitutive emergence in a communicative and teleological system of signs within the whole of nature. In this regard, the pragmatism of Peirce is clearly differentiated from the more popular “psychosocial” pragmatism of James and Dewey, who stress vital action and social action, respectively, with an implicit overtone of Kantian moralism. The factual formation of cognition has today abandoned the Cartesian notion of “consciousness representation”; the structure of the brain and the nervous system evolves through living connection with the surroundings, always mediated by signs in order to produce thoughts. Without these communicable signs, which link our organisms with an independent reality, we could not have an intelligent experience of our life and its circumstances, including a view of the universe and an interpretation of history. The language of poetry and the language of physics do not repel each other; both convey reality. Consequently the Cartesian and empirical notion of certainty has also been replaced by a pragmatic inclusion of the activity of the interpretant in the logic of representation. In fact, only after the triadic and active process of a Sign (or, Representamen), its Objects, and its Interpretant (the mind), can we truly achieve interpretations of the phenomena of the universe as hypothetical conceptions or a reasonable expectation concerning objective facts. It can not be done through mere empirical descriptions, or by means of formalistic and conventional constructions, nor simply to achieve psychological or sociological usefulness. Regarding the interrelation of self and community, the naturalistic pragmatic semiotics of Pierce does not permit gaps and omissions. First, it

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appears to be completely consistent with the current scientific perspective of neurobiology and cognitive neuroscience that deals with the emergence of selfhood and self-control and, particularly, on the cognitive capacity to regulate emotions. Second it is also adequate to the socio-cultural circumstances of our globalizing world, in which each self and the community of selves are challenged to manage life and reality in an open horizon of possibilities, both self and community being in an open process of reciprocal determination. Furthermore, Peirce´s programmatic system of thought is today particularly inspiring with respect to many slippery issues concerning the constitution and reality of the social self, and to the creation of social values for a possible community life that has still not fully emerged and, that indeed is at present blocked by both the diffuse empire of techno- science and by a persistent cultural localism. Let us look at several examples: (a) With respect to social issues, this pragmatism develops within naturalistic and evolutionary ontology and epistemology; it asserts a natural tendency towards a final agreement between human ideas and actions, not enclosed in any particular social system isolated from nature. It is not anthropocentric regarding nature; neither individuals nor social community are ends in themselves. It is not relativist regarding “different cultures”; there are no absolute values in national or religious communities, completely alien to the perceptual judgments of others. (b) The sign mediation of any thought is not reduced to a verbal representation, a linguistic proposition, because minds actually interact and communicate through icons, indexes and symbols with several material embodiments. Therefore, the equation “my language= myself,” or “man is a sign,” should not be understood reductively in terms only of natural languages; stressing the primacy of signs even for aesthetic expression or for the immediate experience of everyday life does not imply the exclusive use of concepts in logic and thought. Pragmatist semiotic is neither nominalist, “logocentric,” or mentalistic. (c) Personal habits, consisting of reflective awareness of one’s self and deliberate conduct, unfold gradually and tend to work coherently in a holistic system; feelings, volitions, and thoughts are incorporated, successively, in a practical domain, which includes an aesthetic, ethical, and logical dimension. As social and historical beings we do not need to hope for an impossible utopia of complete social harmony, pursuing an absolute historical end, as Marxism proposed; neither should we agonize under the fatal clash of contradictory values and aims, evading the question about ultimate ends, as do the utilitarians. All human actions could take place under the basic attraction of the ideal of a summum bonum as their ultimate aim, which never pre-exists in an absolute and determinate mode. In this way, the fundamental relation to beauty, goodness and truth is at the same time a consecutive emergence and

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a functional coherence of a teleological and evolutionary process. Values are not dissociated from facts, and normativity does belong to the realm of being or metaphysics. This was one of the lessons of the 19th century, badly learned during the 20th. The social philosophy of Peirce presupposes, then, an objective and common validity of the “logic of experience,” for persons and for community, for one national or particular community and for a global society. Apparently contradicting William James’ focus on individualized thinking, for example his point that “a thought is always my thought, or your thought, or his thought, or her thought,” Peirce said that “thought thinks in us rather than we in it” (CP 5.289n1). But he was pointing not to the natural process of thinking, to the perspective of the individual existing, psychologically, in nature, but to the general validity of thought, to its scientific logicality. The remaining question could be stated now as follows: how can we define the valid conditions for a good life and for peaceful social living in this age of undefined community life, with a global “clash of cultures” and new forms of reactive localism? There is, first, a fundamental viewpoint: a personal self can only be conceived under the communal method of experiencing reality, and, of course, with the concourse and guarantee of public law; otherwise individuals risk their social dimension. We should next give to the concrete singular human agent, and to concrete historical-political situations, a clear “significance,” that is, an appeal to the future according to the potential of present reality. And, more particularly, we should enable human beings to unify instinct and theoretical reflection, to conduct one’s life and to seek personal and political goals that provide constant direction to their lives. But this application appears to go beyond the actual intention of Peirce; we have moved from the original Peircean conception of the community of inquirers towards an emergent political community. Is this transformation pertinent? The answer will reveal our ultimately fundamental conceptual framework. If we were still Kantian, a normative community should be understood as a moral one founded upon the social will (Rousseau) rather than on tradition. However, after the 19th century naturalism that is clearly evident in Perice´s thought, we are compelled to recognize that morality itself is something between happiness and logic. In an age of knowledge, information and communication, and in a post-western and post-Christian social space, it is time to put to work that “natural and cultural” utopia. In effect, it seems plausible to point towards a future situation of the free life of individuals beginning with their internal potential and within the socio-cultural community, without being lost in, or regressing into, an authoritarian collectivism, and without remaining trapped in modern subjectivism, or in a narcissistic hedonism, or in any kind of relativism in thought or conduct. In a word, we badly need a common sense of the future. But of course this move is not a simple matter of the logic of experience, nor

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is it a matter of description or nihilistic criticism, but a historical and political fact; it is not an issue of logical validity but of an imaginative sense of history. Should we undertake this leap in practice? 3. Looking Toward the Future: A Critical Sense of History The “sense of history” is today an ambiguous and generally controversial expression. I will first point to three significant intellectual references, before making my own point, which is itself based on Peirce’s method of reflection. In neglecting any objective, holistic and teleological meaning of history, or a Hegelian-Marxist historicism, Karl Popper actually reconfirmed a Kantian ethic in politics: “It is up to us to decide what shall be our purpose in life, to determine our ends.” He was, nonetheless, conscious of the “antinomy” in the philosophical system of Kant, accepting at the same time “scientific determinism” and moral liberty, and he proposed a general critical attitude with tradition, without extracting from historical antecedents any suggestion about what is progressive or reactionary. Within this historical conception, the weight of a rational self and an autonomous will tend to be clearly overstated, at least in respect to culture, though less so in relation to political institutions. In John Rawls the sense of justice, i.e. an effective desire to act in accordance with the principles of justice, is fully active only within a social order, structured by constitutional principles and the rules of the free market. It presupposes and requires the so called “reflective equilibrium,” a combination of the general (law) and the singular (particular facts and conducts), somewhat analogous to the Hegelian “concrete universal” and the Peircean “perceptual judgment” and his “abductive inference.” As a result, historical tradition for Rawls is nothing else than the extended present, continually occurring with our participation, not a memorable past acting upon us through changeable and dependent interpretations. Isaiah Berlin, for his part, strove to maintain a reasonable conception of historical self-consciousness with some degree of individual responsibility. For him a sense of history was the predominant constituent of a sense of reality: basically, a matter of acquaintance with particular situations, or relationships of actual things and persons, well informed through ordinary knowledge and scientific means. Historical understanding comes through an “imaginative insight into ways of life alien, or little known, to us.” He makes a detailed criticism of Kantian idealism, firmly rejecting “historical inevitability,” and defending the inclusion of moral judgments in historical interpretation. Therefore, responsible decisions should be taken, but within the stream of culture and tradition. Given these three precedents, I will defend the view that the ethic of freedom is necessarily a political and social ethic within a historical process

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and consciousness. In his day, Peirce´s intrinsic normative approach to reality actually succeeded in avoiding the naïve optimism of the 19th century, i.e. liberal utilitarianism and, implicitly, Marxist holistic utopia. Today this program when applied to the historical domain can integrate facts and values, circumstances, aims and decisions. In a Peircean mood, we can maintain that thinking well is reasoning together about the past or the present as much as facing the future with reasonable agreement; it is to look backward and forward. In fact, Peirce challenged the simple evidence that clear and definite views are frequently in contrast with agreement on purposes and goals; against the frequent gap between “is” and “should,” he recognized that desires and wants can be included in the rational principles of conduct. He noticed perceptively that some conclusive deliberations do not end in practical decisions and actions, but that the typical historical connection between two consecutive states of facts was based on a temporal and material causation: the so-called narrative or colligatory explanation, a goal oriented interlacing sequence of events (after Whewell, and later, after Collingwood, W.S. Wash, and many others). This relationship between concepts we use to colligate events with successive events has certainly a sound foundation in fact. This ontology of time is, precisely, the ultimate reason that good arguments are not exclusively deductive, or inductive, but consist also of abductive inferences. Now a sense of history implies not only the understanding of the past, and the preservation and transmission of culture, but also a way of looking into the future. In general our conceptions should be verified or justified afterwards, but we also need to control, to some degree, future facts, aims and actions, which might or might not occur. Politics and policy-making, in particular, deal precisely with those states of affairs that depend on human effort in some conceivable circumstances; its goal is not to arouse a utopian vision, but to cultivate with sobriety enduring public, and still primarily national, purposes in a global space. Of course Peirce did not deal directly with political history; he did not pay special attention to the essential distinction between moral good and legal right, neither did he work out an approximation to the historical future. But his naturalistic and semiotic evolutionary metaphysics is intrinsically temporal and historical. First, because it overcomes mechanical explanation in that causation and teleology coincide in the description of events and processes; and second, because it expressly includes human action among objective facts. And he was, by the way, quite aware that evolutionary ideas and the method of abduction were consistent with modern times, the Reformation, the French Revolution and the new sciences. We are living in a world of possibilities, and we can not easily or always imagine and choose the most relevant ones. But our reasoning and our practical engagements grow in the same imaginable direction: where the repetition of

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previous experience is possible and where that repetition is impossible, as in the unstopped time of politics. Under neopositivism scientific thought for political purpose has lost intellectual credibility (if we except participatory democracy), as it also has in recent post-modern relativism with its devaluation of scientific validity. But problems and social knowledge are now even more pressing. In this regard, Peirce´s perspective on history is something more than a messianic realism about scientific progress towards truth. It implies an operative means of empirical induction – in “drawing history” as knowledge, and in settling opinions, selecting truths and reviewing ideals. It is not an impossible or utopian struggle for perfection of thought and world; in his canonical version, “pragmatism is the doctrine that every conception is a conception of conceivable practical effects.” The particular difficulty about historical anticipation is not completely insurmountable in that we also perceive the path we are presently covering; from precedent facts and actual propensities we do anticipate some states of affairs we try to deal with, accelerating them or slowing them. Politics is today in a rather deplorable state due to the lack of prospective intelligence, but conceiving reasonable programs is not impossible. There are in fact means of accountability through institutions, polemic, public opinion, and elections, themselves a self-correcting mechanism against the decisions of elected government, which continue to betray the benefits of society as a whole and in the long term. The critical common sense of Peirce can certainly be interpreted, or misread, as a vision of ultimate scientific progress, in which case it should be set aside for political purposes. It seems, however, very pertinent today to remark that political measures do not encompass the entire significance of a philosophical conception. Action of thought is not reducible to political action, neither should philosophy be reduced to a political ethic, or confused with cultural studies or a narrative novel, focusing on the unified experience of feelings. Political reasonability as normative action not only presupposes a common aesthetic approbation, but the inclusion of ethical reasoning in logical thought. Finally, from the anthropological and social dimension, the sense of self (of the different persons of a community) and the predominant and plural sense of reality constitute a fundamental rather than a secondary historical interplay. We could even say that the riddle of human history revolves around the logic of the interdependence between personal self-control and cultural community. Implicit in Peirce´s thought was the potential development of the kind of philosophy of history and politics outlined above. But at this point I will shift my approach because it will be better to begin to make the case with concrete examples. I will present a familiar one to show how methodologically in history conceptions are logically connected with practical effects, and why anthropologically an objective or developed constitution of self permanently demands a practical comprehension of a social, cultural and

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political community. In the process of discovering and willing an ideal, both aspects are at work in tandem. Miguel de Cervantes grasped in the 16th Century, especially in Don Quixote de la Mancha, the minute realism of an ideal humanity: something relevant for the conception of the fiction of the novel as a universal genre and a key to Spanish history and its peculiar difficulty with modernization. The imperial Catholic Monarchy was producing in Spanish society a disturbance in the scale of social values. In the shadow of the state’s power and glory, dissatisfaction and unrest surfaced. The country, already having a living tradition and a linguistic memory, had been humiliated shortly before in its local communities (“the defeat of the Comuneros”), which were deprived of their institutional power, from then on completely under the control of the aristocracy. The old orthodox Christians did not trust the new converts, and the surveillance and censorship of the Inquisition inhibited free conscience, thought and beliefs. The Knight Don Quixote rides, then, on the plain, outside the suffocating routine of the cities, through the open reality of his imagination. In this way he also expressed an existential division between the external adventure and his internal convictions; he denounced with irony and comedy the spiritual fraud of the Counter Reformation and the imperial shallowness, accepting, at the same time life and history in their contingency. The interpersonal and intrapersonal conversations of Quixote and Sancho bind ideals and interests, and release the joy and love of things, and the healthy air of a social common sense. Cervantes finally challenged the inert beliefs of the whole community from below; mockery, amusement and serenity could not be suffocated by prejudices or dogmas, not even by conscience. This wounded soldier had learned a lesson from historical experience: his sense of life was first connected with the “destiny” of the community. At the beginning of the 20th century, starting approximately from 1914, with a prolonged bankruptcy of the Reformed Monarchy as a functional administration and a collective ideal, a civic and political project of modernization and Europeanization was conducted by a small and compact intellectual elite – Unamuno, Ortega, Azaña, A. Machado, J. R. Jimenez, Americo Castro, etc. The contribution of Cervantes was then evoked as a narrative interpretation of the human life of Spanish society within a tolerant and secularized religiosity. Political instinct was for the first time evolving toward intentional action; under a progressive renovation of literary sensibility, science and morality were the philosophical and political solution. The failure of the Second Republic under military assault (1936-1939) reduced to ashes the serious attempt to construct a civil political community, the melancholic strength of Cervantes’s critical imagination, and his enterprising melancholy as a day-dream for social self-determination. That tragic civil war, inseparable from the continuity of the two European wars, extended a loss of historical faith

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throughout continental Europe, spreading fanaticism and irrationalism over free will. The social process of learning was interrupted for decades. The recent democratic transition, after Franco’s death, has finally reconciled, after a very long detour, the values of people with political values, within the frame of a unified Europe and the international community. But this has raised a new question: is the current democratic culture, with its advances and its weaknesses, a consequence of an external diffusion or also a process of internal transformation? It appears that the reshaping of personal identity and the extraordinary recovery of collective vitality derive from a passive adaptation rather than from an active learning process. There is no common understanding of the past. The dictatorship has been condemned by the majority, but there is no explicit consensus in historical interpretation regarding the significance of the defeated Republic; public virtues or civil religiosity are still relatively weak, and pervasive consumerism coexists with an imperfect social state. Responsibility in the international community has barely begun; the politics of Nature, the new ecological economics, is little more than displeasure with the rapid territorial devastation. With selective insight, we can perceive a lack of consistency both in the social self and in the general sense of reality. The vocabulary most frequently used by public opinion (in Spain, perhaps in Europe, and up to a point worldwide) to face these deficiencies is tolerance, peace (against terrorism), territorial distribution or the recognition of social identity, social cooperation, on so on. This is a discussion currently enclosed in a kind of diffused tautology or truism. But we are forced to modify our way of thinking, precisely in order to combine individual aims and communal tasks, to improve the quality of education, economic productivity, and the like. Not everything, then, depends on communicative rationality, institutions, and cultural discourse. Should Spanish philosophy now simply regain the line of the phenomenological political aesthetic of an Ortega y Gasset, reviving the lost historical memory? Things are not that simple; the analytical approach has been present all along, and an unstoppable cultural globalization is now creating other expectations. Today, national community is not obviously the “destiny” of an existential orientation, narrated as a literary reflection. On the post-national horizon, the naturalistic evolutionary metaphysics of Peirce is especially inspiring under current cultural conditions: for the growth of information, and for the broadening of our sense of reality in two main respects. First, as has been repeated here, the phenomena of reasoning, or the ideals of good logic, are entangled with the facts of morality; good conduct always has satisfactory feeling as an internal control. Second, therefore, any kind of human action, or thought, is at the same time forced by the external pressure of reality, without limitations, to follow a dynamic coherence.

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And now, finally, to point out perhaps the major sin of modern times, here extended in some degree to the global society: the anthropocentric conception of human action and the instrumental subjugation of nature in a Baconian pretension. Should we continue to place under suspicion “pragmatist humanism”, as Russell or Horkheimer did in their time because of a similar doubt? Absolutely not; action is not at all a goal in itself for pragmatism, and pragmatist reason is not an instrumental reason. The naturalistic and objectivistic conception of Peirce is precisely an antidote to this irrational activism, and to the lack of values and orientation in our technological culture, the compulsive consumption which erodes our quality of life and our civic culture, privatization, devouring privacy, and so on. In the end, we have to describe the historical past and the present situation with an appeal to the future, always integrating the singular self, the contingent process of becoming self, in the objective sense of Reality, and the socio-cultural system in nature or the cosmos. There is a logical connection between our conceptions and the future consequences we conceive, not a guarantee that such a “conceivable occasion” will take place.

Two WILLIAM JAMES’S SOCIAL UNDERSTANDING OF THE SELF James Campbell While William James is rightly criticized for the individualistic focus of his ethical and political views, his descriptive psychology offers a much richer account of the social aspects of the self. In The Principles of Psychology (1890), for example, he presents us with an understanding of the self as shaped and largely constituted by the processes of interaction with our social groups. James’s ideas influenced the attempts of such later social thinkers as Mary Whiton Calkins, Charles Horton Cooley, John Dewey, W. E. B. DuBois, and George Herbert Mead to understand the self; and it is worthwhile to examine his ideas on this topic in depth. (I will also include some of the ideas of these later thinkers in parentheses.) 1. “I” and “Me” James’s presentation of the social aspects of the self is to be found primarily in the chapter “The Consciousness of Self.” He begins with a distinction between the “I” – the aware, knowing part of the self – and the “me” – the known part of the self. “This me is an empirical aggregate of things objectively known” and the “I” is that “which knows them.”1 (George Herbert Mead later elaborated on this distinction as follows: “The ‘I’ is the response of the organism to the attitudes of the others; the ‘me’ is the organized set of attitudes of others which one himself assumes. The attitudes of the others constitutes the organized “me,” and then one reacts toward that as an “I.”2) While the two aspects of James’s understanding of the self are distinguishable, they are not distinct because our experience provides us with either one only when it is connected with the other. Beginning with the “I,” or what was often called in his day the ‘pure ego,’ James indicates that it is the more difficult aspect of the self to explore. Attempting to understand this thinker-component has led, as James shows, a long series of philosopher/psychologists to focus, with less than complete success, on personal identity, the soul, associationism and transcendentalism. 3 My interest in the present piece, however, is in the other aspect, the “me.” James separates his discussion of the “me,” or the “empirical self,” or the self-as-known, into three sub-topics. The first of these considers the constituents of the “me,” which he lists as “the material Self,” “the

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social Self,” and “the spiritual Self.” Compared to many of the familiar individualistic understandings of the self, all of these constituents are in a broad sense ‘social.’ Beginning with the material self, for example, James notes that for most individuals there is no sharp line between the “me” and what they call “mine.” The self opens outward to the objects of the natural world. “We feel and act about certain things that are ours very much as we feel and act about ourselves,” he writes. “Our fame, our children, the work of our hands, may be as dear to us as our bodies are, and arouse the same feelings and the same acts of reprisal if attacked.” About our bodies themselves, James asks, “are they simply ours, or are they us?” Using this recognition of the vagueness of the boundary around the self, James gives us a very expansive understanding of the material “me”: “In its widest possible sense . . . a man’s Self is the sum total of all that he CAN call his, not only his body and his psychic powers, but his clothes and his house, his wife and children, his ancestors and friends, his reputation and works, his lands and horses, and yacht and bank-account.” This seems to be our understanding as well. Rather than living as immaterial beings at best tangentially connected with the material world, we all recognize the power that our ‘stuff’ plays in our lives. As James writes, “[t]here are few men who would not feel personally annihilated if a life-long construction of their hands or brains – say an entomological collection or an extensive work in manuscript – were suddenly swept away.”4 Such losses are felt so powerfully because the self extends beyond the body and all but incorporates the materials of our lives. The self incorporates others as well. James’s second theme is what he calls more narrowly “the social Self.” Here his emphasis is that as social creatures, we have, and need to have, a place within a social group. (Charles Horton Cooley later repeats James’s emphases: “Social consciousness, or awareness of society, is inseparable from self-consciousness, because we can hardly think of ourselves excepting with reference to a social group of some sort, or of the group except with reference to ourselves . . . Self and society are twin-born, we know one as immediately as we know the other, and the notion of a separate and independent ego is an illusion.”5) James continues, moreover, that we have many places within many social groups: “a man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him and carry an image of him in their mind.” We simplify this in our normal activities by reducing these multiple individuals to groups or classes, to which a person “generally shows a different side of himself.” For example, James notes that “[m]any a youth who is demure enough before his parents and teachers, swears and swaggers like a pirate among his ‘tough’ young friends.” Similarly, James notes that we adults “do not show ourselves to our children as to our club-companions, to our customers as to the laborers we employ, to our masters and employers as to our intimate friends.”6 (Mead continues: “We are one thing to one man and another thing to another

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. . . We divide ourselves up in all sorts of different selves with reference to our acquaintances. We discuss politics with one and religion with another. There are all sorts of different selves answering to all sorts of different social reactions.”7) James indicates that we have learned much of what it means to be a person from our parents, and we interact with them a certain way. (Mary Whiton Calkins develops this point: “the child imitates his father’s stride, because it is his father’s, not from any intrinsic interest in the movement in itself, and he is fiercely Republican because his father belongs to the Republican party, not because he himself inclines toward these principles rather than toward others. The life of the child shows most clearly, indeed, the intense personal nature of imitation.”8) We interact differently with our lovers (and former-lovers); with them we present a far different social self. On a broader scale, through our interactions in community, we try on others’ lives and personalities and learn what it is to be human. (John Dewey later phrased this point: “To learn to be human is to develop through the give-and-take of communication an effective sense of being an individually distinctive member of a community.”9) We choose various of these social selves (‘roles’), and with these choices come responsibilities. If I decide to have children, for example, I accept as well the obligation to try to be a good parent; if I decide to become a firefighter, my goal must be to be a good one. James writes of the social responsibility that individuals impose on themselves through their career choices. “It is his image in the eyes of his own ‘set,’ which exalts or condemns him as he conforms or not to certain requirements that may not be made of one in another walk of life,” he writes, “a layman may abandon a city infected with cholera; but a priest or a doctor would think such an act incompatible with his honor.” Similarly, a soldier is required “to fight or to die under circumstances where another man can apologize or run away with no stain upon his social self,” and public servants are “debarred by the honor of their cloth from entering into pecuniary relations perfectly honorable to persons in private life.”10 (For Mead, “self-criticism is essentially social criticism, and behavior controlled by self-criticism is essentially behavior controlled socially.”11) The third component of the “me” to which James points is “the spiritual Self,” a somewhat less clear notion. “By the Spiritual Self, so far as it belongs to the Empirical Me,” he writes, “I mean a man’s inner or subjective being, his psychic faculties or dispositions, taken concretely.” By “abandoning the outward-looking point of view” of the “I,” we are “able to think of subjectivity as such, to think ourselves as thinkers.” I can, in other words, focus not on thinking but on myself as a thinker, with a collection of states of consciousness, faculties, dispositions, and so on; and I can do so without at the same time maintaining that I am a “mere ens rationis.” James continues “[t]hese psychic dispositions are the most enduring and intimate part of the self, that which

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we most verily seem to be.” He points, for example, to the satisfaction that we derive from thinking “of our ability to argue and discriminate, of our moral sensibility and conscience, of our indomitable will.”12 James indicates, however, that there is no general agreement about what this spiritual self amounts to, especially in its more controversial role as knower (the “I”). Empiricists want a minimalist version of the self; rationalists and transcendentalists want a more expansive version. Whatever the answer to that question is, the spiritual self is not a purely intellectual or thinking thing, and it remains connected with my body. 2. Self-evaluation We can narrow our focus a bit as we move from this consideration of the constituents of the “me” to James’s consideration of the feelings and emotions to which these aspects of the self give rise. When we evaluate ourselves, what do we find? Sometimes, he notes, we are complacent or satisfied with, proud of, or vain or conceited about ourselves; at other times, we are ashamed of, disgusted with, or mortified by ourselves. James suggests that there is usually some justifiable relationship here between our personal performance and our self-evaluation – our self-complacency or our self-dissatisfaction. He writes that the “the normal provocative of self-feeling is one’s actual success or failure, and the good or bad actual position one holds in the world.” Thus, a successful person is normally self-satisfied: “A man with a broadly extended empirical Ego, with powers that have uniformly brought him success, with place and wealth and friends and fame, is not likely to be visited by the morbid diffidences and doubts about himself which he had when he was a boy.” On the other hand, a person who “has made one blunder after another, and still lies in middle life among the failures at the foot of the hill, is liable to grow all sicklied o’er with self-distrust, and to shrink from trials with which his powers can really cope.” As James points out, however, this objectivity of judgment is not always present in our lives: at times even the generally successful are prone to an excess of selfdissatisfaction, and the generally unsuccessful to unearned self-satisfaction. So it is at times with all of us. As he writes: “We ourselves know how the barometer of our self-esteem and confidence rises and falls from one day to another through causes that seem to be visceral and organic rather than rational, and which certainly answer to no corresponding variations in the esteem in which we are held by our friends.”13 James’s third sub-topic in his examination of the “me” is the actions that result from these aspects of the self – especially those of self-seeking and selfpreservation. He notes that self-interest has teleological value: for the individual to survive, it is necessary that it be interested in the self. “Its own body, then, first of all, its friends next, and finally its spiritual dispositions, MUST be the

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supremely interesting OBJECTS for each human mind.” Thus, from the point of view of the material self, the animal must care about food and safety. “All minds must have come,” James writes, “by the way of the survival of the fittest, if by no directer path, to take an intense interest in the bodies to which they are yoked . . .”14 Turning to a consideration of the (narrow) social self, we act so as to be more highly regarded by our fellows, to have a better image of our person in the minds of others. “Our social self-seeking,” James writes, “is carried on directly through our amativeness and friendliness, our desire to please and attract notice and admiration, our emulation and jealousy, our love of glory, influence, and power, and indirectly through whichever of the material self-seeking impulses prove servicable as means to social ends.” Minimally, he notes, “I should not be extant now had I not become sensitive to looks of approval or disapproval on the faces among which my life is cast. Looks of contempt cast on other persons need affect me in no such peculiar way.” He continues that our desire “to be ‘recognized’ by others . . . has so little to do with the worth of the recognition computed in sensational or rational terms.” We want the respect of others even when we know that it is not worth wanting; our self wants to be held in great respect even by those for whom we have little regard. “We are crazy to get a visiting-list which shall be large,” James writes, “to be able to say when anyone is mentioned, ‘Oh! I know him well,’ and to be bowed to in the street by half the people we meet.” We even manage to increase the self through our impersonal experiences: “Not only the people but the places and things I know enlarge my Self in a sort of metaphoric social way.”15 The spiritual self, finally, seeks after the highest inward nature. James writes that spiritual self-seeking ought to include “every impulse towards psychic progress, whether intellectual, moral, or spiritual in the narrow sense of the term.” The reality is often somewhat less ‘spiritual,’ however, and he continues that “much that commonly passes for spiritual self-seeking in this narrow sense is only material and social self-seeking beyond the grave . . . It is only the search of the redeemed inward nature, the spotlessness from sin, whether here or hereafter, that can count as spiritual self-seeking pure and undefiled.”16 3. Conflicting Aspects Lest all of this appear too orderly and rational, James then turns his discussion to the rivalry and conflict among the various aspects of the self. (W. E. B. DuBois emphasizes these conflicts, especially as they are present in African-Americans: “It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness,

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– an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”17) For one thing, James indicates that, given the vast array of possibilities of who we might become, we select our potential selves. We are forced, in other words, by the pressures of life to choose among its possibilities; I must confront, James writes, “the necessity of standing by one of my empirical selves and relinquishing the rest.” He continues that the average man would, if it were possible, “be both handsome and fat and well dressed, and a great athlete, and make a million a year, be a wit, a bon-vivant, and a lady-killer, as well as a philosopher; a philanthropist, statesman, warrior, and African explorer, as well as a ‘tone-poet’ and saint.” The reason why this does not happen is that it is “simply impossible.”18 We are constantly evaluating and passing judgments on ourselves. The “I” judges the “me.” We do this by comparison to standards of beauty and intelligence and athletic ability and so on that are often mistakenly seen as coming from ‘outside.’ These standards of judgment are more accurately seen as having been internalized from community life, and are in fact constituents of our selves. Thus, I judge that I am smarter than her and stronger than him; but at the same time I must admit that she is a better musician, and he a better poet. In a similar fashion, we recognize that we all lack sufficient spirituality, and probably need to work at improving our marriages. The standards behind these judgments are in some sense chosen, or at least accepted, by us. We construct a self-image in which intelligence matters somewhat, as does physical strength; we fashion an ideal in which music and poetry, and spirituality and marital success, play their ‘proper’ roles. And, of course, we determine the ranking of these various traits that is ‘proper’ by using the values of our society. James writes of this process of ranking the potential components of the “me” in terms of his own career: “I, who for the time have staked my all on being a psychologist, am mortified if others know much more psychology than I. But I am contented to wallow in the grossest ignorance of Greek.” He continues that his Hellenic deficiencies give him as a psychologist “no sense of personal humiliation at all.” Had he, on the contrary, “‘pretensions’ to be a linguist, it would have been just the reverse.” The power of these self-evaluations is indicated in James’s discussion of the sad plight of the athlete who seems fated ever to finish second. “That he is able to beat the whole population of the globe minus one is nothing; he is ‘pitted’ himself to beat that one; and as long as he doesn’t do that nothing else counts,” he writes. “He is to his own regard as if he were not, indeed he is not.”19 James offers us a sort of ‘scientific’ formula that sees our self-esteem as a function of our successes divided by our expectations: “our self-feeling . . . is determined by the ratio of our actualities to our supposed potentialities; a fraction of which our pretensions are the denominator and the numerator our success.” We can therefore increase our sense of self-esteem by either increasing our actual successes or decreasing our expectations, and we know

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which method is easier. “To give up pretensions,” he writes, “is as blessed a relief as to get them gratified; and where disappointment is incessant and the struggle unending, this is what men will always do.” Thus, we find ourselves happier when we rein in the internalized demands of our social self and admit that we are no match for its illusions. For example, James points to the potential rise in self-esteem for a large class of men and women “if they could once for all abandon the notion of keeping up a Musical Self, and without shame let people hear them call a symphony a nuisance. How pleasant is the day when we give up striving to be young, – or slender!”20 Ultimately, however, James sees our potential social self to be related to our fundamental ideals. Especially in cases of fundamental conversions, he sees the power to change coming from our re-identification of a certain value as primary. Thus he writes, “when, as a protestant, I turn catholic; as a catholic, freethinker; as a ‘regular practitioner,’ homeopath, or what not, I am always inwardly strengthened in my course and steeled against the loss of my actual social self by the thought of other and better possible social judges than those whose verdict goes against me now.” Thus, the person who is supposedly standing individually against all of society is, in fact, appealing to other judges – ideal judges, actual if not real – who support the values he or she now advocates. Our pursuit of this “ideal social self” has been connected historically with religion and with “the highest possible judging companion, if such companion there be.” We need not be religiously inclined to recognize the power of this “Socius” for bringing some sort of order to the strivings of our “me.”21 (There may also be a purely natural version of this ideal social self that finds in the principles of its communal life the possibility of a refinement that would offer a new cluster of values that could move society toward a more valuable state. Dewey writes: “Suppose for the moment that the word ‘God’ means the ideal ends that at a given time and place one acknowledges as having authority over his volition and emotion, the values to which one is supremely devoted, as far as these ends, through imagination, take on unity.”22) 4. Conclusion American Pragmatism offers us an understanding of the human self that is both embodied and social. The human individual has emerged through a complex process of problem-solving that was carried on by ancestors of an increasingly social nature. James’s volume, The Principles of Psychology, helps us to understand this evolutionary process. He helps us, in particular, to understand how our sense of self – of self-identity, of self-worth, and of self-improvement – is tied up with our life in community. In his descriptive psychology, much more than in his ethical and political thought, James presents an understanding of the self as a social being.

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NOTES 1. William James, The Principles of Psychology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1890/1981), p.379. 2. George Herbert Mead, Mind, Self, and Society from the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934), p. 175. 3. James, Principles, pp. 314-52. 4. Ibid., pp. 279-281. 5. Charles Horton Cooley, Social Organization (New York: Scribners, 1909), p. 5. 6. James, Principles, pp. 281-282. 7. Mead, Mind, Self, and Society, p. 142. 8. Mary Whiton Calkins, An Introduction to Psychology (New York: Macmillan, 1901), p. 341. 9. John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, in The Later Works of John Dewey, vol. 2, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984), p. 332. 10. James, Principles, p. 282. 11. Mead, Mind, Self, and Society, p. 255. 12. James, Principles, pp. 283-286. 13. Ibid., pp. 292-293. 14. Ibid., pp. 307-308. 15. Ibid., pp. 294, 308, 294. 16. Ibid., p. 295. 17. William Edward Burghardt DuBois, “Strivings of the Negro People”, in W. E. B. DuBois: A Reader, ed. Meyer Weinberg (New York: Harper, 1970), p. 20. 18. James, Principles, p. 295 19. Ibid., p. 296. 20. Ibid., p. 296-297. 21. Ibid., pp. 300-301. 22. John Dewey, A Common Faith, in Later Works, The Later Works of John Dewey, 1925-1953, vol. 9, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986), p. 29.

Three DEWEY AND STEINBECK ON THE INDIVIDUAL AND COMMUNITY Richard E. Hart 1. Introduction The nature of the relationship between individual and community is a vexed topic researched and articulated by myriad social scientists, literary artists and philosophers. This paper focuses on two such figures. It explores, in brief fashion, the comparative relationships between individual and community in the thought of two prominent American “Johns,” Nobel-prize winning writer John Steinbeck and arguably America’s most important home-grown philosopher and social theorist, John Dewey. Through this brief ref lection, we will discover that neither “John” adopts any sort of absolute or fixed position on the relationship between individuals and their communities. Neither (I hazard) permanently prioritizes or places greater emphasis on one over the other. Neither can be described as a theorist of the individual or the community exclusively. Indeed, both are theorists of both, and the interplay of complex relations between individual and community in their work constitutes an intriguing, and in various ways parallel, philosophical enquiry. Both, I suggest, hold positions that are subtle, nuanced, complex, f luid and flexible. Neither accepts a permanently stable or established formula for how to conceive and explain relations between the individual and community. I believe this to be, in part, the consequence of two seminally important factors in the thought of both Steinbeck and Dewey. Both express the importance of “context,” what might be deemed the “setting” – both social and natural. When thinking of man’s natural setting, we cannot underestimate the importance of an organic model for both men. Both fundamentally embrace what I will call an “ecological perspective,” an orientation that tends to pervade all their philosophical or literary expressions of how and why individuals and communities interact. What follows is merely a synopsis of what we can glean of their views on this topic. Hopefully, my remarks will be suggestive of central lines of comparative analysis between Dewey and Steinbeck, avenues until now little examined. Clearly, whole

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book-length studies have been devoted to each figure on this general theme that I believe lies at the very heart of each man’s contribution.1 For present purposes, and with an eye toward clarity, I will utilize a manageable strategy for approaching the work of both. In effect, I propose to examine their respective views on relations between individual and community through the prism of their moral philosophies or expressions of moral experience and sensibility. For Steinbeck his moral philosophy is embedded in and articulated through fictional creations, for he never advanced an argument or theory of ethics. A sampling of his better-known stories will be briefly interpreted here. For Dewey one source for understanding his moral philosophy is through his writings about community and the social character of human existence. They are, of course, voluminous, and here I must limit myself to a key source supplemented by the claims of some notable Dewey scholars. Each figure, though thoroughly American and partially overlapping in time, emerges from radically different backgrounds and life histories. Yet I regard them as having certain common social, political and moral sensibilities. While we may note variations in their views, we are likely to find more commonalities than differences in their respective beliefs and convictions regarding how the individual and community are related. A section will be given to each figure and in the Conclusion I will seek to clarify the comparisons and contrasts. 2. John Steinbeck Steinbeck’s Ma Joad…is determined…to maintain the integrity and reality of the family in the face of… competing models of social responsibility… [Arthur Miller’s] All My Sons, with its emphasis on human solidarity, on the interests of mankind over those of the individual or the family group, clearly chimes with a central conviction of the 1930’s, embodied in the work of Steinbeck…2 Regarding Steinbeck’s moral philosophy (a phrase he would have decried), two prominent Steinbeck scholars have taken opposite positions. Their respective analyses shed light on Steinbeck’s views about the relation between the individual and community. John J. Han contends that utilitarian philosophy can be readily discovered in Steinbeck’s fiction. Given that utilitarianism emphasizes the moral good or well being of the group, the majority, Han construes Steinbeck as focusing chiefly on community over the individual. One immediately recalls Steinbeck’s (and friend Ed Rickett’s) ideas about the “phalanx theory” or “group man,” and his telling explorations of worker communities, union collectives, and village interests in such works as Grapes of Wrath, In Dubious Battle and The Moon Is Down. As Han concludes,

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“An examination of Steinbeck’s fiction shows that he is largely utilitarian, especially act utilitarian, in his moral philosophy.”3 By contrast, John H. Timmerman thinks of Steinbeck as a deontological moralist whose fictions exhibit “an acute sense of right and wrong behavior” at the level of the individual. Such a view accentuates the individual’s obligations and duties rather than beneficial outcomes or progress for the community. Individuals occupy (and illustrate) a rule- based moral universe, a world of moral certainty oriented around the individual rather than community. For Timmerman, “It should be manifestly clear …that his is a deontological ethics.”4 In reply to Han and Timmerman I have written that both scholars are, in a sense, correct while incorrect.5 On my interpretation, Steinbeck’s fictions make clear that he can never be consistently pinned down to any particular ethical theory, utilitarian or deontological. Put another way, he is never steadily focused on only the community or only the individual. One clearly detects strains and shades of utilitarian (community) and deontological (individual) moral sensibilities at different moments in his writing career, even in different contexts within the same novel, short story or play. Some of his created scenarios suggest an absolute sense of individual consciousness and duty at the core of the action. On other occasions his focus becomes the interests and welfare, the overwhelming reality of, the group, the community, and how the individual must serve the higher power of the community. What may seem a wavering posture is grounded, I believe, in Steinbeck’s nearly instinctive awareness that actions and ethical decision making by individuals is in reality inseparable from social responsibility and the welfare of the community in general. Individual and community live in reciprocal, mutually reinforcing and complementary relation. What I call Steinbeck’s “ecological” and “contextualist” temperament imply that the individual, for all practical purposes, is never fully distinct or separate from community (the group). The science of ecology teaches that man resides in nature (not over and against nature), that the individual is found in community in an inextricable fashion. Characters, and their situations in fictional worlds, parallel the lived experience of us non-fictional persons, inasmuch as we all bear witness to the fluidity, the non-static nature of life as lived. In effect, Steinbeck on the individual’s relation to community, and vice versa, is, like most of us, a waffler. His attitude and posture coincides with human nature as it plays itself out in the joys and drama of lived experience. I now seek to confirm these claims by briefly recounting some important story elements in three Steinbeck novels spanning the four decades that constitute the heart of his working career: Of Mice and Men (the 30’s); Cannery Row (post –WW2 40’s); The Winter of Our Discontent (late 50’s-early 60’s). In the classic novella, Of Mice and Men, readers follow the journeys of two seemingly lone individuals (George and Lennie) who become in the story linked to a community of others, and whose actions can be fully understood

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only through such linkages. Their shared “dream” about a little place of their own, where they can live in peace and happiness, is initially a private, individual matter. But as the story evolves it becomes a dream shared by the likes of old Candy, the black man Crooks, and even Curly’s seductive young wife. Dreams, once articulated publicly, can sometimes become contagious. They can function as “community builders” as more and more people invest in the possibilities and enticement that dreams afford. Steinbeck knew this in his bones. This then becomes the power and magnetism of their dream, as incredibly unrealistic as it may be. The dream naturally expands beyond an individual thing to a group phenomenon. An evolving, loose sense of community among disparate, alienated characters suggests the prospects for liberation and fulfillment (on earth) for more than isolated individuals. Further illustration of this theme grows out of the killings that occur in the story: of Candy’s old dog, Curly’s wife and Lennie at the very end. The bunkhouse occupants lobby for the euthanizing of the sickly old dog on the grounds of mercy and fairness extended to an individual sentient being. But, simultaneously, they stress that it would be a good thing for their bunkhouse community inasmuch as the dog stinks up the whole place and, in a variety of ways, makes life miserable for everyone. The groups’ interests will be served, life will be made more livable for the whole, if Candy’s beloved companion is eliminated. Similarly, the tragic death of Curly’s wife (at the hands of Lennie) removes a powerful threat to the unity of the men on the ranch (to them she is nothing but “jail-bait”), thus aiding the welfare of the community. Furthermore, the posse that quickly forms to hunt down the escaped Lennie must function, in part, to satisfy the community’s need for vengeance and some rough semblance of justice. Virtually no one cares a whit (including Whit himself) for the individuals – Curly, his wife, the slow-minded Lennie – but somehow in Steinbeck the “community” emerges, rises up to stake its’ claim, its’ needs becoming for the moment a high priority. George’s action, in his final embrace of mercy killing, has an ambiguous character to it. I believe he acts on the highest moral principle of individual responsibility for the fate of a dependent other. But he, also, functions to restore the balance of the community, and in satisfying its’ deepest emotional needs, perhaps lays the ground for his own re-entry into community. Similar patterns (of individual and community) are found in both Cannery Row and The Winter of Our Discontent. Cannery Row, Steinbeck’s affectionate and humorous re-creation of that famous coast-line street in new Monterrey that probably meant more to him than any locale, is a perfect illustration, as Susan Shillinglaw writes, that “…place is defined by the interaction of inhabitants and their environment.”6 This novel exemplifies most eloquently Steinbeck’s “ecological vision” as well as his non-teleological acceptance of simply what “is,” without demanding explanation or justification. Cannery Row (the actual

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place and the story) is a collection of motley and wild individuals – the flotsam of society – that live forever on the margins, verging always on unbearable loneliness, who eventually come to realize that they are all dependent on one another for survival and some sort of happiness. It is in their interconnected lives – their unorthodox sort of community – that Steinbeck actually locates the very essence of life. All humans are interwoven with nature as they are with other humans. Steinbeck’s synonym for this ecological concept is the “ALL.” In effect, he seeks (in this novel) to see the whole of interconnected life, in its broadest definition, as existing in this one locale, Cannery Row. As Shillinglaw summarizes, “The book embraces at one moment the group, at another the individual.”7 In his last novel, The Winter of Our Discontent, the main character, Ethan Allen Hawley, starts out fixated on unwavering individual responsibility to his family, including its’ legacy and image. Fidelity and patriotism mean everything to him as a man. By mid-story, however, he begins to seriously ponder the future and well-being of his community, the sea-side town of New Baytown. He becomes ensnared in the moral degradation that condemns individuals, but which will also spell collapse for his town, given profound social and economic changes in the 1950’s and 60’s. At the end of the story, he has come full-circle, back to individual moral principle and responsibility, expressing that each person is a point of moral light that must aggregate together with others if they and their community are to survive. In sum, fluid patterns of moral consciousness, changing relations between individual and community, are a hallmark of Steinbeck’s mature fictional creations. Contextualism and ecological consciousness come to pervade his works from the late 30’s onward. His characters and scenes represent a hybrid, a mixture. No fixed formula for defining the relationship between individual and community ever presents itself in Steinbeck, except for the consistent affirmation that they are always interconnected to varying degrees and in differing manners. It could be said I think that Steinbeck is at times a philosopher of the individual, at others, a philosopher of the community. Most typically, however, he is the writer/philosopher of the individual in community. 3. John Dewey Within the flickering inconsequential acts of separate elves dwells a sense of the whole which claims and dignifies them. In its presence we put off mortality and live in the universal. The life of the community in which we live and have our being is the fit symbol of this relationship. The acts in which we express our perception of the ties which bind us to others are its only rites and ceremonies.8

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Here Dewey, at his poetic best, articulates in a single passage essential aspects of his ideas on the relationship between individual and community. Dewey, the tough-minded pragmatist, forever reminded us that we as individuals live in a natural and social environment which conditions who and what we are as well as all our individual ways of responding. Further, Dewey, of course, stressed the inherent dignity and possibility of the individual, forever advocating social reconstruction toward a greater democratic social order that in turn would further human dignity. His abiding faith was that humans, through the exercise of intelligence and experimental method, could come together in rational cooperation, not force, to transform society in ways that would permit each person to realize her own growth as a person. Dewey’s foundation was, thus, a commitment to humanism and to realization of the integral, unseverable bond between the individual and community. For some Dewey may seem to be of two minds. He argued that any criteria for the workability of ideas or hypotheses must be, by nature, social and public, not individual and private. At the same time, Dewey was never indifferent to individuals and their life experiences. Time and again he contended that the purpose and value of any social institution or any community was to be determined by the extent to which it provided the individual with a more meaningful and fulfilling life. Such a development would always be a function of growth, of evolution. Dewey, like Steinbeck, accepted the fundamental tenets of evolutionary biology and ecological science. With this as a given, all our thinking, including philosophical and scientific thinking , had to be understood not in abstraction or in technical, logical terms, but rather as a functional mechanism (of our organism) for solving problems and seeking to provide for our survival. The thought and other activities of the individual must inevitably lead to alteration and growth of the community, to the reconception and subsequent reconstruction of our social structures. Morality, art, public policy, scientific experimentation and philosophizing were each, in their own ways, tied up in, indeed, crucial to this process of adaptation and change. In short, the individual and the community (the social) are never two distinct realities. For Dewey, rooted in an organic union of man and nature, the individual and community reflect, rely upon and extend one another. Dewey is all about interaction, relations and ties that bind rather than separation and categorical schemas of isolation. Paul B. Thompson has written, “…it hardly needs saying that for Dewey… self-discovery and self-discipline are inherently social activities.” This seems to contrast with various individualistic, ascetic traditions in which the individual thinker must, through hard discipline, go it alone in the direction of self knowledge and wisdom. Yet, interestingly, it compares favorably with Socrates’ pursuit of the Delphic oracle’s instruction to “know thyself,” a process which for him involved an ongoing discussion/enquiry with various members of his community. With shades of Martin Buber appearing, Thompson further claims that for Dewey “Individuals

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only ponder the ‘I’ and what ‘I’ should do to the extent that they are in a community that ponders in terms of ‘we’.”9 James Campbell discusses the Deweyan relation between individual and community in his essay, “Freedom and Community.” He points out that for Dewey the rights and interests of individuals can only (ever) be secured through the establishment of secure community. Those members of society not committed to being left alone in their journey of self-discovery must work to build “…the complex web of shared expectations and responsibilities necessary for the existence of permanent community.”10 He reminds us of Dewey’s insistence that shared experience is the greatest of human goods, and that his social sense of the self is not something we are born with or that emerges from being left alone to grow. Rather, it is “…something that emerges in the process of social interaction.”11 Each of us learns to be individually distinctive members of a community only through openended connections and correspondence with others. Campbell concludes his essay by drawing on the Pragmatic social thought of Dewey (and others) in claiming that a successful democracy can exist “…only if [individual] freedom and community are integrated.”12 Finally, I allow Dewey to speak for himself, returning now to the same essay (“Morality is Social”) from which the quote that opens this section of the paper is taken. In this short chapter that concludes Human Nature and Conduct he argues that all morality is inherently social. Moral judgment and the sense of responsibility are naturally wrought in us by the social environment of which we are a part. Similar to the inevitable conditioning effects of our interaction with the physical environment, “Our conduct is socially conditioned whether we perceive the fact or not,”13 and “Our intelligence is bound up, so far as its materials are concerned, with the community life of which we are a part.”14 All of the decisions and actions of the individual bear the stamp of the community. Such social saturation is, for Dewey, not a speculation or a prescription. It is a matter of fact. As stated before, our “individualism” is never a matter of nature or birthright. Instead it is to be found in the habitual activities and frames of mind acquired under social influences. Morality is a useful conduit for understanding relations between the individual and community. In a line that is vintage Dewey, he states “Morals is as much a matter of interaction of a person with his social environment as walking is an interaction of legs with a physical environment.”15 In reflecting on the growth of a scientific social psychology Dewey claims that the “…formation of habits of belief, desire and judgment is going on at every instant under the influences of the conditions set by men’s contact, intercourse and associations with one another. This is the fundamental fact in social life and in personal character.”16 In effect, the individual and the community (or the larger whole), while not one, are inseparable in the lived situation. “For individuality signifies unique connections in the whole.”17

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4. Conclusion I said at the start of this brief inquiry that for both Steinbeck and Dewey the various relations between individual and community have to be characterized in terms that are both fluid and dynamic. Neither adheres to a firm, unbending manner of explaining the nature of the relations and interactions. Steinbeck vacillates, by necessity, when telling his stories, because, if a writer is to be honest and true, the fictional settings will demand such shift of focus and emphasis. On appropriate occasions the individual reigns supreme for Steinbeck. The individual is beset, for example, by the agonies of inescapable moral decision making. The individual must assume full responsibility. In other settings the individual is subservient to the needs and demands of the community. Any explanation of the nature of the relationship between individual and community must take into full consideration the context and what it requires. This is not inconsistency in theory, but rather honesty and full cognizance of the complexities of human life. A writer must portray the truth of the human situation. Dewey is perhaps a bit more stubborn in insisting always on the social, even when analyzing the decisions and actions of the individual. The individual is simply incomprehensible without the shaping community of which she is a part. Perhaps Dewey is more consistent than Steinbeck on this theme. Perhaps because Dewey is a philosopher he is more inclined to stick firmly to certain guiding presuppositions. Both men were deeply influenced by evolutionary science and the fundamental concept of ecology, even if such a concept was hardly in use in their day. Both American “Johns” it turns out have a great deal to tell us about the nature of individual and community relations. Social scientists and philosophers alike would be well advised to study their works, artistic and philosophical, with open-minded hopefulness that the better we apprehend our relations with the environment and others the more chance we have to improve the conditions of life.

NOTES Brief portions of this paper have been adapted from an earlier essay of mine, “Steinbeck on the Individual and Community: Implications for Moral Philosophy,” presented at the 6th International Congress on John Steinbeck, Kyoto, Japan, June 2005.

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1. See, for example, Stephen K. George, ed., The Moral Philosophy of John Steinbeck (Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, 2005); selected essays from James Campbell, The Community Reconstructs: The Meaning of Pragmatic Social Thought (Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1992) and his Understanding John Dewey: Nature and Cooperative Intelligence (LaSalle, Illinois: Open Court, 1995). 2. Christopher Bigsby, “Introduction” to Arthur Miller, All My Sons (New York: Penguin, 2000), p. xvi. 3. Jon J. Han, “’I Want To Make ‘Em Happy’: Utilitarian Philosophy In Steinbeck’s Fiction,” in Stephen K. George, ed., The Moral Philosophy of John Steinbeck (Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, 2005), p. 42. 4. John H. Timmerman, “John Steinbeck: An Ethics of Fiction,” in George, ed. The Moral Philosophy of John Steinbeck, p. 37. 5. Richard E. Hart, “Steinbeck on the Individual and Community: Implications for Moral Philosophy,” paper delivered at the 6th International Congress on John Steinbeck, Kyoto, Japan, June 2005, p. 3. To be published in the forthcoming John Steinbeck: Global Dimensions. 6. Susan Shillinglaw, “Introduction” to John Steinbeck, Cannery Row (New York: Viking Penguin, 1994), p. vii. 7. Ibid., p. x. 8. John Dewey, “Morality is Social,” from Human Nature and Conduct: An Introduction to Social Psychology (New York: Modern Library, 1939) (1922). Here quoted from John J. McDermott, The Philosophy of Dewey: The Lived Experience (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1973), p. 713. 9. Paul B. Thompson, “What Does It Mean to Have an Ethics?,” in Experience as Philosophy: On the Work of John J. McDermott, ed. by James Campbell and Richard E. Hart (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), pp. 165-166. 10. James Campbell, “Freedom and Community” in The Community Reconstructs: The Meaning of Pragmatic Social Thought (Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1992), p. 82. 11. Ibid., p. 85. 12. Ibid., p. 90. 13. Dewey, “Morality is Social,” from Human Nature and Conduct: An Introduction to Social Psychology (New York: Modern Library, 1939) (1922). Here quoted from John J. McDermott, The Philosophy of Dewey: The Lived Experience (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1973),p. 715. 14. Ibid., p. 713. 15. Ibid., p. 716. 16. Ibid., p. 718. 17. Ibid., p. 723.

Four DEWEY AND THE LOST INDIVIDUAL Donald Morse 1. Introduction: Applying Pragmatism Pragmatism shows us that society helps to shape the self. It provides detailed, theoretical arguments for this, as in the case of Dewey’s entire book Human Nature and Conduct.1 Yet when the theoretical arguments are all laid out, and when all is said and done, the more pressing issue is a concrete one – what types of selves are shaped by what types of societies? How can we use this knowledge of social self-definition to improve the kinds of selves we become? Dewey provides a fascinating account of how selves are shaped adversely with his concept of “The Lost Individual.” This concept serves as an example of the kinds of selves we do not want to create. In this essay, I will take certain trends in western thought and behavior as examples of how society is generating this problematic version of the self. Using Dewey’s insights as a resource, I will first indicate how western societies at times creates lost individuals, and then I will turn to the question of what, if anything, we can do to help individuals to find themselves again. I do not want to say that all individuals in the West are lost, or that the situation is dire, but only to highlight some social trends that would seem to affect individuals negatively, encouraging them not to be individual selves. Only by fully identifying these trends, I argue, can we begin to think about how to address them. 2. Definition of the Lost Individual On Dewey’s account of things, normal, stable individuals are part of a community to which they feel they belong.2 The community provides objects of loyalty worthy of the individual’s reverence and respect, and the individual attaches herself to the community as a result. Objects of loyalty are beliefs that give support, direction, and coherence to individual thoughts and actions. When these objects are meaningful to the individual, and the individual can attach herself to them, she is normal, stable, functioning, for she has a base of support from the objects or beliefs that provide direction to, and meaning for, her actions.

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A lost individual is a person that lacks any objects of loyalty. The community of which she is a part prevents an adequate recognition of the individual. The individual goes to the community to find her place, but the community fails to provide a place in which she could play a definite, meaningful role. She thus withholds her loyalty and withdraws from the community into herself alone. Because they cannot recognize themselves in the community, lost individuals are “confused and bewildered.”3 They lack any coherent framework in terms of which to understand their situation and make informed decisions about it. The lost individual drifts without purpose, unable to direct herself, let alone direct the public to which she may happen to belong. A society of lost individuals would have no control over itself. It would be a public, but not a democratic public, not one that decides and directs for itself. Tyranny would always be just around the corner. Anyone could control the society of lost individuals, for they have no sense of direction and so do not direct, so that direction would necessarily come from someone or something else. 3. Western Communities Western society is a good example of a society that, in some places, encourages the production of lost individuals. To see that this is the case, consider four different types of communities available to Westerners today – work, free time, religion, and politics. As we will see, in many cases these types provide no space in which individuals can recognize themselves and to which they would therefore be willing to give their allegiance. There are, of course, other types of communities than these, no doubt many of which do provide objects of affection and loyalty. But for the purposes of this paper, I will only focus on these four as examples of how individuals are formed adversely, the better for us to focus on them and think about their consequences. There is, first, the community of work, the work world. Dewey already saw in the 1930’s that work was a problem. In many cases, work today is imposed; it constitutes a blind necessity, in which workers have little or no control of the conditions and consequences of their work. “The new technology applied in production and commerce resulted in a social revolution,” Dewey explains. “The local communities without intent or forecast found their affairs conditioned by remote and invisible organizations,” namely corporations and the demands of production and consumption. What occurred was “the invasion of the community by the new and relatively impersonal and mechanical modes of combined human behavior.” Because of “these ways of aggregate activity, the community, in its strict sense, is not a conscious partner, and over them it has no direct control.”4 In many instances (though certainly not all), we have not a democratic public of workers, directing itself from within, but an impersonal

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and autocratic enforcement of working conditions from afar, from external sources. As a result, workers cannot find themselves in these jobs, but only an alien force that commands them and dictates conditions to them. Their true loyalties clearly cannot belong here. The next sphere of life in which one might go to find room for the individual is that of the free time of the population, the sphere of activity left over after work. The problem here, however, is that the entertainment industry has so to a large extent colonized this area of life, so the possibility exists that Westerners find in it not themselves, but what corporations want them to find, namely a bemused self that cannot think clearly and is open to mass suggestion. This seemed to be the case when Dewey wrote. The physical agencies of publicity which exist in such abundance are utilized in ways which constitute a large part of the present meaning of publicity: advertising, propaganda, invasion of private life, the “featuring” of passing incidents in a way which violates all the moving logic of continuity, and which leaves us with those isolated intrusions and shocks which are the essence of “sensations.”5 As Dewey sees it, our technology is being used against us. It is being used, above all, to stunt our thinking, due to the “passing incidents” that permeate our TV and video experience, as well as the experience of our music, news, and daily life. Thinking requires continuity, the consecutive ordering, and development of ideas in careful relation to one another. But when “sensations” form the basic unit of experience, in which one perception is introduced without any connection to another, thinking is inhibited. It atrophies. A blind, undiscerning passivity results instead of an active, engaged intellect. Adorno made a similar observation when he wrote that, for many people in the West, free time as well as work is becoming permeated by the very consumer culture that they experience in the work world and try to flee. 6 Bombarded with sensations, discontinuities and disruptions of experience, and unable in some cases to think because of this, Westerners are encouraged to have passive intellects. The result, of course, is that someone else is willing to step in to try to do the thinking for them. The ones who try this, according to Dewey, are the public relations agents who prey upon our passivity. What Dewey said almost eighty years ago also seems true today: “We seem to be approaching a state of government by hired promoters of opinion called publicity agents”.7 Affects are calculated, opinions are manufactured: We live exposed to the greatest flood of mass suggestion that any people has ever experienced. The need for united action, and the supposed need for integrating opinion and sentiment, are met by organized propaganda and advertising. The publicity agent is perhaps the most significant symbol of our present social life. There are individuals who resist; but, for a time at least,

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sentiment may be manufactured by mass methods for almost any person or any cause. 8 Mass suggestion plays a big role in the Western mentality today. One might think that beyond work and free time, other spheres of social life must give support to individuals. Religion, for example, seems to have gained ascendancy recently in Western life, and one might suppose that here, if nowhere else, some allegiance might be possible. The opposite, however, seems to be the case, at least if Dewey’s analysis is correct. As Dewey sees it, religion has declined “as a vitally integrative and directive force in men’s thought and sentiment.”9 Once a symbol at the heart of a community standing in for the unity of the community life itself, religion in this sense has only disintegrated since the seventeenth century. “There are, of course, those who are still militantly fundamentalist in religious and social creed. But their very clamor is evidence that the tide is set against them.”10 The truth of the situation, for Dewey, is that “there is no such bond of social unity as once united Greeks, Romans, Hebrews, and Catholic medieval Europe.”11 What stands in the place of such a unifying bond of the community is either “merely private indulgence” or “a matter of sects and denominations divided from one another by doctrinal difference, and united… by tenets that have a merely historical origin.”12 Religion no longer serves as a symbol of a unified community as such. Even religious advocates admit this, since they call for such unity themselves. But the call for unity itself lacks direction. The situation is confusing. There is no consensus “as to what a new religious attitude is to center itself about.”13 Too many differences exist, too many denominations. The bare call to have unity, especially by an individual choice, will not suffice; it only adds to the confusion of voices. For religion is a symbol of social unity; so long as such unity is lacking, religion alone cannot provide it; the symbol awaits something to symbolize. Perhaps politics still offers some way to accommodate the individual, as, for example, through voting or service. But, according to Dewey’s view, liberalism, for one, seems a lost cause today, since it has no definite doctrine to inspire loyalty. “Liberalism today is hardly more than a temper of mind, vaguely called forward-looking, but quite uncertain as to where to look and what to look for.”14 Conservatism fares no better, despite the false sense of unity it communicates among its members. As Dewey observes, It would be a waste of words to expatiate on the meaninglessness of present political platforms, parties, and issues. The old-time slogans are still reiterated, and to a few those words still have a real meaning. But it is too evident to need argument that on the whole our politics, as far as they are not covertly manipulated in behalf of pecuniary advantage of groups, are in a state of confusion; issues are improvised from week to week with a constant shift of allegiance.

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It is impossible for individuals to find themselves politically with surety and efficiency under such conditions. Political apathy broken by recurrent sensations and spasms is the natural outcome.15 Western political parties would seem at best (at least on Dewey’s view) to serve the wealthy against everyone else, at worst to offer confusion and misdirection. The people would seem to have a difficult time finding their own voice within such a framework. 4. Consequences for Western Individuals Within the spheres of social life that we have considered, at least, some Western individuals would inevitably appear to be lost. Given the social forces at work, some individuals are bound to exist detached from any arena of social outlet, detached from any sphere of shared self-expression and self-identification. Individuals can only exist as definite selves by existing in a definite relation to a group. This psychological truth amounts to “a law of mental integrity.”16 To see myself, I must see myself through the lens of society. I require a language and a social understanding that I cannot create myself. I must see myself mirrored, reflected back by others, to be present to myself. I require social mediation to attain a sense of myself. Here we arrive at the heart of the problem. We have seen that, within the work world, within entertainment, politics, and religion, there seems to exist little viable social space in terms of which Westerners could identify themselves. Without a public in which to find itself, at least in these realms, the Western individual is tempted to fall back on itself alone, on an exertion of particular expression. There is no mirroring of the individual self, no social confirmation (or disconfirmation) of its efforts at identity. As a result, pathology may occur. Dewey explains the potential consequences in this way, in terms of our hurried way of life: The unrest, impatience, irritation and hurry… are inevitable accompaniments of a situation in which individuals do not find support and contentment in the fact that they are sustaining and sustained members of a social whole. They are evidence, psychologically, of abnormality… Feverish love of anything as long as it is a change which is distracting, impatience, unsettlement, nervous discontentment, and desire for excitement, are not native to human nature. They are so abnormal as to demand explanation…17 Cut loose from any stable object of support, at least in terms of work, entertainment, politics, and religion, some Western individuals drift aimlessly, without a sense of their purpose and meaning in life.

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5. Looking Deeper into the Problem The real cause of our ills, as Dewey sees it, is dualism – something the West inherited from Europe long ago, so that European thought is predominately to blame for the problem. It is true that those who manipulate us play their part, but they do not form the most serious problem. Those who have ability to manipulate social relations for their own advantage have to be reckoned with…But the more serious enemy is hidden entrenchments. Emotion habituations and intellectual habitudes on the part of the mass of men create the conditions of which the exploiters of sentiment and opinion only take advantage.18 The principle, offending habit we have retained is “the idea of mind complete in itself apart from action and from objects.” We then have “the spectacle of mind deprived of its normal functioning, because… it is driven back into secluded and impotent revery [sic].”19 Seeing itself as free in its inherent detachment, already always free regardless of conditions, the Western mind in fact becomes susceptible to slavery. “A belief in intellectual freedom where it does not exist contributes only to complacency in virtual enslavement.”20 Our dualism can ensnare us, for it can detach the self from the actual conditions that affect it, and it flatters such a self that it is complete and sufficient as it is, when in reality the self is simply oblivious to how it is being shaped and why. The objective conditions that really do cut off mind from the world in the realms of religion, work, etc., then reinforce the dualism in mind and matter that people already embrace, giving it outside confirmation. The belief in the split between mind and matter lends itself to objective conditions that then actually do sever the mind from objective conditions. It is a kind of circle. They way out, it seems, would be to overcome our inveterate dualism. There are those like Adorno who are not optimistic about such improvements. Indeed, Adorno claims that “At the present moment, no higher form of society is concretely visible.”21 But this is clearly an exaggeration. From a Deweyan perspective, to be sure, there are difficulties. False patriotism is one of them. Dewey explains the point this way. Armies and navies exist to protect commerce, to make secure the control of raw materials, and to command markets. Men would not sacrifice their lives for the purpose of securing economic gain for the few if the conditions presented themselves to their minds in this bald fashion. But the balked demand for genuine cooperativeness…in daily life finds an outlet in nationalistic sentiment. Men have a pathetic instinct toward the adventure of living and struggling together; if the daily community does not feed this impulse, the romantic imagination pictures a grandiose nation in which all are one. If the simple

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duties of peace do not establish a common life, the emotions are mobilized in the service of a war that will supply its temporary simulation.22 In other words, lacking real togetherness in some key spheres of life (though, again, not in all), some Westerners may be too eager to accept a false substitute, namely the embrace of war on behalf of securing economic wealth for a few. By labeling such outright robbery and slaughter “patriotic,” a false sense of collective action comes to dominate individual minds. They cling to it tenaciously, despite its falsity, and its actual harm to individuals, because it is the only semblance of community belonging that they are offered at all. And yet, as Dewey has also taught us, “problematic situations” are also openings, situations making possible something new. Once we have identified the problem of lost individuals, we can begin to try to solve it. Once we isolate the spheres of life that prevent the full allegiance of individuals – work, entertainment, politics, and religion – we can begin to re-conceive them along less problematic lines. We can begin to reshape these areas of life – slowly, intelligently, non-violently – so that they will become more conducive to individuals and their needs. Just how we should do this remains an open question, a question, in any case, made possible only once we first define the problem. 6. Conclusion We know thanks to pragmatism that society helps to shape the self. I have argued that, as a concrete instance of this fact, one can say that Western society in some cases shapes the self into a lost self. Western individuals, in some cases lost, detached from a stable social framework, are at the mercy of external forces. Such individuals in these cases risk becoming confused and bewildered, open to suggestion, unable to form a self-directing public, and incapable of finding themselves. There is a lesson here, I suspect, for pragmatism, which is that it must resist becoming a new scholasticism. Rich in theory – and tempting as it is to enjoy the nuances of its theoretical insights – pragmatism should nonetheless remain true to its practical roots, to its attempt to solve problems. Pragmatists should not simply analyze in general detail, for example, how society shapes the self, but should also show in specific detail how it shapes the self today, so that we can think seriously about how to improve the types of selves it forms. Pragmatism is an engaged theorizing, and should remain so, for the problems that need its help, like the problem of the lost individual, are important ones, probably even more important than the problems posed by theory alone.

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NOTES 1. John Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct, in The Middle Works of John Dewey, vol. 14, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University, 1983). 2. John Dewey, “The Lost Individual”, from Individualism Old and New, in The Later Works of John Dewey, vol. 5, ed. Jo Ann Boyston (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984), pp. 66-76. This whole section is my paraphrase of some of Dewey’s main ideas in the essay “The Lost Individual.” 3. Ibid., p. 66. 4. John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems in The Later Works of John Dewey, vol. 2, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984), p. 296. 5. Ibid., p. 340. 6. Theodor Adorno, The Culture Industry, ed., J. M. Bernstein (London: Routledge Classics, 2001), pp. 190-191. 7. Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, p. 341. 8. Dewey, “The United States, Incorporated”, from Individualism Old and New, pp. 61-62. 9. Dewey, “The Lost Individual”, from Individualism Old and New, p. 71. 10. Ibid., pp. 66-67. 11. Ibid., pp. 71-72. 12. Ibid., p. 71. 13. Ibid., p. 72. 14. Ibid., p. 70. 15. Ibid., p. 70. 16. Ibid., p. 69. 17. Ibid., p. 68. 18. Ibid., p. 341. 19. Ibid., p. 339. 20. Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, p. 340. 21. Adorno, The Culture Industry, p. 202. 22. Dewey, “The Lost Individual,” from Individualism Old and New, p. 71.

SELF AND SOCIETY

Five THE SOCIAL CHARACTER OF OBLIGATION IN DEWEY’S PRAGMATIC ETHICS Michael Eldridge 1. Introduction Although pragmatism is generally regarded as a philosophy that values ethics, it has not been a major contender in the competition between utilitarianism, Kantianism and virtue theory. Although Hugh LaFollette chose to include pragmatism in the Blackwell Guide to Ethical Theory (2000) that he edited, contributing the chapter on pragmatic ethics himself, he – significantly – put it in the section labeled, “Alternative Views.” Following James and Dewey, LaFollette correctly emphasizes in his chapter the primacy of habit, to use the classical pragmatists’ term, or practice, to use a term with which we may be more comfortable. He also has good discussions of ends and means and the pragmatist’s rejection of fixed criteria, their desire to move beyond the absolutism-relativism dichotomy, and their refusal to separate theory from practice. Where he comes up short, however, is in his implicit identification of morality with social concern. He does not immediately or explicitly make this reduction. He begins well enough in the section, “Morality is Social,” calling attention to the “essentially social” character of our habits and cautioning us to avoid the two extremes of making individuals “mere products of social forces who lack any personal responsibility” or thinking of them “as wholly autonomous, free from all social influences.”1 But he then proceeds to tell a story that many people of my age and time could tell: “I grew up a bigot, living in a land of bigots. I had no acquaintance with blacks, and no experience or habits to prompt me to change my bigoted habits.” Then, as his social environment changed, he changed. 2 This, in the absence of an explicit discussion of what John Dewey regarded as the distinctively moral – in the sense of moral that is opposed to non-moral – situation, leaves the impression that a moral situation is one in which one is to exercise social concern. I want in this paper to provide what I think is a better account of the pragmatic understanding of morality both in the descriptive and normative senses. Thus I hope LaFollette will regard my correction as a friendly amendment in the effort to understand pragmatic ethics. I will proceed by

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considering the current moral controversy over stem cell research, for this issue enables us to grasp clearly the differences in what Dewey calls customary and reflective morality or the ethics of rules and the ethics of deliberation regarding competing values. 2. What Makes Stem Cell Research a Moral Issue President Bush’s decision to provide federal funding for embryonic stem cell research is clearly a political issue, and most would regard it as a moral one as well. And so it is, in the conventional sense of “moral” as a matter that involves the doing of something that is either good or bad, right or wrong. Often the moral issue is articulated as one that involves a conflict between the sanctity of human life and the potential benefits of embryonic stem cell research. As such, there are two “goods” here, and it is usually thought that one cannot honor the one and pursue the other. So a choice must be made with deliberation being required for those who would make the decision intelligently. As Dewey says in Reconstruction in Philosophy (1920): “A moral situation is one in which judgment and choice are required antecedently to overt action.”3 A moral situation is one in which we are required to choose intelligently before we act. But not all of us think that human life is sacred or that embryos are human life in the strong sense that requires “respect for persons.” Some of us deny them the moral status that others accord them. For those of us who think embryos have some value but are not to be accorded “human rights,” there is no conflict that requires serious moral deliberation. There may well be a moral issue here, but it is not the one that it is ordinarily taken to be. There are not two compelling goods about which one must deliberate. No doubt, as a matter of prudence, one will take into account the conventional understanding and enter carefully into this disputed territory. But one will not agonize over the decision as one might if s/he were to think that embryos are human in the requisite strong sense. Instead one will regard the issue as a political one, in which some of the disputants make claims that one cannot accept but nevertheless respects – not because one accepts the claims but because one respects the makers of the claims. This sort of analysis does, I should note, require one to think in two different ways about many matters. One must understand both what conventional morality requires and what counts as moral on a Deweyan analysis. But this is not that difficult. Many of us manage to move about successfully in a culturally diverse environment. So, for Dewey, “moral” is often a descriptive term, indicating, as noted earlier, that one must discriminate among competing goods. This obligation is not a moral one in the sense that one must conform to some rule or norm. Rather it is a practical one. If one is to be effective, s/he must exercise intelligence. Having determined that there is a problem, one figures out the

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means to realize some desired end, or chooses among competing ends. It is in setting the problem, thoughtfully rehearsing possible courses of actions and then choosing one of them that one engages in moral deliberation. In so doing one is engaging in inquiry, or the method of intelligence. But Dewey also uses “moral” in the conventional sense as well, such as in this statement from Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (1938), in which he uses both the conventional and his preferred understanding: . . . the transfer of the burden of the moral life from following rules or pursuing fixed ends over to the detection of the ills that need remedy in a special case and the formation of plans and methods for dealing with them, eliminates the causes which have kept moral theory controversial, and which have also kept it remote from helpful contact with the exigencies of practice. 4 But in identifying morality with intelligence, he makes clear that he is valuing the reconstructive process that is intelligence. Our experience is constituted by our various practices. These exist for our well-being. We initiate, sustain and reform our habits or practices in response to our various needs. Their purpose is to enable us to live well. The chapter from which the preceding statement is drawn ends with this sentence: “Democracy has many meanings, but if it has a moral meaning, it is found in resolving that the supreme test of all political institutions and industrial arrangements shall be the contribution they make to the all-around growth of every member of society.”5 Here “moral” is being used in an honorific sense to designate those practices which are the continuing products of intelligent reconstruction. But this honorific sense is not primary. It designates that which is characterized by the use of intelligence. Now I can return to the stem cell controversy. The value of embryonic stem cell research is in its potential, rather than actual, benefits. We have yet to establish its usefulness. The search, in that it exploits the cells of unwanted or otherwise unusable embryos, is immoral in the conventional sense of “moral” according to some religious traditions. It is a political but non-moral issue in the descriptive sense of “moral,” however, for those who are not adherents of these traditions, or, more precisely, for those who do not find these embryos of sufficient value that they are concerned about their destruction in the pursuit of the potential value of the research. Yet pursuit of this research is good, and therefore moral, in Dewey’s honorific sense, in that it holds promise of securing – through the intelligent reconstruction of experience – benefits that we do not now have. Little or no deliberation is required at this point. It is as a result of prior decisions that we regard something as a good. We have determined, or perhaps for most of us, taken for granted that which benefits us is good.

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There is no free-standing moral law that commands us to improve our lives by reconstructing our practices through the use of inquiry. We are under no external obligation to be intelligent. But the various practices in which we engage have as their aim the enhancement of our lives, and intelligence, Dewey thinks, is the means by which we make our lives better. Inquiry is what enables us to identify conditions and consequences so that we can institute means and ends “in strict conjugate relation to each other.”6 This is how we enhance our lives rather than by engaging in “moral blame and moral approbation.” In fact, approaching “human problems in terms of . . . wickedness or righteousness,” he declared, “is probably the greatest single obstacle now existing to development of competent methods in the field of social subject-matter.”7 The problem then with those who oppose embryonic stem cell research is not just that they oppose this particular form of scientific research but that they have not learned from scientific practice how to improve our lives through the intelligent reconstruction of experience by means of causal analysis and the institution of means and ends. They are engaged in moral (in the conventional sense) condemnation rather than moral deliberation (in Dewey’s descriptive sense), thus hampering the moral (in the honorific sense) development of potentially beneficial therapeutic techniques. Thus the political constraint of embryonic stem cell research for moral (in the conventional sense) reasons is a paradigm case of the antithesis of Deweyan social intelligence. But this is not the end of the matter, because given the descriptive sense – deliberation regarding goods – the stem cell issue becomes a moral one as one moves from the primarily personal to the primarily social level. Clearly a political conflict exists. As individuals we may not be conflicted but as a society we have two proposed but incompatible goods – preservation of all human life and research that involves the exploitation of human embryos. Thus deliberation is required of us as a society, and as such we have a moral problem in Dewey’s sense. On this understanding all political situations are moral ones. It is important to get the categories straight not just for analytic reasons but primarily because it helps us realize the social character of morality. Dewey cannot appeal, as we have seen, to extra-natural sources. Instead he locates the development of obligation in our social experience, providing a radical reconstruction that has proved difficult for moral theorists to accept and creating a difficulty for his pragmatism. His anticipation of John Mackie’s error theory and his clearly nonconventional alternative are not what one would expect of the incrementalism that is often associated with pragmatism. This tension arises from his naturalism. 3. “Morality Is Social” Dewey clearly distinguishes between the oughtness of social concern and the fact of the matter in the final section of Human Nature and Conduct (1922),

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which is titled “Morality Is Social.” Summing up his discussion in the first three paragraphs, he opens the fourth paragraph with this statement: These two facts, that moral judgment and moral responsibility are the work wrought in us by the social environment, signify that all morality is social; not because we ought to take into account the effect of our acts upon the welfare of others, but because of facts. Others do take account of what we do, and they respond accordingly to our acts. Their responses actually do affect the meaning of what we do. . . . Our conduct is socially conditioned whether we perceive the fact or not. 8 Then a few paragraphs later, he declares that “. . . the formation of habits of belief, desire and judgment is going on at every instant under the influence of the conditions set by men’s contact, intercourse and associations with one another. This is the fundamental fact in social life and in personal character.”9 He then considers the alternative to this naturalistic account, characterizing it as “abstract moralism.” Its features include “a remote goal of perfection, ideals that are contrary in a wholesale way to what is actual, [and] a free will of arbitrary choice.”10 Dewey does not, however, simply endorse our social practices. He thinks we traverse a spiral in which social customs generate some consciousness of interdependencies, and this consciousness is embodied in acts which in improving the environment generate new perceptions of social ties, and so on forever. The relationships, the interactions are forever there as fact, but they acquire meaning only in the desires, judgments and purposes they awaken.11 It is not the case that an individual, outside of society, asks, “Why be moral?” Rather we find ourselves within a whole network of obligations, any one of which we may place under scrutiny and either ratify or modify. Obligation arises within society, or better, to be socially related is to experience moral demands. Normativity is a natural, social development. It is not something that must be imported into our conduct. It occurs naturally as we interact with one another. The issue, then, for Dewey is not whether we should be moral but how we are to be moral. 4. The Radical Dewey and Contemporary Ethical Theory Dewey’s naturalistic account of morality both in terms of what he is against and what he is for anticipates John Mackie’s Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, in which he proposed an error theory of morality. Ordinary people and philosophers systematically err in thinking that moral values are nonnatural in origin. Mackie thinks that these non-natural values or objective

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prescriptions are “queer” entities; so much so, that they should not be thought to exist independently of us. In fact, he argues that we project or objectify them: Moral attitudes . . . are at least partly social in origin: socially established – and socially necessary – patterns of behavior put pressure on individuals, and each individual tends to internalize these pressures and to join in requiring these patterns of behaviour of himself and of others. The attitudes that are objectified into moral values have indeed an external source, though not the one assigned to them by the belief in their absolute authority. Moreover, there are motives that would support objectification. We need morality to regulate interpersonal relations, to control some of the way in which people behave towards one another, often in opposition to contrary inclinations. We therefore want our moral judgements to be authoritative for other agents as well as for ourselves: objective validity would give them the authority required.12 We should acknowledge this and take responsibility for what we have developed. Like Dewey, Mackie’s complaint is not with ethics, what Mackie calls “first-order morality.” To be sure Dewey and Mackie have problems with some of the content of conventional thinking, but they have no problems with us making normative judgments. Their complaint is with what Mackie calls “second-order morality.” They think we are mistaken in how we understand normativity. Recent moral theorists have often referred to Mackie’s radical explanation of morality as our invention – not so much attention is given these days to Dewey’s account; hence my introduction of Mackie into the discussion – but generally they try to preserve more of the conventional understanding than did Mackie. Stephen Darwall notes, “According to Mackie, ethical discourse and practice can proceed despite the massive error it is committed to,” then observes, “but many doubted that this could be so. For them, Mackie’s argument from ‘queerness’ stood as a challenge to the viability of ethics itself.”13 Particularly ironic is Christine Korsgaard’s dismissal of Ma-ckie’s view. After correctly summarizing his view she comments: But Mackie is wrong and realism is right. Of course there are entities that meet these criteria. It’s true that they are queer sorts of entities, and that knowing them isn’t like anything else. But that doesn’t mean that they don’t exist. John Mackie must have been alone in his room with the Scientific World View when he wrote those words. For it is the most familiar fact of human life that the world contains entities that can tell us what to do and make us do it. They are people, and the other animals.14

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She offers as a counter example the very entities – humans and other animals – that Mackie and Dewey think are the sources of value and obligation, except that they make clear that these normative agents are social animals. 5. The Tension in Pragmatic Ethics Mackie’s language is more dramatic than Dewey’s but I think both are at odds with the mainstream of ethical thought. They think that morality arises in human activity, and we should frankly acknowledge that. One would think that the pragmatist Dewey’s commitment to meliorism would preclude him from being at such odds with conventional thinking. One would have expected his revisionism to have taken a more incrementalist form. For the pragmatist begins with one’s present practices, modifying them as needed. As anyone who has engaged in social change knows, it is difficult to get from here to there because of the inertia of the present practice. To be sure, Dewey begins with an analysis of our practices, but he, like Mackie, refuses to accept non-natural entities and explanations. He thus develops an account of ethics that is unacceptable to many, if not most, people. If he were more prudent, he would have found a way to fudge the differences, as he did in his religious proposal. In A Common Faith he continued to use the term “God,” defining the divine as the active relation of ideal and actual.15 Many readers, but not all, appreciated Dewey’s use of the term and some of these did not note Dewey’s rationalistic reconstruction. They simply were consoled by a prominent philosopher’s apparent endorsement of religious belief and practice. To be sure, those who paid close attention to his language realized that his was a thoroughgoing naturalistic account of religion. But he does not seem to have pulled his punches in his discussions of value. Admittedly he is not as combative as Mackie, but he did title the often-reprinted tenth chapter of The Quest for Certainty (1929), “The Construction of Good.”16 That we are the makers of value is clearly his point. Good is not something to be discovered or inherited; it is something we devise. My inclination is to do what Dewey and Mackie did – make the best case one can for an intellectual position even if it places one at odds with conventional thinking. This is particularly appropriate when one is engaged in philosophical discussions. Philosophers should not fudge ideas. If we were talking about a social practice, however, then I would be more open to an accommodationist strategy. I am mindful of Bill Lawson’s essay, “Booker T. Washington: A Pragmatist at Work,” in which he identifies the “everyday” sense of pragmatism: “Pragmatic” in the everyday sense is taken to mean practical, realistic, and nonideological. To say that a person is pragmatic or a pragmatist is to say that he or she is practical and/or realistic; the person is doing what is necessary given the situation. The person is doing what he or she thinks is practical given an assessment of the social situation.17

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Agents are not under the same constraints as intellectuals. They are free to employ means that achieve the desired ends, even if the instrumentalities are less than ideal. (Ends and means must, however, be “in strict conjugate relation to each other,” as noted above.) But when one is explaining a social practice, such as morality, or providing an understanding of an idea, such as obligation, there can be no hedging. So I would resolve the tension by appealing to two sorts of pragmatism – everyday and intellectual. The latter should account for the former, but what may be permitted in everyday life could well not be tolerated in intellectual practice. Philosophers and other intellectuals hold themselves to more stringent standards of clarity and precision. 6. Concluding Note The foregoing paper was presented on three separate occasions, one of which was a general philosophical meeting (a joint meeting of the North Carolina and South Carolina Philosophical Societies) and the other two were pragmatist philosophical groups (the Atlantic Coast Pragmatist Meeting and the Central European Pragmatist Forum), all of which were held in 2006. A concern expressed on each occasion was that the socially-developed ideals or standards presented in this paper would not be able to escape conventionalism. Pragmatic values would not provide one sufficient leverage to oppose such moral evils as slavery in the United States prior to the Civil War or the Nazi holocaust. One needs objective values to counter conventional moral practice. Dewey and Mackie’s rejections of fixed ends and objective prescriptives are unacceptable forms of societal relativism. This criticism was made despite my presentation of Dewey and Mackie as being at odds with ordinary moral thinking and the mainstream of moral philosophy. Apparently the conventional philosophical loyalty to objective norms and hostility to relativism is such that it did not register with some of my auditors that the pragmatist Dewey was unconventional in his ethical thinking. He swam against the current. Ironically those who swam with it did not realize that they were the ones who were conventional in their thinking. That a historicist can adopt unconventional ethical norms should not be unthinkable, but apparently it is for some. They can only conceive of ethical norms as given or found. They cannot regard one’s (or their predecessor’s) constructions as being action-guiding when the action required is unconventional. Yet in this paper I provided (in Dewey and Mackie’s thought) examples that the conventionalist critics would not regard as either a fixed end or an objective prescription. Dewey thought that it was a significant implication of the scientific approach for our common practice that it showed us how to be a self-correcting society. By adopting an experimental, collaborative approach to deliberation we

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would be able to modify our dysfunctional practices. To accuse him of being convention-bound is to reject what I argued in Transforming Experience was his “life-long effort” – to “make our present beliefs, attitudes, and institutions more intelligent than they would be otherwise.”18 We can – as individuals and a society – self-correct. We are not bound to the way things are at any given time. NOTES 1. Hugh LaFollette, Blackwell Guide to Ethical Theory (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2000), p. 408. 2. Ibid., p. 409. 3. John Dewey, The Middle Works of John Dewey, vol. 12, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982), p. 173. 4. John Dewey, The Later Works of John Dewey, vol. 12, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986), p. 174. 5. Ibid., p. 186. 6. Ibid., p. 490. 7. Ibid., p. 489. 8. John Dewey, The Middle Works of John Dewey, vol. 14, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983), p. 217. 9. Ibid., p. 222. 10. Ibid, p. 223. 11. Ibid., p. 225. 12. John Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (New York: Penguin, 1977), p. 42f. 13. Stephan Darwall, “Ethical Theory,” in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Supplement. Donald B. Borchert, Editor in Chief (New York: Macmillan, 1996), p. 150. 14. Christine Korsgaard, “The Origin of Value and the Scope of Obligation,” in her The Sources of Normativity (Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 166. 15. John Dewey, The Later Works of John Dewey, vol. 9, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986), p. 34. 16. John Dewey, The Later Works of John Dewey, vol. 4, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984), pp. 203-28. 17. Bill Lawson and Donald F. Koch, Pragmatism and the Problem of Race (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), p. 127. 18. Michael Eldridge, Transforming Experience: John Dewey’s Cultural Instrumentalism (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1998), p. 6.

Six PUBLICS AND PRODUCTS: REASSEMBLING THE SOCIAL Larry A. Hickman Even viewed from the perspective of more than fifty years after his death, John Dewey’s analyses of social relations – including his treatment of social inquiry – still seem to many of his interpreters both fresh and relevant. This is especially the case when his work is compared to some of the intervening theoretical work in those fields. Working against the grain of what Bruno Latour has called “sociology of the social” – the type of essentialist social analysis that treats the social as a special domain or special realm operating as a sort of backdrop behind or foundation under the activities that Latour has termed “social links” – Dewey emphasized the multifaceted and continually shifting relationships among the functionalist-instrumentalist entities that he terms “publics” and that Latour terms assemblies of “actors” and “objects.” Dewey’s publics are remarkable in the sense that they do not fit into any entity that could be termed “the social,” nor are they determined by any such thing. This is because apart from such publics (and the private associations which give rise to them) there is nothing to which we can point whose essence is “the social.” It would be tempting to say that in describing the state as a means of regulating such publics, Dewey just reverses Plato’s account, which gave pride of place to the state and attempted to work out the ways in which individuals might fit – or fail to fit – into their proper place in it. But it is clear that such temptations must be resisted. This is because Dewey also criticized those who did in effect invert the Platonic model: especially social contract theorists such as Hobbes, who attempted to build up “the social” from interactions between what one can only conclude must have been pre-social, that is, feral individuals. In what follows I shall suggest that we can get a sense of just how advanced Dewey’s social theory was by placing it along side some recent works by Bruno Latour. As for Dewey’s works, the ones I have in mind are The Public and Its Problems, published in 1927, and chapter 24 of Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, published in 1938. For Latour, I have in mind his Paris: Invisible City, first published in French in 1998 and now available on-line in English with translator’s corrections dated 2006, and Reassembling the Social, published in 2005. I have chosen to compare these two bodies of work because I think that

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reading Latour helps us get a richer sense of just how radical Dewey’s proposal was at the time he wrote, and that reading Dewey allows special insights into the work of Latour. Both approaches are radical in terms of what they strip away from social theory, and in terms of their commitment to common sense. Before I proceed, however, I want to issue a caveat about the word “pragmatism.” It is probable that the word is now more widely used within academic circles than at any time in its history. It is for that very reason that the term is increasingly difficult to define. Yet here we are at a meeting of the Central European Pragmatist Forum. So what is it that we are about as pragmatists? I think it is possible on the one hand to speak generally about pragmatism as a development within American philosophy whose formative period was the half-century between the 1870s and the first decades of the 20th century. Very generally speaking, classical pragmatism is expressed as a theory of meaning, according to which the meaning of a conception lies in its conceivable practical effects. If that view is taken seriously, most forms of foundationalism and essentialism are disallowed, as is the idea that the sources of knowledge and value are transcendent of human experience. Beyond that, however, the founding pragmatists differed among themselves – sometimes in ways that were quite significant – when it came to their theories of inquiry and their theories of truth. As we know, for Peirce truth was convergence toward an ideal limit within a community of scientific inquiry. For James, it was what satisfied the objective and subjective conditions of a belief or hypothesis. For Dewey, knowledge is what has been warranted by prior experimental inquiry and is therefore assertible under relevantly similar future conditions. And beyond their theories of inquiry and truth there were even greater differences. I realize that by advancing such a broad statement I have put myself in some peril of being challenged or even corrected. Nevertheless, I think it worthwhile to recall that “pragmatism” is a very loose term that has many meanings. As we know, Peirce abandoned the term as part of his protest against the manner in which James appropriated it. Even Dewey objected to the use of the term except in a very limited sense. In 1905 he wrote to his colleague A. W. Moore that I have never known a myth grow so rapidly as that of “pragmatism”. To read its critics one would think it was a positive system set forth for centuries in hundreds of volumes, & that its critics were the ones engaged in a tentative development of new & undogmatic ideas. But I object root and branch to the term ‘pragmatism’ (except in its original limited sense). . . . Any name can only be one[-]sided, and so it seems a pity to have any. Radical empiricism begs as few as any, tho I should prefer the term experimentalism to empiricism. Philosophy is Functionalism in the sense that it treats only of functions of experience (not of facts, nor of

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states, ideas, &); it is Geneticism [a]s a mode of analyzing & identifying these functions; it is Instrumentalism as a theory of the significance of the Knowledge-function; it is Experimentalism as a theory of the test of worth of all functions. If I were a German I could stick all these words together and announce a new system. Doubtless. Meanwhile I think there is nothing to do but to peg away at the analyses of particular problems...1 What Dewey seems to be saying in this passage is that he was a pragmatist in the limited sense of the theory of meaning he shared with Peirce and James, but that his functionalism, geneticism, instrumentalism, and experimentalism all had to come into play if his pragmatism were to be applicable within the spheres that he wished it to be. Having registered that caveat, I now want to proceed with my suggestion that the work of Latour advances the work of Dewey – whether we want to call this particular aspect of his work pragmatist or not – in interesting and admirable ways. As I have indicated, this relationship is a transaction – it works both ways. Latour can be read against the backdrop of Deweyan insights in ways that demonstrate how social inquiry can be advanced, and in the process our appreciation for the untapped potential of Dewey’s insights into the social dimensions of logic (as the theory of inquiry) can be enlarged. Latour’s writing style is often difficult to the point of exasperating. It is at once provocative and dispassionate, tightly structured and chatty, linear and non-linear, serious and playful, maddeningly general and excruciatingly detailed. His books remind one of nothing so much as three-ring circuses. Beyond that, however, what are the pertinent elements of his proposal for new ways of thinking about social inquiry? In general, Latour thinks that we are off on the wrong foot if we start with things called “the social” or “nature” as if they were backdrops against which things happen, and then conclude that the social or natural scientist just needs to find out how things fit into “the social” or “nature.” This is the way he thinks that sociology at least since Durkheim has been done. In other words, Latour makes a move that could be termed “pragmatic” when he rejects the essentialist strain that infects the work of some sociologists. A perfect example of the type of approach he rejects can be found in the work of Jacques Ellul, who was for many years a considerable force in the philosophy of technology. Here is Ellul in The Technological Society, published in French in 1954 and in English translation in 1964: “To me the sociological does not consist of the addition and combination of individual actions. I believe that there is a collective sociological reality which is independent of the individual. As I see it, individual decisions are always made within

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the framework of this sociological reality, itself pre-existent and more or less determinative.”2 This is a clear case of “the sociology of the social” at work. Latour thinks that we need to extricate ourselves from this way of doing sociology. As I said, he argues that his view is radical in the sense that it strips away some of the unnecessary metaphysical entities required by sociology-asusual, as well as in terms of its unexpected appeal to common sense. Why do sociology at all? It’s because stuff happens that involves collections or assemblies of actors and sometimes that stuff is puzzling. We read about a new vaccine, a new job opportunity, a new political movement, a new planetary system. Put in Dewey’s terms, there is a new situation that demands our attention because there has been some sort of breakdown of business as usual. For Latour, one of the tasks of the sociologist is to study what happens when old associations break down, when they are reshuffled, when previous definitions become irrelevant, when “we are no longer sure about what ‘we’ means. . . .”3 In Dewey’s terms, if something disturbs us, if we are puzzled or otherwise irritated by some sense of disequilibrium, then it is probably a good idea to try to find out what the problem is. For Latour, sociology is both wider and more limited than the kind of sociology Ellul had in mind. It is wider in the sense that all sorts of actors have to be taken into account as they influence the shifting scene. If our particular shifting scene involves Paris, we may need to take into account actors such as its 400 news stands, 700 billboards, 2,000 information stands, 400 public toilets, 1,800 bus shelters, and so on.4 And we will also have to take into account the people who buy the newspapers, view the billboards, visit the information stands, use the public toilets, or wait for a bus. Does this mean that Latour treats objects as social? Not really. It would be better to say that he treats anything that is involved in a relevant way in the situation under scrutiny as an actor. An actor is any object, human or nonhuman, that has a role in an assembly that is either stable or needs to be reassembled. Hmmm. Latour treats humans as objects, I can hear you saying. Don’t worry. When there is reassembly going on, the objects become actors. In terms of classical pragmatism, there are several very interesting things about Latour’s treatment of objects. First, if an object does not leave a trace, then it is no longer an actor. That sounds like an extension of Peirce’s suggestion that the meaning of a conception lies in its conceivable practical effects. Latour thus functionalizes objects: the meaning of an object lies in its functions, or traces. Second, even the most routine objects can have a new life when they are encountered by users who, because of their distance in time or space, are ignorant of their uses. Think archeologists, for example (or antique junkies – “I wonder what the hell this is. It’s pretty. I think I’ll take it home and use it as a paperweight.”). And third, objects can do flip-flops. In some circumstances, as Latour puts it, “completely silent intermediaries become full-blown mediators.”5

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Latour’s discussion of objects sounds a great deal like Dewey. First, Dewey reminds us that objects are not as fixed as they are often characterized as being: their meanings tend to shift depending on their effects in context. It is reasonable to conclude that he would not have objected to Latour’s term “traces.” That goes for logical objects as well as objects that are more tangible. It goes for humans and non-humans alike. If I ask what a table is made of, I’ll probably get different answers from a physicist and a carpenter. In Latour’s terms if you want to know the meaning of an object, take a look at its traces. (This might for some raise the question of intrinsic value of human beings versus the instrumental value of objects. Dewey handles this issue in more or less the same manner that Latour handles it.) Here is Dewey: Intrinsic values are not objects of judgment, they cannot (as intrinsic) be compared, or regarded as greater and less, better or worse. They are invaluable; and if a thing is invaluable, it is neither more nor less so than any other invaluable. But occasions present themselves when it is necessary to choose, when we must let one thing go in order to take another. This establishes an order of preference, a greater and less, better and worse. Things judged or passed upon have to be estimated in relation to some third thing, some further end. With respect to that, they are means, or instrumental values.6 Second, when common objects become the source of scientific interest, they are capable of taking on new characteristics. When flocks of finches on the Galapagos Islands become the subject of scientific interest, they become case studies of evolution in action. The other way around, what was previously a scientific instrument – say a brass ship’s barometer – becomes an aesthetic object on someone’s mantle. Third, and most importantly, Dewey thinks that objects flip-flop. A lot. They may have become stabilized by means of prior inquiry, but they may suddenly lose their stability and become the objective of a current sequence of inquiry. Here is Dewey in his 1938 Logic: The name objects will be reserved for subject matter so far as it has been produced and ordered in settled form by means of inquiry; proleptically, objects are the objectives of inquiry. The apparent ambiguity of using “objects” for this purpose (since the word is regularly applied to things that are observed or thought of) is only apparent. For things exist as objects for us only as they have been previously determined as outcomes of inquiries. When used in carrying on new inquiries in new problematic situations, they are known as objects in virtue of prior inquiries which warrant their assertibility. In the new situation, they

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If Latour’s sociology is wider than traditional sociology (in that there is a greater variety of types of actors), then it is also narrower than traditional sociology. For Latour, the social is not something in back of all these news stands, billboards, public toilets, and bus shelters. It is instead “a very peculiar movement of re-association and reassembling.”8 What are some of the benefits of this approach? For one thing, we don’t have to try to account for religion by appealing to “social forces.” Just as Dewey suggested in A Common Faith, we can look at what religious people individually and in groups do – their traces – and make judgments about the relative value of their behavior. For another, we don’t have to worry about placing organizations in a “wider social context.” As Dewey told us in The Public and its Problems, organizations are the ways that they relate to the actors that constitute them and the effects they have on other publics. And for yet another, we can stop scratching our heads about what Ellul could possibly mean by “system” and “society” in the titles of two of his books, The Technological System and The Technological Society. There are no such things. There are only assemblies and re-assemblies. Speaking of Ellul, it is easy enough to see that Latour is following in Dewey’s footsteps with respect to his treatment of technology. Technology is not a thing. Technology is analysis of tools and the ways in which they are used. Technology is study of how collections of objects get used in the process of being assembled, breaking up, and getting reassembled. It’s now time to be a bit more specific. The first moment of social inquiry is what Latour calls “deployment.” This means that we should not assume that the number and roles of the relevant actors have not changed since the last time we looked. Deployment is a type of analysis of who and what might contribute to a reconfiguration of a social situation. Some actor that was relevant the last time we looked has become irrelevant in the new situation. In all of this it is important to note that this is not deployment of nothing. It is deployment of reality – what has traces or effects – as it is at the time that a reconfiguration is required. The second moment is what Latour terms “stabilization.” What this means is that you have to follow the actors and get a sense of what they are saying. As we have seen, actors can be organic or inorganic – we count anything that can provide testimony or weigh in with a relevant voice regarding how the unstable situation can be reassembled into some sort of equilibrium. Steven Shapin has a wonderful example of this in his book A Social History of Truth. In his story, Robert Boyle has this idea that water exerts

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pressure. So he asks divers whether they feel the pressure of the water. No, they say, but they do feel discomfort because of the cold. So he asks a physician who treats divers. Yes, he says, divers who have gone down to about eight fathoms – or about 16 meters – exhibit problems with their eyes and ears, and sometimes even spit blood. Then he asks an engineer who has been at sea. The engineer says that a bottle like the one in which the sailors carry their rum shattered when it was lowered to 40 fathoms (80 meters). A former president of the Royal Society reports an experiment in which a weighted pewter bottle was crushed when lowered into the sea and another experiment in which a bottle lowered into a tropical sea to be cooled had the cork driven in so tightly that it could not be removed.9 There are lots of actors in this account: divers, a physician, an engineer, a glass bottle, a pewter bottle, a cork, measures of rope, fathoms, ships, tropical waters, an insistent and perplexing hypothesis, Robert Boyle, and the Royal Society, to name a few. They are all actors and all have traces. There is a small assembly that distresses Boyle because it is unstable. One of his tasks is to take an account of these actors/objects in order to get a sense of what they are saying. It is at this stage that “formats, standards, and metrologies” emerge and are tested against the situation. As Dewey would put the matter, there is an ongoing transaction between means and ends-in-view, the tools we use and the projects we undertake, in which each has to be tested (and sometimes modified) with respect to the demands of the other. Finally, there is the third stage: “composition.” The trick here is to see how the assemblage – or better, the re-assemblage – that was made in step two “can renew our sense of being in the same collective.”10 In Shapin’s story, the new assemblage creates a new “we.” Boyle was a member of the old unstable assemblage. He is also a member of the new stable assemblage. The new assemblage is larger, since it includes such things a pewter bottles and the testimony of engineers. It also includes the report he can now make with confidence before the Royal Society. The “we” is a different “we” than before: it includes an engineer, a pewter bottle, and of course the very important new object: water pressure. (Note: it no longer includes the testimony of the divers.) How does Latour deal with that persistent old philosophical problem – of the relation of an individual to society? For Latour’s project, the problem comes up just in time to be dismissed. There is no society apart from the assemblages and re-assemblages of individual actors/objects. As he puts the matter in his book about Paris, “The path we have followed, sniffing along the trail, short-circuits both Paris and Parisians. No path leads to either the global context or local interaction; our social theory metro line stops at neither the ‘Society’ nor the ‘individual’ station.”11 There is no “Society,” and individuals only come into play as they become actor/objects in the shifting pattern of assembly and reassembly that Latour terms “social.” The point of his study is a cascade of transformations.

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Dewey’s account is remarkably similar. There is no fixed society or social structure, and there is no atomic individual. Individuals form publics and are in turn informed as a part of Latour’s “cascade of transformations.” An individual may be (and probably is) a member of many overlapping publics, some of which may even be working at cross-purposes. Publics come and go. They come into existence as required, they are transformed as a consequence of changing conditions, including interactions with other publics, and they pass out of existence when the conditions that called them into being are no longer present. Of course it must also be said that some publics tend to outlive their usefulness. Dewey thinks that it is not necessary to appeal to “causal laws” (such as one finds almost gridlocked in the work of Ellul) in order to engage in social inquiry. He regards knowledge of cause and effect in the abstract as knowledge of a “formula of correlation in change” and in the concrete as “a certain historical career of sequential events.” Moreover, “The appeal to causal forces at large not only misleads inquiry into social facts, but it affects equally seriously the formation of purposes and policies.” Such social scientists have determined their program in advance instead of doing the hard work of “finding out the particular thing which needs to be done and the best way, under the circumstances, of doing it.”12 Finally, how do Latour and Dewey treat the relation of facts to values? Again, the problem comes up just in time to be dissolved. For Latour, like Dewey, the point is to “learn how to feed off uncertainties, instead of deciding in advance what the furniture of the world should look like.”13 The trick is to shift from talk about “matters of fact” to talk about “matters of concern.” With William James, Latour rejects the notion that there is one reality and many interpretations. The alleged split between the natural sciences and the social sciences, between facts and values, ignores the etymology of the term “fact.” Facts are fabricated. As Dewey says, they are selected as facts-of-a-case. Elsewhere, in an extended technological metaphor, he compares facts to intermediate stock parts in manufacture. For both Dewey and Latour, to introduce an actor, an object, a fact-of-thecase, is to introduce a matter of concern, or a valuation. Both Dewey and Latour build their accounts in ways that, as Latour puts it, modes of fabrication and stabilizing mechanisms become clearly visible.14 Here is Dewey, writing in 1910, almost 100 years ago, in a passage that could be straight out of Latour: In abstract or symbolic knowledge all facts are of equal importance or value; perception of their relation to ourselves as agents and to their consequences with respect to our success and failure, to our efforts and accomplishments, confer upon objects a scale of relative values. So far as knowledge takes this form of genuine, deep, and intimate sense of values, action follows insight, for this sort of insight is obtainable only through

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constant activity in the way of adjustment, response, experimentation, and trial.15 Here is Latour on the same subject, in 2005, in a passage that could have been written by (a somewhat more hip) Dewey: Things, chairs, cats, mats, and black holes never behave like matters of fact; humans sometimes do, for political reasons, to resist enquiries. So it’s absurd to resist ‘treating humans like objects.’ At worst, it would simply put humans on par with other matters of concern in physics, biology, computer science, etc. Complexity will simply be added to complexity. Far from being ‘lowered down,’ ‘objectified humans’ will instead be elevated to the level of ants, chimps, chips, and particles! To be ‘treated like things,’ as we understand it now, is not to be ‘reduced’ to mere matters of fact, but allowed to live a life as multifarious as that of matters of concern.16 In short, both Dewey and Latour reject the essentialism that is often apparent in traditional accounts of the social. Both emphasize the functionalinstrumentalist nature of social entities. And both are deeply pragmatist in the narrow sense that I described earlier in my remarks. NOTES 1. John Dewey to Addison Webster Moore, 1905.01.02, (01827), in The Correspondence of John Dewey, 1871-1952, vol. 1, Larry A. Hickman, General Editor (Charlottesville, VA: InteLex Corporation, 2005). 2. Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society (New York: Vintage Books, 1964), p. xxviii. 3. Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to ActorNetwork-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 6. 4. Bruno Latour and Emilie Hermant, Paris ville Invisible (Paris: La Découverte-Les Empêcheurs de penser en rond, 1998), as translated by Liz Carey-Libbrecht (Paris: Ecole des Mines de Paris, 2006) http://www.ensmp. fr/~latour/virtual/paris_invisible_city.pdf, 64 (accessed July 18, 2006). 5. Latour, Reassembling the Social, p. 81. 6. John Dewey, Democracy and Education, in The Middle Works of John Dewey, vol. 9, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980), p. 247. 7. John Dewey, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, in The Later Works of John Dewey, vol. 12, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986), p. 122. 8. Latour, Reassembling the Social, p.7.

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9. Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 263-264. 10. Latour, Reassembling the Social, p. 249. 11. Ibid, p. 32. 12. John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, in The Later Works of John Dewey, vol. 2, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984), p. 361. 13. Latour, Reassembling the Social, p. 115. 14. Ibid, p. 120. 15. John Dewey, “Contributions to Cyclopedia of Education,” in The Middle Works of John Dewey, vol. 6, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978), p. 384. 16. Latour, Reassembling the Social, p. 255.

Seven SOCIAL COOPERATION AS CIVIC VIRTUE Juan Carlos Mougán Rivero The demand for cooperation has become an increasingly relevant feature of democratic societies. This need for cooperation is evident not only in our political lives but also within professional, social, mass media and family contexts. Moreover, technological advances have served to facilitate and diversify the ways in which people can contribute to a project or process. The present paper aims to show how Mead’s philosophical anthropology and Dewey’s political philosophy have laid the basis for an understanding of social cooperation as a civic virtue and as a normative model for democracy. The paper is organized in two parts. In the first I will set out the basic requirements for underpinning social cooperation: human nature and civic virtue (sections 1 and 2). In the second part, I will indicate the main features that define the idea of social cooperation as a civic virtue (sections 3 – 7). 1. Social Cooperation and Human Nature From the outset it is important to consider whether cooperative behavior is the consequence of natural drives or whether, as usually argued, it is a nonnatural attitude. The modern majority opinion has been that human beings are self-interested by nature and that individuals develop their rational capacity to maximize their own interests. Modern ethical (utilitarianism), political (liberalism) and economic (capitalism) theories consider not cooperation but self-interest and selfishness as the keys to explaining human action. Other people and social relationships are a means or an instrument to achieve these ultimate goals. Consequently, the market idea appears as a logical outcome of human nature, and competition becomes the undeniable principle to optimize social organization. As Hans Joas1 has suggested, Dewey’s and Mead’s pragmatism represents an alternative, not only to the instrumental perspective which sees society as an exchange between competitive individuals in search of their own interests, but also to the rationalist tradition that understands society as a result of a normative order. In this sense, authors such as Kant or Durkheim are opposed to the utilitarian theory of individual interest, and defend the necessity of moral duties in order to give meaning to human action. According to Joas, pragmatism offers another way of understanding society, focused not on

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justifying the norms but on solving the problems of the agent, based now on a different relation between action and consciousness. Thus, Mead maintains that individual consciousness constitutes a stage in a dynamic process that is socially and interactively rooted. According to Mead, human acts cannot be explained from the existing mind unless there is social interaction first. The individual and self-consciousness can only be seen as the consequence of the internalization of the other’s reaction to our gesture. That is, no identity exists prior to the process by which we start to cooperate with one another. Consciousness and identity are the result of the existence of intrinsically cooperative action. The precedence of cooperative action over the constitution of consciousness, language and communication lays the basis of an interpretation of human nature in which society cannot be understood as an instrumental order structured to satisfy solipsistically constructed necessities. Distinguishing between “I” and “Me” – the latter being the result of the internalization of the attitude of others towards myself, and stressing that “I” is only possible as a reaction to “Me” – Mead conciliates two ideas. On the one hand, identity is only possible as a consequence of the process of social cooperation; on the other, this identity is not determined by a reference to the same process because “I” is characterized by its capability to resist and innovate, thereby making its reaction unpredictable. Creativity and innovation only make sense in the environment of social interaction. From an ethical and political point of view, Mead has established the basis for an anthropological rationale in which the ideas of individuality and of cooperative relationship are established as a counterpoint to the liberal and individualistic tradition of thought. In the liberal tradition, the problem is to explain how self-interested individuals can cooperate given that cooperation means struggling against “the crooked timber of humanity.” Mead, by contrast, understands a cooperative attitude to be a prerequisite for the constitution of the self. For him, social and political theory must explain not just how cooperation is possible, but also how to facilitate the spread and universalization of cooperative mechanisms from the basis of its necessity and convenience to the construction of human communication. At the same time, an anthropological framework that holds that human beings are constituted by intersubjective action allows us to consider social cooperation as a civic virtue. Rationalistic and empiricist entailments have prevented these traditions from giving adequate relevance to phenomena of social cooperation. The empiricist perspective, which sprouts from individual interest, is unable to explain the multiple facts of cooperation that appear in social contexts and which are common in domains such as the family, religious communities or other types of associations. Furthermore, the use of unverifiable mechanisms to harmonize the pursuit

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of individual interest falls outside the traditional spirit of empiricism. Equally unsatisfactory is the rationalistic hypothesis that seeks to derive cooperation and solidarity from a rationality that overcomes the drives of human nature. Both Mead and Dewey have shown the necessity to get rid of the dualistic picture of human nature and reject the idea that desires and emotions are the cause of selfish and antisocial behaviors. They understand that emotions are established by social interaction that defines individuality. Shame, wrath, culpability, etc., are consequences of the original environments of individuals coming into contact through action. That is the reason emotional and desiderative life is as collective as reason. Rational and emotive life does not form part of the original data of an individual but rather is a consequence of social interaction. As Joas writes, “Human action is not the carrying out of norms or impulses and we conceive of the individual involved in a continuous process of designing and opening up to other individuals and collectives.”2 To summarize, it is clear that Mead’s thesis, which suggests that individuals can only constitute their own identity to the extent that they have adopted the attitude of the generalized other, allows for an understanding of social cooperation as civic virtue. From Mead’s standpoint it is possible to argue that social cooperation is both an individual necessity and a political convenience. 2. Political Theory and Civic Virtues To cooperate socially has ethical and political significance, if we understand that cooperation is not a private option unconcerned with political order but a virtue of citizenship. As a civic virtue, it should be considered a fundamental requisite for the attainment of a rich democracy. In this sense it is necessary to make clear the role of civic virtues, and social cooperation in particular, within the framework of political theory. In broad terms, and following Turner, 3 we can distinguish three main interpretations of this relationship. First, there is a liberal and minimalist conception that emerges in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and that, since the 1970s, has become dominant. In this respect it is argued that in order to defend freedom, political order is required so that good and bad are open to personal interpretation. The building of virtue is an element of privacy and citizenship that implies the non-interference with others. To be a citizen is synonymous with holding a set of rights which protect us against the claims of the collective and that the individual can choose his own way to excellence. Democracy and the political system become procedures to guarantee and protect the individual’s life from invasion by others. Cooperation is, from this point of view, an individual’s choice, devoid of political meaning and relevance.

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A second interpretation of citizenship tries to smooth the impact of market capitalism and finds its formulation in terms of social and worker demands. From this perspective, both the social and the political rights of citizens are increased. The proffering of these rights that protect the individual from the arbitrary powers of the state is undertaken, however, with the proviso that citizenship implies not only rights but also some duties. From a standpoint that tries to be critical of liberal positions, the importance of certain civic virtues to maintain political order needs to be stressed. The point is now not that the state should be indifferent to civic virtues, but that certain civic virtues become necessary if we want social and political systems to work properly. That is why a certain degree of citizen cooperation and participation appears as a condition for the optimum development of society. It is important to stress that this view represents an instrumental conception of civic virtues because it is just a means of political order. Cooperation is not understood as something worthy in itself, or for its continuous contribution to a more satisfactory way of life; it serves as a useful means of maintaining political order. Third, there is a tradition founded on Greek philosophy that finds contemporary development in John Dewey’s theory. For Dewey, as well as for Aristotle, political institutions should be judged by the way they promote and facilitate the moral growth of individuals. The virtue of citizenship is seen as a basic element of political organization, and it is felt that people require an education in values in order to become good citizens. This is a noninstrumental conception of civic virtues that holds that there is a link between the development of individual virtues and good political and social order. In such an approach, it is understood that democracy needs citizens with civic virtues, and the requirements of political order are at the same time individual tools to attain a good life. Democracy is not only a political order but is also a comprehensive moral view that embraces different areas of human experience. In Dewey’s terms, democracy “is a way of life.” Democracy is an attitude embodied within the individual, incorporating certain habits. According to Kymlicka, the virtue of civility “applies not only to political activity but also to our actions in everyday life, on the street, in neighborhood shops, and the diverse institutions and forums of civil society. Civility refers to the way we treat non-intimates with whom we come into face-to-face contact.”4 Comprehending social cooperation as civic virtue, in the third line of interpretation, underlines the importance of political habits. Cooperation from the perspective of habit touches on all aspects of human activity. Consequently, cooperative requirements are not limited to the sphere of political representation, thereby challenging both republican and liberal perspectives. The ethical meaning of social cooperation surpasses the requirements of political institutionalization and implies that the areas of productivity, intellectual creativity, and leisure, are also ruled by the same logic of cooperation.

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Dewey stressed the importance that the institutionalization of habits has for democracy. For his part, Mead emphasized that cooperative attitudes are humanly constituted, since they are located on a pre-logic phase in relation to the consciousness of the self. 5 Conversation through gestures, language, and communication is only possible through the organic immersion of individuals in the social process marked by cooperation: “There cannot be symbols unless there are responses.” So mechanisms of cooperation originate within social spheres that we can define as pre-political, and the identification of democracy with the existence of cooperative civic habits ought to be understood as the development of the potentialities registered in human interaction.6 3. Social Cooperation as Model of Democracy To understand social cooperation as a civic virtue helps us to understand the normative meaning of democracy. Thus, we can define democracy as the process through which a group is in charge of its own problems and searches for solutions cooperatively and experimentally. Young writes that “A useful way to conceive of democracy is as a process in which a large collective discusses problems such as these that they face together, and to arrive peaceably at solutions in which implementation everyone will co-operate.”7 In the same sense, Honneth has emphasized this idea, founded on Dewey’s philosophy, as an alternative model of democracy: “What is primarily of interest today in this mature model is the fact that the procedures of democratic will formation are grasped as the rational means with which a cooperatively integrated society attempts to solve its own problem.”8 To understand democracy in such a way accepts that in democracy procedures are relevant, and that values or goods are important. But both are based precisely on the idea of guaranteeing the process through a group sorting out its own problems. Understanding democracy in terms of social cooperation leads to the rejection of other ways of defining democracy, such as the characterization of democracy as the sum of citizens’ preferences. In this model, democracy can be represented as a procedure able to determine the will of society from its own expressed desires and preferences. Considering preferences as given shortcircuits the idea of citizenship built through the process of social cooperation. It therefore also rejects the normative meaning of democracy that involves the pursuit of a fairer society. To cooperate implies to accept that we can never hold our own point of view to be definitive and that, within the process of cooperation, our perspectives must be open to change. Thus, we can say that cooperation as a civic virtue imposes reflexivity and deliberation, and promotes an open attitude toward modification amongst those who participate in the process. In addition, cooperation represents a critical defense against the impositions and manipulations of a small group.

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As a conclusion we can consider cooperative action from two perspectives. On the one hand, collaboration means that the individual is ready to get involved with shared activity and can consequently accept the possibility that, during the course of the action, his point of view, desires and interests may be altered. On the other, collaboration means that the order of action is never closed – since otherwise it would not be cooperation but rigidity. Not only the individuals but also the process needs to be open and continuously reformed. 4. Logic of Cooperation Conservative positions on civic virtues are those that suggest that cooperative civic attitudes have been possible and dominant in societies where social and communitarian bonds are strong. In this way, they argue that modern individualism has undermined cooperation and solidarity. The solutions in our societies for phenomena such as apathy, discord and the absence of collaboration lead to a need for an external order outside of the individual (as in transcendent religions). To understand social cooperation in this way, however, underestimates its political meaning. Cooperation is positive, not just because of what it can achieve but also because of intrinsic good that can be derived from it. The logic of cooperation by individuals exclusively based on the motivation of their own benefits, and without external authority, has been clearly investigated in Axelrod’s analysis inspired by experimental studies of the prisoner’s dilemma.9 Although, according to Axelrod, cooperation is the best option for every individual, it becomes the worst option when it is generalized. The ultimate paradox of Axelrod’s analysis is that every individual whose behavior is driven exclusively by personal gain proceeds irrationally. His conclusion is that, in time, cooperative strategies may emerge in a world without central authority as long as the appropriate conditions, such as face-to-face contact, remain in place. Even though cooperative strategies are successful from a logical point of view, educative and coactive policies are required to enable individuals to internalize a social perspective into their motives of action. In other words, the point is for them to be convinced that an intelligent selfishness imposes reciprocal collaboration. Obviously, it becomes necessary to face the “free rider logic,” the problem of those who take advantage of the cooperative attitude of others. Here is where the philosophies of Mead and Dewey show their superiority. The argument against the free rider is to demonstrate that cooperative enterprise is convenient for us, or that it is in our interest to cooperate faithfully. The reason for the latter is that we derive benefits as individuals, not only because these achievements (to protect the environment, to reduce inequalities, etc.) are impossible from the position of pure self-interest, but also because we get intrinsic benefits from cooperation since our nature is a product

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of social interaction. As Baurmann suggests “cooperative enterprises are needed in order to fulfill political, social, religious and private interests; furthermore they offer the internal good of the practice or interpersonal relationships.”10 5. Social Cooperation and Self-realization As Honneth has shown,11 what we can find in Dewey and Mead is a link between social good and self-realization without the commitments of a more Hegelian teleology of human nature. It is the building of an anthropological theory based on the intersubjective structure of human action which allows the compatibility between social action and self-realization to be maintained. The same structure of action forces the recognition of others to be a constitutive part of individual identity. The ethical and political relevance of this kind of recognition has been demonstrated by Taylor in the context of multicultural discussions. But it is Honneth who, using Mead’s anthropology, has transformed it into the core of an ethical and political interpretation.12 The importance of Mead’s thesis in relation to the thesis of social cooperation as a civic virtue is that it allows us see how self-realization may be anthropologically bonded to the process of recognition. In other words, the same concept of civic virtue creates the need to overcome the dualism between the individual and collectiveness. Since virtue indicates a model of excellence that may be individual only when it is civic, it is considered to be the right way of action for the group. Defining cooperation as a civic virtue leads to an understanding that cooperation is a feature of self-realization. So we can understand the characteristic individualism of Western societies not as an obstacle but as the necessary condition to understand cooperative attitude as a civic virtue. As Baurmann has shown, the emergence of individualism makes an individual fully responsible for his actions and this therefore lays the foundation for freedom of association and cooperative action. The breaking of the hierarchical order, the leveling and exchanging of individuals, and the absence of external constrictions necessary for commercial development makes possible, at the same time, the free cooperation among individuals who are committed to their own interests. The liberal and individualistic perspective emphasizes an essential dimension of the process of cooperation: that individuals are present in the process from start to finish. Cooperation is carried out between and for individuals. To ensure the final beneficiaries of the process of cooperation are individuals and not abstract entities is a political caveat. 6. Social Cooperation and Consensus We should stress that cooperation as civic virtue does not require agreement on ideas or values. The majority of political theories, whether they are liberal,

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procedural or deliberative, have suggested that the need for an agreement, factual or hypothetical, is the bedrock of democratic living together.13 If democracy is seen as cooperation, however, the important thing is not simply to reach agreement, but rather the commitment to face the difficulties encountered collectively. So, Dewey’s emphasis on common interest “does not refuse the conflict but stress[es] its constructive resolution.”14 Pragmatists see objectivity as the result not of merely subjective wills, but of transforming situations into ones which are clearly better. So the relevance of a cooperative attitude to the meaning of democracy lies in adopting a fallible conception of knowledge and intelligence. In this conception, the goal is not the existence of unchangeable ideas or principles, but rather the free exchange of ideas within a regime or collaboration.15 In the same sense, we should not understand the concept of cooperation as an accommodation of pluralism already existing in societies. As we indicated before, cooperation requires ideas and interests to not be accepted as absolute and unchangeable realities. From Dewey’s and Mead’s perspective, the problem of pluralism cannot be seen in democratic societies from an external point of view. Since deliberation implies as much a process of public exchanges of ideas as an internal dialogue from different perspectives, and since the process of social interaction forms individual identity, what democracy requires is that pluralism is an expression of those conditions which are of moral worth: sensitivity to others and consideration towards alternative point of views. Democracy entails the transformation of individuals, turning these attitudes into habits through the process of cooperation. Again, this is Dewey’s definition of democracy as a way of life. 7. The Contents of Cooperation The fact that there is cooperation is not enough in itself to be considered worthy in political or moral terms. As Dewey pointed out,16 while a band of robbers may function with a high degree of internal coherence and social integration, it may at the same time be based on inequality or external exclusion. We can say that social cooperation acquires ethical meaning when it serves central values of democracy such as freedom and equality. Cooperative processes have an ethical and political democratic meaning to the extent that they are subjected to the following restrictions: • Cooperation must be amenable, within the framework of constitutional and democratic states, to a legal institutional system as a way of guaranteeing values of freedom and equality. The idea of social cooperation may be useful as a normative model of democracy, but it is not necessary that in every process we start from zero. At the same time it should be noted that the

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aim should be to transform the legal frame so as to establish measures to guarantee that decisions taken imply processes of social cooperation. • Social cooperation requires an enlightened spirit. In both senses, the process of cooperation must be deliberative. It must be the result of open and well illustrated debate, and the cooperative process which spreads knowledge, culture or art should have a moral dimension to the extent that cooperation entails a commitment to the development of individual autonomy and the empowerment of individual ability. Furthermore, and continuing Dewey’s line, cooperation has epistemological support in the modern conception of science and knowledge that understands research projects as communities of people who cooperate in a context of the free play of ideas, contrastability, experimentalism, etc. • Social cooperation requires inclusiveness. Social cooperation has moral meaning, to the extent that it accepts the idea that problem-solving implies the establishment of mechanisms which include the greatest number of affected people. From this perspective, cooperation as a civic virtue represents the positive aspect of the principle of non-discrimination, implying the criticism of segregation: economic, cultural, etc. Besides this, the idea of inclusiveness draws attention to the fact that the development of democracy at an international level needs collective involvement in the resolution of political problems. Mead pays special attention to the political meaning of international cooperation based on his theory of social interaction. In an age of globalization, where problems affect an increasing number of people, the search for cooperative solutions is seen by Mead to be of particular importance as the democratic way to face a plural world. • The structure of cooperation has an equalitarian trend since it removes differences based on arbitrariness, preclusion or unjustified privileges. It does not imply, however, that everyone is placed on the same level in the process of social cooperation. There are differences caused by the different forms of contribution to the process. These differences have to be justified by the extent to which they contribute to the improvement of social cooperation. We can apply the same argument used by Rawls in the second of the principles of distribution in his Theory of Justice, namely that inequalities are acceptable in cooperation if they serve to improve the prospects of the worst placed individuals. Cooperation rejects everything that isolates, secludes or segregates individuals, or does not consider the interests or opinions of others. So great social and economical inequalities do not contribute to a common understanding, but rather isolate the individuals, making their perspectives particularistic and dogmatic. Showing the cognitive distortion which represents the social separation and establishing it as a problem, Putnam holds that Dewey provides an “epistemological justification of democracy”17

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• Social cooperation leads to self-contention. Inasmuch as we think of society as a community where individuals cooperate, we cannot accept behaviors that deny the principle of equality and freedom. Cooperation can be expanded, if only as a way of thinking about future generations. This would allow ideas of democracy to be linked to environmental rights. NOTES 1. Hans Joas, El pragmatismo y la teoría de la sociedad (Madrid: Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas, 1998). pp. 270-296. 2. Ibid., p. 291. 3. Bryan S. Turner, “Cosmopolitan Virtue, Globalization and Patriotism”, Theory, Culture and Society 19 (2002), pp. 45-63. 4. Will Kymlicka, Politics in the Vernacular. Nationalism, Multiculturalism, and Citizenship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 298. 5. George Herbert Mead, Mind, Self and Society from the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1934) p. 186. 6. Ibid., p. 190. 7. Iris Marion Young, Inclusion and Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 28. 8. Axel Honneth, “Democracy as a Reflexive Cooperation”, Political Theory 26 (1998), p. 765. 9. Robert Axelrod, Complexity of Cooperation: Agent-Based Models of Competition and Collaboration (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). 10. Michael Baurmann, El mercado de la virtud (Barcelona: Gedisa, 1998), p. 143. 11. Honneth, “Democracy as a Reflexive Cooperation”, p. 771. 12. Axel Honneth, La lucha por el reconocimiento (Barcelona: Crítica, 1997). 13. Ian Shapiro, Democratic Justice (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), p. 14. 14. William R. Caspary, Dewey on Democracy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), pp. 9-10. 15. Ian Shapiro, The Moral Foundation of Political Philosophy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), pp. 205-207. 16. John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, in The Later Works of John Dewey, vol. 2, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984), p. 232. 17. Hilary Putnam, “Una reconsideración de la democracia de Dewey”, in his Cómo renovar la filosofía (Madrid: Cátedra, 1994).

Eight PERSONAL IDENTITY OF AN INTERSECTIONAL SELF Kathleen A. Wallace Two recent approaches to the concept of self and person are (1) the idea of a relational or intersectional self, which seems to capture an important sense in which a self has multiple dimensions or traits; and (2) the temporal parts (four dimensionalist) idea of a person, which seems to recognize that a self is a temporal spread, that is, is its history and has historical traits. These approaches have rather different provenances, although both aim to demystify and to naturalize the self. (“Naturalizing” need not be reductive, and should be broadly understood.) A relational view of the self arises from objections by feminists, communitarians and others to an atomistic view of the self that ignores the extent to which the self is a product of its social relations and cultural or community locations. Four dimensionalism arises from problems in the metaphysics of identity of physical objects that change over and persist through time. Four dimensionalism argues for perdurance, namely, that objects perdure in four-dimensional spatio-temporal regions; “perdurance” contrasts with endurance, namely, that a three-dimensional (spatial) object endures (persists) through time. On four dimensionalism, time is, in a sense, a dimension of an object, just as space is. Both these approaches to the self were anticipated, at least in part, by pragmatist and naturalist American thinkers, such as Mead, Dewey and Buchler. In this paper I will draw on the Buchlerian framework for developing a view of what I call an intersectional process-self.1 According to this framework, the self is a process (and therefore, a temporal spread) and a complex of plural constituent relations (and therefore, an intersection of traits). 1. Relational or Intersectional View of Self On the relational or intersectional view that I am proposing, the self is a network of traits and relations.2 Consider an example: my friend as mother (aunt, daughter, sister, niece, etc.) is located in a network of familial or kinship

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relations, as novelist is located in a network of linguistic, authorial, economic, editorial and social relations, as someone fluent in English is located in a network of linguistic, vocal, social and meaning relations, as professor of philosophy is located in a network of academic relations (involving a particular university, professional organizations, etc.), as a possessor of a driver’s license is constituted by a network of coordinated skills and is located in a network of social, political and institutional relations, and so on. On this approach each self is a unique interrelation of traits that constitutes the self ’s overall integrity or the overall characteristic determinateness of the self as she is up to that point in time. My friend was not always a mother or a novelist, or a professor of philosophy or a licensed driver and so on. When she was five years old she was a kindergartener, a budding English speaker etc.. One interesting aspect of an intersectional view of the self will be its account of how the self is one and the same self through radical alterations in its relational locations. Related to that will be an account of what relations are constitutive (or “essential”) versus those which are simply incidental (or “accidental”). For example, while waiting for a subway train one is standing on a platform and is therefore related, in virtue of the standing-on-relation, to the platform. Yet, that relation, standing on the platform, does not seem to be constitutive of who or what the self is. Therefore, this view will need an account of the distinction between these kinds of traits. There are other interesting issues as well, such as how to account for a first-person perspective, which I can not fully address here. On a temporal parts or four dimensionalist model of the self, the self is conceived as spread out over a space-time region. Thus, the “five year old self ” and the “thirty-five year” old self are segments or parts of a space-time region, the entire region constituting the self as a whole. On one version of this view, the self is a space-time worm, never wholly present in each of its parts or segments, or alternatively put, the self is never wholly present at a time; no segment is the same as any other, but each segment is a part of one and the same whole self (space-time region). One problem with this view is that at any point in time, there is only a part of the self present (namely, that particular segment of space-time region). A four-dimensionalist view that aims to address this problem is the stage view. 3 According to this view, at any time there is, wholly present, the person, a three-dimensional object, who is a person-stage of a four-dimensional person-career. One problem with this latter version of the four-dimensionalist view is that there then appear to be many persons (person stages) instead of just one person, although there is just one person-career. In addition, an account is needed of what unifies the stages or locations such that they are constitutive of a self, what in personal identity literature is sometimes referred to as an account of the I-relations or the genidentity (unity) relations of a person. Among standard accounts,

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unity relations have been conceptualized in terms of psychological relations or bodily relations or both, depending on what overall view of the person one holds (such as a psychological view, a physicalist view, an animalist view). 4 On the view I am developing, the unity of the self is secured by conceptualizing the self as a process. A self is a product of its own past relations. It also projects itself into a future. During its existence a self is always in a sense incomplete. Conceptualizing the self as a process captures both these dimensions, namely, that it is both its past and that it is incomplete as long as it has a future. Thus, a self is a processual totality and intersection of multiple locations 5 – physical, social, biological, psychological, linguistic, and so on. The self as self-process is a history, and therefore has temporal spread, is constituted of genetic relations, neurochemical relations and events, other biological processes and structures, social relations and locations, linguistic, inferential, judicative, and cultural ones, and so on, and it has possibilities in virtue of those relations which establish its direction into the future. The self in its entirety then is a self-process, and that should be understood to mean processual-totality-and-intersection-of-multiple-traits. (Buchler does not use this hyphenated phrase; it is my construction to capture the basic idea.) This implies that if the self-process were different, if it took a different path, then it would be a different self. But, one might object, wouldn’t a self still have been the same self even if some of its relations or intersectional locations had been different and its processual path had been different? Strictly speaking, any difference, even a trivial one, means that the thing in question is not the same; it is not qualitatively indiscernible from what it otherwise would have been. But, the objection is also getting at something else, namely, that not every alteration is one that matters to what a self fundamentally or really is. 2. Unity of Self-Process and Constitutive Relations To address this, we need to introduce another distinction, namely, between relations that are constitutive versus those that are simply incidental. Recall the earlier example: while waiting for a subway train one is standing on a platform and is therefore related, in virtue of a “standing-on-relation,” to the platform. Yet standing on the platform does not seem to be constitutive of who or what the self is. Philosophers have often made this distinction in terms of essential and accidental traits or qualities. In Buchlerian terms, the distinction is made in terms of traits or relations that are strongly relevant to the overall integrity of the self and those that are weakly relevant to the overall integrity. This distinction does not map directly onto a typical essential/accidental distinction. A strongly relevant trait determines or alters the overall integrity of the self, while weakly relevant traits do not. For example, suppose a self mastered riding a bicycle at 8 1/2 rather than at 8 years old. The history of the self-process would have been

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different, but the overall integrity of the self -process would very likely have been the same, because while the slight difference in the exact age at which the self learned to ride a bicycle is a difference, it is one that is (probably) only weakly relevant to the overall integrity. But, suppose that instead of being born into and living in an advanced and wealthy industrial country, a self were born in a poor, agricultural country. While the self would have been genetically and in many biological respects (e.g., those that are not dependent on nutritional conditions) the same, the overall shape and direction (the overall integrity) of the self-process may have been very different. Thus, geographical, social and political relations could be strongly relevant to determining the overall integrity of the self. (They need not be, though; it depends on the specific relations and contexts. Having been born in the county hospital rather than in a teaching hospital, for example, would, strictly speaking, be a geographical and social difference in the beginning of a self-process, but it is likely to be one that is weakly relevant to the overall integrity of the self-process.) To help illustrate the distinction being drawn between strongly and weakly relevant traits and relations consider another example. Suppose the population of New York City, which is several million people, were 100 people more or less than it currently is. Unless among those individuals is someone who for reasons other than mere addition to the population makes a significant contribution to the overall character of New York City, such a change in population is, in all probability, weakly relevant to the overall integrity of New York City. Thus, such an alteration in population would not alter the integrity of New York City, even though strictly speaking the population difference alters New York City’s scope. Such a difference in population would be a difference, but only weakly relevant to New York City. (That’s not to say that repeatedly many reductions or additions in population couldn’t alter the overall integrity of New York City, but there may not be a precise algorithm for assessing that or a precise boundary between an alteration in overall integrity and an alteration in scope.) The same considerations apply to a human self. If by a self we simply meant a body with genetic and physical characteristics, then whether that self had the same social, cultural, linguistic, professional, kinship, judicative and other relational traits would be irrelevant to its constituting the same self. But I take for granted that this is not what is meant by a self, that this is an insufficient, even if a necessary, condition of a self. (I leave aside here proposals for cyborgian selves that question the biological and organismic constitution of selves. 6) Rather, if by a human self is meant a self-process with a particular history, character, educational and professional trajectory, a particular personality with habituated ways of acting and judging, then to the extent that differences in relational traits constitute a different overall integrity of the self, the self (selfprocess) would be a different self (self-process).

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For any particular self it will be an empirical matter as to what is strongly relevant to it being the self-process that it is. Suppose, for example, that instead of being one of five siblings, my friend had been an only child. Wouldn’t she still have been the same self-process? The answer, on this view, would have to be, “Yes, no, and, it depends.” There would still have been the same organism, the same body, and that organism still would have had some of the same other traits (kinship, etc.), possibilities and talents (all other things being equal). But, would her personality have been the same? Would her habits of interaction with others have been the same? Would she have become a philosopher? In other words, the same organism would still have been individuated as organism, but would it have been individuated in the same way as the self-process that she now is? The answers depend on whether and in what respects her sibling relations are strongly relevant to (determining conditions for) those other traits and locations as individuating conditions of her as the particular self-process that she has become. It’s conceivable that the organism as single offspring would have, for instance, become a philosopher; in principle it is not ruled out, for there is no contradiction between not being a sister and being a philosopher. But the question is whether the kinship relations are a condition for (a determinant of) that talent and career path being realized. This is not a logical or principled but an empirical matter; whether – and how – kinship relations are a condition for other traits of an individual self, depends on the individual self. Perhaps she would have had the same talents, but with no other children in the family, she might have had different nurturing experiences, different educational experiences, and different opportunities, and thus possibly have realized a different talent or pursued a different career path. Maybe philosopher would have been a strong contender, but maybe other relational conditions would have worked in favor of another direction. Or maybe philosopher would have been her predilection in any case. We can all think of examples where the conditions of someone’s talent seem to be strongly determined (genetically or however) regardless of many social relations and conditions. (Mozart is the example that springs to mind for me – whether he had siblings or not seems to be weakly, if at all, relevant to the actualization of his musical talent [although his relations to his father might have been strongly relevant]). But that just means that for that particular self-process it is other, perhaps genetic, relations and conditions rather than sibling relations that are the strongly relevant conditions for the realization of a talent, whereas for another self-process, sibling relations and the subsequent nurturing and education may be strongly relevant. Sibling relations don’t have to be strongly relevant to the realization of a talent, but in any given case, they might be. This is very counterintuitive. Each of us tends to have the strong intuition about oneself that it still would have been “me” undergoing even a very different self-career, meaning by “me” the very same self with the same fundamental

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nature or integrity. When I wonder counterfactually, when I hypothesize or imagine what I would have been like, or what my life would have been like had I had different sibling relations, I carry over into that hypothetical case myself as I am and have been formed. In imagining this alternative scenario, I cannot help but do so from my already formed first-person perspective. I project myself as I already am into another, imagined, scenario. But the self-process that I am, including my first-person perspective, is constituted by the relations and locations that I do have (which includes the possibilities that I have at any given time). Since at least some of those are strongly relevant to the overall integrity of who I am, then in that imagined alternative life my first person perspective and my overall integrity may have been very different from what it actually is. The self would have been the same organism, have had the same genetic structure, had the same parents, grandparents, cousins, and so on (all other things being equal). Many constitutive relations and traits would have been the same. Maybe enough of those that are strongly relevant would have been the same such that the overall integrity would have been very similar, perhaps almost indiscernibly so, from my overall integrity as it is. But maybe not. It’s a contingent matter. At any time, the perspective from which a self views itself is a cumulative expression of what the self is up to that time. When I hypothesize a different selfscenario, I am imagining a different cumulative self-process. If the hypothesized cumulative self-process is sufficiently different in strongly relevant traits, then there would have been a different self(-process) than who I am. But that different self(-process) would have been me! The process conception of the self means that if the process that is the self takes a sufficiently different path or course, then the resultant self(-process) would be a different self. To refer to an example that I use in sections 3-5 below: if the infant born on Krypton had not been sent to earth, the self(-process) “Clark Kent/Superman” would not have existed; the organism (infant) which became that self(-process) would have become a different self(-process). 3. Pressing Issues To conceptualize the self as a self-process means that the self as a whole is spread out in space and time. The self-process as it is at a particular time, say a five-year old self, is different from the self-process as it is at a subsequent time, say a thirty-five year old self. Therefore, this view entails that the self-process as a totality is never wholly present at a time. At least two immediate objections might arise. (1) One objection says, “It’s not just a part of the self that is present at any time, but the whole self. It just seems counterintuitive to say that the self at a time is a trait or part of the self-process as a whole, that the self is not wholly present at a time. Isn’t the self “as a whole” present at any time?”

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(2) Another objection says, “If at any time the constitutive relations of the self are different, such that the five-year old self is different from the thirty-five year old self, then how would one account for the identity of the five-year old self and the thirty-five year old self? In other words, what would it mean to say that someone at five years old is identical with – is one and the same self as – that someone at thirty-five years old?” In what follows, I will address the objections in reverse order and use another readily familiar example, namely, Clark Kent/Superman. “Clark Kent” (CK) is identified by the following (non-exhaustive) intersection of traits: adopted son of the Kents of Kansas USA, newspaper reporter, wears eyeglasses, tends to wear a man’s business suit, has various social and professional relations to other reporters, has some memories of his Kansas childhood and possibly his origin on Krypton, and so on. “Superman” (SU) is identified by the following (non-exhaustive) intersection of traits: born on the planet Krypton, wears a skin-tight blue body suit with a red cape, can and does fly, can and does perform feats of unusual strength [unusual compared to those of which human beings are capable], is vulnerable to kryptonite, has memories identical to those of “Clark Kent” and so on. “Clark Kent” and “Superman” are constituents of one and the same self-process, namely, Clark Kent/Superman (CS for short). CK and SU may not be exhaustive of the traits of CS. But they are salient, just as fingerprints and DNA are not exhaustive, even if for the purposes of unambiguous biological and legal identification in a criminal investigation they might be among the most salient. What I am suggesting is that the assertion, ‘Clark Kent is identical with Superman,’ is elliptical for suppressed complexities in the constitution of the self-process CS, which is a processual-totality-andintersection-of-multiple-traits. So, first, identity over time. 4. Reply to Objection 2: Self-process as Identical over Time Consider identity at a time. One might argue that since Clark Kent (CK) and Superman (SU) have different traits, they are not identical with one another; thus, “Clark Kent is not identical with Superman.” On the other hand, Clark Kent refers to one and the same being as Superman, so in another sense, “Clark Kent is identical with Superman.” Both can’t be true. The solution on the approach I am developing goes something like this: The trait (or dimension of the self-process) CK is not identical with, that is, is discernible from, the trait (or dimension) SU. However, CK and SU are traits of the same one thing, namely, the self-process Clark Kent/Superman (CS). This claim is in principle no different from a more conventional one that says my fingerprints are a trait of the same organism of which my DNA structure is a trait, even though my fingerprints are not identical with (are discernible from) my DNA. Similarly, the trait (‘trait’ can be shorthand for ‘trait cluster’) CK and

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the trait SU pick out one and the same self-process, that is, CS. The self-process who is Clark Kent and the self-process who is Superman are identical, that is, are one and the same thing (self-process CS). CS is indiscernible from itself and is numerically identical with itself; but CK and SU are distinguishable subaltern traits (trait clusters) or dimensions of CS that are discernible from one another. CK is not equivalent to SU in an identity or identification statement insofar as each, CK and SU, is a distinct trait. In the proposition ‘Clark Kent is identical with Superman,’ the equivalence has to be understood as elliptical for a more complex truth; otherwise, the proposition appears to generate contradictions. For precision, the complex truth should be expressed as follows: The self-process (CS) with trait CK is identical with the self-process (CS) with trait SU. (The traits pick out numerically one and the same self-process. The traits are not identical with one another, but CS is identical with itself, namely, is indiscernible from and numerically identical with itself.) In order to demonstrate with any precision that this is an identity relation, I’d have to show how this approach would meet the standard criteria of symmetry, reflexivity and transitivity for identity as an equivalence relation, which I’m not going to do here. All I want to introduce here is the idea that subaltern traits of a whole, which are not identical with one another, nonetheless pick out the whole. Some alleged identity puzzles, such as “Clark Kent both is and is not identical with Superman,” are generated because a distinction is not made between a trait as a subaltern trait and a trait being taken to stand for the whole. The latter should be understood as elliptical for the more complex truth. Let us now consider traits of the self-process CS, which is Clark Kent/ Superman, at different times. A self-process is, by definition, temporally extended; the issue of identity over time can be conceptualized as analogous to identity at a time: there will be a self-process that is identical with itself, which has different traits, but now with the added feature that they are at different times, each of which picks out one and the same self-process. Thus, suppose at time t1 the selfprocess is located on the planet Krypton and at time t2 the self is located on the planet Earth. At t1 the self-process that later acquires the trait CK (when it lives on planet Earth) does not yet have that trait (and thus the self-process might not be called “CS” at that time); it may have the possibility of living on earth, but at t1 it is not necessarily known what future traits the self-process will actually have, and at t2 the self-process that has acquired the trait CK is no longer living on Krypton. However, at t2 it is the same self-process that at t1 lived on Krypton. What does that mean? Obviously, not that it has remained unchanged, for it hasn’t, but that one and the same process is picked out by the traits identified.

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A self-process is constituted by different traits at different times (e.g., living on Krypton at t1; living in Kansas at t2, being a newspaper reporter at t35, and so on). As a process it acquires traits and therefore a trait that is salient at one time may not be so at another. At t1 the self-process might not be identified as or called CS, because it has not yet acquired the trait CK. (And if the self-process had taken a different path and never gone to earth and become Clark Kent, there wouldn’t have been the self-process, CS. The self-process would have taken a different path, so to speak, and would, therefore, be constituted differently from what it has in fact become. For the idea of a self with the possibility of branching paths, see Lewis7). Since the process is spread out in space and time, the traits are traits of the part(s) of the process of which they are traits, but the process is its past as well as its present. Thus, the self-process with trait ‘living on earth as newspaper reporter Clark Kent at t35’ is identical with (one and the same self-process as) the self-process with the trait ‘living on Krypton at t1.’ Just as at a given time the self-process that is Clark Kent is identical with the self-process that is Superman, so too, considering the self-process from the point of view of its entire spatiotemporal spread, the self-process that lives on Krypton at t1 is identical with the self-process that lives on earth as newspaper reporter Clark Kent at t35. The problem of identity over time is usually posed in the following terms: if Clark Kent at 5 years old has different traits from Clark Kent/Superman at thirtyfive years old, then how can there be identity over time, for identity presupposes sameness, that is, indiscernibility of traits? The solution lies (1) in recognizing that identity over time cannot mean simply “sameness of traits” and (2) in reframing the problem. Just as my finger is not identical with my foot, Clark Kent at 5 years old is not identical with Clark Kent/Superman at thirty-five years old. But my body that has that finger and my body that has that foot is one and the same body. Similarly, the self-process that is Clark Kent at 5 years old and the self-process that is Clark Kent/Superman at thirty-five years old is one and the same self-process. But in order to conceptualize this, one has to think of time as a dimension of the self, which is another way of saying that the self is a self-process. (This is the four-dimensionalist or perdurantist approach to personal identity mentioned at the beginning of this paper. I am freely expanding on that notion and applying the idea to a process). Conceptualizing the self as a self-process allows for a way of conceptualizing identity over time, that is, for being able to articulate what it means to assert that someone at five years old is identical with – is one and the same self as – that someone at thirty-five years old. They are one and the same self-process, even as the five year old “piece” is not identical with the thirty five year “piece” of the self-process. But, the self-process that at five years old has its characteristics and the self-process that at thirty-five years old has its characteristics is one and the same self-process, that is, is identical with itself.

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5. Reply to Objection 1: Presence of the Whole Self The other objection is that this view does not capture an important feature of a self, namely, that it is wholly present at any given time. It’s not just a part of the self –for example, the five year old part or the thirty-five year old part – but the whole self that is present at any time. It is all well and good to say of bodily parts and constituents such as fingers, feet, DNA, that each is a part of the body, that no part is identical with the whole and that the whole body is not present in any particular part of the body. But, with the self, it just seems counterintuitive to say that the self at a time is a trait or part of the self-process as a whole, that therefore a whole self is not (wholly) present at a time. Isn’t the self “as a whole” present at any time? As a process, the self at any time is the product, if you will, of what it has been up to that point. Therefore, the self at any time is not just a spatiotemporal slice of a space-time region. Rather, at any time or cross-section of the self-process, the self is a cumulative upshot of the totality of its processual locations. Thus, the five year old self who is adopted by the Kents and named Clark and who lives on a farm in Kansas is the upshot of the gross totality of his experience and locations as of that time (not all of which may be known to him). The thirty-five year old self – who is Clark Kent (newspaper reporter in Metropolis, and so on) and who is Superman – is the upshot of the gross totality of his experience and locations as of that time. The thirty year old self and the five year old Clark Kent on a farm in Kansas are (qualitatively) different from one another, but at each time, each is and presumably experiences itself as the whole (cumulative) self of the gross processual intersection of traits and relations as it is at each time. An analogy might help in clarifying the distinction between gross and cumulative wholes. Consider nutrition. An organism eats food at time t1; the food is digested and converted into various absorbable and non-absorbable biochemical products. The non-absorbable products are discarded as waste; the absorbable ones enable the organism to grow, to alter in size and composition. At t2 the organism is the cumulative upshot of that digestive process: it is the whole organism at that time that is the upshot of the digestive process. The organism as a gross totality however is the process that includes the previous stage of the organism when, say, it was smaller at t1. I am suggesting that the self be similarly conceptualized, only in the case of the self, it is not only an organism, a biological process, but the intersection of biological, and of social, linguistic, cultural, psychological processes as well. The processes by which language, customs and values are acquired and incorporated into the cumulatively developing character of a self yield a distinctive character to the cross-sectional upshot of the self-process at any time, but the self-process

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as a totality is more comprehensive than the cross-sectional cumulative whole. However, the cross-sectional cumulative whole at any time is the (cumulative) whole self in the same sense as the organism growing through nutrition is the (cumulative) whole organism at each phase of its growth, even though its size and developmental characteristics may differ from one phase to the next. (This is Buchler’s distinction between what he calls the gross and imminent proceptive domains of the self-process. ‘Proception’ is Buchler’s categorial neologism for reconceptualizing ‘experience,’ which Buchler regards as a concept that has become too freighted and limited to be philosophically useful. I will not here pursue an analysis of proception.8) (Bourdieu’s idea of habitus also seems to exemplify something like the idea of a cumulative whole. Habitus embodies the notion of cumulative shaping, in Bourdieu’s case of social and cultural practices, enacted by and transmitted through both individuals and societies. “The habitus, a product of history, produces individual and collective practices...[and] ensures the active presence of past experiences....This system of dispositions – a present past that tends to perpetuate itself into the future by reactivation in similarly structured practices...is the principle of continuity and regularity which objectivism sees in social practices.... ”9) The distinction between cumulative and gross wholes conceptualizes the complex fact, (1) that at any time it seems that there is a present whole self, (2) but that the character of the present whole self (its cumulative upshot) is different at different times and thus, that the whole self appears to lose and acquire traits, and (3) that the self-process as a totality does not lose traits. The gross totality by definition is not present at any one time or cross-section of the self-process, but is the process, its past and present, that is spread out in space and time. The cumulative upshot of the gross totality is the character or nature of the self as a whole at any time. Thus, the self at t1 is the upshot of the gross totality of the self’s experience and locations as of that time; the self at t2 is the upshot of the gross totality of the self’s experience and locations as of that time. What is available to and experienced as the “(cumulative) whole self” at each time is different, and neither is qualitatively identical to or qualitatively the same as the gross totality. Each is discernible from the other and from the gross totality, but each is the cumulative upshot of the total self-process up to that time. Each cross-section is the self-process in cross-section. This is analogous to the point made earlier: CK and S are discernible traits or aspects of CS. “Clark Kent is identical with Superman” is elliptical for “the self-process that is (has the trait) ‘Clark Kent’ is identical with the self-process that is (has the trait) ‘Superman’. “Five year old Clark Kent is discernible from thirty-five year old Clark Kent/Superman (they are qualitatively different from each other). Thus, “five year old Clark Kent is identical with thirty-five year old Clark Kent/Superman,” is elliptical for the following complex reality:

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“The self-process that is cumulative upshot-1, (that is, has a particular overall character at t5, e.g., being five year old Clark Kent) is identical with the selfprocess that is cumulative upshot-2 (that is, has a particular overall character at t35, e.g., being thirty-five year old Clark Kent/Superman).” The awkwardness and cumbersomeness of the precise formulation mitigates against its use in ordinary everyday contexts, and that’s fine since such contexts don’t usually require precision, but can rely on easy and shorthand ways of referring to and identifying selves and other objects in the world. The view thus far suggests that the self-process has temporal spread; therefore, it is not literally wholly present at any particular time. However, the self at any particular time is a cross-section of the process. But that cross-section is not just a slice; it is a cumulative upshot of the self-process, namely, of the processual-totality-and-intersection-of-multiple-traits up to that time. I will call this the imminent-self.10 Cumulative upshot is meant to suggest that the imminent-self is not just an accumulation of traits all with equal relevance; rather, some traits of an earlier phase of the process may continue to be relevant as continuing traits, some may be relevant to the having of some new traits and some may cease to be relevant to a subsequent phase, even though they are traits of the process as a totality. In an assertion like “that was me at an earlier time, but I was a different person then,” there is a distinction being made between different selves experienced each time as a present whole. There is affirmation of evolution in one’s self-process and perhaps even a distancing from a former self (earlier part of overall self-process), while at the same time an affirmation of the sameness of the self, that it is “me” who was/is each of those distinct selves. In the terms I am proposing, the assertion distinguishes between one’s imminent-self at one time and one’s imminent-self at another while at the same time recognizing each as a cross-section or cumulative upshot of one as a total self-process. So far I haven’t said much about memory or other psychological relations. While memory and psychological relations are important and contribute to the cumulative upshot of a self-process at any time, they are to be understood here as dimensions of a self-process in a naturalistic, but non-reductive (meaning not merely physicalistic) view of the self. However, experiences at one time need not be remembered in order to contribute to the cumulative self-process at another time. Suppose, for example, that at t16 Clark Kent is in high school, reads the novel Silas Marner and at that time hates the novel and hates the author George Eliot. Suppose at t35, Clark Kent is thirty-five and, in addition to being Superman, is also an avid reader of novels who reads George Eliot’s Middlemarch, loves it and Eliot becomes one of his favorite authors; perhaps he even goes on to read Silas Marner and on this reading loves it (or at least doesn’t hate it). Perhaps he totally forgets that he ever read Silas Marner and hated George Eliot in high school. Thus, it might be argued that at t16 Clark Kent is

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a “hater of George Eliot as author and of Silas Marner” and at t35 is a “lover of George Eliot as author of Middlemarch and perhaps even of Silas Marner,” and the former trait appears to have no or negligible impact on the latter. I say “appears” because I’m with Kant, Freud and others in thinking that the fact that we don’t remember something doesn’t mean that it doesn’t influence us in the present. (Many psychological views of personal identity recognize this problem and posit various other kinds of psychological relations to circumvent the problems posed by a strictly Lockean memory criterion for personal identity.) Thus, even if Clark doesn’t remember having hated Silas Marner and George Eliot as author, that wouldn’t mean that his childhood experiences of reading the book might not have influenced his selection of or appreciation (or not) of novels and novelists over the years, or have had some effect on his attitude toward spending and saving money. However, it is also possible that something in one’s past ceases to have relevance to the cumulative character of the self. That’s the force of the term “cumulative” (note, not “accumulative”). The gross totality of the processual self is accumulative, but the character of the self as a whole at any time is a cumulative upshot. That means that at some time a trait of the self’s past, while it remains a trait of the past and hence of the gross totality, may cease to be relevant or may become only weakly relevant to the self in its cumulative upshot in the present. For example, suppose a trait of the five year old Clark Kent – that he was a lover of peanut butter marshmallow sandwiches. Suppose that at that time such a trait even played a large role in the five year old Clark Kent’s life; maybe peanut butter marshmallow sandwiches were all that he would eat. That particular trait may not have any relevance to the cumulative upshot of the self-process as thirty-five year old Clark Kent (CS who is Clark Kent). However, that trait is still a trait of the five year old Clark Kent and of the total self-process even if it is not a trait of and no longer influences any trait of the thirty-five year old self. 6. Conclusion I have begun to sketch out here a view of the self, inspired by Buchlerian metaphysics, as a self-process having both a gross or total self-process dimension and a cumulative, cross-sectional dimension of the self-process (the imminent self). This view allows for conceptualization of the self as constituted by its history, as having (spatio-)temporal spread and as constituted by plural relations. It has resources to account for the identity of a relationally constituted self and of a self over, or rather through, time, and for conceptualizing the notion that it is a whole self that is present at any time and that has unity relations with its earlier (and subsequent) temporal dimensions. I have only sketched out the basic approach to the identity of an intersectional processual self. There are

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many details that need to be filled in and other dimensions of the self that need to be more carefully conceptualized. But, if the idea of a relationally constituted self that is its history is to be taken seriously as an ontology of the self, then the self cannot be thought of in static terms, or in merely physical (bodily or biological) or merely psychological terms. I am suggesting that the Buchlerian framework of self as self-process provides resources for reframing how to think about these issues.

NOTES 1. Justus Buchler, Toward A General Theory of Human Judgment, 2nd, revised edition (New York: Dover Publications, 1979), hereafter referred to as TGT. On Mead, see Kathleen Wallace, “Autonomous ‘I’ of an Intersectional Self”, Journal of Speculative Philosophy 17, 3 (2003), pp. 176-191. 2. Kathleen Wallace, “Anonymity,” Ethics and Information Technology 1, 1 (1999), pp. 23-35; and Kathleen Wallace, “Educating for Autonomy: Identity and Intersectional Selves,” in Education for A Democratic Society, eds. John Ryder and Gert Rudiger-Wegmarshaus (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2007). 3. Theodore Sider, Four-Dimensionsalism: An Ontology of Persistence and Time (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). 4. See, Eric Steinhart, “Indiscernible Persons,” Metaphilosophy 33, 2 (2002), pp. 300-320 for an excellent analysis of these issues. 5. Buchler, TGT. 6. For arguments for the (remote) possibility of a “post-human” self, see, for example, the works of Hans Moravec, Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), and Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). 7. For example, David Lewis, “Survival and Identity,” in his Philosophical Papers, vol. 1 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), pp. 55-77. 8. See Buchler’s Introduction to TGT, and TGT, pp. 8-9. 9. Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), p. 54. 10. I borrow the term imminent from Buchler’s use of it in “imminent proceptive domain.” See TGT, p. 9f.

Nine EDUCATION AND SOCIAL CHANGE: GORKY, DEWEY AND FABIAN SOCIALISM Lyubov Bugaeva This paper focuses on the connection of social change with education for a new society. Of special interest in this respect is the American context of the novel Mother, written by Russian writer Maxim Gorky during his half-year stay in the US. The article presents a Gorky who is little known – Gorky in search of active and efficient philosophy. The unique context in which Gorky found himself in the summer of 1906 – at the crossroads of two influential intellectual and social trends: the philosophical school at Glenmore in the Adirondacks, where Dewey lectured, and the Fabian Socialist utopian community associated with John and Prestonia Martin – determined his future transition from radicalism of means, i.e. revolution, to radicalism of ends, that is the creation of the mentality for the “new man.” This radical end is to be achieved through education.

1. Prehistory: Gorky in Search of Active Philosophy Maxim Gorky’s novel Mother (Mat’, 1906), which anticipated and initiated socialist realist literature, is a mighty and mass rite de passage encompassing many characters as well as the author himself. In Mother, the education of workers and peasants entails a change in their worldview and leads to their miraculous transformation. Written in the period after the failure of the first Russian revolution of 1905, the novel reflects a turn in the writer’s views. From revolutionary activity and the organization of an explosion of social reality Maxim Gorky, who was directly involved in bomb production in the period of the 1905 revolution, moved to literature and to a description of the explosive awakening of revolutionary consciousness. The reaction of the institutions of power in Russia corresponded to the revolutionary danger that the novel presented. The Saint-Petersburg publishing committee confiscated the issues of the journal Znanie (Knowledge), where Mother was published, and forbade distribution of all foreign editions while claiming the novel to be “nearly totally

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revolutionary.”1 Gorky was charged with encouragement of and commencing riotous and traitorous action.2 Soviet researchers, in their attempt to present Gorky as an ancestor of socialist realism, interpreted Mother as a novel based exclusively on Russian facts. The idea of the novel was said to be born in 1902 right after the 1st of May demonstration in Sormovo, a small town on the Volga River.3 Nikolai Burenin, a musician and an informer appointed by the party to look after Gorky, was in a hurry to witness that Gorky worked over the novel already in the spring of 1906, aboard the Friedrich Wilhelm der Grosse, i.e. before he came ashore in the United States. Gorky, who indeed had enormous personal experience of revolutionary activity, was attributed with a close acquaintance with Vladimir Lenin’s program works on revolution. The characters’ prototypes were found entirely among Russian revolutionaries.4 However, despite the best efforts of Soviet commentators to make the book entirely Russian, it was in the United States that Mother was written and first published in English in 1906 by Appleton and Co. The intellectual environment in which Gorky found himself in the US contributed to the conception of the novel and influenced afterward the literary work of the Russian writer. Having arrived in the US, Gorky hoped to find there active philosophy that can be used for revolutionary purposes. Gorky’s correspondence in the early 20th century reveals his interest in a philosophy that can serve as a tool for organization and reorganization of the party, the society, and of human beings in general. Thus Gorky’s works written after his trip to the US that were included in the book Religion and Socialism (1907–1910) initiated the discussion of socialism as a new religion aiming to create a “new man.” In 1909, Gorky wrote to the Russian philosopher, physician, economist and writer Alexander Bogdanov (Malinowski): “Our task is the philosophical and psychological reorganization of the party; we, as I see, are able to fulfill this task – its fulfillment is what all our energy should be aimed at.”5 Gorky saw in Bogdanov’s collectivist idea the basis for solving the conflict between “I” and “We.”6 However, one can suggest that Gorky’s conception of Godbuilding reflected in “Disintegration of the Individual” (part of the collective work Essays on the Philosophy of Collectivism, 1909) and in Confession (1908) is partially rooted in Gorky’s acquaintance with the works of the American pragmatists and in his American experience. For Gorky socialism was connected with human activity, and the main task of party members was the formation of the “new consciousness of the proletariat” on the basis of the collective will, collective feelings and emotions, and collective sensations.7 At the beginning of the 20th century Gorky felt a desperate and unsatisfied need for active philosophy; this need determined his negative attitude towards Leo Tolstoy, whose position he regarded as passive and non-active. In his letter to Lenin in 1910 Gorky described the principal

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goals and tasks of the new journal he wanted to establish as follows: “...realism, democracy, and activity...to fight against the Tolstoy legend and his religion... hands tremble and shiver with cold.”8 However, already by 1906, i.e. by the period when he writes Mother, Gorky seems disappointed in the possibilities of Russian philosophical thought and, in particular, in the philosophy of Leo Tolstoy. His dissatisfaction is obvious in an interview about the influence of revolution on Russian literature. While estimating Tolstoy negatively, Gorky thinks that “Russia needs active philosophy.”9 According to John Spargo, Tolstoy, Gorky declared, is without influence in Russia to-day, contrary to a widely prevailing notion in this country. Of the older writer’s consummate literary art, the younger man spoke with reverential admiration, while condemning his views as reactionary. But the Count’s teaching has no real influence in Russia to-day, either for good or ill, Gorky says. There was a period, in the seventies, when Peter Lavroff’s works dominated the thought of Russia; in the eighties it was Tolstoy; in the nineties Tolstoy’s influence waned and there was a blank. Now younger writers with new ideas provide the real intellectual motive force of Russia.10 Gorky was especially interested in the forms of socialist and social activity in the US that could change and develop the spiritual self: He wanted to know about American Socialism, expressing a fear that there exists a tendency to measure its growth by votes instead of by its spiritual development, its devotion to the ideal. My explanation of the mechanism of the Socialist movement, the party organization, means of propaganda, the party press, and the growing hold of Socialism upon the literary class seemed to interest him greatly.11 American intellectual life offered Gorky a chance to have a close look at several models of reorganization of the individual. In the Adirondack Mountains in New York State, he found himself at the crossroad of two schools, two experiments in the creation of a new form of social consciousness and social behavior. The first was Glenmore, a unique philosophical camp, a “School for the Cultural Sciences,” founded in 1889 by Thomas Davidson,12 and the second a utopian community created in 1895 by Prestonia Mann Martin. “Both schools were based on a large humanitarianism and both took into themselves great minds in the fields of philosophy and sociology.”13

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2. Gorky and the American Context A. “Education as World-Building”: Thomas Davidson At Glenmore the regular lecturers included John Dewey, William James, W.T. Harris, Johns Hopkins, and Felix Adler. James “counted that summer woefully lacking that did not include a sojourn at Glenmore.”14 As Davidson pointed out, Glenmore could “… become more than a school for the ‘culture sciences,’ that it should be ‘made to stand for something definite… It must be a seminary for the new creed. But we are not ready to formulate that yet’.”15 Davidson was, to use James’s expression, “essentially a teacher.”16 For Davidson the concept of education put forward three questions: “(1) What is the being to be educated? (2) Wherein does education consist? (3) What is the result aimed at in education?”17 In answering the questions, Davidson developed a conception of the self as the conscious world defined by the experiences acquired through its interactions with the environment: I am a feeling, or sensibility, modified, in innumerable ways, by influences, which I do not originate. These modifications, when grouped, are what I call the world, or my world, for I know no other. I am the sentient unity of a sensible world.18 Davidson’s conception of the self is idealistic by nature. Having taken as a starting point the understanding of the self as a subjective feeling, Davidson identifies desire as an active element in the structure of the self that classifies sensations and transforms them into the world of things. Almost in a Lacanian way of differentiating need as purely organic energy, and desire as an active principle of physical processes, he defines desire as “an effort after satisfaction, that is, the largest possible amount and variety of feeling.”19 While seeking pleasure and shunning pain a human being creates hypothetical essences that he places beyond sensations, and in grouping them for practical purposes he creates the world.20 According to Davidson “education consists in enabling a human being to construct a certain kind of world”21 that is able to provide the highest satisfaction. Regarding satisfaction as the end of desire, Davidson yet insists on the variety of desires and hence on the variety of worlds. Since the sentient aspect of the soul articulates itself through experience, education is to be aimed at “the evolution of the social individual in knowledge, sympathy, and will.”22 Davidson sees a change within the soul as a change in the world, the evolution of the individual as “the evolution of an ordered world in his consciousness,” and increase of knowledge as “increase of world.”23 Hence education is understood as directed world-building, instructive “in acquiring a manifold experience and in organizing the same.”24 Every world is organized upon a certain principle that is “some form of desire, need or longing”

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and is “a means of satisfying desire.”25 Since all the choices human beings make are directed to the satisfaction of desires, the task of education consists in creating space for choices through expanding the world. As Davidson puts it: If the world is narrow, the life will be narrow; if it contains but small motives and beggarly ideals, the life will be meager and low. If the values are disordered, the life will be disordered and criminal. If, on the contrary, the world be large, and the values duly ordered, the life will be rich, full, and lofty.26 It seems that the idea of education as world-building resonates in Gorky and finds its reflection in the novel. The world of the factory workers at the beginning of the novel is very narrow. They work, eat, drink alcohol, quarrel with their wives and beat them, have children, and die at the age of 50. The desires they have are mainly a desire for rest and a desire for alcoholic intoxication. The fulfillment of these desires brings them satisfaction and a kind of happiness. Nobody looks for a change in his or her life and everyone is afraid of the new. However, to have an actual desire for something it is necessary in some degree to experience or feel it. It is possible to develop desires by providing certain experiences and creating certain habits in the process of education. The changes in the lives of the workers in the novel start with the beginning of their education, which forms a different set of desires. Having been acquainted with illicit revolutionary literature, the main character Pavel Vlasov breaks the predetermined behavior of a factory worker and develops new habits, from the habit of cleanliness and hygiene to respect for his mother, and then enters the revolutionary struggle. The transformation of his mother’s mentality from a miserable, downtrodden wife of a factory worker into her son’s political supporter, a revolutionary fighter and propagandist, a spreader of propaganda leaflets, ensues from the new experience she acquires through her son’s revolutionary activity, which gives her an understanding of the miseries of her life and enriches her with the knowledge of new people, new places and new possibilities. It is also connected with the liquidation of her illiteracy in both direct and metaphorical senses. As she put it, she started to understand life when she acquired the ability to compare looking beyond the life of her circle. The rite de passage that the Vlasovs and other characters experience leads to their resurrection into new spiritual selves, a kind of consciousness the future generations are to have. B. Education as a Cultivating and Radical Change: John Dewey Gorky was acquainted with John Dewey in New York City. Dewey, at that time a professor at Columbia University, organized a reception in honor of Gorky’s companion Madam Andreeva (where she gave a speech about the participation of

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women in revolution).27 Closer relations between Dewey and Gorky came in Keene, NY as Dewey’s house was but a step from the Martin’s house where Gorky stayed. In summer 1906, other lecturers at Glenmore in addition to Dewey were Morris Cohen, Frederick J.E. Woodbridge, James B. Pratt, Felix Adler, W.P. Montague, Dickinson S. Miller, George M. Stratton, Clark Murray, and Charles H. Judd. The subject of the lectures Dewey gave during the week beginning July 16 was “Philosophical Problems in Every Day Life,” with “Ethics of Experience” as a Sunday lecture. Later, in January-March 1909, in the Capri school organized for select party elite of Russian factory workers by Maxim Gorky, Alexander Bogdanov and Anatoly Lunacharsky, Gorky will turn to his American experience and, in the first place, to Dewey’s educational theory. He will include Dewey in the course of his lectures: “Dewey, his pedagogy and philosophy, his attitude towards ‘Americanism’.”28 What attracts Gorky is Dewey’s focus on many-sided education. In his lecture notes “Culture and Industry in Education” Dewey argues that “when laboring people are excluded from political activities, it is possible to obtain a double system of education, one sort for cultured leisure called liberal, the other sort for work, called professional, mechanical, utilitarian.”29 He insists on the impossibility of separating practice from theory and on a type of education that is combined with industry. In Democracy and Education (1916), Dewey develops the idea of education as “a fostering, a nurturing, a cultivating, process.”30 Dewey considers education as a means of providing to each individual “an opportunity to escape from the limitations of the social group in which he was born, and to come into living contact with a broader environment.”31 Gorky also sees education as the possibility of smoothing away differences caused by social distinctions. Given the opportunity to study, workers and peasants in Mother not only develop quickly into philosophically thinking intellectuals but also leave behind the representatives of the intelligentsia whose behavior at first they copy. Their understanding of literature and even of classic music is by no means inferior to that of the intelligentsia. Moreover, some workers, especially Mother, her son Pavel and his friend Andrei, seem in the end more advanced than the other characters with a traditional education, as they have experience that the latter lack. Thus, having been acquainted with a revolutionary woman Sophie, a good musician and a teacher’s sister, Mother soon feels pity for her as Sophie, despite all her education and musical sensitivity, cannot express revolutionary ideas in language that is as simple and clear as Mother’s. From Gorky’s point of view both sides, the working class and the intelligentsia, need education that will expand their experience and will lift the limitations of the social group to which they belong. In 1906, Gorky is still fascinated with the idea of revolution and seems tempted to take a revolutionary path as the way of creating the mentality of the new man. He is distressed by the impossibility of satisfying his desire for revolutionary changes:

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In such moods, he would pace up and down his room like a baffled beast in an iron cage, morose and silent, his only relaxation being the catching of flies and their liberation. Standing by the window, gravely and gently catching flies of the large “blue-bottle” variety, he would open the window and release them, his face beaming with pleasure, and shouting in triumph at their free and rapid flight to liberty. The freedom of the flies was for him a symbol of the freedom for which the Russian people are struggling against bureaucracy, and which they must inevitably win. “See! So shall Russia enjoy freedom!” he cried exultingly. If ever a man lived whose life was wholly consecrated to an ideal, Maxim Gorky is such a man – and his ideal is freedom for Russia and for all mankind.32 Dewey, on the contrary, rejects the radicalism of means for constructing a new type of the society and sees true radicalism as radicalism of goals; it constitutes for him the core of democracy as the goal of social development: “The end of democracy is a radical end…It is radical because it requires great change in existing social institutions, economic, legal and cultural.”33 However, already in Mother, through his character the peasant Rybin, Gorky expresses the idea of the radical inner transformation that is not directly connected with revolution. Rybin wants to reconstruct man, to purify him: Man ought to be renovated – that’s what I think! When a man grows scabby, take him to the bath, give him a thorough cleaning, put clean clothes on him – and he will get well. Isn’t it so? And if the heart grows scabby, take its skin off, even if it bleeds, wash it, and dress it up all afresh. Isn’t it so? How else can you clean the inner man? There now!34 Later, in 1918, in his Untimely Thoughts Gorky will depart from the idea of revolution as a means of radical change of mentality as well of society and will become a proponent of a gradual non-revolutionary way of educating for a new society. C. Education as Testudinal Transformation: Fabian Socialism Among the influences that caused Gorky’s switch from radicalism of means to radicalism of ends, and his emphasis on a slow transformation and gradual education for a new society, were the Fabian socialists he was acquainted with in the US. The people that hosted Gorky – John and Prestonia Martin – were Fabians. In Soviet studies on Gorky, they were either presented just as kind hosts or not mentioned at all. Yet Prestonia Mann Martin, a cousin of Horace Mann and a student of Thomas Davidson, was far more than just a hospitable woman. She was a public figure and an author of several theoretical books. In 1895, inspired with the

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idea of a summer school, Prestonia bought land from Dewey’s brother and founded her own school – Summerbrook. Mrs. Martin …with a profound faith in the social ideals of the Collectivists, hoped to rekindle the spirit of social enthusiasm for which the famous Brook Farm stood in the days of Ripley, Greeley, Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller and others – that famous group of earnest men and women who embraced the teachings of the gentle French Utopist, Charles Fourier. Accordingly she designed her beautiful home to meet the needs of a little community of writers, artists, teachers and social thinkers of all schools of thought, whose vacations should be inspiring and profitable as well as pleasant and restful.35 In Gorky’s character Pelageya, besides the traits of Russian prototypes, one can find the traits of Prestonia Martin, who adopted and raised several children, who called her Russian guests “mes enfants russes,”36 and who took care of them as if they were children.37 Though in Summerbrook there were no formal lectures, the participants who did some physical work for several hours participated in discussions and group readings. In her school Prestonia wanted …to foster the more humane aspects of society and to make her school a pattern of the enlarged family – the ideal community…She led her guests in the consideration of social problems and in daily two-hour labor stint. Nothing but physical labor counted as work with Mrs. Martin, but it was all made a cooperative game in which social reformers of New York and Boston took part – such people as Edwin Markham and his wife, Lillian Wall, Jane Addams, Henry D. Lloyd, Upton Sinclair, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman.38 John Martin, English by birth, was a member of the British Fabian society and one of the founders of the American branch of the Fabians. Gorky happened to be present at a weeklong conference of socialist reformers organized by John Martin in Summerbrook.39 Gorky, though, was disappointed with the non-radical character of Fabian views. He thought that many participants of the conference were neither socialists nor reformers. For a number of reasons, including the language barrier, Gorky failed to find in American reality an “instrumental” philosophy that could have provided the ready-made formula of social development. As a result, Gorky left the US in a critical mood: “America, a country of adolescents, is also extremely interested in, i.e. frightened by, the Russian revolution and discusses it curiously; it is eager to understand it, but cannot.”40 The seeds of the Fabian doctrine will grow in Gorky’s work later. However, they are already visible in Mother, as for example in Gorky’s emphasis on education as a means of social reorganization. The strategy of the Fabians, who took their name

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from Fabian Cunctator (the Delayer) and associated themselves with a tortoise, is the gradual and slow reformation of society, also through training and education. In Mother Pavel Vlasov states that “only reason will free mankind.”41 But in contrast to the gradual social development declared by the Fabians, the workers and peasants in Gorky’s novel Mother progress rapidly while reading a lot of serious literature – as rapidly as Pelageya Vlasova, an aged and oppressed woman, learns to read. Yet Gorky, as well as the Fabians, is against education as merely the quantitative accumulation of information separated from experience. He advocates knowledge as a necessary step for the spiritual transformation of man. Having read literary masterpieces and having mastered revolutionary theory, the characters in the novel move from apprenticeship to instructorship. They rather often fill both roles at once. To his mother’s question, “What do you want to do, then?” Pavel Vlasov answers “Study and then teach others. We working men must study. We must learn, we must understand why life is so hard for us.”42 He is echoed by his friend Andrej Nakhodka, who declared that everybody had a task to educate himself and to educate others. By the end of the novel Pelageya, illiterate in the beginning, teaches the people the truth about life, as she has learned it. The characters of working class and peasant origin, including Mother, look more impressive, wise and enlightened when compared with characters from the intelligentsia, including professional teachers. Gorky apparently transfers the image of the well-read intelligentsia and his own passion for books to the working-class characters of the novel. 3. The Construction of Social and Socialist Utopia The failure of the revolutionary activity of 1905 and the unsuccessful attempt to find in the US a ready-made philosophical formula for the practical application and building of a socialist society resulted in the social utopianism of Mother that later made it possible to treat it as the founding novel of socialist realist literature. Utopias that by their genre definition eliminate alienation, as a rule are created by philosophers in a situation of alienation, e.g. “in a prison (Thomas Campanella, Chernyshevsky), in emigration (Karl Marx), at the end of the literary movement the author belongs to” (thus, romanticist Odoevsky wrote his utopian works, Anonymous City and 4338, in the period when Romanticism in world literature fell into decay.”43 Gorky wrote Mother, the forerunner of socialist realist literature, which depicts the utopian scene of the mass reformation of human consciousness in a situation of alienation – in the US. The utopian orientation of the novel for the most part goes back to Fabian socialism. Among the Fabians that Gorky met in the US was H.G. Wells. Gorky became acquainted with Wells at a reception organized by the publisher of the Wilshire Magazine, and then met him a number of times in April-May, 1906 at the Martins’ home in Staten Island. Wells, a Fabian member since 1903 and a supporter

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of Fabian before that, expressed Fabian views in both theoretical and literary works: Mankind in the Making (1903), A Modern Utopia (1905), Socialism and the Family (1906), Faults of the Fabian (1906), The Future in America (1906), Reconstruction of the Fabian Society (1906), and When the Sleeper Wakes (1899). Together with Bernard Show, another Fabian writer, he was highly regarded by William James.44 According to Wells, every utopia has a temporary character; a utopian model of the future is of interest from the point of view of construing the model of the relationship among people. In his essay A Modern Utopia Wells develops a theoretical basis for the justification of individual freedom within society. Wells understands individual freedom, the principle theme of the modern utopia, as freedom of movement, of word, and of the choice of profession and religion. He depicts the happy society as based on Fabian socialism through the efforts of the party of intellectuals – the “Samurai of Utopia.” In a similar vein James sees the role of the intellectual in society to be that of an educator and a reformer, a representative of a “higher race” (in Well’s terminology it would be a holder of a poetical or an analytical mind in contrast to a holder of a dull and narrow mind). James wrote to Gorky in September 1906: …there is a higher nation, the cosmopolitan communion of liberal minds, of “les intellectuals,” which is organizing itself more and more, and out of which the essential lines of the future will be drawn. You Russian writers, with your extraordinary genius for human sympathy, are among the most potent organizers of this true and wider communion.45 James, on the one hand, praised Wells and, on the other, criticized Wells for the idea of a society ruled by an elite – the Samurai. James comments: “Your Samurai chapter is magnificent, tho’ I find myself wondering what developments in the way of partisan politics those samurai would develop, when it came to questions of appointment and running this or that man in. That I believe to be human nature’s ruling passion.” James thought that “intellectual training doesn’t curb men’s passions; it only gives them more instruments of service.”46 Instead of Well’s Samurai or James’s “higher cosmopolitan nation,” in Mother Gorky created the image of a well-educated working-class people, members of the party that are to rule the society. He endowed them with the characteristics of the intellectual elite. The advanced working-class people in Gorky’s novel occupy the leading position in the preparation of the social reforms and the revolution not only due to economic factors but also as holders of an analytical and liberal mind combined with a profound knowledge of life. In his novel When the Sleeper Wakes Wells criticized revolution as a means of changing a society as he considered such revolutionary transformations useless. From his point of view, revolution does not change a social structure; it just replaces the existing rulers with other ones, one type of aristocracy with another. Any

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attempt to change the system in a truly revolutionary way, instead of making the changes within the system that social evolution has made possible, is doomed to fail. The main character, the Sleeper, having awoken after 200 years of lethargic sleep, dies when instead of enjoying his top position in the society gained as a result of a “revolutionary” change within the system, he tries to reorganize the society on the basis of the 19th century ideals of freedom. Any rapid changes, according to Wells, are incorrect. He also criticizes the educational system that is fast and aimed at a quantitative accumulation of certain skills and information. The enlightening in his dystopian novel is replaced with suggestion: instead of a longstanding systematic educational process, there are several weeks of hypnosis sessions during which the “necessary” skills and data are imparted into the pupil’s brain. Unlike the Fabians, and Wells in particular, who considered the rapid progress of society impossible and revolutionary change of regime ineffective, in his polemics with the Fabians in Mother Gorky considered both rapid progress and revolutionary change to be possible. The rapidly progressing consciousness of the characters in the novel leads them to a realization of the necessity and inevitability of revolution. Utopianism in general has a terroristic character, and in that spirit Gorky describes and justifies the execution of the traitor Isaiah.47 Andrei Nakhodka does not see the traitor as a human being; for him Isaiah is a pest no less than a beast, and therefore his death is justifiable. When Isaiah is assassinated, Andrei compares it with kicking a toad and does not feel any remorse or sympathy. Utopianism as a thematically integral discourse affirms the inalienability of being from the subject. Utopias differ from each other depending on what form of alienation the utopian project disaffirms.48 Well’s social dystopia When the Sleeper Wakes, on the contrary, demonstrates various forms of alienation while, through the rule of contraries, asserts the need to overcome them. In the novel, the aristocracy is separated from the world by the walls of the White Counsel. The slaves of the Worker’s company, the working class of the utopian society, are marked by the blue color of their uniforms and moved out of sight – to the underground. Children are alienated from their parents and right after the birth are placed in the state nursery as orphans. In Mother Gorky also depicts total alienation. Pavel stands up to defend his mother against his drunken father, and the father estranges his wife and his son by no longer supporting them. After his death, Pavel first tries to substitute for his father but then builds his own life as distinct from his father’s. Another character, Nikolai, did the same. Two revolutionary girls, Natasha and Sashenka, break with their well-to-do parents and take the revolutionary path. There is not a single happy couple in the novel. The possibility of a happy married life for Pavel Vlasov and Sashenka shifts to Siberia, where Pavel is exiled, and is not part of the story. Something similar happens on the other level of narration, where Gorky constantly overcomes alienation among people. The limits of maternal love expand and it spreads first to the son’s friends and at the end to all the participants in

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the revolutionary activity. Mother, on one hand, looses features of the biological mother of Pavel; her conversations with her son are less cordial than with Andrei Nakhodka. On the other hand, having lost her archetypical role of mother, Pelageya develops the maternal qualities of a spiritual mother of the revolutionaries, going as far as associations with the mother of God. She notices the spiritual unity of the revolutionaries: during a secret meeting, the individual faces of the revolutionaries who are present melt into a single decisive and clear face, with a deep appearance of dark eyes, tender and strict, like the appearance of Christ. Furthermore, the novel eliminates the alienation among people from various countries: In the small room a vast feeling was born of the universal kinship of the workers of the world, at the same time its masters and its slaves, who had already been freed from the bondage of prejudice and who felt themselves the new masters of life. This feeling blended all into a single soul; it moved the mother, and, although inaccessible to her, it straightened and emboldened her, as it were, with its force, with its joys, with its triumphant, youthful vigor, intoxicating, caressing, full of hope.49 According to Ernst Bloch, utopia reflects the emerging tendencies in the development of a society. According to Georg Lucács, true realistic writers, Gorky among them, are able to forecast the future of a society: Great realism, therefore, does not portray an immediately obvious aspect of reality but one, which is permanent and objectively more significant, namely man in the whole range of his relations to the real world, above all those which outlast mere fashion. Over and above that, it captures tendencies of development that only exist incipiently and so have not yet had the opportunity to unfold their entire human and social potential.50 Gorky, however, depicts as real the tendencies that never occurred in social reality. He finds inspiration in James: But gradually our will can lead us to the same results by a very simple method: we need only in cold blood ACT as if the thing in question were real, and keep acting as if it were real, and it infallibly ends by growing into such a connection with our life that it will become real.51 Fortunately or unfortunately, Gorky’s approach failed. The miraculous enlightenment and consciousness of workers and peasants in Mother shown as a norm was replaced in Gorky’s Untimely Thoughts (1918) with the depiction of an insufficient level of education and enlightenment of working-class people and their inadequate preparedness for revolution. Gorky planned to write a

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continuation of the novel entitled Son, but never completed the project. As a result, Pavel remained as if undetached from his mother and from the discourse on mother, hence deprived of independent actual reality. Despite the tendency of utopia for its realization in practice, the utopian picture of enlightened, spiritually transformed people, internationalists, who are ready for the revolutionary struggle, remained beyond the frames of historical reality. Though James evaluated positively the social utopias of H.G. Wells, Bernard Shaw and William Dean Howells, 52 nevertheless he insisted “on the permanent presence of the old Adam.”53 Utopian schemes, on the contrary, presuppose a transformation or reconstruction of man. The orientation to the future that Nietzschean Marxism and God-building demonstrate echoes in the utopian picture of spiritual mass transformation of the characters in Mother, creating a new God. At the same time Gorky’s aspiration to present the ideal future as a real present adds the novel to the socialist realist literature that was created as a result of the writer’s efforts almost 20 years later: In his exposition, religious feeling is presented as a dynamic force; it expands the consciousness of the individual and creates a sense of pride and joy. There is also a future-oriented historical dimension to Gorky’s sense of religion; he sees a spiritual perfection which will lead to the emergence of a new psychological type (a “new man”)…The optimism with which the future is regarded, the faith in endless progress, and the conviction that there are no limits to human potential also resonate with more conventional Marxism and foreshadow notions that were to be expressed in much pro-Bolshevik fiction of the 1920s as well as socialist realist writings of the subsequent decades.54 In a book titled Is Mankind Advancing? (1910), which was begun when Gorky was in the US, Prestonia Martin tried to answer the question asked by the title by measuring progress through evaluative comparison of the intellectual, technical, moral etc. level of social development in various historic periods. In the end, she concludes that the progress of humankind can be judged not by an individual genius or particular achievements, but on the basis of the common weal, enlightenment and erudition of common people. She stands for the creation conditions for education and enlightenment of “common people.” Her book starts with the dedication “To THE SUPER-SUPERMAN with the hope that his coming may not be too long delayed.”55 Gorky in the novel Mother showed the rise of this super-superman that nevertheless remained an unrealized utopia in Russia. Mother being the first text of socialist realist literature and the beginning of the new mythology of history, at the same time is a utopia manifesting the end of an historic period. Gorky after Mother turned to

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educational experiments and a couple of years later organized in collaboration with Alexander Bogdanov an experimental school for workers in Italy. NOTES 1. E. L. Jefremenko, “Commentaries”, from Mother, in Gorky, M. Polnoje sobranije sochinenii v 25 tomakh (The Complete Works in 25 volumes), t. 8 (Moskva, 1970) p. 436. 2. Ibid., pp. 428, 462. 3. Ibid., pp. 442–443. 4. Ibid., p. 468. 5. Maxim Gorky, Neizdannaia perepiska s Bogdanovym, Leninym, Stalinym, Zinovievym, Kamenevym, Korolenko (Unpublished Correspondence with Bogdanov, Lenin, Stalin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Korolenko), series “M. Gorky. Materialy i issledovania (M. Gorky. Materials and Studies)”, t. 5 (Moskva: Nasledie, 1998), p. 53, transl. L.B. 6. V. Zaika, “Ot redaktcii (From the Editors)”, in: Gorky, M. Neizdannaia perepiska s Bogdanovym, Leninym, Stalinym, Zinovievym, Kamenevym, Korolenko, p. 5. 7. Ju. Sherer, “M. Gorky and A. Bogdanov”. In: Neizvestny Gorky (Unknown Gorky), series “M. Gorky i ego epoha (M. Gorky and his Time)”, t. 4, Novy vzgliad na M. Gorkogo (New View on M. Gorky) (Moskva: Nasledie, 1995), p. 58. 8. Maxim Gorky, Neizdannaia perepiska s Bogdanovym, Leninym, Stalinym, Zinovievym, Kamenevym, Korolenko, p. 140, transl. L.B. 9. Letopis’ zhizni i tvorchestva А.М. Gorkogo (The Chronicle of A.M. Gorky’s Life and Work), vyp. 1. 1868–1907 (Moskva: Izdatel’stvo Akademii Nauk USSR, 1958), p. 602. First published in: Twice a week Spokesman Review, 22 April. 10. John Spargo, “With Maxim Gorky in the Adirondacks. A Week with Maxim Gorky”, The Craftsman XI, (November 1906). 2, p. 155. 11. Ibid., p. 153. 12. Glenmore was open every summer from July 1 until August 31 though students could stay there from the middle of May until the middle of October. Lessons started in the morning: there were two lectures after breakfast, group readings in the open or active rest after the lunchtime, and an evening lecture after dinner. 13. Marjorie L. Porter, “East Hill. Two Experiments in Social Living”, North Country Life (1957), Fall, p. 28. 14. Charles M. Bakewell and Mildred Bakewell Hooker, “Glenmore School for Culture Sciences” (“A Summer Course of Study in the Adirondacks”), Adirondack (July–August, 1970), p. 64. 15. Ibid., p. 64.

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16. See: Douglas R. Anderson, “Philosophy as Teaching: James’s “Knight Errant”, Thomas Davidson”, Journal of Speculative Philosophy 18 (2004), 3, pp. 239-247. 17. Thomas Davidson, Education as World-Building (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1925), p. 6. 18. Ibid., p. 7. 19. Ibid., p. 9. 20. Ibid., pp. 10-11. 21. Ibid., p. 12. 22. Ibid., p. 14. 23. Ibid., pp. 17, 16. 24. Ibid., p. 19. 25. Ibid., p. 21. 26. Ibid., p. 31. 27. “Barnard girls secretly greet M-me Gorky”. Published in the newspaper World, 5 May, 1906. 28. Maxim Gorky, Khudozhestvennye proizvedenia. Statji. Zametki (Literary Works. Essays. Notes) (Moskva: Nauka, 1969), t. XII, p. 244. 29. John Dewey, “Culture and Industry in Education”, Manuscripts and Lecture Notes, box 51/12, p. 4. [1906 May]. TM. Morris Library, Southern Illinois University . 30. John Dewey, Democracy and Education, in The Middle Works of John Dewey, vol. 9, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980), p. 14. 31. Ibid., pp. 24-25. 32. Spargo, “With Maxim Gorky in the Adirondacks. A Week with Maxim Gorky”, p. 150. 33. John Dewey, “Democracy is Radical”, in The Later Works of John Dewey, vol. 11, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987), pp. 298–299. 34. Maxim Gorky, Mother (McLean, VA: IndyPublish.com), p. 63. 35. Spargo, “With Maxim Gorky in the Adirondacks. A Week with Maxim Gorky”, p. 149. 36. N.E. Burenin, “Poezdka A.M. Gorkogo v Ameriku (A.M. Gorky’s Trip to America)”, in: M. Gorky v vospominaniyah sovremennikov (M. Gorky in Memories of his Contemporaries) (Moskva: Goslitizdat, 1955). 37. At the end of June-beginning of July 1906, Maria Andreeva wrote to Е.F. Krit: “Frequently our hostess Prestonia Martin is pathetically attentive to me. I fell ill and she did leave for a moment, took care of me as if of a child; as hard as she can she tries to please me and adores Alesha. I know that she is quite an unusual person for the US, kind and hearty, but even she sometimes amazes me with such inescapable main of alien understanding and point of view, that all

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of a sudden I start to feel as if in front of some unseen and unknown zoological type with some touch of psyche” (Maria F. Andreeva, Perepiska. Vospominania. Statiji. Dokumenty (Correspondence. Memoirs. Essays. Documents) (Moskva: Iskusstvo, 1961), p. 109; transl. L.B. 38. Porter, “East Hill. Two Experiments in Social Living”, pp. 29–30. 39. The conference took place in August 19–26 (September, 1–8), 1906. 40. Gorky to Elena Malinovskaya. Capri. December 1906. In: Arkhiv A.M. Gorkogo, t. XIV, 1976, p. 312; transl. L.B. 41. Gorky, Mother, p. 64. 42. Ibid., p. 16. 43. I. P. Smirnov, Bytie i tvorchestvo (Being and Creation Work) (SanktPeterburg, 1996), pp. 164–165. 44. William James, The Correspondence of William James, vol. 11., April 1905 – March 1908, ed. Ignas K. Skrupskelis and Elizabeth M. Berkeley (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2003), p. xliv. 45. Ibid., pp. 270–271. 46. Ibid., p. xliv. 47. This characteristic of utopianism results from the essence of utopianism: being that in utopia triumphs over consciousness has to cling to death penalty as the only radical means that takes away being from consciousness (Smirnov, Bytie i tvorchestvo, p. 168). 48. Smirnov, Bytie i tvorchestvo, p. 160. 49. Gorky, Mother, p. 39. 50. Georg Lukács, “Realism in the Balance”, in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent B. Leitch (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2001), p. 1049. 51. William James, The Principles of Psychology, vol. 2 (New York: Dover Publications, 1890/1950) , p. 322. 52. William Dean Howells was part of the Gorky committee organized in the US to support Gorky during his visit. 53. James, The Correspondence of William James, vol. 11, p. xliv. 54. Barry P. Scherr, “Gorky and God-Building”, in William James in Russian Culture, ed. Joan Delaney Grossman and Ruth Rischin (Lanham, Boulder, New York, Oxford: Lexington Books, 2003), pp. 196–197. 55. Prestonia Mann Martin, Is Mankind Advancing? (New York: The Baker & Taylor Company, 1910).

SELF AND POLITICS

Ten TOWARDS A PRAGMATIC RECONSTRUCTION OF INTERNATIONAL INSTITUTIONS: TRAVELING SELVES AND EPISTEMIC COSMOPOLITANISM Thomas C. Hilde 1. Globalization and Democracy as a Way of Life The institutional shape of global governance is a crucial contemporary issue because of the existence of widespread problems and general agreement that some pressing issues affect everyone regardless of national boundaries and economic status. The problems are such that they must be dealt with collectively and often, unavoidably, globally. Problems such as global warming, human rights abuses, disease, and so on require economic, legal, and political problemsolving mechanisms that transcend traditional state boundaries. Global governance, as it currently exists, involves states, international development institutions, transnational corporations, mechanisms of international law, and the institutions of trade liberalization as governing agents. A global system in which each of these elements is somehow consistent in letter and spirit with the others is impossible and probably undesirable. But if global problems necessitate reconstructed institutions of global governance, then a further problem is generated from the widely shared value of democracy: how do these existing and future forms of governance adopt democratic means and ends? This element – reconciling international institutions and democratic practices – is perhaps the most intractable problem of global governance. We might say that international institutions are attempts to eliminate political, economic, and scientific uncertainty. But there’s nothing certain about democracy. The pragmatic democratic ideal is ultimately to create and continually recreate political, social, and economic conditions through which people live through the broadest possible participation in the reconstruction of institutions, and through the full application of intelligence in the name of qualitative individual and social growth. Democracy supplies epistemic and social conditions for such growth. It comprises at least three mutually

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supporting elements: 1) basic instrumental institutions of democracy; 2) a form of deliberative social and ethical inquiry; and 3) an ideal, communal “way of life,” as John Dewey put it.1 The first has wide acceptance as a philosophical and practical matter – suffrage, free speech, and so on – and finds its most significant battles in the disparities between different cultures’ visions of these institutions. We know these instruments are problematic in practice since they often suffer from rhetorical excess and shallow mechanics, but I’ll leave this point aside. The second will also remain largely implicit in this discussion. The third facet, however, has always perplexed me. Democracy is an ideal, the “idea of community life itself,” as Dewey says. It represents the best of collective, evolving human endeavor, for Dewey, as the political form of experimental inquiry. This is the activity of “trying, on the one hand, to discover how to attain or realize the life that is desirable and, on the other, to determine what is, or could be, meant by ‘desirable.’”2 As we know well by now, this is never an entirely solitary, individual project. Democratic institutions provide significant advantages for these activities. But how does democracy as an ideal function and what would it mean for people to live fully a democratic way of life? Dewey insisted that it begins by living in communities of “face-to-face” interpersonal interactions. But isn’t this now a bit too quaint? Communitarians and some pragmatists often use for examples those forms of cultural and traditional “community” that appear to lock identity politics into place: Québécois, Welsh, Christian, Amish, etc. Of course, selves are shaped by membership in complex geometries of overlapping groups and identities that change over time and place and inspire various degrees of loyalty. The above kinds of ethical-cultural communities are, in fact, not totalities on the genuinely experimentalist view but loose fits in constant transformation, with internal differences and permeable membranes, as many contemporary anthropologists have acknowledged. We’re likely better off not taking as fixed and “natural” that which is an evolving historical contingency. But we often do precisely that when we think of the units to which value and political agency are or should be ascribed. As a practical matter, contemporary deliberative democratic community seems feasible only in small-scale societies, towns, or neighborhoods, as many have pointed out (and thus appears naturally identifiable with communitarian groups). It is not possible to have everyone affected by institutional decisions to be “conversationally present.” Institutionally, such a democracy would have almost zero purchase on the affective dimensions of whatever approximates actual community. We are led to the need for what Robert Goodin refers to as the “imaginatively present” in deliberation. 3 What and who are we then imagining?

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Allow me to set the scene with an overview of a set of problems I see in international agreements, which I think is indicative of broader problematic assumptions regarding global governance. The evolving global situation outpaces the internal and external theoretical assumptions and tools used to develop and analyze such agreements. Some of the tools in the toolbox are obstacles to better (better, because problem-solving) global governance rather than useful instrumentalities. I’ll then take a bit of a narrative flight of fancy in briefly sketching the contours of what I call the traveling self and epistemic cosmopolitanism as entry points to rethinking the basic contemporary nature of global institutions. 2. The Institutionalization of Global Agreement There is an overwhelming emphasis by both negotiators and analysts on compliance with rules and regulations in the formation and analysis of international agreements. It is, of course, easier to comply with new rules if the rules and their demands are clear, but even easier if they do not require much effort or changes in behavior. Herein rests a central problem of global governance. International agreements tend to have a more or less linear and standardized framework of, first and obviously, a publicly perceived transnational problem such as biodiversity loss or climate change, which generates an action-motivating consensus strong enough to effect potential compliance with the eventual norms of an agreement. Second: A series of negotiations. The nature of negotiations is such that the eventual agreement is a set of rules for which achieving compliance is a matter of member states viewing the overall agreement as corresponding to and taking up their own interest calculations. The agreement is then drafted, involving further negotiation, revision, and generalization. It all seems rather flexible, revisable, and civil. Agreements then move into compliance mode where, as it happens, their effectiveness is defined less in terms of solving the initial motivating problem and more in terms of the extent to which states comply with the agreement by enacting and enforcing domestic laws in accordance with the treaty. This gives rise, of course, to much discussion about the problems of free-riding, disparities in state power and differentiated responsibilities, reassessment of the treaty’s details in light of individual states’ cooperation, each state’s capacity to carry out the agreements, and adjustments in enforcement techniques necessary for the agreement to be integrated into recalcitrant states’ policies. Most analysis of such agreements focuses on these important elements. But notice that they are all located at the back end of an agreement, facets of the issue of compliance.

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To the extent that parties comply with a treaty or regime, the treaty may be viewed as “effective.” This is often how effectiveness is gauged, as opposed to, say, whether or not the agreement actually goes some distance towards solving the concrete problem it initially set out to solve. Since parties do indeed come to the table, however, there exists some prior normative basis for consensus. But the overwhelming focus on compliance is problematic because, in this approach, …individuals (and groups) start with a clear end (goal) in mind, they gather evidence of the costs and efficacy of alternative means for reaching that end, and they then select the most advantageous means for achieving that predetermined end. The ‘best’ means is the one in which the net economic value (benefits of the end minus costs of the means) is as large as possible. Notice here the naïve presumption of a clear distinction between ends and means, and notice that ends and means do not change in the course of calculating the ‘best’ means to reach the predetermined end.4 The principal assumption is that agreement will only take place to the extent that the problem to be resolved is viewed from the perspective of each state’s net (economic) interests as serious enough for states to act in accord with other states. The corollary assumption of the compliance focus is that each state will seek to avoid as much as possible any infringements upon its own sovereignty or national interests, where these interests are usually defined in economic terms. Given the emphasis on compliance outcomes of the institutionalization process itself, consensual agreement becomes the problem to be solved. The effectiveness of a treaty is judged in terms of economic (substantive) and, secondarily, juridical (procedural) considerations, where these are circumscribed in order to eliminate the presumably ineliminable contentiousness of joint deliberation between self-interested agents. When the issue at stake is one of environmental well-being, for instance, institutions might be highly effective and efficient on juridical or economic grounds. But they may be entirely ineffective in resolving or even explaining the concrete environmental problem that motivated the initial concern. The real problem is that the very nature of “effectiveness” is commonly taken as endogenous to the economic or juridical sphere that directs most policy-making, and “once something is made endogenous, it is no longer capable of being explained by the structure within which it is embedded.”5 Another way of putting this is that the claims and terms of agreement are at best weakly justifiable to a concerned public, the source of the motivating action, because the conventional procedural drive towards agreement might well become an obstacle itself to resolving the initial problem

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(or at least acting on behalf of public moral concerns). The initial problem might then continue apace exogenously. A pragmatist winces at assumptions about unitary and static self-interest or state interest, considering them unreflective habits, and questioning the very nature of institutional “consensus” and “success” even collectively constituted upon these grounds. Such institutions often solve only those problems they set for themselves. A focus on compliance with its built-in notion of effectiveness generates incentives towards simply making the conditions of agreement easy to meet. It assumes – whether at the level of individual selves or states – that these individuals know a priori what they want, what they will do, and, further, that any flexibility is a function of a more precise perception of one’s own interests. The most common measure of this interest is, of course, net economic value. It is not the extent to which the informed public’s perception of the problem is met or the empirical nature of the problem is resolved. We often simply end up with a product of an agreement industry that leaves misguided assumptions intact. Individual or state self-interest in conflict with – indeed, as the keystone of – compliance is one such assumption. In philosophy, we know well that this is a drastically incomplete picture of human selves and of states. Moreover, complex and consequential political and moral questions are not reducible to predetermined interests as objects and rationality as essentially a matter of efficiency and success on the part of agents in choosing and achieving those objects. Now, some recent work among institutional analysts acknowledges that, in addition to interests, normative commitments, dynamic ideas, beliefs, and non-economic values are all crucial factors in determining the shape of institutions and the reasons for their very existence. Yet, the tools of development and analysis of international institutions, those concrete instantiations of globalization, remain anchored in the older assumptions. 6 This matters because these assumptions imply specific notions about the relevant agents at the individual and state level, how they think or ought to think, and what they should want if they are rational when they are engaged in developing institutional instruments of global governance. In other words, they are charged with normative implications while generally denying the significance of normative commitments in shaping institutions. But normative commitments are actually of the essence. Democratic experimentalism entails the confrontation of these commitments with those of others who are and will be affected by the institutions they ostensibly help to create. What might prompt a more democratically experimental, grounded approach? Many think the answer lies in the complex and dynamic configurations of global civil society.7 Global civil society organizations use the communication and information technologies of economic globalization in order to challenge and reform the limits and legitimacy of state and global

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institutional power. This is achieved not only through shaming and other techniques, but also through serving to inform moral and political obligations and commitments of domestic polities that apply pressure on institutional power “from below.” This creates a feedback loop of publics: not only in the Deweyan sense of publics organized spontaneously in response to perceived indirect consequences of collective behavior, but of a global flow of information that transforms domestic concerns. Global civil society has little direct effect on states except through publicizing transgressions of the emerging and perhaps necessarily vague sense of a global ethic. Where it does have the most effect is in the loop through which global civil publics themselves are formed out of perceived effects of actions and the seeking of solutions. The process is experimental in fits and starts. I want to add some further considerations at this point. Many focus on relatively new features of global society – such as the various elements of global civil society – as presenting challenges to orthodox modes of institutionbuilding, and as a consequence of economic and technological developments. To the extent that these associations genuinely represent previously marginalized normative commitments, values, and political and economic claims, they are indeed a challenge to orthodox forms of global governance and institutionbuilding. I suggest, however, that global civil society would not exist if its growth had come not only with economic globalization but also hand-in-hand with two normative and conceptual sources of experimentally democratic, public, and global problem-solving I call traveling selves and epistemic cosmopolitanism. 3. Traveling Selves Kwame Anthony Appiah, in his recent book, Cosmopolitanism, suggests that rather than try to preserve cultures as somehow static entities, we ought to praise what he calls the “contamination” of cultures as both a historical reality and a healthy ideal. Appiah wants to reinvigorate the notion of “world citizenship.” Intellectual, economic, and political elites often wear this coat, and many commentators are therefore critical of cosmopolitanism as an elitist ideal. Yet, I believe that Appiah is correct when he says that “thoroughgoing ignorance about the ways of others is largely a privilege of the powerful.”8 He, however – like communitarians and others – portrays cosmopolitanism multiculturally rather than pluralistically, as if cosmopolitanism involves an aggregation of communities of identity with some confusing overlaps and, thus, contradictions. The traveling self is more complex and dynamic than Appiah’s world citizen. My claim, developed further below, is that we are already in many ways de facto epistemic cosmopolitans in varying degrees because we are

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increasingly compelled as intersubjective beings in an undeniably pluralistic world to internalize the perspectives of others through imaginative projection. Even if ultimately forced by the material circumstances of our world to render “imaginatively present” the views and problems of others, through perhaps a new form of involuntary association, and even if we might currently have serious reasons to be pessimistic about the human capacity to do so, as pragmatists we ought to rejoice in the fact because epistemic cosmopolitanism opens us to the experimentalism latent in these circumstances. “Traveling selves” are the possessors of epistemic cosmopolitanism. In the following loose account, I submit for consideration the metaphor of the traveler as the experiential stand-in for an experimental mode of inquiry that navigates the tension between unreflective habits of action and creative accomplishments. The term “travel” suggests not only movement, but suffering affliction or distress, undergoing labor or the pains of parturition, of giving birth, “travail.” This travailing/traveling aspect of experience reflects George Santayana’s thoughts on travel. In his essay, “The Philosophy of Travel,” he says of “thinking while you walk” that, “the scene as a whole is found to change with the changed station of the traveler, revealing to him his separate existence and his always limited scope, together with the distinction (which is all wisdom in a nutshell) between how things look and what they are.”9 Some forms of travel do not lead to the experiences through which new forms of community or shared cosmopolitan projects may be critically evaluated and reconstructed. They are products of force or are accepted inattentively. Exiles and refugees are coerced to different degrees. Tourists seek pleasure. Dinner-party travelers conversationally bring up those experiences of their traveling that others are unlikely to have replicated. Still others talk about travels and authenticity – that my experience approached a central spiritual core to cross-cultural or self- understanding that others have not touched, the moment where everything became clear and against which the seemingly trite tales of others trivialize this clarity. Others check places off mental lists. Some wander the world with a backpack and a diary, earning their way like migrant workers who must do the same for their very existence. Some tour the world in great comfort and return with menacing tales of the dark taxi driver who led them through poverty-ridden back streets and then overcharged them upon arrival at the hotel. One tells these various stories and one learns from these experiences. Sometimes they represent the central social problems of the time captured in narrative form. What is it like for the weary Western backpacker, sick from giardia and the early fevers of malaria, to float through the severest poverty of dystrophic Bombay and arrive on the swept marble steps of the luxurious Taj Mahal Hotel? This traveler recovers in the cool bath in his room, ordering room service, steps out of the hotel smelling faintly of lavender soap to see that

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he has just spent perhaps two or three years’ income of the scabbed mendicant at his feet. Home and the foreign come tragically together in such moments of cold, global economic continuity. In the unwieldy language of authenticity, this traveler lives an even greater life of luxury to be able to backpack – isn’t it in fact more genuine for him to remain in the hotel or at home? Or is it to step out of that luxury and into the full ethical revelation of his small, ignominious contribution to the experiential exhaust and human disasters of the world? A traveling self is one that finds its own ends, values, and beliefs partially called into question, into doubt, by the spotlight that is cast on this self’s difference from others around it and disorientation of foreign places, values, and beliefs. In the places where he comes to rest momentarily during these travels, in the encounters with strangers, this self is at first alone, ostensibly detached from his history and the immediate presence of its orienting belief framework. No other in the place in which he finds himself is like him, it appears, or he may recognize comforting similarities through momentary glimpses. One reaction is that he remains satisfied in this unique difference and fortifies it by insisting on his previous truths or values as more essential to himself than theirs. Or, concomitantly, he asserts the superiority of these truths or values like a conquistador or missionary and closes off the possibility of transformative encounters. This is the fundamentalist’s urge. Alternatively, pragmatically, he may question the verity of the difference, the solidity of this self he finds isolated, even if the modes of interpretation and evaluation remain within a communal framework. Whichever – the fundamentalist or the self-critic – he eventually becomes disoriented in the face of the resistances of experience, which can destroy unreflective expectations. Events occur for which his categories of understanding, modes of interpretation, habits, and valuations are exposed as inadequate. But for the experimental inquirer this disorientation may serve as the formerly impossible moment of reflexivity and viewing his strangeness as others might view it. He can’t know how others actually view his strangeness – he perceives the persistence of his own modes of behavior, now salient through their pragmatic awkwardness. There is no external view from which to view his self, only observed reactions to it. These observations appear as a difference he cannot understand, his interpretation of them as a problem in itself. This disruption of his habitual self-evidence and what he takes to be community does not show him the critical truth of his ends, values, and beliefs. It presents him with the project of selfjustification of them, a justification that may fall on strangely deaf ears. He thus learns to reconstruct this self and the self-justification in ways that the others so seemingly different from him might understand. When he engages in this reconstruction he is learning to communicate in their language, behavior, and beliefs. He is adapting to whoever he supposes they might be. Then again perhaps he is mistaken in his assessment of who the others are and how they

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view him. How people really are is called into question by his rearticulation of himself in a foreign context that demands trust in others. Trust is a matter of acting in a moment in which the validity of hypotheses about how best to act cannot be determined until one has willingly acted. The traveler has now evolved from the stage of being entirely adrift, of being entirely indebted to a framework of habitual orientation for which in this context there had no longer been secure recourse. Instead of some impossible total loss of communal identity, his former community no longer represents the meaningfulness it did prior to the voyage, the travail. So where is he? Who is he? To what community does he belong? The answer seems to rest in the banality of a language that he happens to share with others in a different part of the world, a language he no longer uses in the place where he now is. He upholds some of the former beliefs and traditions – others fade as irrelevant. He happens to share experiences and particular values, and perhaps particular historical narratives, with some of these distant people. He happens to share interests in particular projects. Yet now he also knows something about the experiences he shares with these others. He has gradually developed a language, however fallible that language may be when it comes to accurately representing others and shared experience. He now knows that he no longer entirely shares those values and beliefs that others on the opposite side of the globe appear to accept, some of which he may now find quite unreasonable. Not only is the content of the communal framework transformed, but the framework itself is eroded at its edges. It has evolved in such a way that it has become by default more inclusive of differences than his previous collection of habits of interpretation, belief, action, and expressions of membership. It has become a partial melting away of the particular biases comprising these habits, replacing them with new ones to be renegotiated. He may find that he loves these formerly strange people as deeply as he loves those who were like him in sound, behavior, belief, and appearance. He finds that this love has translated into some semblance of understanding and loyalty that sets him apart from who he used to think he was. He arrives at the understanding that the sentiments of inchoate and fragile community are found in unlikely places. The idea of the traveling self goes to the heart of how communities are formed or are in the ideal processes of being formed now. Communities, like selves, are not exclusively preordained cultural existents. They are processes, ongoing creations composed out of the only relatively stable and objective material of traditions and the beliefs of which they are constituted. They are also creations of the present experience of traveling selves, an experience into which we are plunged by the risk-laden economic vanguard of globalization. The traveling self also learns that the boundaries of ethnocentrism are elaborate theoretical constructs as much as the content or consequences of ethnocentrism are failures of accommodation in regard to a pluralistic world.

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He therefore also does not take up an “outsider within” view, but negotiates the values, habits, beliefs, knowledge, and practices of his situations through a combination of relatively stable cultural and epistemic reference points, created imaginings that may turn out quite differently than expected, gesture, varying degrees of linguistic competence, good will, and experimental intelligence. He embodies an ever-shifting form of cosmopolitanism without having to apply universalizing laws to the world – the very notion runs contrary to the traveling self. He understands that intelligence works analogous to his own traveling across the map – through settlements and displacements, disruption and accident, and flexible habits as the means of bringing the disruptions under control in changed situations, however contingent. The story here follows the basic pragmatic pattern of doubt initiated by a problematic situation, dialogue, transformation, and the return to resolving the initial problem and doubt from a changed intersubjective position. But the significance here is not that it is an issue of identity, as much popular and academic literature puts factual pluralism. The significance is epistemic, having to do with the deliberate and deliberative intersubjective formulation of belief and knowledge as habits of action. Isn’t this default epistemic cosmopolitanism at the core of a democratic way of life? Wouldn’t democracy as a way of life entail conflict, disorientation, and a constant quest to slake the concomitant real doubt? Might this not be opposed, institutionally, to orthodox state and international procedures of institutionalization and regime-formation based in fixed a priori interests, preferences, and even the expectation of what it means for a state to function well? 4. Epistemic Cosmopolitanism10 Moral cosmopolitanism generally constitutes sets of arguments for obligations to aid human beings as individual human beings apart from the boundaries of region or nation. It includes foreigners or strangers as candidates for moral consideration and obligation rather than only those in the more intimate relations of community. Political cosmopolitanism generally insists on the view that political institutions should map onto and reflect these moral duties, especially in response to problems that cross boundaries. Such institutions could range from “world government” to interactively layered local, regional, and global institutions. Generally, however, they require prior acceptance of some kind of liberal consensus built upon a strong notion of individual rights, and this can risk its own fundamentalism. In contrast to these approaches, the outlook of epistemic cosmopolitanism (abbreviated here as EC) has the advantage of an empirical, pragmatic basis absent in the utopianism of moral and political cosmopolitanism. Like communitarian

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views, epistemic cosmopolitanism accepts and defends the possibility of a “thickness” of values and beliefs embedded in particular contexts of culture, history, and environment. It repeats the mantra of orthodox liberalism’s challengers that there is no one discernible moral or political viewpoint beyond such contexts that could legitimately represent all concerns, beliefs, and values of all communities. As a form of cosmopolitanism, however, EC treats those contexts empirically as increasingly globalized, with their attendant cultural pluralism, social complexity, and inequalities. It takes the continuity of tradition seriously; but it also takes seriously the possibilities of involuntary association, curiosity, experiment, and transformation by indicating that our individual and communal knowing, valuing, and believing draw upon, contribute to, and are critiqued against a “thick” and globalizing range of ideas, beliefs, practices, events, and traditions. Some problems we face individually and collectively may be tackled best through reexamining or reconstructing the conceptions of individual or community with which we start. In other words, EC takes as its starting point the basic idea that communities and individuals are not fixed but evolving entities and that, at the same time, our attachments do indeed richly constitute whatever we mean by identity. EC expresses the fallibility and partiality of the positions brought to the table in resolving practical problems. It celebrates not the detached “citizen of the world” belonging to no place and no one, collecting various cultural trophies, but contextualized peoples whose “memberships” stretch beyond traditional notions of membership and the institutions in which they are often embodied. A broader contribution and variety of practical means and ends for thinking through problems is thus inherently collective and evolving. Even if participants in collective action are not all led by or towards one overarching normative view, they are at least aware of the practical constraints, partiality, and possibilities of their own and others’ views. If there is a basis for genuinely democratic institutions grounded in democracy as a way of life, wouldn’t this be it? And, despite our pessimism, isn’t current history full of its potential? Epistemic cosmopolitanism as an analytical tool shows that democratic community lags behind global problem-solving instruments. Such instruments are then detached from important values. How does it expose this lag? First, it identifies the conflicting philosophical formulations involved, but frees us from trying to fix them. Rather, it redirects our focus to addressing the failures of a given international institution to effectively address the actual problems on the ground. Second, it suggests vigilance in regard to means themselves for how they can shape or embody worldviews that deter multiple perspectives on globally consequential practices, including the reality of individual perspectives that are multiple (traveling selves). Third, then, it points to ways of mutually transforming individual, communal, and institutional behavior: by readjusting incentives; by telling different stories – that is, stories that evoke sympathy and

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identify the deleterious aspects of current practices; and by drawing on diverse disciplines such as anthropology, law, economics, and science for further tools instead of reaching for a new philosophical one or an orthodox economic one in reconstructing institutions. The very existence of international agreements and their pressures from global civil society reflects the irreducibly complex normative conscience of traveling selves as they seek incipient forms of collective action to resolve transnational and domestic problems. What these institutions need now are tools of development and analysis – of travail – that stack up to the realities, loyalties, and aspirations not of the internal scaffolding of orthodox analysis and the problems generated therein, and not of interests somehow predetermined by arbitrary circumstances, but of epistemically cosmopolitan traveling selves.

NOTES 1. See John Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct, in The Middle Works of John Dewey, vol. 14, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988); The Public and Its Problems, vol. 2, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984); “A Theory of Valuation”, in The Later Works of John Dewey, vol. 13, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988). 2. Raymond Geuss, History and Illusion in Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 125. 3. Robert Goodin, “Democratic Deliberation Within”, Philosophy & Public Affairs 29 (2000), 1. 4. Daniel W. Bromley, Sufficient Reason: Volitional Pragmatism and the Meaning of Economic Institutions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), p. 144. 5. Ibid. p. 70. 6. John L. Campbell, Institutional Change and Globalization (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). See especially Chapter 4. 7. Margaret Keck, and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists beyond Borders (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998). 8. Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006), p. xviii. 9. George Santayana, The Birth of Reason and Other Essays (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968), p. 9. 10. Some paragraphs here are adapted from Thomas C. Hilde, “The Cosmopolitan Project: Does the Internet Have a Global Public Face?”, in The Internet in Public Life, ed. Gehring Verna (Lanham, MD and Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2004).

Eleven GENOCIDE’S AFTERMATH: REFLECTIONS ON SELF AND RESPONSIBILITY Armen Marsoobian Recent controversies in the historical debate about the Armenian genocide have raised some intellectually challenging philosophical and historiographical problems. As is well known, the government of the Republic of Turkey denies that the events that transpired in Ottoman Turkey in the period 1915-1923 qualify as a genocide. Armenians, especially those in the diaspora, have attempted to counter this denial by seeking official recognition of the Armenian genocide by national and local governments, multi-state associations, and academic societies. For example, the European Parliament passed a non-binding resolution in 2005 setting out recognition of the genocide as a precondition for Turkey’s admission into the European Union. My concern here is not with the politics of genocide recognition and denial or with the historical argument per se regarding what actually happened during those dark years early in the last century. This controversy has challenged me to rethink the very concept of genocide itself. This challenge will take the form of a reflection upon a number of questions, chief of which focuses upon how we are conceptually to identify the victims of genocide. Aiding my examination of these questions will be intuitions derived from the pragmatist ref lections on the social nature of the self. The conclusions I will reach are provisional and identify only the outline for future work. Most evidently, the first question that arises is the “What is?” question. What is genocide? The word itself was coined by the Polish-born American jurist Raphael Lemkin to capture the peculiarly heinous mass killings of Jews in Europe from 1942 to 1945 and of Ottoman Armenians from 1915 to 1923. The word has a Greek root, géno(s) meaning race and a Latin suffix, cide, meaning the act of killing. A standard dictionary definition would be “the deliberate and systematic extermination of a national, racial, political, or cultural group.”1 But as we all know, dictionary definitions do not get us very far in understanding a concept. So I will dig deeper and begin with the more extensive definition provided in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide that was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948 (and subsequently ratified by the United States in 1988). As I hope to show, this definition is deeply problematic.

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But as such it raises some important questions about the perpetrators and the victims of genocide: What behaviors and intentions qualify one as a perpetrator of genocide, and what needs to have happened to individuals for them to qualify as victims of genocide? Murderous intent and action on the part of the perpetrators and death for the victims are certainly not sufficient. In trying to answer the question of what distinguishes these sorts of killers from other mass killers and these sorts of victims from other victims of mass killing, I will employ some standard assumptions concerning the self that are found in the pragmatist tradition. The seemingly intractable issues surrounding genocide would remain ever more so without the richly nuanced relational conception of selfhood found in the writings of John Dewey, George Herbert Mead, and other pragmatists. This relational notion of self is succinctly captured by Dewey in the opening sentence of chapter 6 of Experience and Nature: “Personality, selfhood, subjectivity are eventual functions that emerge with complexly organized interactions, organic and social.”2 While I do not intend to sketch out Dewey’s notion of the self, a Deweyan naturalistic and pragmatic regard for the temporal, organic, and social will implicitly guide my thoughts in the ensuing analysis. We begin our analysis with the definition of genocide in the UN Convention of 1948: Genocide means any of the following acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:



(a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily harm; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.3

As a definition this formulation seems straightforward enough. Five particular actions are identified as acts of genocide if the requisite intent is present – “the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” But as it turns out, this initial part of the definition regarding intention has generated significant controversy. One obvious difficulty is with the fact that only four types of groups are identified. Why are race, nationality, ethnicity, and religion singled out for special moral status? Socio-economic class or political ideology seem to be ruled out. Pol Pot’s annihilation of millions of his fellow Cambodians or Stalin’s culpability in the deaths of a million kulaks would fall outside the extension of this definition. By singling out these groups, are we saying that there is

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something unique and morally repugnant in harming members of these groups as opposed to members of other groups? I believe that to a certain extent we are. This is so because the concept of genocide captures an important intuition that there is something especially heinous about this kind of killing as opposed to mass killings in general (such as the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki). Such moral intuitions are important and should not be brushed aside because they are conceptually inconvenient. A related issue that these two examples raise centers on the phrase “intent to destroy.” Stalin’s actions on one construal were not intended to destroy any particular group but were intended to destroy a way of life and replace it with another, that is, a collectivized farming system. The consequences were the destruction of millions of lives, but the intended goal was something else. Or so many would claim. Finally, the phrase “in whole or in part” is problematic. How significant a part? This is where the “numbers game” comes in. Must the body count reach a certain number before we can apply the word “genocide”? This “numbers game” has been played out with regard to the Armenian genocide. The Turkish government’s position is that only 300,000 Armenians perished during the “troubles,” while most historians place the number somewhere between a million and a million and a half. Of course, why they perished is an even more important matter of dispute. In more recent memory this issue has come up in the aftermath of the conflict in the former Yugoslavia. General Ratko Mladić and the political leader of Bosnian Serbs Radovan Karadžić have both been indicted for genocide, indictments based in large part on the death of 8,000 Bosnian Muslims (Bosniaks) in Srebrenica. In 2001, Radislav Krstić, a Serb commander who had led the assault on Srebrenica alongside Mladić, was convicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia (ICTY)) on genocide charges and received a sentence of 46 years to life in prison. These indictments and conviction have generated a great deal of controversy not just from the perspective of the Serbs but also from that of many experts in the field of international law. The introduction of the phrase “ethnic cleansing” in the 1990s to describe events in the former Yugoslavia reflects the discomfort many have had with the applicability of the concept of genocide to these events – a discomfort that reflects in part a worry about numbers. Of course, one may get around some of these qualms by reflecting more carefully on the words of the U. N. Convention. There has to be a certain sort of intent, and that intent has to be reflected in a certain sort of action. If the intent was there to destroy the Bosnian Muslims in whole or in part and one of the acts that carried out this intention was the killing of members of this group, then does it really matter how successful that act was in carrying out that intent, that is, does it really matter how many people were killed? It is at this point that a certain style of analytical argumentation has been employed by some

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philosophers who are troubled by the numbers game. This is a style of argument that employs imaginatively contrived counterexamples. The typical scenario would be one in which a lone individual who is unsuitably armed intends to annihilate the inhabitants of an ethnically homogenous nation-state but due to incompetence or chance fails to harm any more than a handful of people. But this lone individual scenario runs counter to our intuitions about genocide, that is, our intuition that numbers count, or so this counterexample goes. So if in this case we are willing to dismiss the genocide classification while still admitting the presence of genocidal intent, then we must, according to this argument, give up any attempt to define genocide in a manner similar to the one proposed in the Convention. Since the Convention definition doesn’t specify numbers and the small numbers in this scenario are morally counterintuitive, it therefore follows according to this thinking that the definition fails. But my pragmatist intuitions incline me to dismiss such contrived counterexamples, for they provide little moral clarity to this vexing problem of genocide identification. Genocides are never committed by lone individuals, no matter how powerful those individuals may be. Rather than considering such unrealistic hypothetical scenarios, we could more usefully spend our energies on untangling the complex motivations of Stalin and his followers and the causal relationship of those intentions with the facts on the ground, that is, the deaths of one million kulaks. The same can be said with regard to the Armenian genocide as is evidenced by the ongoing research of the Workshop on Armenian/Turkish Scholarship (WATS) and the recent Istanbul conference of Turkish historians who have begun the difficult process of open-mindedly examining the treatment of the Armenians during the declining years of the Ottoman Empire.4 These are prime examples of how good history trumps bad philosophy. But now it is time to see how good philosophy can aid history. I began this essay by identifying my motivation as lying in the historical controversy surrounding the understanding of the Armenian genocide. Let me explain some aspects of this controversy. On the one hand, some historians have concentrated their energies in making sense of the intentions behind the Young Turk leadership (the Committee on Union and Progress) that was in power in the crucial years immediately preceding and following the outbreak of the First World War; recent research has shed much light on the motivations and planning of the events that transpired in this period. On the other hand, some historians have tried to contextualize these events by examining the intentions and activities of all the players involved in what the British historian Donald Bloxham has called “the great game of genocide.”5 Here such factors as Armenian nationalism, Russian expansionism, the legitimate and illegitimate fears of the Turkish leadership, and the maneuvers of the Allied powers and those of Turkey’s ally Germany have all played significant roles. Added to these factors is the often-volatile mix of ethnicities living in the historical Armenian

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homeland of central and eastern Anatolia. Sorting out the relative importance of these factors is the job of a good historian. Good philosophy can be of some assistance in a number of respects. Let us revisit the question of intention and then relate this to the nature of the harm involved in events such as those that marked this period in history. Intentionality is a thorny philosophical issue. The literature in this area is immense, but it is safe to say that short of direct confessions most intentions are judged by our interpretation of actions and communications. In the historical context this takes the form of interpreting the written record from the time in question and connecting it to how the facts on the ground transpired. As I mentioned above, this is being done with regard to the Armenian genocide. Although the archival evidence incontrovertibly establishes that the Young Turk government of the time gave deportation orders to remove the Armenian population from central and eastern Anatolia to locations in Syria away from the eastern front with Russia, do such actions meet the requirement of intention in the genocide definition? What must the content of the required intention be? Must the relevant intention include the destruction of all members of the group as its aim? This is where a distinction needs to be made. The pursuit of one’s aims involves consequences, some intended, some not. With regard to morality, it is important to distinguish between foreseeable consequences and unforeseeable consequences. Generally speaking we are not held to be morally responsible for the consequences of our actions that were unforeseen at the time. But this is sometimes qualified by a further question. Given our knowledge of the facts at the time, was it reasonable not to foresee some harmful consequence of our actions? The question of whether we should have known the harmful consequences of our intended actions is a different sort of question from that of whether we actually knew or predicted those harmful consequences. A historian may well establish a positive response to the former sort of question without ever clearly establishing such a response to the latter. Moral culpability may be established for reasonably foreseeable harms even when there is no clear intention to cause harm. This is especially so if the chosen means to carry out such aims carries an inherent risk of harm. The genocide scholar Israel Charny sees Stalin’s drive for collectivization in this light. Even though Stalin’s intent was to obtain enough grain to trade for goods crucial for the Soviet Union’s drive for industrialization and not a policy of intentionally killing millions through famine, he did foresee or should have foreseen the deadly consequences of his policies. Stalin’s collectivization policies do count as genocidal on Charny’s reading. 6 Was the Turkish government’s policy of deporting the Armenians to the Der Zor region of Syria a similarly genocidal policy despite its ostensible aim of removing a possibly traitorous population from a war zone? The Turkish historian Fuat Dindar has recently established that the interior minister who

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signed the deportation orders, Talât Bey, was the same minister who had commissioned and commented upon a number agricultural studies of the Der Zor region during the period immediately preceding the events of 1915.7 These reports clearly state the total unsuitability of the desert region around Der Zor for population transfers. Even on the most charitable of readings of the aims behind the deportation orders, the Young Turks had the requisite knowledge to predict the fatal consequences of these orders. Here we move well beyond the moral-culpability standard of “they should have known” to that of “they did know.” I have said much so far about the perpetrators of genocide but not much about the victims. What distinguishes the intent of a Stalin, a Hitler, or the Young Turks from the intent of just any mass murderer? I contend that what makes their intentions genocidal is the unique type of harm that is perpetrated on the victims of this particular sort of mass murder. The type of harm inflicted on the victims of genocide is ethically distinct from the harm inflicted in other kinds of mass murder. This is why the numbers game does not have the moral significance that some would claim. Body count is not the appropriate distinction, because with genocide we have the intentional destruction of selfhood, not just of bodies. The evil of genocide involves more than the biological destruction of individuals; it also involves the social destruction of self. The feminist philosopher Claudia Card has appropriated the term “social death” to characterize this destruction of self. 8 It is her contention, a contention that I share, that the harm of social death is what is unique to the crime of genocide. I earlier quoted Dewey to the effect that selfhood involves a complexly organized interaction of the organic and the social. This is the social self that undergoes the social death of genocide. Dewey, as well as Mead and others, recognized that meaningful human existence is necessarily social. The destruction of one’s community, which in many cases of genocide occurs before or contemporaneously with the biological destruction of individuals in that community, is a crucial component of the evil inherent in genocide. When members of one’s family are removed, whether they are killed or not, the social vitality of human relationship is destroyed. When communities are uprooted from the geographical landscape of communal memory, social vitality is destroyed. When communication is restricted or prohibited between members of a community, social vitality is destroyed. When communal life is disrupted or destroyed in these ways, intergenerational memory is lost. The kind of harm suffered by individual victims of genocide, in virtue of their group identity, is not captured by other types of crime. The social death involved in genocide may under this formulation apply to the survivors of such atrocities. Dating a genocide by the date on which the physical killing ends is problematic on this view. Did the Holocaust end in 1945, or will it end when the last survivor dies? When is closure achieved? Does genocide end when repair begins? What is

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painfully troubling for some Armenians is the fact that their genocide has never been acknowledged by the perpetrators or by succeeding Turkish governments. If denial is a component of genocide, does the genocide continue if the denial continues? These are troubling questions, ones that I cannot answer in this essay. I would like to raise one last issue before concluding. My earlier discussion of intention centered too much on the individualistic. Genocides require collective actions, often by vast numbers of perpetrators. If we look at three historical cases of genocide, the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust, and the Rwandan genocide, we see three cases of collective action. All three involved central coordination, but in varying degrees. With regard to the Holocaust, there was a high degree of central coordination. We are all aware of the death camps and the machinery of the Final Solution. In the case of Rwanda, there was a lesser degree of control. In Rwanda there was both explicit and direct involvement by Hutu elements of the government, the military, and militias armed by the government. There was also a high degree of civilian mob-inspired participation that took the form of neighbors killing neighbors. The Armenian genocide included perpetrators ranging from the military, the gendarmes, and armed criminal elements, some from the local Kurdish population and others consisting of relocated Turks who were themselves victims of the ethnic wars in the Balkans. The perpetrators of these genocides acted collectively. Much has been written in the philosophical literature about collective action. There is a vast literature to explore, and space constraints do not allow me to rehearse many of the standard arguments here. Some of this literature, such as Peter French’s, was developed in the context of examining the ethical responsibilities of business corporations. French and Margaret Gilbert have argued that the notion of collective agency is dependent upon the existence of corporate or collective subjects. Others, such as Christopher Kutz and Bill Wringe, have argued that collective agency should be understood in terms of individuals acting collectively and not as the actions of collectives.9 Looking at the historical accounts of genocide from these two approaches leads me to some tentative conclusions, ones that I cannot fully argue for here. On the first approach, that of a collective subject, identifying just who composes this collective subject becomes a tricky business. The collective intention here may be harder to pin down because of the disparate intentions and aims of the various perpetrators. What works as a model for corporate action may not work for genocides. On the second approach, it seems easier to identify a collective intention that each of the perpetrators subscribes to in varying degrees and with varying levels of awareness. Different perpetrators may even formulate this collective project in different terms. Perpetrators act individually but with participatory intentions. Their actions contribute in some manner to a collective project – whether it

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be the Final Solution or the Armenian Question. What makes this approach especially attractive is that even though the individual perpetrator needs to have some sort of awareness of the collective project, he or she does not need to be aware of the scope and dimensions of the project. This may at times facilitate the recruiting of greater numbers of perpetrators. One might not be aware of the other participants in the genocide, nor be aware of their roles. Full mutual recognition need not be evident. For instance, those Kurds who took advantage of the situation during the deportation of the Armenians by robbing and raping the columns of women, children, and elderly were not centrally coordinated from Istanbul, nor were they vaguely aware of the dimensions of what was taking place. Yet under this approach they were just as much joint participants in the genocide as was the cabinet in Istanbul. In conclusion, what I have sketched above about the nature of genocidal intentions and the suffering of genocide victims is only by way of a beginning in my attempt to understand the concept of genocide. For it is only through such an understanding that the evil of genocides past can be repaired and of genocides future be prevented. NOTES 1. Random House Webster’s College Dictionary (New York: Random House, 2000). 2. John Dewey, Experience and Nature, in The Later Works of John Dewey, vol. 1, ed, Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1981), p. 162. 3. “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide”, United Nations, Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, www.unhchr.ch/html/menu3/b/p_genoci.htm (accessed March 27, 2007). 4. Workshop on Armenian/Turkish Scholarship (WATS), www.armturkwokshop.org/. 5. Donald Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism, and the Destruction of Ottoman Armenians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 6. Israel Charny, “Toward a Generic Definition of Genocide”, in Genocide: Conceptual and Historical Dimensions, ed. George Andreopoulos (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), pp. 64-94. 7. Fuat Dindar, “Verser un peuple au desert: Comme une ‘solution définitive’ à la question arménienne,” unpublished paper presented at the fifth meeting of the Workshop on Armenian/Turkish Scholarship, New York University, May 15, 2006. 8. Claudia Card, “Genocide and Social Death”, in Genocide’s Aftermath: Responsibility and Repair, eds. Claudia Card and Armen T. Marsoobian (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), pp. 10-26. 9. Some of this literature is summarized by Bill Wringe in “Collective Action and the Peculiar Evil of Genocide”, in Genocide’s Aftermath: Responsibility and Repair, eds. Card and Marsoobian, pp. 94-110.

Twelve AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY AND FOREIGN POLICY John Ryder Philosophy recovers itself when it ceases to be a device for dealing with the problems of philosophers and becomes a method, cultivated by philosophers, for dealing with the problems of men. John Dewey, “The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy” (1917)1 It is a great mistake, made by many Europeans, to assume that America’s moralistic rhetoric of freedom is merely a cloak for selfinterest…Americans were Wilsonian long before Wilson. Timothy Garton Ash, Free World: America, Europe, and the Surprising Future of the West (2005)2 1. Introduction I would like to explore the question of what the implications of American pragmatism and naturalism might be for foreign policy. To put it a different way, I am asking the question what a reasonably thoughtful and consistent pragmatist would do if in a position to make foreign policy. The possibility of a “practicing” pragmatist being in such a position may seem remote, and it may in fact be remote. With respect to the pragmatist philosophical tradition, however, the question is apt, as the well known quote from Dewey that philosophy ought to address the problems of people indicates. With respect to political reality, the prospect of the legacy of an important philosopher or philosophical tradition being brought to bear on national policy is not in fact so remote. Much has been made in recent years of the influence among current American policy makers of the work of Leo Strauss. 3 Whether Strauss can be fairly tarred with the policy decisions of many of those who appeal to his legacy is another question. The fact is that at the moment there are many people in influential policy making positions in the American government who regard themselves and each other as thinking in the Straussian tradition. If Strauss and those who identify themselves with him can have that kind of influence, there is no

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reason that Dewey, other pragmatists and those who identify themselves with the pragmatist and naturalist traditions could not. The conclusions to which we come may also seem far-fetched or unrealistic to some. Among the principles that drive a pragmatist’s thinking on foreign policy questions is that the fundamental values of a democratic way of life are more important than national interest or national sovereignty. For those whose understanding of international relations is rooted in the realist tradition, such a view may suffer from naïveté at best and is possibly delusional and dangerous at worst. But Garton Ash, as suggested in the quote above, is right to say that American foreign policy (and my concern here is with American policy, though I think that the pragmatist perspective can be generalized) has always been rooted in values of some sort, i.e. social or moral commitments beyond simply national interest and sovereignty. This, I take it, is what he means when he says that “Americans were Wilsonian long before Wilson.” Furthermore, there are influential, and very mainstream, figures in international relations and foreign policy circles in the US who have come to realize, though perhaps they knew it all along, that acceptable foreign policy requires the sacrifice of the preeminence of national sovereignty. In his 2005 book The Opportunity, for example, Richard N. Haass, a former ambassador and now President of the Council on Foreign Relations, makes just this point, if somewhat reluctantly.4 Francis Fukuyama in his recent book, America at the Crossroads, also argues that whatever value national sovereignty has had historically, and whatever value it may retain, it is now something of an anachronism and is in fact a dangerous component of contemporary international affairs.5 The pragmatist view, as we will see, is more unabashed about the secondary nature of sovereignty than either Haass or Fukuyama, and urges the point more forcefully and thoroughly than the others might. Nonetheless, there is every reason to believe that a foreign policy built on pragmatist principles is neither naïve nor dangerous. In fact, it is very much what both the US and the world are currently in need of. 2. Philosophical Background There is not enough space to develop an explanation of the basic tenets of a naturalist pragmatism, and in this context there is no need. Nevertheless, it is worthwhile to lay out the traits of pragmatism that are most relevant for an exploration of the problems of foreign policy. Pragmatists, following Dewey and others, tend to avoid dichotomies that are drawn too sharply, for example between being and action, or between means and ends. With that caveat in mind, we will list several relevant characteristics of the philosophical tradition, and separate them into ontological traits, means, and ends. All have a bearing

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on the implications of pragmatism for an understanding of international affairs and the development of foreign policy. Pragmatic naturalists, and even less naturalistically oriented pragmatists such as Peirce, avoid the more atomistic view of reality that characterized the empiricist and rationalist traditions that stem from the 18th century. In its place they, or better we, tend to view things as relational, in fact as constituted by their relations. Ours is not a “billiard ball,” or Newtonian, conception of nature, but one in which things can only be understood in the contexts in which they reside. The shift from an atomistic to a relational understanding of nature was made at least a century ago, and probably more, in physics, at least since Darwin in biology, and it is well understood in the arts. Philosophers other than American naturalists, pragmatists and some post-modernists have been slower to catch on, as have many social scientists. The same is true in international relations theory in general, a point we return to below. Pragmatic naturalists, furthermore, are also likely to understand the traits of nature as contingent rather than fixed, which point of view contributes to the fact that pragmatism is a constructivist philosophical tradition. The world, in a Jamesian turn of phrase, is “in the making.” Pragmatism, like any philosophical tradition, places enormous emphasis on the methods of inquiry. It is, in Dewey’s language, an instrumentalism, in that the very role of ideas is to serve as instruments, tools, which we bring to bear in the resolution of problems. In that process we are empiricists in the sense that we take experience seriously. We seek to develop a critical intelligence that enables us to approach experience and generate ideas carefully, but in the process we are thoroughgoing fallibilists. We do not insist with ideologically driven certainty that any set of truths is unquestionable, rather we take it as a given that any of our ideas, in the face of experience and the ongoing development of problems and their solutions, may require revision or even abandonment. This much, at least, we have learned from the methodology of the natural sciences. In the analysis of problems and in their solution we think that communication is a permanent necessity. Working together, we believe in the need, and have a faith in the possibility, to act individually and collectively to bring about desirable ends. Such individual and collective action requires education, and education of certain kinds, to develop the appropriate skills and habits of mind.6 Desirable ends are always to be developed within the contexts given by specific problems. With respect to the social world, which is the relevant context for our interest in foreign policy, we nevertheless approach problems with the assumption that certain ends are likely to be most desirable. We assume, for example, that our social world is always in need of improvement, of reconstruction. The past and present, whatever virtues they may exhibit, are never good enough. Most fundamentally, and most importantly for foreign policy, pragmatists bring to the social problems with which we engage

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a commitment to democracy as the social structure and way of life most suitable to the human condition, the most desirable state of social affairs. The pragmatist commitment to democracy is both the most fundamental and the most problematic of its social commitments, especially when discussing foreign policy. In the American context everyone favors democracy and wants to see it spread, including those with whom pragmatists have the deepest disagreements. The specific meaning of democracy in the pragmatist sense, and its place in international relations and foreign policy, is at the heart of our considerations. 3. Tentative Implications It is significant to note that for the most part, the traits of pragmatic naturalism that have been mentioned do not provide the assumptions or conceptual tools on which the foreign policy of any state rests, though some are coming close. Nor do they figure prominently in the discipline of international relations theory. The possible exception is the reliance on experience, though even fairly clear lessons of experience can be and often are dismissed in favor of ideological commitments. International relations theory locates the beginning of the modern political world with the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, the agreement that ended the Thirty Years War in Central Europe. This is generally accepted as the beginning of the modern nation state, defined as distinct spheres of concentrated power, legal authority, and sets of interests. International relations, then, is the set of ways in which these distinct entities interact with one another. This is a thoroughly Baroque conception of both the nature of nation states and their interaction, Baroque in the sense that it embodies precisely the ways in which other phenomena, natural and social, were understood in the 17th and 18th centuries. Nation states are, on this view, individual entities, inherently unrelated, interacting with one another according to certain principles, the nature of which it is the business of the discipline of international relations to understand. This was also Newton’s view of nature, Locke’s view of human beings, and by implication of society, and Smith’s view of economic actors and their interactions. To see how thoroughly this general world view permeated the time, one need only notice that it was also Bach’s view of music. Atoms, planets, people, and even musical themes, possessed their traits inherently, regardless of their relations with one another. In each area, somehow these discrete entities managed to interact without, for the most part, causing chaos. The task of physics was to articulate the laws of the interaction of physical bodies, of social and economic theory the laws of the interaction of human beings in economic and other social contexts, of the theory of counterpoint the harmonic interaction of melodic themes, and of

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international relations theory the principles of the interaction of nation states with one another. International relations theory, to a significant degree, is tied to a world view, a set of assumptions about the nature of things, which is characteristic of the 17th and 18th centuries. In that respect we can also expect that it will embody the epistemological ideas of that era, which is to say a combination of assumptions about human knowledge and action. In all these ways international relations theory, and the assumptions about the nature of nation states that grounds a good deal of foreign policy thinking, rests on a world view that is long since outdated. Given this regrettable but not terribly unusual situation, it should not be surprising that neither international relations theory nor foreign policy reflect the methodology or desirable ends that characterize pragmatic naturalism. To that extent pragmatism may well have something to offer both the discipline of international relations theory and the crafting of foreign policy. 4. Pragmatism and Democracy I have already said that pragmatism’s approach to democracy is central to the issue of foreign policy, so it is best to begin there. Many philosophers have discussed democracy, but none have done so as thoroughly as Dewey, so it is to his understanding that we turn. In Chapter 7 of Democracy and Education Dewey defines democracy through its two most fundamental traits. The first is that a democratic society is one that is characterized by the ongoing pursuit of common interests among its members; the second is the encouragement, and the implied changes of habit, of “interaction and cooperative intercourse” with members of other “groups,” i.e. the pursuit of common interests with those beyond the borders of one’s own group, which is to say beyond one’s own immediate community, class, race, gender and, what will be most important for our purposes, beyond one’s nation.7 A couple points to note about this definition are, first, that it is consonant with the better known and developed trait of Dewey’s conception of democracy, viz. that democracy is more than a form of government or a process of political decision making, rather it is a way of life, “a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience.” Second, it describes not political institutions, though those are of course important, but habits of mind and forms of behavior. A democracy is a society in which its members are inclined to pursue common interests with one another, and to assume an expansive rather than a restricted sense of the relevant other. This is the reason that a democratic society can tolerate no forms of racism, sexism, or any other attitudes or behavior that exclude rather than include people or groups. Similarly, there is no place for xenophobic nationalism in a democracy.

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The inclusive nature of democratic behavior points further to the fact that democracy as Dewey conceived it is by its nature outward looking. To pursue common interests with those beyond the boundaries of one’s group, regardless of the kind of group we might focus our attention on, is to say that the democratic individual regards boundaries as at best of limited meaning and value. In this respect pragmatist democracy cuts across the standard distinctions between liberalism and communitarianism. Democracy, and social and individual good, is not grounded primarily in either individual or community values or goods. The fundamental trait, rather, is the restless search for, which should be taken to include creation of, interests held in common with others, i.e. with all others. This point raises a curious problem. To say that a democratic society is one in which its members pursue and construct common interests with others is to say that it seeks to bring others within its orbit. To pursue common interests with others, and to open and maintain the lines of communication that common interests imply, is to some extent to seek to attract others to one’s own habits of mind and behavior. The pursuit of common interests is in the end possible only if the other comes to recognize the same common interests, and is eager or at least willing to engage in the communication necessary to pursue and develop them further. Without such reciprocal interaction the initial pursuit is soon aborted. But such reciprocity of interests and communication in this case amounts to a shared set of values, means and ends. To draw the other into communicative interaction in the pursuit and maintenance of shared interests is to draw the other into the habits of democratic living. Pragmatist democracy, in others words, seeks by definition to spread itself beyond its own borders. In its commitment to democracy as the most desirable form of social organization or form of life, and in the fact that democracy understood as, we might say, the spreading of the democratic form of life beyond one’s borders, pragmatism shares two of the basic conceptions of neoconservatism. The latter, as it developed in the US from the 1970s to the present, insists on democracy as the highest form of social life and on the importance of liberal democracy being spread as widely as possible throughout the world. In this respect neoconservatism has at its core an imperialistic impulse. The current American regime, to the extent that it has embraced these neoconservative principles, has taken this imperialistic impulse seriously, and sought to implement it militarily. Precisely here is the curious problem. Does pragmatist democracy, which by its nature seeks to expand the range of the democratic way of life around the world, amount to a brand of imperialism? If we wish to say that it does not, then we must ask the question how we can differentiate the outward orientation of pragmatist democracy from the aggressive imposition of democracy characteristic of most neoconservative writings. One possibility is to distinguish between liberal democratic imperialism and (what shall we call it?) the liberal democratic reach of Dewey and pragmatism.

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5. Liberal Democracy and Imperialism One way to approach this question is to consider the argument for a more aggressive, imperialistic brand of liberal democracy. In his 2004 book Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire, British economic historian Niall Ferguson provides just such an argument, to which we now turn. 8 Ferguson argues that the United States, taking up the mantle of the British Empire before it, has been on an imperialistic course for a century, and that all things considered this has been for the good. The latter claim is rather a startling one, in that there are relatively few people who actually want to be considered, or consider themselves, imperialists. Ferguson is undeterred. In his opinion, there are several features of American imperialism that have overall been of value:



• It brings liberal democratic institutions, political and economic, to its imperial subjects; • It provides protection from forces hostile to liberal democracy; • It brings investment and material development; • It creates educational opportunities: higher education at least for an elite, and broader access to basic education for the general population;

And, though Ferguson does not say this, one might add the neoconservative point that: • It expands an integrated set of liberal democratic nation states. This set of presumed virtues of imperialism requires, of course, that a liberal democratic empire be managed properly. Ferguson argues clearly and forcefully that Americans have failed in this regard, and are likely to continue to fail, even if the best intentions are ascribed to their efforts. But this is an issue we must leave aside. What, now, do we make of the claim that if properly structured and managed, a liberal democratic imperialism, which is to say an imposed democracy, is a good thing? The claim is often made that it is self-contradictory to impose democracy. But is it? The answer must depend on the defining traits of democracy, its distinctive characteristics. If we look at Ferguson’s list of the virtues of imperialism we can see the traits that he thinks define democracy: electoral political institutions, the rule of law, more or less open markets, flexible labor markets, fiscal restraint, capital investment opportunities, political and economic stability, and transparent and corruption free public administration.

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This list of the defining characteristics of liberal democracy would probably align well with the views of the national leaders of the US and those of many other leaders and citizens throughout the liberal democratic world. They define the so-called “Washington consensus.” And it is significant to note that everything in this list of traits could be imposed without contradiction. In other words, each of these traits could be generated by an imposing force that had the knowledge and commitment to do it. If this is what democracy means, and if we leave aside the question of whether in fact an imperial situation is capable of sinking the roots of such characteristics deeply enough into a subject culture and society, then surely it can be imposed without contradiction. But still, there are those of us who are troubled by the imposition of democracy, by liberal democratic imperialism, because we continue to suspect a lurking contradiction. The only legitimate reason, however, to be troubled by the imposition of democracy is if one does not accept the list of defining traits just described. Or to put it a better way, one may be troubled by the imposition of democracy only if one accepts this list of defining traits of democracy as at most a necessary but definitely not a sufficient account of the characteristics of a democratic society. Even granting this is almost surely to give away too much, in that certain of these traits are likely to conflict directly with pragmatist democratic principles. The most obvious of these is the commonly articulated interest in “flexible labor markets,” which is itself a code term for crushing the capacity of labor to defend its interests. Nonetheless, for the sake of argument let us grant even the outlandish. 6. Pragmatist Democracy If the list of standard traits of liberal democracy is insufficient, what other characteristics might we say are important for a more robust democracy? Precisely here is the relevance of the pragmatist and Deweyan understanding of democracy. First, as we have said, democracy is a way of life, a set of habits, and the democratic way of life has a number of features not present in what we might call the standard model of liberal democracy. It requires on the part of its citizens that we be reflective with regard to our lives, our society, its problems, our policies, and the directions in which our society is moving at any given time; it requires that we be experiential in the sense that we rely more on our experience than on a set of ideological principles, even when that experience is troubling for one reason or another; it expects of us that we be willing, even eager, to take an experimental approach to policies designed to deal with specific problems; and it demands of us a desire to be genuinely communicative with one another.

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Second, democracy is a form of life and of social relations that is conducive to people’s development, i.e. to the development of people’s potential. This feature points to one of the most critical weaknesses of the standard model of liberal democracy, which is that it emphasizes form over content. Even if it is true, for example, that relatively open markets, opportunities for capital investment and flexible labor markets are conducive to a fairly fluid movement of people, goods, and even ideas, it is never acceptable to ignore the actual consequences of such structures, or to attend to them only selectively. There is no doubt that over the past century, liberal democracies have created unprecedented wealth in their societies, and that in many respects that wealth and the opportunities it has created have spread to a larger proportion of the population than ever before. This, and the relative freedom of citizens in liberal democracies in political and cultural matters, is the outstanding achievement of liberal democratic principles, policies and traditions. But it is also the case that in practice, especially when its principles, policies and traditions have been imposed on developing nations, the results have often been far from desirable in economic and other respects. Even in some of the stronger liberal democracies, the US for example, poverty, infant mortality rates, underemployment, illiteracy, and other markers of economic insufficiency are much greater than we should tolerate. If the democratic form of life is one that is conducive to the development of people’s potential, and to the creation of material and cultural opportunities for all citizens, then the standard model, judged on its record to date, is inadequate. Third, pragmatist democracy is both individualist and communitarian in the sense that the development of each requires the development of the other. It was mentioned above that pragmatist democracy cuts across traditional liberal and communitarian points of view, and in so doing it draws from both. The development of the community cannot be ignored in favor of the development of the individual, nor can the significance of individual development be buried in an emphasis on social development. The standard model of liberal democracy and traditional socialism have both made this mistake, though in opposite directions. The failure of traditional liberal theory to appreciate the fact that individuals and communities, or societies, are relationally constituted is one of its most serious flaws. It is here that we see the insidious effects of the Baroque metaphor mentioned earlier. Societies are not the aggregate of the mechanical interactions of individuals, nor are individuals atoms in a void. If the development of both individuals and their communities and societies are important aspects of a democratic society, then its principles of behavior and policies must take into account the many factors relevant to the development of both. In its reliance on the development of individuals and their opportunities, the standard model of liberal democracy simply assumes that social development will follow automatically, much as Newton held that order in the physical universe follows from the laws of the interaction of bodies, and in this it is mistaken.

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Fourth, pragmatist democracy is egalitarian in that it values an equality of opportunity for all people in so far as that can be achieved, a principle that follows from the third. The standard model is satisfied in creating conditions that any number of people can take advantage of, and it eliminates traditional class advantages to individual and social development. But it is content to allow whatever new class advantages emerge, and justifies them as the unavoidable outcome of an otherwise desirable set of conditions and policies. On pragmatist principles, however, no democracy worthy of the name can be content with this. If policies and practices throw up even inadvertent obstacles to people’s opportunities, obstacles that are through other policies and practices unnecessary, then they are inadequate to a democratic polity and way of life. These are four defining traits of a pragmatist democracy and way of life, yet they are absent from the standard model. If we augment the standard model with them, i.e. if we conceive of democracy in a pragmatist rather than standard way, then an imposition of democracy is much more difficult to justify. I am not certain that it is a logical inconsistency, but surely it rings false to impose on individuals or whole societies reflective, communicative and experimental sensibilities. If these are central traits of democracy, then democracy must be nurtured; it cannot be imposed. Pragmatist, Deweyan democracy is inherently internationalist, as is Ferguson’s imperialist liberal democracy. The difference is that pragmatist internationalism can only be exercised in ways consistent with its other democratic traits, which rule out imposition. Pragmatist democracy is not and cannot be imperialistic. In whatever ways its outward looking, international reach is expressed, it cannot be imposed. Two critical questions now emerge: 1) How can pragmatism’s internationalism be expressed, or how is pragmatist democracy nurtured in an international environment, and 2) How might democratic foreign policy embody and reflect pragmatist principles? 7. Pragmatist Foreign Policy Francis Fukuyama suggests that there are four major theoretical alternatives in contemporary American foreign policy. The first is traditional realism, with its assumption of distinct states interacting on the basis of their internally determined interests, and the realpolitic that accompanies it. Realism of this sort tends to regard the domestic characteristics of states as their own business, to be accepted as describing the conditions which define the international situation and the pursuit of one’s own nation’s power. The second is liberalism, with its interest in advancing certain goods internationally, for example human rights and democracy, and its inclination to employ international organizations of states in pursuit of those ends. The third is neoconservatism, which insists that the

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nature of other states’ regimes is of paramount importance and where possible can be defensibly interfered with in the pursuit of the expansion of liberal democracy. Neoconservatism tends to distrust international organizations as toothless, and as too prone to require the sacrifice of national sovereignty. The fourth is isolationism, more or less strict and usually with a dose of xenophobia, that regards national interest as best served by avoiding interaction with other nations to the extent possible.9 In general this is a fair account of the most influential alternatives currently available, though it does not take into account recent innovations and suggestions. One of them is a rethinking of realism that looks to take into account relational conceptions of nation states.10 Another is an appeal to realism not of Henry Kissinger but of Hans Morgenthau, George Kennan, and, interestingly, Reinhold Niebuhr.11 A third is the effort in recent years to explore the implications of pragmatism for international theory, foreign policy, and the ethics of foreign policy.12 With the exception of the latter, however, none of the alternatives currently available take adequate account of pragmatist democracy in the crafting of foreign policy. In the development of the traits of pragmatist democracy we had recourse to Dewey, and it is both consistent and useful to turn to him again to develop a pragmatist approach to international affairs. In Democracy and Education, later in the same chapter in which Dewey defines democracy, he raises questions that point us in the right direction. His general context in the book is education, so his remarks are couched in those terms. Is it, he asks, possible for an educational system to be conducted by a national state and yet the full social ends of the educational process not be restricted, constrained and corrupted?…Externally, the question is concerned with the reconciliation of national loyalty, or patriotism, with superior devotion to the things which unite men in common ends, irrespective of national political boundaries…The secondary and provisional character of national sovereignty in respect to the fuller, freer, and more fruitful association and intercourse of all human beings with one another must be instilled as a working disposition of mind.13 Dewey here is assuming the necessity of the principles, habits of mind, and behavior of pragmatist democracy as we have described them above. He goes on to indicate the relation of democracy so conceived to national loyalty and national sovereignty. With respect to both, the democratic traits take precedence: the “devotion to the things which unite men in common” is “superior” to “national loyalty, or patriotism,” and national sovereignty is “secondary and provisional…in respect to the fuller, freer, and more fruitful association and intercourse of all human beings.” This is the crux of the matter

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as far as pragmatist foreign policy is concerned, and the greatest challenge to those who would like to frame contemporary foreign policy on pragmatist principles. Though it sees the value of the expansion of democratic societies around the world, pragmatism’s commitment to democracy does not imply that installing democracies is a necessary goal of foreign policy. The commitment to democracy rather means that foreign policy must embody the traits of the democratic form of life. Democracy is relevant to foreign policy in so far as it bears on means more than immediately on ends. The details of a foreign policy flow from this basic principle. Consider the question of international cooperation. It has been a given for American governments since Woodrow Wilson and the creation of the League of Nations, at least until the strong strain of unilateralism of the current administration, that international collaboration is a key component of any successful foreign policy. The difficulties with the United Nations and much of Europe in the months preceding the Iraq War, however, led the Bush administration to forego traditional alliances in favor of what it called a “coalition of the willing.” To generalize this approach, it has become more or less official policy to assume that in the future, national interests will best be served not by building strong and sustained international partnerships but by crafting coalitions that can be expected to shift with each new international problem or crisis. The difficulties that have been faced in Iraq since the beginning of the war in 2003 have, however, generated a renewed interest in international collaboration among foreign policy specialists. Richard Haass in The Opportunity defends a fairly traditional realism. He argues against making the promotion of democracy the centerpiece of foreign policy, and he develops a sustained argument for what he calls the principle of Integration, by which he means collaboration among states for any successful handling of international problems. His rationale for the necessity of integration among national foreign policies, if not among states themselves, is first that the process of globalization in economies, technology, the flow of information and so forth has produced a de facto integration already; second, contemporary problems have an international dimension, for example terrorism, environmental problems, economic dislocations, disease, etc; and third, integration is more effective because though it is always possible for a powerful nation to act alone, it is rarely possible for it to succeed alone. For these reasons, the US and other nations must be prepared to cede some degree of sovereignty and integrate the pursuit of their interests. Fukuyama, though approaching the question from a different set of conceptual assumptions than does Haass, comes to a similar conclusion. He argues for what he calls a realistic Wilsonianism. By this he means first, unlike Haass though consistent with his neoconservative principles, that the

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US should continue to care about the internal character of other nations, i.e. it should continue to promote the spread of liberal democracies. However, to do so requires that to a large extent it demilitarize its foreign policy: “The most important way that American power can be exercised at this juncture is not through the exercise of military power but through the ability of the United States to shape international institutions.”14 Despite the traditional hostility of neoconservatism to international organizations, one of its most prominent representatives is here calling for the US not simply to tolerate them but in fact to promote them and to structure its foreign policy around them. Thus Fukuyama endorses to no less an extent what Haass calls integration. He makes an additional interesting point by urging what he calls “multi-multilateralism,” by which he means that we should expect and encourage not a single overarching international institution such as the United Nations as the most workable forum through which to act, but a multiplicity of international institutions that can be expected to arise and develop around various different issues and problems.15 There is a degree to which these are the sorts of things a pragmatist might say too, though there are weaknesses in both Haass’ and Fukuyama’s views that point up the important differences between them and pragmatism. The basic difference is that if pragmatism is committed to a robust, Deweyan democracy in its foreign policy, Haass’ integration and Fukuyama’s realistic Wilsonianism are half-heartedly democratic at best. At several points Haass speaks as if the important foreign policy goal of the US is that it must make every effort to convince other nations to cooperate with it.16 The significant inadequacy of this approach is that it assumes that the US, presumably like every other country, should and would determine its foreign policy unilaterally, and only then seek international cooperation. To assume a unilateral determination of national interest and policy, however, is to ignore one of the defining traits of pragmatist democracy, i.e. the pursuit and construction of common interests across borders. A pragmatist foreign policy does not understand integration and collaboration as an effort to convince others to do as we do or as we want. Rather, integration and collaboration mean to work with others, in this case other nations, in the very determination of what we should be doing, individually and collectively, and in the most appropriate means of doing it. This is the stronger, and most appropriate, sense in which nations should be prepared to cede some degree of sovereignty. Haass thinks it is enough to concede that the US in any case should agree that whenever possible it will not act alone. The pragmatist democrat, however, insists on the much stronger point that what is required is collaboration and communication in the very process of foreign policy formulation. Fukuyama has a similar problem. As we saw in the short quotation above, he calls on the US to promote, actually he says to “shape,” international institutions, and to work through them in the handling of international

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problems. One cannot object in principle to the “shaping” of international institutions. After all, if institutions are to be developed they must be shaped. But it sounds as if Fukuyama advocates that the shaping be done primarily by the US, rather than collaboratively by all parties involved. Like Haass, he suggests a certain ceding of sovereignty only to reinsert it at another level. It is also interesting to note that in a footnote he nods in the direction of Haass’ more traditional realism. In the context of a discussion of promoting democracy and economic development in the Middle East, he says that “It might be possible to argue for an authoritarian transition in the Middle East if one could find any truly modernizing autocrats in the region, comparable to Park Chung-Hee of South Korea or Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore.” (my emphasis)17 In the end Fukuyama is willing to forego democracy in both means and ends. The critical point is that for the pragmatist democrat the pursuit and construction of common interests across borders is the fundamental principle, and it is so because the pragmatist is committed to democracy so defined. Furthermore, democracy in just this sense takes precedence over national interest unilaterally defined, national sovereignty and national allegiance. This is likely to be a bitter pill for many people, or many Americans at any rate, to swallow, but it is the pragmatist position. If Haass is right that contemporary problems pay no heed to borders – terrorism, a deteriorating environment, disease, the economic and social problems generated by a globalizing economy – then the foreign policies at least of influential states must themselves be reconceived to look beyond borders in their determination. If our problems are international, then conditions are ripe for us to live out the very definition of pragmatist democracy: the pursuit and construction of common interests across borders. If even the timid versions of this view that we find in Haass and Fukuyama indicate the need to cede some degree of sovereignty, then the stronger, pragmatist commitment is to overcome sovereignty in much more thoroughgoing ways. This may seem difficult if not impossible to realize, at least in the US, given the strength of appeals to national sovereignty and national loyalty. But that difficulty is due in part to the fact that the alternatives have been mistakenly construed. Many contemporary government and policy figures speak as if the alternative is between a rigid sovereignty and surrender. The point that needs to be insisted upon, however, is that it is in the interest of the citizens of the country, and it is in the interest of democracy itself, for national policy to be designed and defined through communication and collaboration with international partners, as many as can be induced to participate in the process. We may in fact speak, as Larry Hickman has, of the importance of “global citizenship,” though with an awareness of all the complex ethical issues associated with a cosmopolitanism of this sort.18

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That this is not simply an abstract and utopian ideal can be seen in the fact, or so I would argue, that this process is precisely what is currently underway in the ongoing formation of the European Union. For all its difficulties and setbacks, the EU is a case, the first in history, where nations have voluntarily constructed institutions through which they agree to determine policy. To date the policies have dealt more with domestic issues, though they are domestic with respect to the EU as a whole, not simply with respect to each of its constituent member nations. The common formulation of international interests and policies has proven to be more difficult, but the process is underway and all things considered is moving in the direction of a collaborative pursuit of common international interests. That the EU, in both principle and practice, is more a success than a failure to date can be seen in the fact that many neighboring nations are clamoring to join. It is a model whose time has come, and it is in many respects an illustration, even if not consciously, of the desirable means and ends of a pragmatist democracy. 8. The Means at Our Disposal If communication and collaboration are among the defining traits of democratic behavior, then it is obvious that institutions to enable them will be a necessary component of a pragmatist foreign policy. This much the pragmatist shares with most other foreign policy makers. And like most others, the pragmatist will not simply take as a given whatever institutions are handed to us, but will seek to reform existing institutions and create new ones that will best fit pragmatist principles and their application in the international arena. Unlike most others, however, the pragmatist will seek to craft institutions, existing and new, in a genuine partnership with other nations. Furthermore, it will employ those institutions not as forums in which to urge US policy or to bend other nations’ policies to US will. On the contrary, it will work through the institutions to develop policies that are likely to lead to the recognition and the construction of common interests among participating states. In this respect it will bring to bear the Deweyan commitment to “interaction and cooperative intercourse” with those beyond our national borders. Precisely which such institutions will be the most viable is impossible to say ahead of time. Perhaps the United Nations can be reformed in such a way as to provide an appropriate forum for this purpose, but perhaps not. The UN was founded and is organized on different principles, and it may or may not ever be equal to the task. It is likely that Fukuyama’s proposal for a multi-multilateralism is something pragmatists should take seriously. It is quite possible that differing problems require collaborations of different nations to address them most effectively. Nuclear proliferation, the environment, disease,

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terrorism, relations with the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, to name only a few current problems of foreign policy, involve most centrally differing sets of nations and can be addressed most fruitfully through differing sets of coalitions and related institutions. Nonetheless, there is a current need for the US and other liberal democracies to take seriously their common characteristics and to build on their basis the possibility for a sustained pursuit and construction of common interests and policies. In their recent books both Garton-Ash and Fukuyama mention an organization called the Community of Democracies, an organization that was founded in Warsaw in 2000, with the support of the Clinton administration.19 It still exists, but it has no effective structure, staff or budget. It is, however, the right idea in that it is just the sort of institution that could provide a forum for pragmatists to pursue democratic policy as we understand it. In addition to the development of appropriate international institutions, the pragmatist will also take seriously what is called public diplomacy. Though public diplomacy has waxed and waned in recent decades as an instrument of US foreign policy, it is without doubt an important element of a pragmatist internationalism. Public diplomacy is, basically, the effort to expose others, which is to say other nations, to the best of one’s own public, non-governmental institutions and achievements. It generally takes the form of exposure to one’s highest intellectual and cultural achievements. Public diplomacy is, in a sense, what has come to be called “soft power,” though that term must be used circumspectly. Some years ago Joseph Nye, now Dean of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and an occasional figure in the US State Department and National Intelligence Council, introduced the concept of “soft power,” as opposed, not surprisingly, to “hard power.”20 The latter, as Nye defines it, is the means at a nation’s disposal to compel other nations to do what it wants. Hard power is generally military, though there are also economic weapons that may fall into this category. Soft power, by contrast, is the means at a nation’s disposal to induce other nations, as Nye puts it, “to want what we want.” A nation’s cultural, intellectual and educational institutions are among its most obvious mechanisms for the exercise of soft power. Even a casual reflection on Nye’s formulation of the definition of soft power reveals the same sort of simultaneous progress and regress that we have seen in Haass and Fukuyama. If we are to induce others to “want what we want,” then presumably we will already have determined what we want independently of our interaction with others. In that case, soft power turns out to be at best a kinder and gentler form of manipulation than armed force, but something far short of the kind of democratic policy tool the pragmatist would want. In one sense Nye’s soft power is the right idea, but only if we reconceive and reformulate its definition. Soft power is a valuable tool for the pragmatist

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in the international arena not because it is a way of inducing other nations to want what we want, but because its instruments are among the best we have available to us to exercise across borders the communication and collaboration necessary for an international pursuit and construction of common interests. It is probably best to give up the term “soft power” because of the inadequacies of Nye’s initial definition, though with an acknowledged debt to Nye for having made the relevant distinction in the first place. We may better speak, as we already have, of public diplomacy. The instruments in question are a nation’s cultural, scholarly, educational and in some cases and to some extent its political institutions. American film, musical and arts institutions, and those who work in these fields, are among the strongest representatives of what is best of American society, in both their popular and “high” forms. The same can be said of American universities, and the people who work in them. There have been for years programs through which Americans in these fields and institutions bring their work abroad and have the opportunity to work with their colleagues from other countries. Typically, however, these programs have been the neglected stepchildren of foreign policy. A pragmatist would put them front and center, not simply because a pragmatist is likely to be an intellectual and most at home with them, but because they are aspects and dimensions of the society that lend themselves to the expression and development of the common interests we so desperately need. It should also be noted that whatever their flaws, many of the political institutions that democratic governments have evolved over the centuries are an important foreign policy resource. The parliaments and legislatures of advanced liberal democracies, for example, represent a rich source of political and institutional experience. It would be narrow minded and foolish to think that such institutions could or should simply be transplanted anywhere, but it would be equally foolish to think that there is nothing important to be learned from them. The experience and lessons learned from years of working on and through such institutions, and the expertise of many people who know them well, should be put to the service of a pragmatist democratic foreign policy. 9. Conclusion A more thorough exploration of the implications of pragmatism for foreign policy would need to go on to consider other critical issues. How, for example, should we deal with the question of war, and of the appropriate principles for the use of armed force? And what of ethics and foreign policy? Dewey himself once wondered why it is that international affairs is one area in which it is regularly presumed that ethics is irrelevant, especially when on the face of it, it is a field clearly in need of ethical underpinning.21 The traditional assumption of the

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prominence of national interest and sovereignty most likely helps to explain the paucity of ethical judgment in foreign affairs. Pragmatism, however, in so far as it elevates its conception of democracy above national interest, loyalty and sovereignty, provides an occasion to revisit the question of ethics in foreign policy to more satisfactory effect. A more thorough inquiry into foreign policy would also need to address the question of economic and political development, and the national and international institutions that have evolved to deal with it. What, for example, would a pragmatist have USAID do, and would it be different from its current mission? How do we handle the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization? Another area to which precious little attention has been paid in the current phenomenon of globalization is the internationalization of higher education. Most nations have developed in recent years policies to advance the internationalization of their universities, but the US has lagged far behind in this respect.22 Because higher education is such an important dimension in any serious effort at public diplomacy, a pragmatist foreign policy would without question pay it close attention. And there is the phenomenon of NGOs and their increasingly important role around the world. It is commonplace to say that they need to be taken seriously, but it is another matter to consider how one might do that as a component of a pragmatist foreign policy. There are, then, serious and difficult issues to be worked out. It is clear that because of its commitment to a deep and thorough form of democracy, a pragmatist foreign policy will not be easy to implement, especially in the US in the current political environment. Many things would no doubt have to change before it would become possible. Nonetheless, there are many reasons to think that pragmatism has a good deal to bring to foreign policy, and that a nation would be well served by a foreign policy conceived on pragmatist principles.

NOTES 1. John Dewey, “The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy”, in The Middle Works of John Dewey, vol. 10, ed. Jo Ann Boydston, (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985), pp 3-48. 2. Timothy Garton Ash, Free World: America, Europe, and the Surprising Future of the West (New York: Vintage Books, 2005), p. 120. 3. See for example Anne Norton, Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004). 4. Richard N. Haass, The Opportunity (New York: Public Affairs, 2005).

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5. Francis Fukuyama, America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006). 6. On education see John Ryder and Gert-Rüdiger Wegmarshaus, Education for a Democratic Society (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2006). 7. John Dewey, Democracy and Education, in The Middle Works of John Dewey, vol. 9, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980), pp. 92-93. 8. Niall Ferguson, Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire (New York: Penguin Books, 2004). 9. Fukuyama, America at the Crossroads, p. 7. 10. See for example Michael C. Williams, The Realist Tradition and the Limits of International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 11. Anatol Lieven and John Hulsman, Ethical Realism (New York: Pantheon Books, 2006); and William Pfaff, “Manifest Destiny: A New Direction for America,” The New York Review of Books, February 15, 2007, pp 54 – 59. 12. See Molly Cochran, Normative Theory in International Relations: A Pragmatic Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), and “A Pragmatist Perspective on Ethical Foreign Policy,” in Karen E. Smith and Margot Light, eds., Ethics and Foreign Policy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 13. Dewey, Democracy and Education, p. 104. 14. Fukuyama, America at the Crossroads, p. 190. 15. Ibid., p. 158. 16. Haass, The Opportunity, p. 23. 17. Fukuyama, America at the Crossroads, p. 215, n. 4. 18. Larry A. Hickman, “Pragmatism, Postmodernism, and Global Citizenship,” Metaphilosophy 35, (January 2004), 1-2, pp 65-81. See also Gillian Brock and Harry Brighouse, eds., The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 19. Garton Ash, Free World, p. 205; Fukuyama, America at the Crossroads, pp 176-77. 20. Joseph S. Nye Jr., “Soft Power,” Foreign Policy, No. 80, Fall 1990. Reprinted in Joseph S. Nye Jr., Power in the Global Information Age, (New York: Routledge, 2004), pp 68-80. See also Joseph S. Nye Jr., Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (New York: Public Affairs, 2004). 21. John Dewey, “Ethics and International Relations”, in The Middle Works of John Dewey, vol. 15, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988), pp 53-64. 22. Kemal Gürüz, Higher Education and International Student Mobility in the Global Knowledge Economy (Albany, NY: The State University of New York Press, 2008).

Thirteen SOCIAL CONTROL, SELF-CONTROL AND NORMS: A PRAGMATIST APPROACH Emil Višňovský “Rules are made for man, not man for rules”... And although a man always risks much when he breaks away from established rules and strives to realize a larger ideal whole than they permit, yet the philosopher must allow that it is at all times open to any one to make the experiment, provided he fear not to stake his life and character upon the throw... and the highest ethical life – however few may be called to bear its burdens – consists at all times in the breaking of rules which have grown too narrow for the actual case. William James, “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life” (1891)1 All those who are affected by social institutions … have a share in producing and managing them. John Dewey, “Democracy and Educational Administration” (1937)2 1. Introductory Remarks We human beings are normative beings, at least to some substantial extent. We simply cannot imagine living without norms. We create and demand norms for ourselves as well as for others. We have the inclination to establish norms for everything since we maintain the belief that it is normativity that brings us social order. Normativity is also coextensive with our rationality; we normally consider that the more norms we establish, the more rational our life becomes. The purpose of this paper is to look at the relations between self and society via social norms and normativity. Such an approach raises several important questions: what are the consequences of social norms for the self? How do individuals adopt (internalize) and apply social norms? How do individuals participate in the process of the creation of social norms? Dealing with the issue of social norms, I shall attempt an outline of a pragmatist approach.

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2. Social Norms in Context Understanding social norms is obviously important for understanding social life, social action, the social self and institutions. Norms are implicit in our social practices, as Robert Brandom has recently argued.3 Normative considerations are claims about what it makes sense to think or to do. According to norms we judge what is right or wrong, true or false, nice or ugly, reasonable or unreasonable, justified or unjustified, who wins and who loses, etc. For the agent, the issue behind the norms is “how to behave?” or, rather, “what it is to behave correctly?” Norms tell us that to behave correctly is to behave in accordance with expectations of community, no matter how loose or foolish these expectations might be. People may follow norms either simply by doing as they are told with no need to understand the consequences of the actions the norms prescribe, or they may be motivated to consider the adequacy and feasibility of the norms themselves. The issue of social norms and normativity is very broad and complex.4 There are various kinds of norms as well as several social functions of norms. Among the latter are social regulation and control, the exercise of the power of society and institutions over individuals via formal and informal, written or unwritten instructions and orders, prescriptions and permissions rather than by the brute force. Norms also supply us with obligations and duties. But we should not reduce social norms only to legal and moral norms, which are just their (perhaps most common) instances. Attitudes to norms may also vary greatly – from a social-determinist, Durkheimian approach, which considers norms as a “positive necessity” without which we would fall into conditions of “social anomie,” to liberal and game-theorist “rule of law,” to anarchist “rule without law.” We can also notice a postmodern “transgressionist” attitude, which takes norms mostly as social constraints and boundaries calling for transgression.5 Making sense of norms and interpreting them may be a very complicated and even controversial task (as lawyers can easily confirm). Nonetheless, not every social norm is like a carpenter’s square by which the right angle is set, as the original Latin root of the word says. What is quite often neglected is the fact that norms themselves can also be considered not only valid or unvalid but also good or bad, effective or ineffective, right or wrong, useful or useless. The crucial issue of social regulation is how to form norms that would not be merely stable, long-lasting and respected but, so to speak, “organic” in the sense of their service for the development of the particular sphere of action they are designed to regulate. Norms are also traditionally assumed to claim the highest instance of authority since many of them are socially enforceable by various kinds of

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sanctions. Valid norms do not give agents an alternative option with respect to how to behave, unless they decide to violate the norm and risk the sanctions. Reasons for obeying norms rather than violating them are many: customs, conventions, conformity, socialization, social pressure, etc. But – at least from the pragmatist point of view – norms also can and should be evaluated and judged to be justified or unjustified, reasonable or unreasonable, in terms of their service to particular ends. Norms should be viewed as instruments rather than ends-in-themselves, and it should be made clear to which specific ends they area directed. It would be irrational for rational agents to comply with norms that are not in their interest and operate as constraints rather than aids in the pursuit of their ends. In theory, there is no single generally accepted definition of the concept of a norm. The most traditional conception is that a norm is a rule or a rule-like law, but not every rule is a social norm – a social norm is a rule that minimally (1) Regulates the social behavior of individuals within a certain practice and community, (2) Is socially accepted and/or there is a social mechanism that provides its social application (enforcement, etc.). Specific rules may also be designed in order to provide the instruction as to how to apply norms. For example, one recent general theoretical approach differentiates between “oughtness norms,” which are combined with internal sanctions such as guilt, shame and conscience, and “regularity norms,” which are combined with external sanctions such as penalty and punishment. 6 Such a distinction is congenial to that made by H. L. A Hart between “norm-guided” and “normgoverned” behavior. As Jules Coleman has recently explained: “Norm-guided behavior is behavior in which the norm is the reason on which the agent acts; norm-goverened behavior is behavior that is subject to a norm.”7 It is obvious that the validity, effectuality and obligatoriness of social norms vary from law to ritual to recommendation to advice. The “ontology” of social norms informs us that their necessity is situational and contextual rather than as strict and rigid as that of “natural laws.” Nevertheless, modern societies have exhibited a growing tendency to regulation and control, particularly via norms, as classical sociologists such as Émile Durkheim, Max Weber, Georg Simmel, and Talcott Parsons have clearly shown. A host of laws, orders, instrucions, directives, dictations, bids, imperatives, prescripts, writs, edicts, decrees, commands, fiats, regulations and ordinances are imposed on human action in all kinds of spheres. This overestimation of and over-regulation by formal norms amounts for individuals to living within a grid, a matrix and a frame which sometimes resembles living in a social trap. Too many norms become obstacles and impediments of normal life and creativity. Too strong an insistence on norms is a degradation of human beings, especially in the case of institutional and bureaucratic norms. Such a policy is presumably motivated by a picture of human being as a “free-rider”

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who would otherwise misuse the situation for his own sake. The problem is whether and how such a tendency is compatible with freedom, creativity and the good life. The solution surely is not to abandon any kind of norm and normativity and to succumb to anarchy. So the most important thing is the way social norms are created, and what kinds of norms they are. A normative practice which turns any act of will or even a caprice, a whim of a ruler or a person in a supervisory position, into “generally binding regulations” is a bad practice, as is the normative consciousness of those in a subordinate position to follow with rigid and passive obedience any kind of institutional regulation, etc. 3. A Pragmatist Conception of Social Norms The issue of social norms has not been sufficiently explored in philosophy and social science. Thus the current understanding of social norms is inadequate, as Eric Posner has recently argued, not only for the purposes of lawyers and legislators but for many social agents in general. 8 Nor have pragmatists paid meticulous attention to this particular issue. Nonetheless, we can try to outline some basic tenets of a pragmatist conception of social norms. Alas, in John Dewey, as the chief social philosopher among the classical pragmatists, one cannot find, quite surprisingly, any special treatment of the issue of social norms. He used the term “norm” as applied to logic, ethics, knowledge, education and aesthetics but provided no special treatment of social norms. By “norm of action” he understood patterns, models, rules that are followed or conformed to in action, involving the notion that they have an authoritative claim to control action. The term criterion contains the same idea, but designates a principle or pattern which controls the act of judging, not of external behavior: it denotes a principle which is consciously appealed to as a basis of decision between rival claimants; an intellectual measure of worth, not a mere practical yard-stick. It is a methodological concept.9 In “Contributions to The Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology” Dewey defined the concept of norm as follows; it is [t]he principle, whether truth or mode of reality, which controls action, thought, and emotion, if these are to realize their appropriate ends; the end as law. The norm of thinking is truth; of emotion, the beautiful; of volition, the good. These principles (and their corresponding philosophic disciplines) are hence termed normative. The three normative sciences are thus logic, aesthetics, and ethics.10

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Dewey’s conception of the term was actually “normative,” i. e. evaluative and theoretical rather than behavioral and socio-practical. According to him “norm is closely related to the terms criterion and standard,” which apply to the “process of judgment,” and correct estimations or appreciations as well as measurement or apprehension of value.11 The social and behavioral aspects of norms among classical pragmatists were originally reflected by George Herbert Mead and the sociological school of symbolic interactionism he had inspired. Even though Mead did not analyze the term “norm” explicitly, with his notion of “the attitude of a generalized other,” in the sense of the “attitude of the whole community,” he expressed two of its aspects: (1) the governance of something generalized over individuals and (2) the sharing of their understandings. According to Mead, norms not only govern the behavior of individuals, but are expected to be internalized and provide their common understanding, thus enabling their mutual interaction and communication.12 Mead’s conception accords with Durkheim’s – himself an oponent of pragmatism – who also held that norms are established out of a regular social interaction as a regulation of an action.13 The emergence of norms presuppose social interaction first, not vice versa. This fact was also reflected recently in the already classic work on the origin of norms by Edna Ullman-Margalit: 14 Norms do not as a rule come into existence at a definite point in time, nor are they the result of a manageable number of identifiable acts. They are, rather, the resultant of complex patterns of behavior of a large number of people over a protracted period of time. Such a conception is also in line with some more recent approaches which emphasize that norms require intersubjective agreement in order to exist and survive. If agents feel that the behavior prescribed by the norm is no longer appropriate, they cease to act in such a way, and the appropriateness of the standard evaporates.15 According to this pragmatist school, human action inherently involves social interaction. Individual acts and their consequences are not isolated but pertain to other individuals and to the community as a whole. To act toward other people is related to understanding them, which can be learned through socialization. It is also combined with interpretations – which are changeble through redefinition – of actual situations. For social interactionists, social norms are – or more precisely serve as – “expectations of behaviors.” Social norms, their meanings and interpretations are the product of interactions and negotiations, therefore none of the norms operate just on the general level. Each must be enacted as a “local norm” as well. To achieve this, the agents themselves decide in their “microscopic”situation about the effects of norms.

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Norms may be “statistical regularities,” but in order to be applied they must be incorporated into the actual structure of the social action of particular agents. Norms are always social constructions, and human agency is more important than the structures produced by and governing it. People should not simply “obey” norms; they should “perform” them. Social interactionists endorse the pragmatist stance that the governance of and by norms should not be rigid and based on the ignorance of specific needs of agents and their local situations. In cases where norms do not “fit” properly into the particular structure of social action, the risk might arise that such norms shall become only purely formal, evaded or brutally enforced. Norms must conform to the situation – they must be “situational,” at least to some substantial extent. A promising outline of a pragmatist theory of norms has been laid down by Frederick L. Will in his lengthy essay of 1993, “Philosophic Governance of Norms.”16 He proposes “an alternative general view of norms” with respect to the traditional view, according to which: Norms are widely regarded as kinds of templates (mental, physical, or otherwise) of performance, resident in agents. As such they are thought to determine unilaterally what kinds of thought or action accord with them.17 Will takes into account “the constitutive role played by norms in creating the texture of human life and thought,” but he thinks that [n]orms are intrinsically socio-psychological entities that interlock with each other and are rooted deeply in the practices of individuals and their communities. Embedded in these practices, norms are in principle opentextured: open to further definition and revision when serious anomalies in their extant forms are encountered.18 Thus conceived, norms are “active rather than inert”, alive and “to some degree open, rather than closed.” They “undergo alteration,” and themselves not only determine but are determined by the spheres of life they inform.19 Such a dynamic and naturalist understanding of norms provides the “reconception” according to which norms may be “reformed, reconstructed, or otherwise reordered,” in case older or ready patterns “no longer suffice to guide action.”20 Norms should not be taken as sacrosant structures, unsuspectible to revision. Apart from their “manifest content,” they always comprise “latent aspects” that must be revealed via philosophical reflection. The crucial process is the process of devising norms.

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A wider conception of the instituting of norms in the context of pragmatist philosophy of democracy, drawing mostly on Mead and Dewey, has been elaborated by Beth J. Singer.21 In her analysis of social and human rights, Singer develops the concept of “normative community,” which is “constituted by all who share a common set of norms.”22 The existence of norms and a normative community is the prerequisite of human life as we know it. Norms govern the institution of rights and obligations. There are no apriori rights and obligations; all are established by the normative community. But social norms are the product of communicative interaction, they evolve and change. Thus …for norms to arise... and for them to carry the authority of a community, requires the participation of that community’s members in their institution: it requires that they exercise their own personal autonomy in this process.23 All persons …who are called on or are in a position to apply them must be allowed to do so in accordance with their own judgement and in the light of their own experience. That is, they must be allowed to judge the norms autonomously.24 The nature of norms is interactive and communicative. Norms “evolve in a dialogic process and are the product of that dialogue.”25 They enable mutual identification, an understanding of the responses of others, and a social cohesion, but as rights and obligations they cannot be absolute and unquestionable. Norms may conflict, and the operation of social norms does not preclude criticism. People have the right and even the obligation to criticise norms. Critical deliberation is a part of the process by which norms are instituted, perpetuated and modified. An uncritical and unreflective creation as well as application of norms means degeneration into mechanical habits and misuse of power. Beth Singer considers a condition sine qua non – in fact “the norm” – of such a normative community to be that the efficacy of social norms substantially depends on their internalization, i. e. voluntary acceptance by its members. For this to be the case, the members of a normative community must have their own free right and autonomy not only to interpret all the norms which are at stake, but most importantly …all those who are expected to live by them must participate in their institution, perpetuation, and revision. This means that each must be granted the authority to do so: authority to play a part in shaping the community’s perspective.26

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EMIL VIŠŇOVSKÝ If this precondition is not fulfilled, the conseqences are disastrous: Enforced conformity is only a conterfeit of norm-governed behavior. What is accepted in such a case is the authority, not of the norms, but of the enforcing power. To the extent that a government or a dominant subcommunity tries to impose its laws or customs on other subcommunities and their members, the stability of the inclusive community is undermined. A common history and geographic proximity alone are not sufficient conditions of normative community, and the alternative to normative community is anomie, alienation, the antithesis of community.27

Thus, a true normative community is “a community of self-directing, yet mutually responsive members” who “must be free to articulate their own perspectives,” and who through interpreting the norms participate in the selfgovernance of the community as a whole. This is not a blueprint for anarchy, but rather a conception of “a community of dialogic reciprocity”28 which is the equivalent of a true democratic community. In such a community its members “in addition to sharing a set of norms ... accept one another as legitimate and authoritative participants in collective decision making.”29 The pragmatist conception of normative community and participatory democracy conceives of any kind of norms as deliberative constructions “always open to critical assessment and subject to change.” No one norm “should ever be taken to be incorrigible.” Norms traditionally developed as the instrument of power and social control “from above” should be transformed into the instruments of self-government, and the only legitimate perspective from which they should be critically assessed is the perspective of those who must abide and live by them. 30 The process of designing norms in the realm of law is legislation. Laws are some of the most general social norms, and the general philosophical approach to social norms can also be applied to law-making as a whole. The Pragmatist approach to law – distinct from other approaches such as analytic, historical and natura – is instrumental in that it views laws as tools and tries to explain how laws can be made useful to practical ends. According to so called “legal pragmatism,” social and legal norms are always under reconstruction. Further, in the process of adjudication legal pragmatists deny the separability of norms from their applications – no general rule can ever decide particular cases.31 From among other recent approaches, neopragmatism’s antifoundationalism as expressed in Richard Rorty and Hilary Putnam may be regarded as the main feature of their conceptions of norms. According to Rorty, “we cannot back up our norms by ‘grounding’ them in a metaphysical or scientific account of the world.”32 Putnam’s understanding of norms is,

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however, more complex and richer. Having admitted that norms are historical and contextual, for Putnam they always reflect our interests and values and he allows that norms may evolve for “better or worse.”33 While Rorty would be happy with reducing the normative aspects of our practices to the descriptive, Putnam still considers the normative as irreducible. We cannot give up the normative governance of our behavior, i. e. a propensity to comply with some norms rather than simply behave out of any normative system. However, there is a difference between sincere avowing, simple internalizing of, and being gripped by norms, as Alan Gibbard has recently distinguished. According to this author, our normative judgements cannot be improved without taking into account the merits of pragmatism. 34 To sum up, what is the particular pragmatist approach to social norms and normativity? Based on the outline above, at least the following features may be delineated:

• The historicity and situatedness of social norms as context for their modification and change; • The construction and reconstruction of norms by social interaction and intelligence as the source of their emergence; • The instrumentality of norms for the self and society – norms as promoting social ends rather than being ends in themselves or impediments; • Democratic participation in the norm-creation process; • Self-governance through norms – norms for people, not people for norms.

Strangely enough, these principles are in almost perfect correspondence with the summary of the latest research on social norms by Michael Hechter and Karl-Dieter Opp, who – without any explicit reference to pragmatism – contrast the traditional theoretical approaches with new ones as follows:



• norms as given (according to traditional theory and recent game theory) and obeyed versus norms as constructed, negotiated and performed (according to functionalism, symbolic interactionism and pragmatism); • norms as constraints on versus norms as guidelines to action; • norms are conditional; • norms are ambiguous, i.e. subject to interpretation; • norms are relative and elusive, not absolute; • norms are particular and concrete; • norms are instrumental as a kind of public good, serving public purposes;

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• norms usually have differential effects on various individuals; • not all norms serve in the same way all individuals and groups interests – there is the potential in norms to create some degree of harm for some people; • optimality and sub-optimality of norms – sometimes better than no norms; • systems and networks of norms – their consistency and inconsistency.35

Would it be too presumptuous to consider this analysis to be the “inadvertent advent” of pragmatism in the theory of social norms? 4. Concluding Remarks Norms form the fabric of our social life. But social norms are our human creations, for which we are responsible to ourselves and our communities. Norms are our specific cultural inventions designed to coordinate human action and to keep a community together with their intelligent force rather than by the brute force of primitive power. Via norms we human beings, as intelligent beings, achieve what nature is achieving by its laws – a certain order we create and respect. This order established by norms has to be truly ours, created deliberately by us, and the quality of norms must conform to our interests and needs. The content, quality and even quantity of social norms significantly affects the quality of our social life, in which much depends on what social norms we establish and in what way.

NOTES The work on this paper was supported by the research grant VEGA, Slovak Republic, No 1/4700/07. 1. William James, “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life”, in The Will to Believe and Other Essays on Popular Philosophy (New York: Dover Publications, 1956), pp. 184-215. 2. John Dewey, “Democracy and Educational Administration”, in The Later Works of John Dewey, vol. 11, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), pp. 217-218. 3. See Robert Brandom, Making it Explicit (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1994).

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4. See Michael Hechter and Karl-Dieter Opp, eds., Social Norms (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2001). 5. See Chris Jenks, Transgression (London and New York: Routledge 2003), p. 2. 6. Hechter and Opp, Social Norms, p. xiii. 7. Jules Coleman, The Practice of Principle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 78. 8. See Eric A. Posner, Law and Social Norms (Cambridge: Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002). 9. John Dewey, “Syllabus: Social Institutions and the Study of Morals”, in The Middle Works of John Dewey, vol. 15, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988), p. 238. 10. John Dewey, “Contributions to the Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology”, in The Middle Works of John Dewey, vol. 2, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1976), p. 159. 11. Ibid., pp. 159-160. 12. See George Herbert ,Mead, Mind, Self, and Society (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1934). 13. See Émile Durkheim, The Division of Labour in Society (New York: The Free Press, 1984), p. 368. 14. Edna Ullman-Margalit, The Emergence of Norms (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 8. 15. See Friedrich Kratochwil, Rules, Norms, and Decisions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 16. See Frederick L. Will, Pragmatism and Realism, ed. Kenneth R. Westphal (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997), pp. 159-192. 17. Ibid., p. 159. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid., p. 160. 20. Ibid., p. 180. 21. See Beth J. Singer, Pragmatism, Rights, and Democray (New York: Fordham University Press, 1999). 22. Ibid., p. 29. 23. Ibid., p. 30. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid., p. 67. 26. Ibid., pp. 70-71. 27. Ibid., p. 70. 28. Ibid., pp. 71-72. 29. Ibid., p. 138. 30. Ibid., pp. 156-161

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31. See e. g. Richard A. Posner, Law, Pagmatism, and Democracy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005). See also Morris Dickstein, The Revival of Pragmatism (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1998), pp. 235-343. 32. Richard Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 141. 33. See Hilary Putnam, Realism with a Human Face (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 21-22. 34. Alan Gibbard, Wise Choices, Apt Feelings (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press; 2003), pp. 72, 224-226. 35. Michael Hechter and Karl-Dieter Opp, Social Norms, pp. 394-415.

Fourteen THE POLITICAL SELF IN MODERN DEMOCRACY: INDIVIDUAL LIBERTY AND PERSONAL RIGHTS VERSUS REPUBLICAN VIRTUE AND COMMUNITARIAN RESPONSIVENESS Gert-Rüdiger Wegmarshaus This paper addresses two different concepts of the political self and their significance for contemporary, modern democracies: the liberalindividualistic concept of the political self on the one hand and the republican-communitarian self on the other. The concept or the idea of the political self is an important topic in political theory and political philosophy; at the same time a particular understanding of the political self bears serious, lasting consequences for practical political life. Understanding concepts by considering their consequences for the praxis of thought and of life constitutes the core of pragmatism as a method and as a theory; the paper therefore shall follow this approach. The argumentation proceeds in five steps: first, demonstrating the historical roots of the liberal political self in the European society of early modern times; second, pointing out practical deficiencies of the liberal self and the principle of representation in contemporary democracies; third, comparing the liberal political self with the notion of the republicancommunitarian political self; fourth, explaining the significance of John Rawl’s liberal theory of modern, pluralistic societies; and fifth, demonstrating how shortcomings of the liberal political self are balanced by the republicancommunitarian understanding of the political self. 1. Historical Roots In explaining the emergence of the modern liberal political self one necessarily should turn to the writings of Niccolò Machiavelli who presented the first, radical break with the medieval, Christian, religious understanding of politics, political man and the principles of political action. Machiavelli is considered to be the first modern political theoretician legitimizing the rational, purely interest driven calculation and behavior of political man, i.e. justifying the means and actions needed for the political leader / ruler to acquire and to keep power. At the same time Machiavelli in his Discorsi is still deeply rooted in the

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political ideas of the Ancient world, preserving in particular the intellectual and the moral heritage of politics in the Roman Republic.1 Identifying the roots of the notion of the liberal self in modern Europe therefore requires a look at England during the times of the “Glorious Revolution” at the end of the 17th century. Two deeply intertwined processes, one political-practical and one theoretical, shaped the liberal concept of the political self. After a long political chapter of forty troubled years of insurrection, upheaval, and civil war the Parliament in London entrusted William of Orange to be England’s new King. John Locke, personally benefiting from this pacifying act, praised both the new king and the new political order that allowed him to return home from exile, where he had developed his theory of political power based on liberal-individualistic premises.2 In his writings Locke made a decisive attempt to put political power on the basis of contractual consent between citizens and between citizens and the government. This change in the theoretical justification of state power turned out to have – as we know today – lasting consequences. The “Glorious Revolution” re-installed the institution of the King with its rights, obligations and prerogatives, though the character of the exercise these rights had changed dramatically: The power vested in the King was no longer seen to be legitimized by the Divine. The legitimacy of political power in England changed both in practical terms and in theory: divinely legitimized political authority was – at least theoretically – firmly undermined; governmental, state power ought to rest in something other than divine providence. John Locke in his Second Treatise of Government advanced the novel idea that justifiable state rule ought to be based solely on the consent of the ruled; state authority is the execution of power based on the acceptance by the people, i.e. in the last resort on the well-considered consent expressed by the people, by the citizen. 3 The idea to legitimize political power by conscious agreement between individuals, between human beings represents the Liberal Principle of statehood in the modern Western world. Contractual agreement between individuals creates legitimate governmental rule. Furthermore, general consent in state authority, conscious agreement to a particular government, shall be expressed in a regular and repeated way. This happens in the form of elections, being conducted at local, regional and national levels. Elections have to be “free and fair,” in order to truly represent the will of the people. If the outcome of elections is to be regarded as both legitimate and binding, elections have to be held on a regular, recurring basis, and they shall take place under certain well defined, well observed and well guarded conditions: universal voting rights, i.e. for adult males and females regardless of wealth, social position, ethnic and religious diversity; equality of voters, i.e. equal weight of each cast vote, secret balloting, non-restricted access to information about the candidates, etc. 4 Hence the political self of the liberal paradigm, which had been

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initiated by John Locke under very peculiar, unique societal circumstances of 17th century England, consists of the free-standing, independent, morally autonomous individual, capable of observing and politically expressing sound self-interest. The liberal political self is understood as an individual willing to preserve personal freedom of action by agreeing to grant power to a supreme state authority designed to protect his/her personal life along with acquired property and freedom of individual action. This liberal understanding of the political self (of course consisting of numerous individual political selves) has had an overwhelming intellectual influence on the shaping of the political institutions, procedures, and political culture in Western societies. 5 2. Deficiencies of the Liberal Self At the same time one has to acknowledge practical shortcomings both of the liberal political self and the concept of political representation. In the political practice of contemporary democracies – in the “old,” “traditional” ones in the West as well as in the “new,” quite recently established democratic regimes in Central and Eastern Europe there are feelings of unease with the liberal principle of political representation. The liberal self delegates the right to rule and the right to make decisions to leaders who are elected democratically and entrusted by the people to run politics. But during the last decade or so many people have gotten the impression that important political decisions are being made without proper discourse and consultation of the people affected by these decisions. This is true for politics in international relations: making decisions about going to war, deciding about how to combat international terrorism; and it is true for domestic politics: arriving at decisions about how to handle social and economic change under the conditions of globalization, about what to do with immigration into our societies, how to organize social life in a multicultural, multi-religious and multi-ethnic setting, etc. This situation, when people in a liberal democracy feel loosing control over their lives, leads to frustration, mistrust, and alienation between the political elite and the masses, it opens the door for political populism, and it paves the way for demagogy and extremism on the far-left and the far-right. Addressing this problem a few years ago Norman Birnbaum compared Western societies in Europe and in North America during the “Golden Age” of the Post-WWII-period on the one hand with the troubled years of the Twenties and Thirties on the other, and with the principles and basic assumptions of democracy: The times from 1950 until 1980 certainly had been great. But they certainly did not match the standards set by the prophets of democracy – Jefferson, Mill, Rousseau, and Dewey. The widespread concern about

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GERT-Rüdiger Wegmarshaus the stability of our Western nations is a result of tacitly understanding that our societies are just functioning as plebiscitary consumer democracies. (…) Democracy, however, is – normatively speaking – based on the freedom to organize ourselves. Democracy needs freedom of expression, recurrent elections, and the separation of state and civil society. This notwithstanding, institutional criteria don’t tell us how Western democracies are really functioning. Political freedom might be monopolized by overwhelming power and resources at someone’s disposal. People’s representations might bend the very will of the people. Inside of civil society there might be set up smaller or larger tyrannies. 6

Hence, according to Birnbaum, democracy needs self-confident and educated citizens, citizens able to form their own judgments on the res publica, public affairs, and citizens capable of objecting to opinions and decisions made by the ruling elites. Democracy needs public forums where substantial issues can be discussed. This means that democracy is incompatible with a social situation in which a more or less fragmented mass of the electorate, pre-occupied with sheer business interests, is reduced to periodically either to rejecting or to confirming the decisions made by political elites. On the contrary, democracy needs the functioning of both a differentiated and vital public.7 3. The Liberal Political Self and the Republican-Communitarian Political Self The situation described by Norman Birnbaum asks for addressing in a new way the problem of political power, the nature of political representation in contemporary democracies. There is a need to rethink the political self: what kind of political self corresponds best with the new situation of drastic societal change, of growing social, ethnic, and religious diversity in our societies? Let’s therefore shortly examine the basic characteristics of the two competing concepts of the political self: the liberal and the republican-communitarian. The Liberal political Self is conceived as a free and independent, unencumbered, rational, interest driven, self-conscious, self-confident, and self-assertive individual. The understanding of society and of political power therefore is contractual, procedural, oriented towards institutions, structures and representational bodies. The liberal political self is seen to be autonomous, to be self-assured in its unalienable basic rights enshrined in a constitution and safeguarded by an independent judiciary. This political self developed in European modernity through the abolition (either gradually as in Britain, or in a revolutionary way as in France) of Royal supremacy by establishing parliamentary political representation. This political process went hand in hand with the advent of the modern entrepreneurial self, leading a rational

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business life based on a thorough calculus resulting in the “disenchantment” of the world and the erection of an “iron cage” of bureaucratic order (Max Weber). The practical milestones in establishing a liberal political order based on individual rights and political representation are well known: the English “Magna Carta Libertatum” (1255), the American “Bill of Rights” (1787) and the French “Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizen” (1789). The most influential thinkers who contributed to the constitution of the liberal political self have been John Locke, Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill, Isaiah Berlin, Karl Popper, Friedrich von Hayek, Milton Friedman, and John Rawls. The other understanding of the political self, in opposition to the liberal, is the republican political self. The republican concept of the political self – in contrast to the liberal – is not based on independently existing private interests of the individual. Instead of referring to unencumbered individuals in pursuit of happiness the republican self draws on political virtues, on the fulfillment of social duties and obligations, and on commonly shared public interests. The republican political self departs from commonly framed, conjointly shared life-practical attitudes of citizens directed at maintaining the commonwealth, and aimed at keeping and developing the political and social order. The republican self is based on interested exchanges of opinions and attitudes held by free and equal citizens, not regarding themselves to be divided by private interests but, on the contrary, to be interconnected in a common course of social life. The republican political self comes into existence only insofar as it is being enacted in political discourse, by deliberation of and by participation in public affairs. The republican self is centered on common purpose issues, it constitutes social cohesion through political deliberation, it is community based, and it has a communitarian outlook. The republican self, interested in participating in community affairs and in taking part in town hall democracy, had an impressive flourishing in the early years of the United States. Alexis de Tocqueville’s famous book Democracy in America gave an impressive account of the flourishing of the communal spirit, of the civic activities of the citizen combined with their private interest seeking in the US at the beginning of the 19th century. 8 The communitarian movement in the US today can be seen as republican in spirit, being represented by scholars like Amitai Etzioni, Charles Taylor, and Michael Sandel. There is an interesting and largely untold story of the pre-history of the communitarian movement connected to and inspired by the social philosophy of John Dewey revealed in an article by Hans Joas.9

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4. John Rawls’ Liberalism The modern classic among the thinkers of the liberal political self is John Rawls. Rawls develops his theory from the very fact of modern societies being pluralistic, i.e. members of society do hold a wide range of different, even divergent views and opinions, they occupy very different positions in life and they entertain differing outlooks and positions regarding the question what is a good life and what is the individual pursuit of happiness. Hence Rawls’ contractual theory of society, being based on a set of principles applicable to each single individual person, is neutral with regard to the plurality of conduct of individual life. John Rawls’ is a political liberalism based on fundamental rights attributed to each member of society. The political self according to Rawls is based on fundamental rights to which each person can and should agree agree in order to guarantee one’s own well being under any particular circumstances. Rawls’ introduction of these principles is based on a thought experiment proposing to imagine a contract being concluded between all members of society under the “veil of ignorance” about one’s own particular position in social and economic life.10 The obvious achievement of the liberal position is to be found it the legal safeguarding of the political self: the legal autonomy of each single member of the democratic polity is warranted. By so doing the liberal doctrine is respecting the plurality of conduct of human life in its diverse forms and expressions. The political self is regarded in a minimalist way; the liberal self enjoys fundamental rights and basic freedoms entirely for its own sake. The liberal self might be politically active, but by no means is there any intrinsic obligation to interest or activity in politics involved in it; the pursuit of individual happiness guaranteed by a clearly defined legal framework makes up the essence of the liberal self. 5. A Balance of Political Selves While acknowledging the significance of Rawls’ liberal theory for offering a model of justice applicable to modern, pluralistic societies, one should not overlook its substantial shortcomings: firstly, Rawls’ theory of the liberal political self operates on the assumption of a fictional contract between individuals being positioned behind a “veil of ignorance,” i.e. individuals are supposed not to be affected in their decision making by any knowledge about their actual position in social life. Unfortunately, a fictional contract does not bind real actors in a real society. Second, liberalism assumes society to be based on initially independent individuals; society is understood as made of atomized, autonomous persons. In stark contrast to that presupposition John Dewey insisted on the recognition of the fact that neither in nature nor

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in society can one find a relational vacuum between the elements of which a given situation is composed. There is always at least some connection and some interaction. Third, one has to recognize that individual freedom and personal rights are made possible, under specific circumstances, only by particular human communities and their commonly accepted values. The acceptance and the appreciation of basic, unalienable individual rights is socially agreed upon and legally codified in a community. The crux with the liberal political self, the defense of individual freedom and personal independence, is undeniably a historical achievement, but it rests on the moral and political resources of a given community. The liberal doctrine unfortunately does not pay attention to this fact. In social practice liberal principles are based on a commitment of communities to sustain and defend them. Liberalism, claiming basic rights of the individual, simply overlooks the construction of these rights by social and political practice in a particular community. At this point one should turn to the republican and communitarian concepts of the political self. Three different albeit connected positions shall be mentioned: First, the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor is politically arguing for certain group rights to be defended, for example the cultural or linguistic rights of a minority, even at the expense of freedoms enjoyed by individuals in a liberal society based on constitutional principals. In maintaining this position Taylor is drawing on his critique of the “unencumbered Self” of the liberal doctrine; and he is referring to the political experience with the cultural and linguistic situation in his native Quebec.11 Second, Michael Sandel, a disciple of Charles Taylor, develops a notion of the political self on the basis of republicanism. In the very center of republicanism there is, he argues, the assumption that political freedom rests in civic virtue, based on the willingness of citizens to value the public good over private aims. Political liberty understood in this way may therefore fall into decline if citizens are not following the path of civic virtue because of a preoccupation with the pursuit of their private happiness. According to Sandel the morale of the citizen should be protected from being spoiled by luxury, wealth, and power.12 Third, Amitai Etzioni, the founder of the Communitarian platform and disciple of the religious philosopher Martin Buber, argues that individual rights and duties, personal freedoms and obligations shall be seen to exist in conjunction with each other. To his mind there is no such thing as individual rights per se, rights that exist independently of the fulfillment of certain obligations against the community. Individual rights and personal liberties in Western societies are granted by the community-at-large, but these rights and liberties are to be treated just as one side of the social setting of a particular

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person; on the other side are duties, obligations, and commitments each member of a given community owes to his fellows.13 To summarize, the liberal political self stresses the free will, independence and autonomy as well as the protection of the rights of the modern individual by the legal system. The republican political self places an emphasis on the genesis of political power in the processes of communication and shared action between equal and interested citizen. The liberal self, centered on basic rights of the individual and on political institutions and procedures neutral to any particular claims and interests, seems to be the perfect fit for a growing political plurality and the rising cultural diversity of modern societies. At the same time the republican, communitarian political self is regarded as the embodiment of the civic mindedness of citizens, as the expression of their orientation towards the deliberation of and their participation in the pursuit of the common good. Thus the republican, communitarian political self seems to be able to cure the all too well known evils of disinterestedness and political alienation in liberal Western societies.

NOTES 1. See Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, translated with an Introduction by George Bull (London and New York: Penguin Books, 1961). 2. John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, edited with an Introduction by C.B. Macpherson (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 1980). 3. Ibid., Chapter XIII, Of the Subordination of the Powers to the Commonwealth, pp. 77-83. 4. Robert Dahl, Polyarchy. Participation and Opposition (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1971), pp. 235-236; Robert Dahl, Democracy and its Critics (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989), pp. 97-105. 5. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty and Other Essays, edited with an Introduction by John Gray (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 5-128; Friedrich von Hayek, Die Verfassung der Freiheit (Tübingen 1991); John Rawls, “Die Idee des politischen Liberalismus,” Aufsätze 1978-1998, herausgegeben von Wilfried Hirsch (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1992). 6. Robert Birnbaum, “Mehr Demokratie wagen. Die Zivilgesellschaft braucht selbstbewusste Bürger, nicht selbstherrliche Eliten,” in Die Zeit, (No. 44), 24 October 1997, p. 3. 7. Ibid.

SELF AND NEOPRAGMATISM

Fifteen COMMUNITY, INDIVIDUALITY, AND EXPERIENCE Dorota Koczanowicz The problem of personal identity in contemporary culture has been widely discussed in philosophy, as well as elsewhere in the humanities. This discussion has provoked a change in thinking about human beings, and about their place in society. Questions are posed, for example, about processes of self-creation and about self-understanding. Since we are not totally free in designing our lives, it is very important to indicate the boundaries of self-definition, and to focus on the conditions that organize us as a culture. In this way, we can better understand what affects us as individuals. On the one hand, we have to deal with some attachment to common values, traditions, and desires; on the other, as individuals who can liberate ourselves from this framework, we seek our place in the world by confirming our autonomy and freedom. The question to be answered is whether it is possible to have a society of autonomous individuals. It is surely not an easy task to find a promising method for achieving self-development and total freedom, while at the same time not feeling uprooted or denied the fullest possible interactions with other people. A new understanding of the self as an existence without any premises (a priori known substantial features) growing in time, has enabled philosophers, humanists, and social scientists to use the category of “narration” in their work. Narration as well as life is a time structure that flows from beginning to end with some hope of fulfillment. From this perspective, science does not hope to find an objective, true reality independent of language and mind. To understand is rather to put experiences and events into an adequate narration. One can notice a few causes of the popularity of the narrative-oriented methodology.1 First, it results from a disappointment with so-called ‘scientific method’ with reference to the Geisteswissenschaften. We can consider also the growing conviction about the creative abilities of human beings who can find their fulfillment in the deformation of the cultural and social environment. This human agency evades objective research, but it can be rendered by the interpretive approach. The narrative approach allows us to look at human actions from “inside,” to show their motives, objectives, and the doubts that are connected with them. In other words, it depicts the complexity of the process

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of creating a social and meaningful world. Third, language itself is more and more conceived not as a neutral instrument of the description of reality but as an active force playing a significant role in the construction of the social world. Fourth, the interpretative approach enables us to include the dialogical perspective in our accumulation of knowledge. The dialogical perspective entails in turn the possibility of the introduction of ethical reflection into the sphere of research. From the perspective of psychology, “narration” is an inevitable aspect of human mind and personality. The will to talk about oneself, and to create oneself through this story, has different aspects: constructivist, therapeutic, forming identity and its changes during one’s life, influencing morality, creating an autobiography. Narration is a category through which we define our borders and bonds, so we are able to find our identity and to establish relations with “the other.” Narration is a meaningful structure, lasting throughout our lives. Owing to narrative structure we conceive and apply actions and events; this is a way to confer comprehension on them. In this paper I would like to focus on the aesthetics of existence, which can be treated as an important element in the construction of narrative identity. Anthony Giddens says that in Western culture, in the post-traditional order recognized as a situation of both permanent risks and vast possibilities of choice, one’s identity is not given but is a task.2 We can fulfill this task of creating ourselves by handling our own life as a potential work of art. Charles Taylor’s words are similar. In talking about the notion of authenticity of states of existence, he writes: The notion that each one of us has an original way of being human entails that each of us has to discover what it is to be ourselves. But the discovery can’t be made by consulting pre-existing modes, by hypothesis. So it can be made only by articulating it afresh. We discover what we have in us to be by becoming that mode of life. . . . This suggests right away a close analogy, even a connection, between self-discovery and artistic creation. . . . Artistic creation becomes the paradigm mode in with people can come to self-definition.3 On the one hand, art gives us inspiration about how to create our lives; on the other, it provides a paradigm of self-realizing activity where a subject could be our existence. This Canadian philosopher has presented an original conception of the authenticity of existence that is constructed by a dialogue with tradition and society. I would like to emphasize, however, another philosophical concept: the aesthetics of existence. This concept strongly connects life with artistic creation; and it is most easily presented through the American pragmatists’ point of view. This paper is an exploration into a new conception of

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ethics. A unique feature of the pragmatic conception is a belief that the aesthetic component could be the perfect tool for harmonizing our narration, and also something that assures coherence of our identity and makes it possible for us to be satisfied with our lives. In Dewey’s theory, a person and his or her environment are two parts of one universum and are thus complementary in creating an experience. An aesthetic (or rounded out) experience treated as sublimation and intensification of common experiences, becomes the most important type of experience. This pure, direct and most perfect experience is a kind of pattern and the essence of the experiential process. It is, therefore, especially significant for philosophy. Dewey explains that “aesthetic experience is pure experience. For it is experience freed from the forces that impede and confuse its development as experience; freed, that is, from factors that subordinate an experience as it is directly had to something beyond itself. To aesthetic experience, then, the philosopher must go to understand what experience is.”4 One of the boldest moves in deconstructing traditional ethics is the invention of an aesthetics of existence as a strategy competing with universal, categorical ethics. The aesthetics of existence as a new idea appeared in nineteenth-century artists who did not call themselves avant-garde, but supported ideas that grew out of a resistance to the bourgeois world. The field of art became a convenient one for experiments leading to the establishment of new relationships between art, nature, and social reality. It was also developed in a more philosophical way in Lebensphilosophie and existentialism. Both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche left the domain of traditional ethics, and they chose the aesthetics of existence as a central category for their critiques of contemporary moral systems. In contemporary philosophy, the idea of an “aesthetics of existence” is connected mainly with the name of French philosopher Michael Foucault; but it exists as well in neo-pragmatist theory – in the works of Richard Rorty and Richard Shusterman. I will focus on the polemic between Shusterman and Rorty because two points of view have emerged from it. The first one – Rorty’s – is close to the ideas of the avant-garde, whose project of aesthetic existence is linked to such values as newness and authenticity; the second point of view – Shusterman’s – places uniqueness and individuality above the social values of community. The separation of art and life has a long tradition. The beginning of the “historical catastrophe” of dividing art and life has its sources in the Platonic bifurcation of art and practical activity. The apogee of that tendency is in a current formula “art for art’s sake.” Referring to Dewey’s critique of “museum art,” Shusterman maintains that this unfortunate situation is not an essential consequence of art, but rather the effect of social-historical conditions. A change of these conditions would allow us to stop the progressive processes of

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art’s self-alienation. Shusterman’s suggestion is to consider art as experience. He is convinced that it is obvious that art as experience is a part of our lives. It is the most intensive way of perceiving reality, and it cannot be treated merely as an imitation of nature. Dewey explores tradition to find a new theory of art which restores art to its original state because “the aesthetic is no intruder in experience from without, whether by way of idle luxury or transcendent ideality, but . . . it is the clarified and intensified development of traits that belong to every normally complete experience.”5 For Dewey, then, every experience has the potential to create a unified and total experience having an aesthetic quality. Underlying these beliefs is the view that we can trace the development of art out of simple, everyday experiences. This way of thinking opens the possibility to adapt Dewey’s philosophy to discuss contemporary art, which often deals with the problem of the relationship between art and life. The unlimited imagination of contemporary artists is a big challenge for art critics and theoreticians. The answer from pragmatism is the democratization of art. Dewey did not hesitate to widen the notion of art, seemingly without limit. Shusterman, however, is a little bit more restrictive. He would only widen the border of art enough to include in it popular culture and the ethical art of creating one’s own life. From a pragmatist perspective, art is an essential, irreplaceable element of the good life. Ethics here fuses with aesthetics. The good life is a life filled with aesthetic qualities, in contact with art, and continuously striving for harmony and fulfillment. The pragmatist belief that art is present in everyday experience leads to the project of the aesthetic life – an art of life, the aim of which is an existence that seeks to change every self-activity into an intentional work of art. The aesthetics of existence is rooted in the crisis of traditional ethics. Modern society, without clear and sustained relations, is not able to give individuals satisfactory support because there are no universal rules. As a result, contemporary ethical conceptions have appeared; but they only deny the necessity of a moral codex, rather than propose moral activity as a kind of self-creation. As Rorty writes, “it somehow became possible, toward the end of the nineteenth century, to take the activity of re-description more lightly than it had ever been taken before. It became possible to juggle several descriptions of the same event without asking which one was right – to see re-description as a tool rather than a claim to have discovered essence.”6 The sort of pluralism described by Rorty in this passage can be considered as a privilege of freedom. At the same time, however, it can seem an unpleasant, fear-evoking necessity: the unlimited possibility of choice without any hint about how to take advantage of this situation. In the age of individualism, there is no belief in a Kantian “common moral consciousness.” Shusterman notes: “We cannot tell what is the

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good life for us, because the nature of us is so questionable and unsteady with our changing roles and self-representations.”7 Rorty is of the opinion that each of us is under a compulsion to develop our own ethical attitude in a process of “self-creation” and “private perfection.” Shusterman, on the other hand, insists that freedom of choice must include the possibility of using already existing patterns – otherwise, it is not complete freedom. He criticizes Rorty, saying that “Indeed, the Rortyan compulsion to create oneself in novel fashion can itself be seen as a form of non-autonomy, a bondage to the new and individualistic. Its motivating fear of being a replica suggests, in fact, a very tenuous sense of self, one desperately needing to assert itself by unique individuality and concentration on personal distinction.”8 The belief that life as a work of art must be a unique creation is a manifestation of the ideology of romantic individuality and the modernist passion for newness.9 Rorty is fostering avant-garde ideals, whereas for the author of Performing Life,10 our activity can be limited to the creative adaptation of well known styles of life to one’s own individual goals under contingent circumstances. Thus, contrary to Rorty and Bauman, Shusterman strongly opposes the attitude of extreme individualism in ethics. Although his point of view gives a place for innovative expression of the self, Shusterman notices the dichotomies that rule the process of creating our lives. The development of a self is greatly influenced by the logic of social processes. The self is a part of those processes, and society is a necessary background for the growth of individuality. Shusterman presents selfhood as neither a substance nor a part of an objective culture, but rather as a technique of absorbing and changing the cultural and social environment. The second difference between these pragmatists is that for Rorty a creative activity of aesthetic existence is strongly connected with language. Shusterman opposes this as an unnecessary limitation. For Rorty, “To create one’s mind is to create one’s own language, rather than to let the length of one’s mind be set by the language other human beings have left behind.”11 A man transgresses his animal nature, and really creates himself in language. To create the perfect self we should find a unique description. To picture typical contemporary ethicaesthetic attitudes, Rorty brings into existence two figures: the ironist and the strong poet. What connects them is the creative use of language. The ironist does not believe in the possibility of finding the perfect solution – a perfect dictionary – but she accepts this situation of never-ending quest. The poet, however, is a heroic figure. He is determined to overcome his culture, and tries continuously to escape from order and universality into contingency. Only in the situation of total transgression is the strong poet able to achieve a fullness of humanity. Rorty democratizes this Nietzschean vision of the romantic individualist using Freud, for whom “nobody is dull through and through, for there is no such thing as a dull conscious. What makes Freud more useful and more plausible than Nietzsche is that he does not relegate the

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vast majority of humanity to the status of dying animals.”12 The reason is that a genius is sleeping in each unconscious – each life is a potential poem. On the other hand, a project of total individualization is utopian and dangerous. If we had a strong poets’ society, who would change a language into a “mobile army of metaphors,” there would be no real language because there would be no communication. But for Rorty, the action is as important as the effect. The place of this activity – self-realization and social relation – is always only the sphere of language. Shusterman also in a sense does something for the democratization of the Nietzschean project. Rorty leaves out the conception of the aristocratic ‘Overman’ as the ideal of self-creation reserved only for a few. For him, our rescue is a fantasy that could be discovered in the process of psychoanalysis. Shusterman believes, however, that we can find liberation in our bodies, so we should perform certain bodily practices in order to liberate ourselves. From the pragmatist perspective, he creates an idealistic project of building society, where there will be a place for a “living beauty.” It can emerge thanks to intellectual activity as well as bodily exercises. Dualism of body and soul is, in Shusterman’s opinion, an artificial division, rooted in prior philosophy. In Rorty’s and Shusterman’s reception of “the aesthetics of experience,” we can notice the influence of pragmatist ethical theory. While it is far more obvious in Shusterman’s version than in Rorty’s, for both philosophers pragmatism is an important point of reference. It is clear that one of the founders of pragmatism, John Dewey, worked out the non-foundational idea of ethics, placing an emphasis on individual responsibility. Thus, when Rorty and Shusterman refer to pragmatism, they concentrate on only one of its aspects. In its Jamesian form, pragmatism stresses the role of self-realization and individualism; but other versions of pragmatism emphasize the important role played by community and social bonds. These two tendencies exist in pragmatism, and this is one cause of the inner tensions in this theory. The best example of this is Mead’s division of “me” (social part of personality) and “I” (creative part of personality). We can say that Rorty as well as Shusterman derive their ideas from pragmatism, but each of them explores only one thread. Thus, we go from one extreme to other. As we can see, the question asked by the ancient Greeks about the possibility of harmony between a person and society remains alive. I think about such cooperation, cooperation that would not dispel dreams of individualism, but would at the same time not place a person above or outside of the society.

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NOTES 1. Leszek Koczanowicz, Introduction, in Narracje-(Auto)biografia-Etyka, red. L. Koczanowicz (Wroclaw: DSWE TWP Press, 2005). 2. Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991). 3. Charles Taylor, The Malaise of Modernity (Ontario: Anansi, 1991), pp. 61-62. 4. John Dewey, Art as Experience, in The Later Works of John Dewey, vol. 10, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987), p. 278. 5. Ibid., pp. 52-53. 6. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 39. 7. Richard Shusterman, Pragmatic Aesthetics. Living Beauty, Rethinking Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 242. 8. Ibid., p. 254. 9. We can also find a critique of Rorty’s thought in Hans Joas’ work. In The Creativity of Action (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 258, he states that Foucault, Lyotard and Rorty “sing a panegyric to the ongoing acquisition of new kinds of experience and of new idioms in order constantly to be able to describe these experiences in a new way. For no reason at all, a lifestyle that limits its own options, that allows firm bonds, that is capable of asceticism and is coherent, is thus devaluated by a one-sided understanding of what is aesthetic”. 10. Richard Shusterman, Performing Life: Aesthetic Alternatives for the Ends of Art (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000). 11. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, p. 27. 12. Ibid., p. 35.

Sixteen RICHARD RORTY’S INTERPRETATION OF SELFHOOD Alexander Kremer 1. Introduction “Can Rorty be regarded as a pragmatist philosopher at all?” Clearly, an affirmative response to this question is offered by many philosophers and intellectuals, both in the US and around the world. This answer is possible, however, only if we take “pragmatism” in the traditional sense. The main differences between traditional pragmatism and neo-pragmatism are that the scientific method is not really considered important by the neo-pragmatists, and that the neo-pragmatists focus on language instead of experience. Nevertheless, there are also common features, for example that theory is handled as practice in itself and that we have to struggle for more and more useful descriptions of our world to make it as good as possible. Everybody knows that Rorty, a promising analytic philosopher, changed his mind in the early ‘70s and became a neo-pragmatist thinker who understands well not only the American but also the European philosophical tradition. But let’s raise the question again: “Can Rorty be considered a pragmatist philosopher?” Does it really matter? It can be an interesting question of classification, but it really does not matter if we would like to describe or evaluate Rorty as a philosopher. All that matters in this case is his philosophy. Philosophy can help us with understanding and interpreting human being in the world in connection with our practical life. This is what philosophy is for! Despite thousands of different definitions I am persuaded that the formal structure of philosophical thinking remains the same, and “only” the content is different. This formal structure of philosophy might be regarded as the theoretical and historical self-reflection of a human being that is the permanent condition of existential inquiry. If philosophy is a permanent, theoretical self- and world-understanding and interpretation, then – based on this concept – Rorty is doing pretty well. The better the narrative we can get from a philosopher, the better the philosophy he has created! In this essay, I would like to indicate a novel feature of Rorty’s philosophy. He claims that the human being is a finite and historical being, and everything in our world is a temporal, historical process. These processes always have a continuous and a discontinuous dimension, and only their balance is different. I am persuaded that Rorty knows quite well what makes continuity; he emphasizes, however, the

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discontinuous. Regarding the self, this means, inter alia, that he emphasizes the contingency of selfhood. 2. Rorty’s Philosophy As is well known, Richard Rorty was an analytic thinker who only later, in the 1970s, became a neo-pragmatist philosopher. In contrast to the traditional foundational philosophers, Rorty hailed first Dewey, Wittgenstein, Heidegger and later Derrida as the most important philosophers of the twentieth century. Disregarding here a thorough analysis of his philosophy, I would like only to emphasize that Rorty walked radically his own way and drew the consequences from his views. From these consequences, I will emphasize here the three most important ones from the point of view of my topic. First, pragmatism, according to Rorty, is an antiessentialist, historicist constructivism. Since we create both language and truth about the world, we should be constantly interested in reconstructing language to make it more useful and rewarding, and to make our experienced world more satisfying to our needs and desires. Second, as every pragmatist knows, Rorty is also a pan-relationist. He maintains in his article, “A World without Substances or Essences” (1994), that the gap between the so-called ‘analytic’ and ‘continental’ philosophies shows few signs of being bridged, although the best works being done in these two traditions overlap to an important extent. The quickest way of expressing this commonality is to say that philosophers as diverse as William James and Friedrich Nietzsche, Donald Davidson and Jacques Derrida, Hilary Putnam and Bruno Latour, John Dewey and Michael Foucault – and Richard Rorty, of course – are all anti-dualists. They are trying to replace the world pictures constructed with the aid of metaphysical dualisms inherited from the Greeks (essence and accident; substance and property; appearance and reality, etc.) with a picture of a flux of continually changing relations. Third, Rorty appropriates this standpoint and explains as his own that “everything is a social construction” and “all awareness is a linguistic affair.”1 Once we have said that all our awareness is under a description, and that descriptions are functions of social needs, then ‘nature’ and ‘reality’ can only be names of something unknowable – something like Kant’s ‘Thing-in-Itself.’ From all of this, however, Rorty draws not only the conclusion that it is hopeless to try to get behind appearance to the intrinsic nature of reality, but also that there is no such thing as the absolute intrinsic nature at all. Anti-essentialists, like Rorty, cannot believe even that human reason would be a special faculty for penetrating through appearances to reality. As he wrote: “We anti-essentialists, of course, do not believe that there is such a faculty. Since nothing has an intrinsic nature, neither do human beings.”2

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3. Rorty’s Theory of Truth From Rorty’s above-mentioned views, it follows that he represents a kind of nominalism that goes together with the denial of the traditional representational epistemology. Still, he cannot be considered a solipsistic philosopher. He does not deny the existence of the world: We need to make a distinction between the claim that the world is out there and the claim that truth is out there. To say that the world is out there, that it is not our creation, is to say, with common sense, that most things in space and time are the effects of causes which do not include human mental states. To say that truth is not out there is simply to say that where there are no sentences there is no truth, that sentences are elements of human languages, and that human languages are human creations. Truth cannot be out there – cannot exist independently of the human mind – because sentences cannot so exist, or be out there. The world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not. Only descriptions of the world can be true or false. The world on its own – unaided by describing activities of human beings – cannot.3 According to Rorty, truths, language, objects of inquiry, etc., are more made than found. We create them in describing and re-describing ourselves and our society. In his opinion, the correspondence theory of truth is untenable, for truth as proportional is given only in language. It is a kind of coherence theory of truth: We pragmatists, who have been impressed by Peirce’s criticism of Descartes, think that both skeptics and foundationalists are led astray by the picture of beliefs as attempts to represent reality, and by the associated idea that truth is a matter of correspondence to reality. So we become coherentists. But we coherentists remain divided about what, if anything, needs to be said about truth. I think that, once one has explicated the distinction between justification and truth by that between present and future justifiability, there is little more to be said.4 Rorty claims that pragmatists – both classical and ‘neo-classical’ – do not believe there is a way things really are. So they want to replace the appearancereality distinction with descriptions of the world and of ourselves which are more useful. When the question ‘useful for what?’ is pressed, they have nothing to say except ‘useful to create a better future.’ From all of this, it follows that:

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Alexander Kremer On this view, to say that a belief is, as far as we know, true, is to say that no alternative belief is, as far as we know, a better habit of acting. When we say that our ancestors believed, falsely, that the sun went around the earth, and that we believe, truly, that the earth goes round the sun, we are saying that we have a better tool than our ancestors did. Our ancestors might rejoin that their tool enabled them to believe in the literal truth of the Christian Scriptures, whereas ours does not. Our reply has to be, I think, that the benefits of modern astronomy and space travel outweigh the advantages of Christian fundamentalism. The argument between us and our medieval ancestors should not be about which of us has got the universe right. It should be about the point of holding views about the motion of heavenly bodies, the ends to be achieved by the use of certain tools. Confirming the truth of Scripture is one such aim, space travel is another. Another way of making this last point is to say that we pragmatists cannot make sense of the idea that we should pursue truth for its own sake. We cannot regard truth as a goal of inquiry. The purpose of inquiry is to achieve agreement among human beings about what to do, to bring about consensus on the ends to be achieved and the means to be used to achieve those ends. Inquiry that does not achieve coordination of behavior is not inquiry but simply wordplay. To argue for a certain theory about the microstructure of material bodies, or about the proper balance of powers between branches of government, is to argue about what we should do: how we should use the tools at our disposal in order to make technological, or political, progress. So, for pragmatists there is no sharp break between natural science and social science, nor between social science and politics, nor between politics, philosophy and literature. All areas of culture are parts of the same endeavor to make life better. There is no deep split between theory and practice, because on a pragmatist view all so-called ‘theory’ which is not wordplay is always already practice.5

I think it is clear that Rorty does not deny truth. He says lots of times that he can speak about truth but not in an absolute, Platonist sense. Rorty accepts the contextual and situational truth that is the narrative truth, almost in the same way as Gadamer does. 4. Language and Selfhood in Rorty If we focus finally on language and selfhood, we have to analyze first of all Rorty’s Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (1989), in which he claims that both language and selfhood are contingent. What is the broader framework of his statement? He

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hopes to show here what happens if we give up the idea of a philosophical “single vision,” and if we forego attempts to combine private and public vocabularies. According to his view, authors like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Baudelaire, Proust, Heidegger, and Nabokov are useful as exemplars, as illustrations of what private perfection – a self-created, autonomous, human life – can be. Authors such as Marx, Mill, Dewey, Habermas, and Rawls are fellow citizens rather than exemplars. They are engaged in a shared, social effort – the effort to make our institutions and practices more just and less cruel. If we look at the possible reasons for Rorty’s struggle, it is not only his conviction about the presence of this split, but also the intended defense of the individual and a philosophically clear justification of this impossible fusion at the level of theory. Nevertheless, he is aware of the mutual relationships between the individual and society, which are shown here, and in other places, by the acceptance of practical combinations of the private and the public: We shall only think of these two kinds of writers as opposed if we think that a more comprehensive philosophical outlook would let us hold self-creation and justice, private perfection and human solidarity, in a single vision. There is no way in which philosophy, or any other theoretical discipline, will ever let us do that. The closest we will come to joining these two quests is to see the aim of a just and free society as letting its citizens be as privatistic, “irrationalist,” and aestheticist as they please so long as they do it on their own time – causing no harm to others and using no resources needed by those less advantaged. There are practical measures to be taken to accomplish this practical goal. But there is no way to bring self-creation together with justice at the level of theory. The vocabulary of self-creation is necessarily private, unshared, unsuited to argument. The vocabulary of justice is necessarily public and shared, a medium for argumentative exchange.6 As we can see, Rorty emphasizes the differences only on the theoretical level. We do not have to see continuity and unity in the discontinuous dimension of the socio-historical process. If we could bring ourselves to accept not only these two kinds of writers, but also language as tools, we would have much less theoretical contradiction and we could build a liberal democratic society much more easily. 5. Language The contingency of language means, on the one hand, that we can never “step outside the various vocabularies we have employed and find a meta-vocabulary which somehow takes account of all possible vocabularies, all possible ways of judging and feeling.”7 On the other hand, language as an entity does not exist. It

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can be regarded as a mere abstraction. Language exists only in our socio-historically determined linguistic practice that is always manifested in different vocabularies, that is, in language-games, in a Wittgenstinian sense. Vocabularies do not change according to conscious plans. It is rather a gradual trial-and-error creation of a third vocabulary, when somebody realizes that two or more of our vocabularies are interfering with each other. For example: Europe did not decide to accept the idiom of Romantic poetry, or of socialist politics, or of Galilean mechanics. That sort of shift was no more an act of will than it was a result of argument. Rather, Europe gradually lost the habit of using certain words and gradually acquired the habit of using others.8 The creator of the new vocabulary is the “strong poet,” rather than the scientist or philosopher in the traditional sense. Who is the “strong poet”? In Rorty’s interpretation, it is not only the actual poets and writers, but also the other types of artists, great scientists who invent new descriptions of the world, political thinkers who changed the world through their actions and descriptions – in a broad sense every creative human being. Not everybody will become a strong poet, but that possibility exists for every human being, especially in a democratic society. The more liberal and democratic a society is, the more possibilities are given to become a strong poet, to be, as he says, “someone like Galileo, Yeats, or Hegel (a ‘poet’ in my wide sense of the term – the sense of ‘one who makes things new’).”9 It is worth mentioning that Rorty knows extremely well that the strong poet is only the paradigmatic figure of the most conscious self-creation. Interpreting the “strong poet” in the above-mentioned broad Rortyan sense, we should not forget that he is aware of his or her limits: The strong poet’s fear of death as the fear of incompletion is a function of the fact that no project of re-describing the world and the past, no project of selfcreation through imposition on one’s own idiosyncratic metaphoric, can avoid being marginal and parasitic. Metaphors are unfamiliar uses of old words, but such uses are possible only against the background of other old words being used in old familiar ways. A language which was “all metaphor” would be a language which had no use, hence not a language but just babble. For even if we agree that languages are not media of representation or expression, there will remain media of communication, tools for social interaction, ways of tying oneself up with other human beings.10 Thus, it is clear for Rorty that even the strongest poet depends on others, and that he can also re-describe or re-totalize his or her individuality, that is the private, only in a public framework.

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6. Selfhood As Wittgenstein and Davidson have demonstrated the contingency of language, so too, in Rorty’s opinion, have Nietzsche and Freud done the same regarding the self. On the basis of their thoughts Rorty rejects the traditional, metaphysically founded idea of a common human nature. He is an anti-dualist philosopher and cannot accept the soul-body (mind-body) distinction. In his opinion, our human life, that is our understanding-interpreting being, is always a linguistic one, and language is considered a human product. Our language-games, vocabularies and contextual truths are not found, but rather made. We, as finite and historical beings, are able to create only narratives, not just about the world, but also about our self. But if we could ever become reconciled to the idea that most of reality is indifferent to our descriptions of it, and that the human self is created by the use of a vocabulary rather than being adequately or inadequately expressed in a vocabulary, then we should at last have assimilated what was true in the Romantic idea that truth is made rather than found. What is true about this claim is just that languages are made rather than found, and that truth is a property of linguistic entities, of sentences.11 According to Rorty, we create ourselves by telling our own stories, by re-describing our own narratives, but this story-telling is influenced very much by the contingent events of our lives. Freud, rather than Nietzsche, showed us this contingent characteristic: If one considers chance to be unworthy of determining our fate, it is simply a relapse into the pious view of the Universe which Leonardo himself was on the way to overcoming when he wrote that the sun does not move . . . we are all too ready to forget that in fact everything to do with our life is chance, from our origin out of the meeting of spermatozoon and ovum onwards. . . . We all still show too little respect for Nature which (in the obscure words of Leonardo which recall Hamlet’s lines) “is full of countless causes (‘ragioni’) that never enter experience.” Every one of us human beings corresponds to one of the countless experiments in which these ‘ragioni’ (causes) of nature force their way into experience.12 It seems to me that this brings us back to Heraclitus: pantha rei, everything is changing, everything is in flux. The contingent, the discontinuous moments, are much more comprehensive in our life process than the continuous ones, more comprehensive than we are usually willing to recognize and accept. We try to assure

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some continuity of our self only within this discontinuous framework, within this incomplete process of life. As Rorty says: “It cannot get completed, because there is nothing to complete, there is only a web of relations to be rewoven, a web which time lengthens every day.”13 When Rorty gave an interview for Joshua Knobe in 1995, he revealed the background of his concept of the self, saying that: I think that Davidson’s approach to intentionality, meaning, belief, truth and so on goes together with Dennett’s stuff about the intentional stance, and I think, once you see the intentional stance, the attribution of beliefs and desires to organisms or machines as a way of handling the organisms and machines and knowing what they will do next, it is very difficult to think of the self in the way in which what Dennett calls “the picture of the Cartesian theater” requires you to think of the self. I think Dennett has a brilliant chapter in Consciousness Explained – Chapter 13 on “The Self as Center of Narrative Gravity” – and I think that view of the self is nicely integrated with the rest of Dennett’s system and thus a fortiori with Davidson’s system.14 Daniel Dennett summarizes his views at the end of chapter 13 in this way: Now if you were a soul, a pearl of immaterial substance, we could ‘explain’ your potential immortality only by postulating it as an inexplicable property, an ineliminable virtus dormitiva of soul-stuff. And if you were a pearl of material substance, some spectacularly special group of atoms in your brain, your mortality would depend on the physical forces holding them together (we might ask the physicist what the ‘half-life’ of a self is). If you think of yourself as a center of narrative gravity, on the other hand, your existence depends on the persistence of that narrative (rather like the Thousand and One Arabian Nights, but all a single tale), which could theoretically survive indefinitely any switches of medium, be teleported as readily (in principle) as the evening news, and stored indefinitely as sheer information.15 It is worth mentioning that this Rorty-Dennett standpoint about the continuity of the self harmonizes fairly well with that of Gadamer’s description in Truth and Method. Speaking about arts in the first chapter, Gadamer says that: “we recognize that even the phenomenon of art imposes an ineluctable task on existence, namely to achieve that continuity of self-understanding which alone can support human existence.”16 Perhaps the best way to summarize most of Rorty’s views is to use one of his short paragraphs from Contingency, Irony and Solidarity that claims that the ‘supporting-pillars’ of our human existence, language, self and community are contingent in the sense that we do not rely on any absolute, metaphysical foundation:

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The line of thought common to Blumenberg, Nietzsche, Freud, and Davidson suggests that we try to get to the point where we no longer worship anything, where we treat nothing as a quasi divinity, where we treat everything – our language, our conscience, our community – as a product of time and chance.17

NOTES 1. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1999), p. 48. (PSH) 2. Ibid., p. 63. 3. R. Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 4-5. (CIS) 4. Robert B. Brandom, ed., Rorty and his Critics (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), p. 5. (RC) 5. Rorty, PSH p. xxv. 6. Rorty, CIS p. xiv. 7. Ibid., p. xvi. 8. Ibid., p. 6. 9. Ibid., pp. 12-13. 10. Ibid., p. 41. 11. Ibid., p. 7. 12. Ibid., p. 31. 13. Ibid., pp. 42-43. 14. J. Knobe, “A Talent for Bricolage. An Interview with Richard Rorty” The Dualist 2 (1995), p. 65. 15. Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1991), p. 430. 16. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Crossroad, 1989), p. 96. 17. Rorty, CIS, p. 22.

Seventeen ON THE ‘LOGIC’ OF RORTY’S IMAGINATIVE LIBERALISM: UTOPIA, SOLIDARITY, AND THE PRIVATE-PUBLIC DISTINCTION Miklós Nyírő 1. Introduction I intend to reconstruct some of the most significant aspects of Rorty’s postmodern version of liberalism in connection with his rather philosophical, neopragmatist views. I hope by doing this to indicate the political assumptions by which Rorty’s philosophical projects are motivated. My reading of his work is also informed by his autobiographical essay, “Trotsky and the Wild Orchids.” What I hope will emerge in this paper is the “logic” inherently at work in his overall thought, and some major points of structural interconnections between his political and more philosophical views.1 Since Rorty’s political philosophy is of a basically utopian nature, it may be instructive and even advisable to find out how his utopias, both national and global, look, and what the main features of such forms of utopian coexistence are. We are fortunate in this regard, since in a short piece he has sketched out his utopian vision concerning American society. Recapitulating his national utopia will enable us to focus on its critical points, with a further view to his global utopia. As we will see, however, the latter cannot simply be understood as an extention of the former: the viability of the global egalitarian utopia defended by Rorty poses problems on an entirely new level. Exposing their main aspects and then enumerating their philosophical prerequisites via reconstructing Rorty’s relevant argument will shed light, as I try to show, on several further issues central to his work. Among them is the one concerning his famous private-public distinction, to which I devote a separate section. As a conclusion, I attempt to situate Rorty’s political-philosophical views, highlighting the chief points of connection between these two sides of his work.

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2. National Utopia Built on Fraternity In his essay titled “Looking Backwards from the Year 2096,” Rorty envisions some of the crucial traits of his utopian society.2 Although this vision concerns America’s future, it also has consequences for his global egalitarian utopia. Looking backwards, Rorty writes, history necessitated two major and interconnected changes in the US by the end of the 21st century. First, a shift occurred in the politicians’ convictions regarding the main task of political bodies, and it led to a considerable change in the over-all political vocabulary. Second, a parallel shift took place in the general estimation concerning the relation between the economic and the moral orders.y According to this vision, such changes were effected by a breakdown of present democratic institutions, by a collapse that resulted from the widening gap between rich and poor under the increasing pressures of a globalized world economy. Above all, it was the steady process of losing pride in fraternal ideas combined with the collapse of trust in government, that is to say, with the loss of social hope that drove desperate men and women to revolution. Since social hope can rest primarily on institutions embodying fraternity, the most important lesson to be learned for the US was that “the first duty of the state is to prevent gross economic and social inequality,” whereas formerly “the government’s only moral duty was to ensure ‘equal protection of the laws.’”3 For political discourse centering on the notion of “rights” makes room for huge and immoral social and economic inequalities, as in Rorty’s example “‘the right to a job’ (or ‘to a decent wage’) had none of the resonance of ‘the right to sit in the front of the bus’ or ‘the right to vote’ or even ‘the right to equal pay for equal work.’”4 After all, it was due to the legal, although socially unjust and morally unacceptable, employment conditions and to the gap between employers’ and employees’ incomes that − under pressure − social revolt emerged. Even the so-called “rights revolution” in the second half of the 20th century addressed only the situation of racial, ethnic or sexual groups, and did little for what was at the time above all desirable: economic rights. The alternative to contemporary capitalist democracy, which depends primarily on economic prosperity, is of course not the ill-fated socialist way of merging economy and state. In Rorty’s view, the alternative is rather a morally and politically reformed capitalist democracy, where reforms within the frames of existing democratic institutions extend not only to the introduction of vital economic and social rights, but also and above all to reoriented political aims and corresponding public vocabulary. Under such conditions, inequalities would be regarded not as regrettable necessities but as examples of “evident moral abominations.”5 Accordingly, emphasis would shift from mere economic aspects to that of moral considerations, “talk of rights” would give way to

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talk of unselfishness, political discourse would draw on literary examples of brotherhood rather than on social science and political theory, and “parties of selfishness” would become more and more marginalized as voters gave a mandate to political groups realizing programs of fraternity. 6 Such programs would include at least a strong policy of state-redistribution, and perhaps also new forms of control (by trade unions) and ownership (by the workers). The price to pay for such prospects would probably be a consistently lower rate of productivity. It might well be that all this would relegate the US to the position of an “isolationist, unambitious, middle-grade nation.”7 The point, however, is the restoration of social hope, and of fraternity as the “most cherished ideal” on which this morally reformed democracy primarily depends. 8 Rorty’s national utopia culminates in just that. 3. Global Egalitarian Utopia and the Problem of Solidarity In this vision, the term “fraternity” is used by Rorty in an ethnocentric sense, as something that has long distinguished America. “The whole point of America,” he writes, “was that it was going to be the world’s first classless society,” and the ideal of such a society springs up, of course, from the fraternal feelings of its citizens, presumably having their ground in the historically unique circumstances of this nation’s formation.9 In America’s case, this ethnocentric feeling has furthermore a world-historical importance, insofar as this nation, at least for a period of time, “cast itself in the role of vanguard of a global egalitarian utopia.”10 That promise of American life, coupled with such a mission, is the soul and spirit of the US in Rorty’s view. Those fraternal feelings toward fellow-citizens, which sustain social hope in Rorty’s national utopia, cannot be applied, however, on the global scale without further work. Their ethnocentricity seems to be incompatible with their possible globalization. Yet, some analogue of them is required for the viability of a global egalitarian utopia. Therefore, a closer examination of the possibility and conditions of such a cosmopolitan alternative to ethnocentric fraternity seems to be inevitable. In his Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Rorty points to the notion of solidarity as the supporting pillar of hope in a global egalitarian utopia.11 The question, however, is how solidarity as a moral duty towards others can be saved in a post-metaphysical era, that is to say, within the circumstances of pure historicity and contingency? Rorty rejects every form of grounding solidarity in a universalistic manner, such as the Kantian notion of moral law. He also regards as untenable such ideas as “essentially human,” the “core of the self,” the “nature of society,” or the like. If we take historicity and contingency to heart, there can be no standard accessible to us for telling what is human and what is not human “by nature.” Even the formerly presumed “natural” gap between

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human beings and animals, or human beings and robots, dissolves, and only a texture of similarities and differences − available in descriptions − remains for our orientations. Within such circumstances, it is a matter of historically emerging intersubjective validity to judge, publicly, what is what. Rorty’s point, underpinned by the “Linguistic Turn,” is that in a fully de-divinized context there can be “no source of authority other than the free agreement of human beings.”12 Therefore, it is of special significance that utopia seems to be not only the form of Rorty’s thought, but also that of the supporters of a morally reformed national and global democracy. For the primary function of such utopian thinking is that it embodies a definite conviction which is capable of regulating action. It is indeed one of the main points of Rorty’s pragmatism that, when such a conviction becomes predominant, we no longer need ultimate principles and corresponding philosophical fundationalism to argue for that conviction. In fact, in his view theory in general must lose its primacy as a regulating factor of social praxis, and its place should be taken by social hope. Truly, hope and fraternity are not things about which one should or even could give a theoretical account. That is why utopian political discourse should be dominated by literary examples of fraternity. Such feelings are inclinations that we learn, if at all, by being able to recognize ourselves in others through our capacity of imagination. Imagination, then, must – and in fact will − play a crucial role in Rorty’s utopia, and what is more, the utopian thought itself must also be regarded as a focus imaginarius, that is to say, an outstanding example of human creativity, serving as a contingent yet regulating vision. Returning to the chief question of how solidarity as a moral duty can be saved, we can first examine the notion of morality. In the context of radical contingency, a person’s moral duty has its ground in the accepted practices of a community to which that person, at all times, belongs. It is an issue of our “we”-intention, as Wilfrid Sellars has put it, where this “we” is always an empirical community, in contrast to the ideal notion of humanity in general.13 The so-called “moral principles” are in fact “reminders of, abbreviations for, [but] not justifications for” extant social and political practices.14 “Moral duty” can be taken only to mean the “voice of the community,” in the sense of a call for taking into account its interests. This “we” has a binding force whenever one intends it; but, even then, its force is never absolute or “categorical.” Thus, moral duty always remains part and parcel of our deliberations and, as Rorty repeatedly emphasizes, one cannot demand its “automatic” precedence over against private motives.15 The traditional distinction between pure morality and utilitarian deliberation thereby proves to be outworn, and the conflict between communal and individual motives takes its place. We are supposed to arrive at a decision via deliberation, without any non-contingent criteria, by paying heed to the details of the actual case. Meanwhile, the conflicting interests remain

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rivals of one another, and the best and most reasonable thing deliberation can do is “to make a deal – find some compromise.”16 Furthermore, our feelings of moral obligations are the strongest when they pertain to someone who is “one of us.” This “we” means a particular community that stands always already in an opposition to a “they,” and its significance parallels the contrastive power inherent in its particularity. There is no way for our “we”-intentions to get beyond their particular, or more generally, ethnocentric character − although such an ethnos may include e.g. that of a locally dispersed research team. The ethnocentricity of our “we”-intentions or morality jeopardizes, again, the notion of global solidarity as a moral duty. Nevertheless, Rorty points to imagination as the only viable source of solidarity. For solidarity is not a thing to be found. Rather, it must be “generated” or created. In a sense, one can even learn to feel that way in Rorty’s view – and that is what happened to us in a historical sense. Inasmuch as this inclination has to be created, “constructed out of little pieces,” it is most of all imagination that can help it to come about.17 It is so because the cultivation of imagination can help to recognize similarities, and thus to expand our “we”-consciousness. “Feelings of solidarity,” he writes, ”are necessarily a matter of which similarities and dissimilarities strike us as salient, and . . . such salience is a function of a historically contingent final vocabulary,”18 where “the human self is created by the use of [such a particular] vocabulary.”19 Rorty’s point that imagination could be the source of solidarity is not immediately convincing, however. If solidarity depends on recognizing similarities, and if that recognition depends on our “final vocabularies,” then global solidarity would seem to require that we expand our final vocabulary to include all other people’s contingent vocabularies. This is, of course, not tenable. Indeed, in Rorty’s exposition we find him fluctuating between circumscribing the requirement of expanding our “we”-consciousness and what he calls the “curse” of ethnocentrism. He emphasizes the importance of detailed empirical descriptions as means of improving our moral imagination, and for that reason praises literature rather than philosophical or religious argumentations. But, even if we can improve our ability to recognize similarities, what sort of similarities, which always depend on our particularity, should support global solidarity? Nevertheless, Rorty stresses that “we should try to notice our similarities” with those people “whom we still instinctively think of as ‘they’ rather than ’us.’”20 Meanwhile, he claims that solidarity in the sense of “identifying ourselves” with others is not possible in his view. Perhaps we can find a clue when − all of the sudden − he seems to appeal to a different sort of imaginative achievement, to our ability to consider “more and more traditional differences (of tribe, religion, race, customs, and the like) as unimportant when compared with similarities with respect to pain and humiliation.”21 He ascribes that ability to liberal ethnocentrists who regard cruelty as the worst one can

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do to the others, to “an ethnocentrism of a ’we,’” however, that is composed of “the people who have been brought up to distrust ethnocentrism.”22 From that a requirement of “loosening ethnocentrism” follows, but that again seems to run counter, as we have seen, to our “we”-intentions and sense of morality. To sum up: The problem seems to reside in the “empirical” notion of “global” as such. On the one hand, it stands in tension with our presumably unsurpassable empirical particularity; on the other, it contradicts ideal universality. The question remains whether the notion of “similarities with respect to pain and humiliation” is able to solve this problem – and if so, how? 4. Rorty’s Argument In my view, Rorty’s argument can be summarized as follows: 1. We should not talk about such a thing as the “intrinsic nature” of this or that, for whatever is accessible for us is accessible only via a linguistic description of it, and therefore its presumed inner “nature” is dependent on those historical and contingent descriptions of ours. 2. Accordingly, we should not talk about such a thing as the common “nature” of man. Human beings differ from animals only in the one respect that they invented a tool, language, which makes them more adaptative than the other living beings. The individualization of human beings, in turn, is due to the differences in our linguistically constituted web of convictions, purposes, etc., our “final vocabularies.” Thus, the Darwinian view must hold sway and all the traditional approaches suggesting a distinctively human feature must be rejected. 3. Within such conditions, “moral duties” are in fact always contingent “we”intentions. This means that it is up to our deliberations whether we intend them or not. Fraternal feelings, as one kind of “we”-intentions, are by definition ethnocentric. One cannot have true feelings of sister- and brotherhood towards an ideal notion such as “humanity.” 4. The global egalitarian utopia needs a viable notion of solidarity as the pillar of its vital global hope. One of the available approaches to maintain such notion seems to be that we examine the possibility of “expanding fraternity.” The effort to expand such inclinations, however, contradicts the fact that our “we”-intentions and moral obligations are strongest when they pertain to “one of us.” Expanding them would mean eliminating them.

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5. Thus, solidarity cannot stand in continuity with fraternity. If solidarity is to be possible, it must find its ground in something that is common to everybody on the earth and, nevertheless, not distinctively human (for no such thing exists). We need an empirical yet common feature, beyond the human beings’ linguistic individualization. According to Rorty, this feature is suffering. It is a condition common to us all, not particular, yet empirical and not universal (in an ideal or transcendental sense). 6. It is imagination that is the most suitable for preparing us to recognize similarities, and ultimately the common condition of suffering. 5. Several Consequences I would like to emphasize several points which follow from this argument: 1. Rorty’s notion of a utopian (global) society with institutions embodying (solidarity or) fraternity, which in turn feeds on imagination, enables him to debunk both alternatives of either deducing social bonds from reason or appealing to something “other than reason.” It is so because these ways, in their exclusiveness, lead either to a rational or to an irrational picture of society. In any case, both forms threaten basic social needs, either that of pluralism and individual freedom, or that of social justice. Compared to these, his imaginative utopia offers − at least in principle − a viable alternative. 2. Rorty’s claim that imagination is the source of both solidarity and private autonomy corresponds furthermore to his insistence that we are experiencing today the “rise of a literary culture,” overruling the rationalist one.23 3. Since suffering is a common issue to all of us, acknowledging this fact will teach us, in spite of our being ethnocentrists, to distrust ethnocentrism, to doubt − as Rorty writes − our “own sensitivity to the pain and humiliation of others, doubt that present institutional arrangements are adequate to deal with this pain and humiliation.”24 4. In this sense, Rorty’s conception counters rational ethics with an ethics of good inclination, an ethics of good will, or an ethics of communal values. Even an ethics of practical deliberation is rejected, since solidarity springing from the recognition of common suffering is in itself not a matter of deliberation but has strong ethical consequences. One of the main features of such an ethics is that it applies to our relations to every living being and not only to human beings. It applies to our whole living environment. Also, the notion

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of humiliation, as Rorty uses it, cannot apply exclusively to human beings, contrary to the word’s etymology. 5. Suffering is the only condition common to all human (and living) beings. Therefore – and this is the most important point here − the public-private distinction must be based on that issue. Namely, the ultimate issue of public concerns must be that of suffering; and, since it is cruelty that causes unnecessary and avoidable suffering, the ultimate guideline in public affairs must be the avoidance of cruelty. In turn, questions of final vocabularies, and those pertaining to differences and similarities, should be regarded as being private matters. This distinction is underpinned, furthermore, by the observation that suffering is not something linguistic. As Rorty claims, “there is no such things as the ’voice of the oppressed’ or the ’language of the victims.’” Further, animals do not use language as we do, but are exposed to suffering, whereas the human self is linguistically constituted, in Rorty’s view.25 6. Contingency, Freedom, and the Private-Public Distinction It is one of Rorty’s central theses that by acknowledging and facing the indicated contingency of our morality we acquire freedom: the freedom of being responsible only to ourselves and to each other. In the context of the individual, this means the freedom for creating an autonomous self. As Rorty suggests, however, we must make a sharp distinction between two versions of grasping individual autonomy, namely, between the romantic and the socalled ironic ones. A romantic notion of self-creation is inclined, according to him, to divinize the depth of self, and regards imagination as the medium in which some superhuman “other to reason” finds its expressions. For such an approach, autonomy is in a sense always already “there”; but it is more or less repressed by socialization and needs to be emancipated via an imaginative effort of self-identification that merges into some “infinite.” To this romantic notion Rorty responds with a post-metaphysical alternative. For the real issue is not so much rebellion against universal agreement, as it is in the case of the romantics, but rather rebellion against the ahistorical legitimacy characteristic of both universalism and romanticism. The problem is that both kinds of legitimacy are one-sided and frustrate from their own side what is most needed: a balance between two corresponding needs overly dramatized by them, the need for “intersubjective agreement” and the “need for novelty, to be imaginative, searching for the meaning of life.” An acknowledgement of these two equally basic needs requires their adjustment to each other, rather than their synthesis, which would inevitably lead to the submission of the one to the other.

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In an effort to make such an adjustment possible, Rorty introduces his “ironic” notion of self-creation. For an ironic individual, autonomy is not something that has always already been “there,” it is rather something to be achieved and created, by means of looking for new purposes and coming up with future projects and new metaphors for their description. Ironic individuals are historicist and nominalist enough to think that they cannot pass beyond the element of contingent descriptions of things from which their autonomy must be re-woven. They are pragmatists in the sense that they are convinced that “experimentalist tinkering [with ourselves] is all we shall ever manage.”26 For ironics are, as Rorty describes them, well aware of the fact that in their self-creation they cannot rely on anything beyond their contingent makeup. It is this ironic notion of individual autonomy, with its awareness of contingent self-identity, which furthermore fits the needs of a liberal society. This is a society where we would manage to develop and take seriously the contingency of our coexistence, leading to the freedom of being responsible only to each other. 7. Conclusion: Situating Rorty’s Imaginative Liberalism This prospect would of course follow from a fully-fledged secularism, initiated by the Enlightenment. In this regard, Rorty’s philosophical project aims at completing the Enlightenment’s de-divinization process, by trying to get beyond representationalism in order to secure the conditions of desirable human self-reliance. The use of Rorty’s philosophical anti-representationalism must be understood in the light of his diagnosis about contemporary democracies. He would most probably agree with critics of the prevailing forms of liberalism that they go through a crisis, and also, more generally, that “the forces unleashed by the Enlightenment have undermined the Enlightenment’s own convictions.”27 He refuses to draw any conclusion, however, which would call into question the very project of the Enlightenment. In this way, he is far from trying to give an apology for present conditions, and compares his own critical project to “refurnishing a house,” rather than “propping it up or placing barricades around it.”28 His point is that it is the very vocabulary of the Enlightenment’s original project, taking the natural scientist as its cultural hero, which became an obstacle in the way of contemporary democratic developments. It is time, he suggests, to radicalize the original intentions of liberalism, and this radicalization must take the form of getting rid of the outworn forms of thought embodied in its traditional, representationalist and rationalist vocabulary. This kind of vocabulary is suitable for defining certain, rather rationalistic purposes; but it is much less appropriate for sustaining other, primarily moral goals. Accordingly, in this view it is not the original

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project itself, but its self-understanding and self-description, which seem to be becoming bankrupt. By stripping away its rhetoric and replacing its notions of truth, rationality and moral duty with another vocabulary, “one which revolves around notions of metaphor and self-creation,” Rorty aims at setting free the inner potentialities of the Enlightenment, the unpredictable dynamics of imaginative freedom inherent in modern individualism. 29 This utopian image is supported, as we have already mentioned, by a tendency within the cultural sphere that he depicts as the rise of a literary culture. A version of postmodernism underpins Rorty’s understanding of liberalism. Because of his postmodernist emphasis on imagination and literature, Rorty is able both to reject any attempted synthesis between the private and public realms and to envisage a viable utopian democracy which promotes instead an adjustment of those realms. For tolerance – making room for the acceptance of plurality, difference, and individual freedom in matters of convictions, beliefs, and intellectual projects, as opposed to demanding one standard of rationality in every context – requires a distinction between the needs of society and that of individuals. In this way, he is able to reject the rational-irrational opposition by pointing to a notion of dialogical, communicative reason. This form of argumentation is essential for projects of social cooperation, and in turn, for imaginative freedom in private matters. The viability of his distinction between the private and public spheres depends, however, on an acknowledging gesture – on the acceptance of the requirement that those willing to participate in debate about public concerns should leave their private aspirations at home. Rorty’s utopia comes full circle at this point, for the type of intellectual makeup which is most likely to accept this requirement and acknowledge thereby the private-public distinction is the one he characterizes as ironic liberalism. In other words, the practical realization of that distinction depends on how far ironically enlightened the individuals are who participate in public affairs. This state of affairs points to the importance of education, and to the role of the humanistic intellectuals. Compared to traditional liberal principles, Rorty’s utopian liberalism remains in complete agreement with most of the traditional convictions, such as those concerning individual freedom and the tasks of government assigned accordingly. It differs in one major respect, however, and that is that he utilizes the possibilities inherent in postmodern anti-rationalism to make room for a morality of fraternity – and possibly solidarity – that is hardly compatible with that of rationalism. Even so, this project should not be regarded as a merely moralizing effort. For it aims at taking into account all the contemporary social, political, and cultural developments, and judges its own suggestions according to the strictest criteria of pragmatic utility. In my view, it is according to these criteria that he urges the restoration of social – and possibly global – hope.

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Notes 1. Rorty, “Trotsky and the Wild Orchids,” in Philosophy and Social Hope (London, New York, Victoria, Toronto, Auckland: Penguin Books, 1999), pp. 3-22. 2. Rorty, “Looking Backwards from the Year 2096,” in Philosophy and Social Hope (London, New York, Victoria, Toronto, Auckland: Penguin Books, 1999), pp. 243-251. 3. Ibid., p. 246. 4. Ibid., pp. 243-244. 5. Ibid., p. 243. 6. Ibid., p. 249. 7. Ibid., p. 250. 8. Ibid., p. 249. 9. Ibid., p. 259. 10. Ibid., p. 234. 11. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge, New York, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 189-198. 12. Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope (London, New York, Victoria, Toronto, Auckland: Penguin Books, 1999), p. 237. 13. Wilfrid Sellars, Science and Metaphysics (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968), chaps 6 and 7, discussed in Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge, New York, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 59-60, 190. 14. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge, New York, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 59. 15. Ibid., p. 194. 16. Rorty, “Universalist Grandeur, Romantic Profundity, Humanist Finitude,” talk at the conference “The Place of Philosophy in Culture” held in Pécs, Hungary, 2004. 17. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge, New York, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 94. 18. Ibid., p. 192. 19. Ibid., p. 7. 20. Ibid., p. 196. 21. Ibid., p. 192. 22. Ibid., p. 198. 23. See especially Richard Rorty, “The Decline of Redemptive Truth and the Rise of a Literary Culture,” www.stanford.edu/~rrorty, and also “Universalist Grandeur, Romantic Profundity, Humanist Finitude,” talk at the conference “The Place of Philosophy in Culture” held in Pécs, Hungary, 2004.

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24. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge, New York, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 198. 25. Ibid., p. 94. 26. Rorty, “Universalist Grandeur, Romantic Profundity, Humanist Finitude,” talk at the conference “The Place of Philosophy in Culture” held in Pécs, Hungary, 2004. 27. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge, New York, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 56. 28. Ibid., p. 45. 29. Ibid., p. 44.

Eightteen A KOALA’S FACE, A PIG’S SLAUGHTER, AND RORTY’S CONCEPTION OF SELF AND SOCIETY Radim Šíp 1. Introduction In this paper I will discuss several specific themes of Richard Rorty’s works, namely his mistrust of the old pragmatic conception of experience, the Sellarsian heritage of exteriorism, a concept of societas as “we-intensions,” and his emphasis on procedural justice, and finally their mutual connections. Postanalytic and pragmatic approaches are mingled so brilliantly in his thought that it is possible to overlook the inadequacies of his theories. The inadequacies are most readily recognized in his idea of a split between the public and private domains. In my opinion, the split is wholly unpragmatic and can be dangerous in any case, despite the fact that by introducing the split Rorty tries to avoid the danger of humiliation and harm to other people. 2. The Vice of Postanalytic Pragmatism When I read Rorty’s works I am for the most part not sure what precisely he means by the word “language.” I dare say that Rorty must have a more complex meaning in mind than the usual one. I think he understands “language” in a very broad sense as any semiological system by which people can communicate, for example ordinary language as well as arithmetic, or an artificial logical calculus, or the system of William Blake’s idioms, and so on. In spite of this extension, the meaning does not quite coincide with the meaning of the word “experience.” And the fundamental insufficiency appears when the postanalytic pragmatists, the pragmatists represented by Davidson, Rorty, Brandom and others, repudiate the concept of “experience” as something obscure. According to one of the main beliefs of contemporary antifoundation¬alists, human beings use language not only as a mediating factor of understanding, but also as a formative factor. The significance of language rests in two areas: it helps us to communicate, to share our beliefs or express our disbeliefs, and it is influential in constructing our notion what the world

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“really” is like. Both functions imply one another. Communication can happen only if there is a notion which underlies the debate and which the participants in communication refer to. On the other hand, the notion is infinitely updated by outcomes of the communication, and, naturally, the cognition which is articulated by force of communication. That is of course the reason language begins to dominate in the “experience–language” relationship. The classical pragmatists, i.e. James, Dewey, Mead etc., wisely did not divide this scale into two domains, the domain of language and the domain of experience. After separating those two domains, most of the postanalysts claim that the domain of experience is something obscure and irrelevant, something that can be dismissed. 3. Rorty’s Rejection of Experience As early as in his “Introduction” to The Linguistic Turn Rorty discussed and advocated “methodological nominalism.”1 This approach suggests that if we are unable to relate our reports directly to any empirical inquiry, we should ask ourselves “How do people use the words which they utter?” The answer to this question is the only thing we need to assign meaning not only to the uttered words, but also to the experience which we try to express by these words. The propensity to understand experience only as a linguistic issue appears many times in Rorty’s works. This may be motivated by a postanalytic suspicion that there is not a close relation between our sensation or perception (feeling) on the one side and the appropriate meaning of a word which we use to express the feeling on the other. Concerning the relation between words and empirical inquiry, Rorty often shows that a report of any empirical inquiry is through and through a linguistic issue and that it depends strongly on the way in which people speak. (I should probably stress that the approach has nothing in common with the old idealism, because the intense pragmatic relation between language and world is taken for granted here.) Moreover, any discussion about using words is a meta-linguistic act, and that is why it depends on language much more than a process of linking an area of research (or an area of feeling) with an area of theory (or with an area of common sense conception). From this point of view, Rorty seems to be right when he emphasizes: … To say that all awareness is a linguistic affair is to say that we have no knowledge of the kind which Bertrand Russell, working in the tradition of British empiricism, called ‘knowledge by acquaintance.’ All our knowledge is of the sort which Russell called ‘knowledge by description.’ If you put the two slogans together, you get the claim that all our knowledge is under descriptions suited to our current social purposes…2

A Koala’s Face, A Pig’s Slaughters, and Rorty’s Conception of Self and Society 215 In other words, if we try to specify what knowledge is, we should consider that any piece of knowledge, to be accepted as a piece of knowledge, has to be accessible to other people. Therefore, it has to be a part of a sign system through which human beings can communicate among one another. Surely, if some chunk of our experience cannot be expressed in language (in the very broad sense I have mentioned above), the jury of others cannot assign to it the status of knowledge. This position is very powerful because it reflects the inter-subjective core of human cognition and its constructive character. Furthermore, it is a very effective stance if we try to prevent the reification of our concepts, ideas and theories into really and definitely existing items. Russell worked in the tradition of British empiricism, and therefore he tried to find some connection between Lockean qualia, that is “knowledge by acquaintance,” and a logical system of human reports on these qualia, that is “knowledge by description.” Since no one has found the connection yet, and since no one has been able to identify what the qualia are yet, the entire postanalytic tradition, from Sellars to Rorty, asserts that the whole of our knowledge consists of knowledge by description only, and that the idea of “knowledge by acquaintance” is an obscure and confusing idea, which is “…the heir of Plato’s attempt to model Knowledge on vision…”3 This may be partially true, as all his successors are only a footnote to Plato to some extent. On the other side, every day, every moment there are many events around us that we cannot translate into language. We “feel” that events happen to us, that “something” remains after our attempts to express the events, and we “feel” that this “something” influences us. We can fix “it” by words, we can tag them as “feelings,” “antipathy,” “sympathy,” “unconsciousness,” “drives,” “instincts,” “idiosyncrasy” and so on, but these events are tacit. The events are in some sense our “knowledge by acquaintance,” but they probably cannot be totally incorporated into any semiological system, therefore they cannot be categorized. For postanalysts, these events are obscure and consequently unimportant. This is, in my view, the origin of the postanalytic vice, viz. the supremacy of the outward over the inward. As I will demonstrate in what follows, this move leads Rorty to overestimate the private / public distinction, as well as the clarity and function of procedural justice. Postanalysts treat events either as something that in principle can be translated into language or as something that should be dismissed, because only the utterable actually exists. Experience is considered by them to be either a completely obscure concept or an outdated form of empiricism. For example, Davidson often places this term on the same level as terms like “empirical content,” “feeling,” “sense data,” and “qualia.” Rorty, I think, is more suspicious of experience than is Davidson. In his texts he often considers any application of the term “experience” in philosophical or scientific discourse to be evidence of the absurd idea that our experience is something like Kantian intuitions that

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have to be, and indeed are, formed by our cognitive apparatus. This appears, for example, in Rorty’s essay titled “Dewey’s Metaphysics.”4 Rorty is right to some extent because no pragmatist, as far as I know, has ever articulated the term “experience” clearly enough. However, the articulation is possible only in and through language. In principle, we are not able to articulate what precedes language itself, we are not able to articulate what language springs from. That explains why James, Dewey and many current neopragmatists express “experience” in metaphorical, imperfect ways. When classical pragmatists use such words as “primary experience,” or “pure experience” in James’ terms, they mean something previous from which everything that affects us, everything that we feel, somehow derives. Nevertheless, when we can start to classify, to categorize or to arrange this “quasi-material,” and therefore we can say that “This is myself and this is my surroundings and these parts of the surroundings cause this and this in myself,” at that moment we are already in “secondary experience.” Our consciousness begins to crystallize when this “secondary experience” begins. In this secondary area semiological systems dominate. For these reasons, it seems to be right to assume that “secondary experience” is the only experience that exists. Postanalysts ask classical pragmatists and their successors troublesome questions: “How do you know that there is any ‘primary experience’ if at the same time you admit that we can be conscious of something or we can get to know something only in ‘secondary experience?’ Under these circumstances ‘primary experience’ resembles Kantian intuitions, does it not? ” In fact, from this Rortyan point of view, language “creates” everything important around and in us. There were many attempts to show that we can reach back to “primary experience,” for example James’ gentle analysis of the function of dispositions, or his analysis of the structure of experience that precedes our categorizing, but none of them have been convincing for the postanalysts. Nevertheless, there is a way to prove indirectly that something like “primary experience” exists. The proof will have a pragmatic character, and in the following passages I will try to demonstrate that Rorty’s and others’ non-dimensional conception of experience opens more questions than it solves. 4. The Over-Rationalized Self In one of his excellent essays, “Inquiry as Recontextualization: An Anti-Dualist Account of Interpretation,” Rorty clarifies the antifoundationalist approach to knowledge and to the nature of human beings. According to postanalysts as well as pragmatists, knowledge arises out of clashes between us and the surroundings in which we live. In Rorty’s view, we should imagine the self as

A Koala’s Face, A Pig’s Slaughters, and Rorty’s Conception of Self and Society 217 if it emerged from a centerless web of beliefs and desires. The web originates in the clashes. This metaphor encourages us not to look for intrinsic features of things, but to assume that knowledge is a problem-solving dimension of this web. The web can re-weave itself if it turns out that some of its beliefs cannot be helpful, butt it cannot relieve the pressures of the neighborhood. That is why the self does not have a web, rather it is the web of beliefs and desires. 5 In contrast to realists, there is no clear distinction between the self and world in Rorty’s scheme. James or Dewey would fully agree up to this point. However, Rorty over-rationalizes the self. In the second and almost unnoticeable step, he identifies the web with beliefs only. He calls the step a “familiar trick,” and shows that the trick lies in treating the desire expressed in “Would that it were the case that S!” like the belief expressed in “It would be better that S should be the case than not-S should be.”6 However, if we identify desires, or anticipations, or intuitions with clear beliefs, then we integrate them into a chain of reasons and these mental states cease to be part of “primary (pure) experience.” In this case these transmuted states can be justified to ourselves and more importantly to the jury of others. They can be incorporated into language and into its logical conjunctions. Nevertheless, all of us know very well that sometimes our beliefs are based on desires, feelings, or intuitions that we are not able to justify, but we rely on them. Desires, feelings, an unaccountable antipathy or sympathy, intuitions, visions, or body reactions and so forth, are all part of a dark side of experience that Rorty, like Sellars, Quine, Davidson or Brandom, does not take into consideration. Since these states cannot be expressed in language, Rorty and his postanalytic colleagues ignore them as dubious relics of poor empiricist’s metaphysics. When Rorty identifies desires, intuitions etc. with beliefs, and at the same time defines the self as a web of beliefs, he constructs the self in a completely linguistic way, at least in principle, because beliefs are beliefs if and only if they can be expressed and shared in discursive behavior and, therefore, they can be justified in a chain of reasoning. In this respect, Rorty transfers the constitution of the self from primary experience to secondary experience, or more exactly to linguistic experience which, for postanalysts, seems to be all there is. In other words, from Rorty’s point of view our self originates first of all in the field of linguistic behavior. Primary experience does not exist, and was only James’ or Dewey’s misguided myth. This transfer makes the self highly dependent on society, as we will now see. 5. The Tamed Self The pragmatic conception of society includes many communita¬rian traits. One of these traits is the fact that every society can arise and maintain itself only when there are special relations among its members. In his Lectures on Ethics, Ernest Tugendhat calls these relations “morality.” In his conception

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of this old word, it means that each member of a society makes a claim on other members to be “good.”7 In this and similar definitions, a clear echo of the Kantian categorical imperative can be heard. However, after Tugendhat’s casting doubt upon the interrelationship between the categorical imperative and Reason8 , there are more possibilities for Hegelian approaches. Every society needs this netlike making of the claim, but the concept of “good” can vary in every community according to its environment, history and experience. Rorty’s fight against the Enlightenment conceptions of reason, man and society, that Kantians believe to be true, leads him to emphasize language excessively. When he tries to define his conception of society he cites Oakeshott’s definition of “morality.” (It has been remarked above that the reciprocal demand of “morality” constitutes society from inside.) Rorty applies his definition to demonstrate a shift from an outdated conception of community as universitas to a more appropriate conception of community as societas.9 A morality is neither a system of general principles nor a code of rules, but a vernacular language. General principles and even rules may be elicited from it, but (like other languages) it is not the creation of grammarians; it is made by speakers. What has to be learnt in a moral education is not a theorem such as that good conduct is acting fairly or being charitable, nor is it a rule such as ‘always tell the truth,’ but how to speak intelligently… It is not a device for formulating judgments about conduct or for solving so-called moral problems, but a practice in terms of which to think, to choose, to act and to utter.10 Thus a morality, and therefore a society (societas) is a practice of proper speaking, behaving and thinking, a practice which is passed on from generation to generation. Rorty often uses Sellars’ term “we-intentions.” According to Rorty, these intentions are constituted by banal, everyday language that “has the routine intelligibility of the marketplace or the courtroom.”11 The “weintensions” create the core of our innermost beliefs, and we become attached to them because with their help we can easily identify members of society as “us” and others as those “who do things that we never do.”12 In the quotation from Oakeshott there is the word “practice,” but as we can see, this practice is governed by “vernacular language,” which teaches us not only to speak and to behave but also to speak and behave intelligently. Thus, morality seems not to arise out of a human being, but out of “vernacular” language, which precedes and controls individuals. I would like to sum up the key points that have so far been made: The self crystallizes from a web of beliefs and desires. As desires can be turned into beliefs by expressing them in indicative sentences, everything is potentially utterable in language. Therefore, the self crystallizes in an actual or

A Koala’s Face, A Pig’s Slaughters, and Rorty’s Conception of Self and Society 219 prospective language. At the end of the second chapter of Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, the chapter where the main features of a strong poet are sketched out, Rorty reminds us that persons are highly dependent on society because of communal, or in his words “banal and everyday,” language. It is completely understandable because every person, however independent of others, is born into some language. Since the self as a web of beliefs crystallizes only through the language in which one’s beliefs are expressed, and since, simultaneously, everybody inherits the language of a society the person was born into, then language controls what a person can say, think, and therefore what a person can do, to a huge extent. Why did Rorty sketch out the relation between human beings and society in this way? As I will try to show comprehensively, he was led by his fellow feelings. He believes that everything needs to be expressed in language and then to undergo a democratic discussion from which nobody would be excluded. 6. A Cushion of the Unpragmatic Imbalance What I have just said about the self is only one side of Rorty’s theory. In order to cushion the imbalance between the self and society, Rorty refines the idea that the self, or the web of beliefs, has incessantly to create a new form of speaking in order to escape a total dependence on language, i.e. a total dependence on society. To understand the ambiguity it must be explained who a strong poet is and why he happens to be Rorty’s unusual hero. And here I must mention that I see a closeness between a strong poet and the person who Rorty calls an “ironist.” If somebody is not in doubt about any part of his or her own beliefs´ web, he will never feel the need for re-descriptions. The term “strong poet” is Harold Bloom’s, who defines such a person as someone who can re-describe or explain a substantial part of his relations to the world, and thus who can express his idiosyncrasies. A strong poet is “anyone who spends his life trying to formulate a novel answer to the question of what is possible and important…”13 (The word “poet” should not confuse us. In Bloom’s or Rorty’s jargon, the term “poet” applies not only to a person who writes poems, but also to, for example, a scientist, a literary critic, an architect or a worker. To be a strong poet means to be able to provide oneself with new re-descriptions, which allow one’s new practices.) In the second chapter of Contingency, Irony and Solidarity,14 and primarily in the paper titled “Freud and Moral Reflection,”15 Rorty tries to show that in principle every man and woman can be a strong poet. He repeats Rieffs’ words that Freud democratized genius. Genius is hidden in every human creature. If it is evaluated in terms of Rorty’s emphasizing of the role of language, the importance of a strong poet can be appreciated. Strong poets are persons who

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can furnish us with new ideas and new guidance for our actions – they are “strong” because they usually break through the straitjacket of our language and invent new descriptions that lead us to new, fruitful behavior. Nevertheless, in Rorty’s view there is a danger in the character of a strong poet. The criticism Rorty received after the publication of Contingency, Irony and Solidarity has caused him not to use the term “strong poet” again. However, he has found a new term, which shares the majority of the features of “strong poet”; that word is “utopian.” Like strong poets, utopians can provide us with new re-descriptions and thus they can change our inappropriate behavior. On the other hand, in the word “utopian” there are hidden traits of Rorty’s humanitarian thinking. A utopian is a person who by definition wants the best for his community (assuming, of course, that the community is a liberal and democratic community). This move from strong poets to utopians reflects Rorty’s effort to escape from his own perplexity. A strong poet is a person who tries to express first of all his idiosyncrasy, and that is why he can go against his own community in principle. A utopian, by contrast, wants to bring about the improvement of his community. Strong poets can become enemies of the procedural justice of liberal democracies. They can cause pain to some of their fellow-citizens as a result of their new descriptions and the new behavior that the re-descriptions engender. From this point of view it can be easily seen why a strong poet has to be restricted, why, to use Fraser’s terms, he “must be domesticated, cut down to size and made fit to private life.”16 That is the reason Rorty tries in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity to draw a line between the public and the private sphere. Such fellow feelings require Rorty to secure fellow citizens against the strong poet’s effort to find his freedom. In Contingency, Irony and Solidarity Rorty proclaims that a strong poet can create his self only in own private sphere. However, to establish the private sphere by separating it from the public means to know where the boundary is and how to define it. In that text Rorty tries to define this boundary as a line that circumscribes a place where we cannot hurt or humiliate anybody else by our descriptions or behavior. However, this idea is troubling. Where is this splendid place? I cannot find it for myself. Any of my acts can hurt somebody. My most private deeds have always touched somebody – at least my wife and my son, my parents and so on. When Rorty tried to answer a question of Nancy Fraser similar to mine, he said that Fraser did not understand him properly. The separation is grounded on the distinction between a public act and an act that I only do if I am by myself.17 This answer seems to be consistent with the main thrust of Rorty’s paper titled “The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy,” in which he wrote that “… When the individual finds in her conscience beliefs that are relevant to public policy but incapable of defense on the basis of beliefs common to her fellow citizens, she must sacrifice her conscience on the altar of public expediency…”18

A Koala’s Face, A Pig’s Slaughters, and Rorty’s Conception of Self and Society 221 The agreement of one’s fellow citizens indicates the boundary line in the public/private split. I understand that this prescription intends to prevent the horror of revolutions, but I am not sure if Rorty is right in the context of the contemporary problems of crossing cultures and creeds, the problems of free-floating capital, and globalization. These things change the Enlightenment equation that a true and fair society can be grounded on procedural justice only. The equation seems to be too simple for our global world. Again, I will try to summarize what I have just said: Rorty’s conception of procedural justice as the most fundamental instrument of democracy needs everything to be expressible in language. This is the point where the ideas of the postanalysts and of the Enlightenment thinkers converge and strengthen one another. Only under this condition can every discourse undergo the jury of democratic discussion and democratic resolution. However, there are things that cannot be expressed in language or justified in the eyes of others, or which are created as a part of private life. That is why, according to Rorty, there must be a clear method of differentiating the private sphere from the public one. However, the basic question is this: can we really locate a demarcation between the two spheres? Furthermore, is agreement sufficient for identification of the public sphere? 7. Killing Pigs, Faces, and “Primary Experience” At this point I would like to sketch my conception of the self and of society. First, self and society cannot be detached completely. In epistemology it cannot be precisely determined where primary experience ends and secondary experience begins, and in the same way it cannot be determined where society and the public sphere end and where the self and the private sphere begin in moral philosophy. On the one hand, the self is always influenced by society, not only by its language but also by those of its practices that are hidden behind language and so often evade our rational control. (That is why I think that Rorty’s criticism does not do justice to Foucault’s works.) On the other hand, there is something in the self that we cannot wholly utter but from which all newness of human thinking and action springs. To put it more clearly, Brandom’s phrase should be repeated: “To use a vocabulary is to change it”;19 and it should be completed by the phrase: “no change is conceivable without some cause that precedes using language.” The greatest difficulty of Rorty’s thought structure consists in his inability to explain where new ideas, new feelings, new practices come from. His single explanation of new descriptions or re-descriptions is that they are only rearrangements of old words and meanings. It has to be understood that the strong poet must not cross the line of the private sphere if he is not able

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to “defend [his re-descriptions] on the basis of beliefs common to [his] fellow citizens,”20 and in this case they must be restricted to private life. So where can any newness come from? I know there are utopians in Rorty’s utopia, but how can I distinguish utopians from strong poets? In my view, Rorty has circled around the right answer, around an appreciation of personal non-linguistic experience. His fear of the possibly irresponsible behavior of strong poets with respect to others leads him to a postanalytic emphasis on the function of language and on the supremacy of the outward over the inward. This move is the reason he never found the answer. Nevertheless, as far back as in his Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature Rorty showed that he was very much aware of a thin line, which (only seemingly) separates imagination from rationality. Concerning the line, he wrote: … The moral prohibitions are expressions of a sense of community based on the imagined possibility of conversation, and the attribution of feelings is little more than a reminder of these prohibitions. This can be seen by noticing that nobody except philosophers of mind cares whether the raw feel of pain or redness is different for koalas than for us, but that we all care quite a bit about a koala when we see it writhing about. This fact does not mean that our or that koala’s pain ‘is nothing but his behavior’; it just means that writhing is more important to our ability to imagine the koalas asking us for help than what is going on inside the koala. Pigs rate much higher than koalas on intelligence tests, but pigs do not writhe in quite the right humanoid way, and the pig’s face is the wrong shape for the facial expressions that go with ordinary conversation. Therefore, we send pigs to slaughter with equanimity, but form societies for the protection of koalas… The emotions we have toward borderline cases depend on the liveliness of our imagination, and conversely…21 He has a point. Our imagination influences our rationality, and conversely. To be able to imagine that koalas suffer in the same way as we do is the first step in changing our conduct and the change is to be a cause for a revision of what we consider to be “rational.” Conversely, what we consider “rational” restricts our imagination and only a forceful experience – a scream or a desperate appeal of a vulnerable person, a horror-struck eye or the panic of a squealing pig – can puncture our complacency and make a new insight possible. However, we do not have to imagine that the pig is a member of our language community not to kill it. The pig’s face and its squealing are as expressive as a koala’s or a human being’s. When we accept what Rorty tell us about the inadequacy of a pig’s face to express fear, helplessness, or pain, we only cover up what we do not feel clearly. If the morbid practice of modern slaughter is stopped, too

A Koala’s Face, A Pig’s Slaughters, and Rorty’s Conception of Self and Society 223 many things will change, starting with personal comfort and ending with the “slaughter” of employees and farmers loosing their jobs and other deep economic disturbances. The dread of a pig standing in front of a butcher with an electric hammer is similar to the dread of a convict standing in front of the gallows. Their faces are symbols and projected screens of what is inside. The face and the outcry, not language, move us. In this case language is only a mediator that can amplify or diminish what is inside. To ask: “How do we know it?” is the Scylla of Cartesian skepticism, which reduces the self to an epistemic subject that cannot know anything if there is not someone like a Lockean “Wise Designer.” To ask “Can we imagine a pig as a member of our language community?” is the Charybdis of Sellarsian exteriorism. Rorty’s obstinate adherence to language is a heritage of Sellars’ fight against Cartesianism. The main creed of the fight can be expressed by Rorty’s sentence “…[the] inside of people and quasi-people is to be explained by what goes on outside (and, in particular, by their place in our community) rather then conversely…”22 However, if there is nothing inside us then there is no reason to act or to articulate. We therefore need to steer between both monsters. Rorty is right to say that old properties like the categorical imperative or the idea of an eternal universal justice and so on are no longer needed. I think, however, that we do not need to rely only on language, as Rorty advises. It is true that societies are constituted by claims which each member of a society imposes on fellow citizens. Yet this does not mean that the claim is constituted by linguistic practices alone. In contrast to Rorty, I do not think that to include beasts or small babies in the rank of creatures to whom we have some responsibilities we need to imagine them as members of our language community. I do not understand what a black African woman yells to an armed soldier who takes her child away, but I feel ashamed and angry when I see it. I do not have to imagine a pig as a creature that can speak about its fear, and I can still feel its dread of a coming butcher and be ashamed of my taste for meat. Yes, experience needs a context. I must know what yelling or squealing means and in what situation people or pigs usually do it. Nevertheless, the context based on experience is much more than merely linguistic. On the contrary, experience is the source of all language and of its meanings. For these reasons, “banal everyday language” cannot be the last preservation of the Enlightenment’s desire to ground the relation between the self and society on rationality. In these dangerous days we must completely revise the conception of rationality. Henceforward, rationality must be determined in relation neither to Reason and Man, as Kantians do, nor in relation to the language of some society, as the postanalysts do. Rationality should be defined as an ability to balance a constant establishing and disturbing of order. The impetus for disturbing order comes from inside human being, which is the

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reason the public sphere cannot be separated from the private. The procedural justice of liberal societies is a tool that helped us to build better community, but it is not the only such tool. In the real world, there are situations in which social players disturb the rules of procedural justice or change their frontiers, and in so doing allow societies to evolve or to revolve. These players are the Rortyan “strong poets,” and they are always dangerous. However, without danger there cannot be any important change. And I am sure that our contemporary world, owing to its instability, needs great changes now. 8. Summary As has been shown, Richard Rorty is a noteworthy philosopher who has combined new approaches with the legacy of American philosophy, and thus shed light upon many perplexities of contemporary life. However, I am afraid that his excessive inclination to a philosophy derived from Sellars, which though it released American thinking from the bewitchment of continental analytic philosophy, also distorted his view. The distortion, as I have tried to show, is mirrored in his beliefs that the private sphere of human life can be and in some cases has to be separated from the public. In my opinion this is not possible, and reliance on it can be dangerous in the contemporary world.

NOTES 1. Richard Rorty, “Introduction. Metaphysical Difficulties of Linguistic Philosophy,” in Rorty, R., ed.: The Linguistic Turn. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1967), p. 11. 2. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1999), p. 48. 3. Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), pp. 130–131. 4. Richard Rorty, “Deweys Metaphysics,” in Consequences of Pragmatism, pp. 72–89. 5. Cf. Richard Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth. Philosophical Papers, Vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1991), pp. 93–94. 6. Ibid., p. 93. 7. Ernst Tugendhat, Přednášky o etice (Lectures on Ethics) (Praha: OIKOYMENH, 2001), pp. 40–52. 8. Ibid., pp. 40–52.

A Koala’s Face, A Pig’s Slaughters, and Rorty’s Conception of Self and Society 225 9. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 59. 10. Ibid., p. 58. 11. Richard Rorty, Essays on Heidegger and Others. Philosophical Papers, Vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 196. 12. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, p. 59. 13. Ibid., p. 23. 14. Ibid., pp. 23–43. 15. Rorty, Essays on Heidegger and Others, pp. 143–163. 16. Nancy Fraser, “Solidarity or Singularity? Richard Rorty between Romanticism and Technocracy,” in Malachowski, A., ed., Reading Rorty (Cambridge: Basil Blackwell 1990), p. 312. 17. Cf. Richard Rorty, Against Bosses, Against Oligarchies: A Conversation with Richard Rorty (Charlottesville: Prickly Pear Pamphlets, 1998), p. 61. 18. Richard Rorty, “The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy,” in Malachowski, ed., Reading Rorty, p. 280. 19. Robert Brandom, “Vocabularies of Pragmatism: Synthesizing Naturalism and Historicism”, in Robert Brandom, ed., Rorty and His Critics (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), p. 177. 20. See note n. 18. 21. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), pp. 190–191. 22. Ibid., p. 191.

Nineteen AN INTERVIEW WITH RICHARD RORTY By Alexander Kremer Stanford, California, December 20, 2005 AK: Prof. Rorty, you had a recent dialogue with Gianni Vattimo which took place in December 2002 in Paris. At that time you accepted the idea that the so called “weak thought,” which today is represented first of all by neopragmatism and philosophical hermeneutics, has a common idea that ontology is language. According to this common idea, our world is identical with the historical dialogue among people. However, I would like to ask you, what kind of differences do you see between neo-pragmatism and philosophical hermeneutics? RR: I think that they have in common the view that philosophers don’t have to worry about the relation between language and reality. They don’t have to divide language into the bits that try to represent reality and the bits that do not. All they have to worry about is getting some language games to coexist peacefully with other language-games. So philosophy becomes a matter of cultural politics, rather than metaphysics. I think of philosophical hermeneutics as helping us fuse horizons – a culture-political task. I think of pragmatism as saying that if you can fuse horizons between discourses and language-games then you don’t have to worry about anything else. Your job as a philosopher is done. AK: Regarding the future and the past, could we say that perhaps philosophical hermeneutics deals with the past a little bit more than neo-pragmatism, which emphasizes more the perspective of the future, as Heidegger did? RR: Attention to the past may not be essential to hermeneutics as such, but it was certainly important to Gadamer. He thought that we lost a great deal when we lost touch with certain aspects of Greek thought. Dewey thought that the further we could get from Greek thought the better. It is an obvious dissimilarity. But it should not obscure the fact that they were reacting against some of the same philosophical movements.

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AK: You wrote an article about the Gadamerian sentence that “Being that can be understood is language”. Do you think that Gadamer also denies reality, and he also thinks that our world is only language? RR: No. I was just reiterating that that there isn’t a problem about the relationship between language and reality. The only problem is about the relationship between one language-game and another. I interpreted “Being that can be understood is language” to mean something like this: You can discuss the relation of some sentences to other sentences, or of beliefs to other beliefs, but you cannot discuss the relation between beliefs or sentences and non-beliefs and non-sentences. There is nothing interesting to be said about that relationship; there is nothing to be understood. AK: What is the case regarding non-verbal artwork? If one searches a library, one does not find any book of yours, even an article, devoted to the arts, except literature of course. Do you claim that artworks can be interpreted only if there is some linguistic mediation? Is it that such artworks cannot be understood or interpreted? RR: We can discuss their effects upon us, in the way in which we can discuss the effects of the other non-linguistic entities upon us. But you cannot understand them in the way in which we can understand beliefs and sentences. AK: Was this the reason that you have not written a book or article about nonverbal artworks? RR: I am not sure that this was the reason. I simply have little appreciation for art or music, and have never felt comfortable trying to talk about either. AK: Let’s go back to the dialogue with Gianni Vattimo. The main topic of this dialogue was the future of religion, and you had some differences with Vattimo regarding globalization. Vattimo perhaps believed a little bit more in Socialism than you. You have said that: “I do not have any faith either in socialism or in capitalism. It seems to me that in the industrialized countries capitalism only became tolerable when the state’s intervention created the welfare state and thereby brought the capitalists, to some extent, under democratic control. What we are seeing now is that, in the absence of a world government – in the absence of a global authority that could put global capitalism in the service of democracy – all the worst features of capitalism are reemerging. We shouldn’t have had economic globalization until we had a bureaucratic structure to regulate global capitalism, in the way

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that some countries have been able to regulate it within their own borders. We have unfortunately been overtaken by events.” So, do you also think now that we have been overtaken by events, that we cannot regulate global processes? RR: I cannot imagine how we could get cooperation between Europe, Russia, China and the US even on global warming, much less on global social justice. I think that politics has been overtaken by events: we have no idea either how to save ourselves from ecological disaster or how to equalize the life-chances of the children of the world. AK: Don’t you believe that the UN or some international institutions can, later perhaps, regulate the processes? RR: That seems unrealistic. It is hard to lay out a plausible scenario in which the UN gradually accumulates more and more power, and acquires the ability to bring global social justice into being. I cannot imagine the transformation of the UN into a kind of supra-national government. It just won’t happen. AK: The corporations and the multinational companies will not give the power to the UN; that much is clear. RR: Neither will Russia or China! AK: Could perhaps mankind learn something from a tragedy or something like this, or from some forms of natural catastrophes like hurricanes, earthquakes, and similar things, that could make people aware of the importance of the UN and such types of institutions? RR: I think if the atomic bomb did not teach us that we need to get beyond the era of nation-states, nothing can. The need for a strong supranational organization was apparent in 1945, but it did not come to pass. AK: Oh, really!? This is really a pessimistic view. RR: I think that the period of the greatest public support for the UN around the world was right after Hiroshima. The UN captured people’s imagination; it seemed the only way of avoiding nuclear holocaust. But then, as the cold war made nuclear disarmament seem less and less likely, there was less and less hope that the UN would ever be able to do anything. That is what I meant by saying

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that if the bomb could not scare humanity into transcending the nation-state, it is unlikely that anything else will. AK: What about terrorism? It seems to me that something has changed with 9/11. This is a very sneaky enemy, and one country, one government cannot fight really effectively against terrorism. I know that lots of people do not agree with the American president regarding the Iraq war, but here is some common work, some “common enterprise,” and perhaps these common enterprises could make people aware of the importance of the UN and similar common, global projects! What do you think? RR: I do not think that anybody expects the UN to do anything about terrorism. Certainly there will be cooperation between governments, and particularly between intelligence services. But that cooperation will take place in secret. It is not something whose nature and functioning is likely to be debated in the UN. AK: How do you see the role of the corporations? If we assume that corporations will not give their power to governments or to common international institutions, we can conclude only very pessimistic views from these premises. So, if we look at the world of corporations, we can see that they have much more power than many governments, and it is pretty difficult to believe that they will ever share their power to get more democratic societies in the world. Is the situation really this bad, on your view? RR: Yes, I am very pessimistic. But I would prefer to speak of the rich, rather than of the corporations. The richest people in China are doing exactly the same sorts of things as the people who finance the Republican Party in the US. To attribute all power to the corporations is to ignore the role of, for example, the rich warlords of Burma and the oligarchs of Latin America. AK: So, we have a very pessimistic view regarding this question. How do you see the future of religion within the framework of globalization? By the way, do you see globalization as a historical tendency of mankind or just a contingent event? RR: I see the renewed importance of religion to politics as a matter of various contingent, unrelated, events. Tyrannical Arab governments together with the Palestinian-Israeli impasse have given Islamic fundamentalism a new lease on life. The Islamic Enlightenment has been postponed. Given the world’s dependence on Middle East oil, that is potentially disastrous. That is one contingency. Another is the rise of the religious right in the US, a phenomenon I do not understand. I don’t know why Americans, unlike Europeans, are getting more and more religious instead of less and less. But the alliance

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between the corporations and the televangelists is also potentially disastrous. Yet I don’t think that the new political role of Islam or the new political role of fundamentalist Christianity in the U.S., are manifestations of a world-historical trend. They are unrelated contingencies. AK: Isn’t it possible that the economic and political crisis is one of the reasons, one of the main reasons perhaps, that the so called fundamentalist won more power in the US than earlier? RR: I don’t think so. When we had our big economic crisis in the late 1920s, Americans didn’t get more religious. Instead they joined trade unions, and looked to government for secular solutions to their problems. The Great Depression led to leftist political activity rather than religious conversion. We haven’t been in an economic crisis during the last twenty years, but in those years religion has suddenly become a political force. I don’t know why. AK: Perhaps the Socialist movement was much stronger during this big economic crisis of 1929-32. Besides, that the global situation is very different now because we do not have two super-powers, only one, the US, and perhaps people do not believe in trade unions as much as they believed in the 1920s and 30s, when Socialism was a fairly strong movement, especially in the CenterEuropean countries, because of the Soviet Union. What do you think? RR: Well, the New Deal in the U.S. encouraged the rise of trade unionism, which resulted in the unions acquiring political power. The same thing occurred between 1929 and 1945 in Brittan, resulting in the British Labor Party coming to power after World War II. The power of the labor unions has greatly diminished in both the US and Britain, and I am not sure why. The things that the rich people in America are doing to the poor are appalling. But the poor, instead of organizing and protesting, are turning to God. I do not think that an explanation can be found in the failure of Communism in the Soviet Union and Central Europe. State ownership of the means of production was never an aim of the US labor movement. AK: I think you are right, but if I look at our small county, Hungary, I see that the number of the religious people, the number of the believers, has always increased when some economic or political crisis took place in the country. I think that in the 1960s the situation became a little bit better in Hungary than it was earlier, and after the so-called regime change that took place in 1989, the situation became a little bit better again, and in these cases the number of the religious people decreased. There are of course many private religions, many sects and so on, but there is always a wave in Hungary: if people live better they

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don’t turn to God, they just try to regulate their own lives a little bit better. I can accept the idea that the social-democratic ideals are still alive, but the fall of the Soviet Union perhaps was understood as a fall of the socialist idea as well. Isn’t that possible? RR: I think the situation is different in formerly Communist countries and in Western Europe and the US. In the latter, social democracy and socialism have always been treated as two very different things – the one good and the other bad. AK: I saw the same in Italy. The Communist part got in trouble when the Soviet Union fell. People turned to the Socialist party and did not want to become members of the Communist party any more. Something similar happened perhaps in France with the Communist party. In Hungary the social-democratic ideals and values became much stronger, and they are also very much alive today, but Socialist and especially Communist values cannot have any impact on the people. So, the religious movement is getting stronger and stronger here in the US? RR: It has become stronger by successfully demonizing the liberals – the people who still believe in the welfare state. The right-wing TV and radio stations say that all the troubles of our country are caused by the liberals. The liberals don’t believe in God, they are too tolerant of homosexuality and of abortion, they are in favor of wasteful government spending, etc. The rich have decided that the best way to maintain their power is to ally themselves with fundamentalist preachers, and to suggest to the poor that the liberals are immoral as well as unwise. AK: This is the American situation with respect to religion, but how do you see the situation of religion world-wide? Is it similar? RR: I don’t think one can generalize world-wide. If somebody can, I am not the person to do it. AK: So here in the US might we see the disappearance of religion? You mentioned in one of your articles, “Anticlericalism and Atheism” (2002), in one of your footnotes, that “we anti-clericalists who are also leftists in politics have a further reason for hoping that institutionalized religion will eventually disappear”, and you have quoted John Dewey about the danger of other-worldliness. Do you think that the church will perhaps disappear?

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RR: I don’t think it will disappear, but it would be a good thing if it did. The more confidence human beings have in their ability to shape their own future, the less the other-worldly they become. The more they lose confidence to shape society, the more they will turn to God. AK: So we have to build a more democratic society and we will see what will happen with such institutions as religion and similar social phenomena. RR: Well, in the last two hundred years Western culture has become more and more secular, just as governments have become more and more democratic. AK: Can we speak about a tendency of secularization? RR: Yes, I think so. Certainly if you can compare the role of religion in Western Europe in 1800 and 2000, there are vast changes. America was more secular from its very beginnings. Religious tolerance was built into American institutions. AK: I think this is one of the main features of history of which no one knows the future. We are finite and historical beings, if we accept the Heideggerian and Gadamerian bottom lines. Of course, neither the representatives of philosophical hermeneutics nor the neo-pragmatists believe in metaphysical systems. RR: The unpredictability of the future is illustrated by the fact that distinctions like social-democrat versus conservative and secular versus religious don’t work very well in China. These are Western distinctions. In 50 years China will be a great super-power, and will make most of the world-historical decisions. We Westerners do not know enough about China to have any idea of what the result of the shift of hegemony from the US to China will mean. With the rise of Asia, the future of humanity has become much less predictable. AK: You have made an interesting point about the cultural mission of European civilization in the dialogue with Vattimo. Perhaps the philosophers, the thinkers of this European civilization cannot have a dialogue with the Islamic thinkers, but perhaps they should try to do it at some point? What do you think? RR: I doubt this. Talking about a dialogue with Islamic ayatollahs is like talking about a dialogue between modern Europeans and 15th century Christian theologians. It is hard to imagine how they would find common ground. AK: Yes. However, you mentioned that we cannot use Western European terms and categories regarding Chinese development and perhaps regarding Islamic

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development, too. On the other hand, an army is obviously not the best way to force them to democracy. If we do not accept this military way of forcing people and nations toward democracy, then perhaps we have to start a dialogue with Chinese and Islamic thinkers, or it will not work? What do you think? RR: I don’t think either army or dialogue will work. We don’t know what the dialogue would look like. I mean, how many people are there in Europe or in America who know enough Chinese to have any grasp of the terms in which Chinese intellectuals and politicians think? AK: Yes, but as our world becomes smaller and smaller, we are perhaps forced by these tendencies (secularization, globalization and other economic and political tendencies) to learn much more about other cultures? RR: But they are trapped in stages of history that the West has surpassed. They are only beginning to liberate women; they are only beginning to acquire the concept of citizenship, etc. We cannot help thinking of them as backward. We cannot take seriously the suggestion that their culture is on a par with our own. AK: Cannot we help them make their own Enlightenment? RR: That is what we have been trying to do for a century, ever since we started educating people from the Middle East and the Far East in Western universities. We created a cadre of people in those countries who wanted their homelands to become more democratic, to educate women, etc. But now, the terms have changed, because these parts of the world are going to have more power than the West does. That alters the terms of a possible dialogue. AK: This means that dialogue would be pretty difficult, if not impossible, according to your views, with religious people, especially with the religious fundamentalists, and that’s why we just have to do what we have been doing. That is to educate people from the Far East and the Middle East, and perhaps they will promote their own social development? Would this be the solution? RR: I have no better idea. The problem I see with dialogue is that I have never seen a good example of it, only ritual exchanges of well-meaning platitudes. I have never heard a Western thinker specify just what it is that the West has to learn from non-Western cultures. AK: Perhaps the people who are studying Buddhism, Shintoism and other Far East religions, though of course they are religious thinkers, can clarify some of the features of these Far East religions and philosophies. Perhaps

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the Western world has become a little bit intolerant regarding the poverty, regarding the people of the Third World, regarding the problems of Third World countries. Because we live here in the US and in Europe, within very pleasant circumstances, I think we cannot even imagine how people live there. This is one of the reasons it is difficult to understand them, but the media and these religious thinkers, the new sects perhaps, can show something, can emphasize something, and not only the negative but also the positive features. Don’t you see any positive features in Far Eastern religions and philosophies? RR: What is positive about poverty? AK: I mean in Buddhism, Shintoism, Confucianism! Isn’t there anything we could learn from them? RR: I keep going to East-West philosophy conferences; I have spent a month in China; I have visited Chinese universities; I have just finished writing 10,000 words or so about Pragmatism and Confucianism. I still have not seen any real dialogue. I don’t even have any sense of what a successful dialogue would look like. It seems to me that when you get off the abstract level and try to get down to concrete questions, like “what kind of government might China have in the future?, what kind of government might Indonesia have in the future?, what kind of institutions they will have?”, all the Westerners have to say is “Well, they should become more Western.” All the non-Westerners say is “The West did not turn out very well; maybe we can do better.” But nobody ever has any concrete suggestions about how to do better. Unless you can suggest a concrete political alternative, all the discussion about Confucian ways of life, Buddhist ways of life, and Christian ways of life doesn’t do much good. There isn’t such a thing as Christian politics. There are just various uses of Christianity by the left and by the right. I suspect that there is no such thing as Buddhist politics or Confucian politics either. There is just the invocation of Confucian or Buddhist pieties by the left and by the right. AK: So, according to your opinion, the future is first of all in the hands of the politicians, and… RR: I would say the rich. AK: Yes, in the hands of the rich, and it means that, if they don’t want to change the future of the mankind, it won’t be changed… RR: …and they don’t.

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AK: How do you see the role of the sciences? It is clear, of course, that first of all the rich rule the world, because they can influence politicians and the most important political decisions in the world, but the development of science is also in the hand of the rich people? RR: Yes, pretty much. They make most of the decisions about the directions of scientific and technological progress. AK: I think of such things as the internet, for example. Perhaps we cannot deny that the internet has made the public life much broader and more transparent. RR: I don’t see that it made public life more transparent. AK: Why? RR: The government is still as good at keeping everything secret as it was. AK: If somebody puts something on the internet, it is pretty difficult to deny after that. RR: Oh sure, they can deny it! The situation is the same as in the 50s. I don’t see that the difference between the newspapers and the internet is making a big difference. AK: Perhaps also poor people have much more sources of knowledge about the world, and perhaps it’s not too easy to keep something secret!? RR: I don’t agree. So much of the operation of the American government is secret that it is very difficult for citizens to have a clear idea of what their government is doing. I just don’t think that is likely to change. You can circulate rumors on the internet, but that doesn’t mean that people know what to believe. AK: What if a journalist or somebody who earlier worked for the government launches some secrets on the internet, then in a democratic country like the US perhaps some law suits might be started. No? So, perhaps in this way, or if more and more people agree with a standpoint that can be found on the internet, then perhaps there will be a social movement. What do you think? RR: Maybe, but all I can say is that in recent years all the breakthroughs or revelations of US governments have come from The New York Times and The Washington Post – the same places they have always came from.

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AK: I see. So, it’s a very pessimistic view-point, I would say, regarding globalization and regarding the future of mankind. How do you see the moral development of society? Can we speak about moral development at all? RR: I think we know what we mean when we speak of political development, but moral development is a pretty vague idea. AK: So such movements as the feminist movement, the gay-rights movement and similar things cannot be counted as evidence or aspects of moral development? RR: I would certainly say that the women’s movement and the gay-rights movement have brought about moral progress. But to many people it looks like moral regress. AK: In addition we do not have slavery as a social institution. I know that we still have slaves, but not the social institution. RR: I think that in the US things have gotten much better for white people, for women, and for homosexuals – but not much better for the poor. To really make moral progress, we should have to narrow the gulf between the rich and the poor. In the US, being a middle class woman or a middle class homosexual is much easier than it was fifty years ago, but being a poor woman or a poor homosexual is pretty much the same. AK: Perhaps the rise of the welfare society will decrease a little bit the number of the poor people? RR: It did in America until about 1973. Between 1933 and 1973 there was a period of leveling, but during the last thirty years the gap between the rich and the poor has steadily widened. It gets worse every year. AK: But perhaps in this field we also cannot generalize. Perhaps it’s true regarding the US, but perhaps this thing is changing also region by region, country by country. RR: Maybe. My pessimistic hunch is that on a global scale the movement of jobs from Europe and America to Asia and Latin-America is going to increase the gap between the rich and the poor. AK: So in your opinion it’s not only a phenomenon within the US, but it’s a world-wide phenomenon, a tension between the Western World and the Third World?

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RR: Yes. All the cheap labor is outside of the West. With modern technology you can use foreign labor just as easily as native labor. AK: Finally, I would like to ask you about the role of philosophy. According to your neo-pragmatic views the philosopher should work or act rather as an engineer or as a lawyer than as the sage did in earlier times. Does philosophy have any future at all? RR: I don’t think that philosophy is ever going to be a very important part of the culture. Two centuries ago, in the West, it was more important. In those days, people were still asking themselves “Science or Religion?” They turned to philosophers for answers. Nowadays, I think, people do not see any great tension between science and religion. We can have a kind of religious faith that doesn’t have any particular metaphysical or even political implications. So the questions philosophers discuss have become of less interest to the public than they were in the eighteenth century. AK: You mentioned somewhere that perhaps philosophers could make the compromises between different vocabularies, the vocabularies of the past and the present. RR: I think all intellectuals do that, not just philosophers. Intellectuals help with what Gadamer thought of as fusing horizons by writing historical treatises and novels, as well as my doing philosophy. Philosophers do not have a special cultural task. They are just intellectuals who have read certain books – e.g., Kant’s Critiques – that most other intellectuals have not read. AK: However, intellectuals are so specialized, and perhaps one of the tasks of philosophy since its Greek beginnings has been to harmonize these different dimensions within society, to make some compromises within society on the intellectual level. Do you think that we absolutely have lost this type of task, or perhaps philosophers never had this type of task? RR: Certainly they have had this task. Take Kant. He tried to find some sort of synthesis of Newtonian science, the ideals of the French Revolution, and Christian morality. He was pretty successful. Dewey tried to do that same kind of thing. But we find such attempts at synthesis being attempted by historians and novelists as well. Poets, journalists, economists, political scientists all collaborate in trying to reconcile the new with the old – to fuse the horizons of the present with those of the past. We philosophers have no special skills that make us better at fusing horizons than other people.

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AK: Does it mean that this special profession, I mean philosophy, can also vanish from society? RR: Contemporary Anglophone analytic philosophy is a special case, because it has lost touch with the history of philosophy, as well as with the larger culture. But if we forget about analytic philosophy, we can think of philosophy as a branch of intellectual history. We are the people who are telling stories about Parmenides, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, Hegel and so on. That’s the only thing we do that nobody else does. AK: Yes, but do you believe that to tell these types of stories will still be useful in the future? RR: Yes, it will be useful. As long as people are interested in the past, there will be philosophers and philosophy departments. AK: Can you imagine a type of society where people are not interested in the past? RR: I think that could only happen in a totalitarian society. In a free society people will always be curious about how earlier people solved their problems. AK: I think that Tacitus wrote that “Historia est magistra vitae”, but the German Idealists, especially Hegel, who represented a very radical historicism, also said that we cannot really plan and see the future if we don’t know our past. Of course the World Spirit determines his view more than anything else, but I think what we can learn from Hegel is his radical historicism. RR: Yes. AK: From this point of view perhaps people in the free societies will need some philosophers. RR: Well, they’ll need a sense of the past, and that means that they’ll need people who have read and understood old philosophy books. AK: Can we really cut ourselves off from the past? RR: We can if we try, but it’s not a good idea. AK: It is much better if we try to learn from the past. When we are planning the future, how much are we influenced by the past, according to your views? Could

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you agree with Gadamer in this question, because he says that the historically effected event pretty much determines us? RR: Well, I think we just don’t know to what extent we can become different from the past until we try. The rate of change has sped up enormously in the last 200 years. We in the West have been changing faster than anybody imagined we could change. AK: We cannot predict the future. Do you think the speed of the change will change the basic structure of human historicality? RR: No, I don’t think so. However, I would insist on the fact that we are the children of a particular time and place. Our descendants may live in a world in which parts of the past that are meaningful to us mean nothing to them. They may forget about the Greeks, or forget about Christianity. They might be better off if they did. Maybe China would be better off if the Chinese just forgot about Confucianism. AK: Does it mean that we can get some autonomy from the past. Can we say that it is just an intentional autonomy, or can we also get another type of autonomy from the past? I mean intentional autonomy, where we do not just pick up some traditions but select them; can we do it at all, or we are really influenced by traditions and just not aware of this influence, as Gadamer says? RR: Intellectuals are aware of traditions. Most other people aren’t. I don’t think that we are in the grip of the past any more than children are in the grip of their parents. They wouldn’t be what they are if they had different parents; we wouldn’t be what we are if we had a different past. However, some children are more liberated than other children. Some generations break away from the preceding generations more successfully than others. AK: What are the reasons for these differences in to your opinion? Does it depend only on the circumstances, on the genetic heritage, or on traditions? RR: I don’t think that anybody knows the reason for that. Some kids break with their parents and go off on their own, and some don’t. Some societies develop quickly. Some societies develop slowly. I don’t think we can have a general theory about it. AK: Couldn’t we say that Gadamerian philosophical hermeneutics, from some point of view, seems to be such a general theory about the role of traditions?

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RR: I don’t think of it as a general theory of historical change. It does not have the pretensions of Hegel’s or Marx’s narratives. I admire Gadamer’s criticism of various philosophical positions, but I do not think he has given historians better tools to work with. AK: Perhaps the notion of the process of the historically effected event, which is a summary of very diverse traditions, could be regarded as such a “new instrument?” RR: I guess I don’t see what that notion adds to what we learned from Hegel. AK: Do you think that those two theories are not only similar, but almost the same? RR: Well, I don’t think that Gadamer has given us anything that Hegel wouldn’t be able to do for us. AK: Gadamer perhaps denied the metaphysical part of the Hegelian view? RR: Yes. He got rid of the useless stuff in Hegel and kept the historicism. AK: He took the idea of the Seinsgeschick from the late Heidegger and the hermeneutics of facticity from the early Heidegger, from the 20s, and perhaps this notion of the process of historically effected events is a harmony, a summary of these notions! RR: Yes. Gadamer has some nice essays on Hegel and Heidegger. He is a good commentator on both thinkers. But I am not sure he added anything to them. AK: In your opinion he didn’t give us any new instrument to get closer to a really democratic and liberal society? RR: He wasn’t much interested in democratic liberalism, I think. AK: Thank you very much Professor Rorty!

ABOUT THE EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS Lyubov Bugaeva, is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Philology at St Petersburg State University and from 2002-2006 a Guest-Lecturer at the University of Salzburg. She is an author of over sixty articles (in Russian and English) on comparative literature, and philosophy and anthropology of literature. James Campbell teaches at the University of Toledo, Ohio, where he is Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy. He has been a Fulbright Lecturer at the University of Innsbruck (1990-91), and at the University of Munich (2003-04). He is the author of numerous articles and reviews, as well as four volumes: The Community Reconstructs: The Meaning of Pragmatic Social Thought (1992), Understanding John Dewey: Nature and Cooperative Intelligence (1995), Recovering Benjamin Franklin: An Exploration of a Life of Science and Service (1999), and A Thoughtful Profession: The Early Years of the American Philosophical Association (2006). In preparation is a volume on William James. He is also editor of Selected Writings of James Hayden Tufts (1992), and co-editor of Experience as Philosophy: On the Work of John J. McDermott (2006). Campbell is a former president of the American Association of Philosophy Teachers (1996-98), and he is currently the president of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy (2008-10). Michael Eldridge is the Undergraduate Coordinator for the Philosophy Department at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. His Transforming Experience: John Dewey’s Cultural Instrumentalism (Vanderbilt University Press, 1998) considered Dewey’s proposal to intelligize practice in social and political life. He was the 1999 Center for Dewey Studies’ Democracy and Education Fellow, and he wrote the introduction for the second volume (191939) of the Dewey correspondence. He serves as treasurer for the newly-formed International Pragmatism Society. Richard E. Hart is Cyrus H. Holley Professor of Applied Ethics and Professor of Philosophy at Bloomfield College in New Jersey. He is editor or co-editor of four books: Experience as Philosophy: On The Work of John J. McDermott (2006); Philosophy in Experience: American Philosophy in Transition (1997); Plato’s Dialogues: The Dialogical Approach (1997); Ethics and the Environment (1991). He has published numerous articles, reviews, book

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chapters and essays in the areas of American philosophy, ethics, aesthetics, philosophy and literature and teaching philosophy. He serves on the editorial boards of Metaphilosophy, The Pluralist and The Steinbeck Review. Much of his present work focuses on the American writer, John Steinbeck, and his relation to American philosophy. Larry A. Hickman is director of the Center for Dewey Studies and professor of philosophy at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. He is the author of Modern Theories of Higher Level Predicates (1980), John Dewey’s Pragmatic Technology (1990), and Philosophical Tools for Technological Culture (2001). He is also the editor of Technology as a Human Affair (1990), Reading Dewey (1998), The Essential Dewey (with Thomas Alexander, 1998), and The Correspondence of John Dewey, 1871-1952 (1999, 2001, 2005). His most recent book is Pragmatism as Post-Postmodernism (Fordham University Press, 2007). Thomas Christian Hilde is Research Professor in the University of Maryland School of Public Policy, teaching and writing in the areas of ethics, political philosophy, environmental policy and international law, and international development. He previously directed the Environmental Conservation Education Program at New York University. Hilde was a Fulbright Senior Specialist in Venezuela in 2005 and is a member of the UNESCO Global Ethics Observatory. He co-edited The Agrarian Roots of Pragmatism (2000) with Paul B. Thompson; translated Stalinism and Nazism: History and Memory Compared (2004). He recently edited On Torture (2008) and presented expert testimony on torture to the Helsinki Commission. His volume Pragmatism and Globalization will also appear in 2008. Current book projects include one on conceptual and normative frameworks in the economics and politics of energy systems (On Energy), and a book that develops a pragmatic analysis of democratic legitimacy in international environmental and development institutions (Pragmatic Cosmopolitanism: Reconstructing International Institutions between Philosophy and Policy). Armen T. Marsoobian is Professor of Philosophy at Southern Connecticut State University. He is co-editor of Justus Buchler’s Metaphisics of Natural Complexes (with Kathleen Wallaca, 1990) and of Nature’s Perspectives: Prospects for Original Metaphysics (with Kathleen Wallace and Robert S. Carrington, 1991). He also co-edited The Blackwell Guide to American Philosophy (with J. Ryder, 2004). He is the editor-in-chief of Blackwell journal Metaphilosophy. Dorota Koczanowicz, is assistant professor at University of Lower Silesia. She has published several articles in aesthetics and American Pragmatism, and

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her current work deals with problems of contemporary art and culture. Her first book Art, Experience and Everyday Life is forthcoming. Alexander Kremer is a Professor of Philosophy, University of Szeged, Hungary. Recent publications include “Foundation of Morals, What is The Origin of Obligation?,” “Why Did Heidegger Become Heidegger?,” and “J. D. Caputo’s Hermeneutics.” Joseph Margolis is Laura H. Carnell Professor of Philosophy at Temple University. He is the author of more than thirty books; has taught widely in the United States, Canada, and abroad; has served as President of the American Society of Aesthetics, and holds an Honorary Doctorate in Philosophy from the University of Helsinki. He has recently published Reinventing Pragmatism (Cornell University Press, 2002) and The Unraveling of Scientism (Cornell University Press, 2003) as part of a trio of studies on American philosophy at the end of the 20th century; the third volume has now been completed, Pragmatism’s Advantage. A number of new books are to appear shortly, notably The Arts and the Definition of the Human: Toward a Philosophical Anthropology (Stanford University Press); and he is completing two new studies involving the human sciences and a reading of selected figures from the European tradition. Don Morse is associate professor of philosophy at Webster University. Don’s main interest is American Pragmatism, especially in its connections to Continental Philosophy. He has published articles on the Pragmatists and Socrates, James and Hegel, Dewey and Derrida, and Rorty and Heidegger. Don’s current research involves a book length study of Dewey’s early Hegelian philosophy. J. Carlos Mougán Riveroa is professor of moral philosophy at University of Cadiz. He is author of Racionalidad y acción: actualidad de la obra de J. Dewey (2000) and more recently Democracia y educación para la ciudadanía (2008), as well as articles related to democracy, virtues, civic education and perfectionism. Miklós Nyíro is associate professor of philosophy at Miskolc University, Hungary. He is the author of Linguisticality and the Forgetfulness (2006), a book on Gadamer’s hermeneutical conception of language, and editor of the H.-G. Gadamer - a 20th Century Humanist (2008). He is co-translator of two volumes of works by Richard Rorty, and has published articles in philosophical hermeneutics and recent history of continental philosophy.

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Among his interests is the convergence of Rorty’s work and the hermeneutical approach. Ramón Rodríguez Aguilera is professor of Philosophy at the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Sevilla (Spain). He studied at the University of Barcelona, taking degrees in Modern History (1976) and Philosophy (Doctor, 1986). His research field and articles have moved from Philosophy of History, Theory of Action, and Spinoza to Aesthetics and Classical American Pragmatism; his main current foucs is to present Peirce as a key foundation of Contemporary Thought. John Ryder is Professor of Philosophy and the Director of International Programs, State University of New York. Recent publications include Interpreting America: Russian and Soviet Studies of the History of American Thought, The Philosophical Writings of Cadwallader Colden, co-edited with Scott Pratt, and The Blackwell Guide to American Philosophy, co-edited with Armen Marsoobian. Radim Šíp teaches philosophy at the Faculty of Sport Studies in Masaryk University, where he teaches introduction to philosophy, and human beings and society in contemporary philosophy. In 2006 he achieved his PhD. degree with a thesis on the philosophy of Richard Rorty’s. His book Richard Rorty: Pragmatism between Language and Experience will be published in 2008. Emil Višňovský is Professor of Philosophy and Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Social & Biological Communication, Slovak Academy of Sciences, and the Director of the Institute of Cultural Studies, Faculty of Social & Economic Sciences, Comenius University, Bratislava, Slovakia. He is also the Editor-in-Chief of international journal Human Affairs. He has published 4 monographs and over 100 academic papers and essays in Slovak, English, Italian, Turkish, Polish, etc. He has also translated over 10 philosophy books from English to Slovak. Kathleen A. Wallace is professor of philosophy at Hofstra University. She has coedited two books: Justus Buchler’s Metaphysics of Natural Complexes, second, expanded edition (1990), and Nature’s Perspectives: Prospects for Ordinal Metaphysics (1991). She has published articles in Ethics, Metaphysics, American Philosophy, and Hume Studies. Her current work deals with autonomy, identity and responsibility. Gert-Rüdiger Wegmarshaus is extra-ordinary professor of political science at European University Viadrina, Frankfurt(Oder), Germany, and director

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of EuroCollege, University of Tartu, Estonia. His resreach interest is focused on theory of democracy, political education, and democratic transition in the reform countries of Central and Eastern Europe. He is the author of Komplementarität: Zivilgesellschaft und Demokratischer Staat. Zivilgesellschaftliche Öffentlichkeit im spätsowjetischen Kernkraftdiskurs. (2002) and he is co-editor of Education for a Democratic Society. The Central European Pragmatist Forum. Vol. 3. (2007). Wegmarshaus is a member of several editorial and academic boards, including “Nordeuropaforum,” “Central European Pragmatist Forum,” “Acta Humanitarica,” and “Human Affairs.”

Index A Adler, Felix, 106, 108 Adorno, Theodor, 51, 54, 56 alienation, 111, 113, 114, 168, 175, 180, 186 Anderson, Douglas R., 117 Andreeva, Madam, 107, 117, 118 Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 126, 132 Aristotle, 82, 239 art, 101, 184-189 Axelrod, R., 84, 88, Bakewell Charles M., 116 Baudelaire, Charles, 195 Baurmann, M., 85, 88 Berkeley, Elizabeth M., 118 Berlin, Isaiah, 16, 17, 24, 177 Bey, Talât, 138 Bigsby, Christopher, 47 Birnbaum, Norman, 175, 176, 180 Blake, William, 213 Bloom, Harold, 219 Bloxham, Donald, 136, 140 Bogdanov, Alexander, 104, 108, 116 Borchert, Donald B., 67 Bourdieu, Pierre, 99, 102 Boydston, Jo Ann, 38, 56, 67, 77, 78, 88, 117, 132, 140, 158, 159, 170, 171, 189 Boyle, Robert, 74, 75 Brandom, Robert, 162, 170, 199, 213, 217, 221, 225 Brazil, Federative Republic of, xi Brighouse, Harry, 159 Brock, Gillian, 159 Bromley, Daniel W., 132 Buber, Martin, 44, 179 Buchler, Justus, 4, 89, 91, 99, 101, 102, 244, 246 Burenin, Nikolai, 104, 117 Buddha, 19 Calkins, Mary Whiton, 31, 33, 38 Campbell, James, vii, 2, 31-36, 45, 47,

243 Campbell, John, 132 Card, Claudia, 138, 140 Caspary, William R., 88 Cervantes, Miguel de, 27, 28 Charny, Israel, 137, 140 China, People’s Republic of, 229, 230, 233, 235, 240 Citizenship, 81-83, 88, 126, 154, 159, 234 civic virtue, vii, 4, 79-85, 87, 179 civil society 82, 125, 126, 132, 176 Cochran, Molly, 159 Cohen, Morris, 108 Coleman, Jules, 163, 171 Communication, 13, 15, 16, 18, 20, 23, 33, 80, 83, 125, 137, 138, 143, 146, 153, 154, 155, 157, 165, 180, 188, 196, 214, 246 communitarianism, 146 community, 2, 3, 6, 7, 11, 14-19, 2123, 26-28, 33, 36, 37, 39-49, 50, 52, 54, 55, 70, 88, 89, 103, 105, 110, 122, 127-131, 138, 145, 146, 149, 162, 163, 165, 167, 168, 170-177, 179, 180, 183, 185, 187-189, 198, 204, 205, 218, 220, 222-224, 243 Consciousness, 12, 13, 19, 20, 21, 24, 25, 31-35, 41, 43, 63, 80, 83, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 111, 113, 114, 115, 118, 164, 186, 198, 199, 205, 215, 216 Conservatism, 19, 52, 146, 150, 151, 153 Cooley, Charles Horton, 31, 32, 38 Cooperation, vii, 4, 17, 28, 44, 79-88, 126, 152, 153, 188, 210, 229, 230 Cosmopolitanism, viii, 5, 126, 127,

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critical intelligence, 143 Dahl, Robert, 180 Darwall, Stephen, 64, 67 Darwin, Charles, xiii, 143 Davidson, Donald, 8, 192, 197-199, 213, 215, 217 Davidson, Thomas, 105, 106, 109, 117 democracy, viii, xii, 4, 6, 8, 45, 61, 77, 79, 81-83, 86-88, 105, 108, 109, 117, 121, 122, 130, 131, 144-146, 147-155, 158, 159, 161, 167, 168, 170, 172, 173, 175-177, 179, 180, 202-204, 210, 220, 221, 225, 228, 238, 234, 243, 245, 247 Dennett, Daniel, 8, 198, 199 Derrida, Jacques, 192, 245 Descartes, Rene, 193, 239 Dewey, John vii, xi, xii, 2-7, 21, 31, 33, 37-41, 43, 47, 49-56, 59, 67, 69,79, 77, 78, 81-89, 82, 88, 1036, 105-111, 113, 115, 117, 122, 126, 132, 134, 138, 140-143, 145, 146, 148, 150, 151, 153, 155, 157-159, 158, 159, 161, 164, 167, 170, 171, 175, 177, 1789, 185, 186, 188, 189, 192, 195, 214, 216, 217, 224, 227, 232, 238, 243-245, 244 Dickstein, Morris, 172 Dindar, Fuat, 137, 140 dualism, 3, 21, 54, 85, 188, 192 DuBois, W. E. B., 31, 35, 38 Durkheim, Emil, 71, 79, 162, 163, 165, 171 education, vii, 5, 20, 28, 77, 78, 82, 93, 102, 103, 105-115, 117, 143, 145, 147, 151, 156, 158, 159, 164, 210, 218, 243-245, 247 Eldridge, Michael, vii, 3, 4, 59, 60, 62, 64, 66, 67, 243

Ellul, Jacques, 71, 72, 74, 76, 77 Enlightenment, 8, 16, 114, 115, 209, 210, 218, 221, 223, 230, 234 ethnic cleansing, 135 ethnocentrism, 129, 205-207 Etzioni, Amitai, 177, 179 European Union, 133, 155 experience, viii, 7, 8, 11-14, 17. 19, 21-23, 26, 27, 31, 35, 40, 41, 44, 45, 47, 51, 59, 61-63, 67, 70, 82, 93, 98-101, 104, 106-108, 111, 127-129, 134, 140, 143-145, 148, 157, 167, 179, 183-189, 191, 192, 197, 213-218, 221-223, 243, 245, 246 experimentalism, 4, 70, 71, 87, 125, 127 Fabian Socialism, vii, 103, 105-113, 115, 117 Ferguson, Niall, 147, 150, 159 Finland, Republic of, xi foreign policy viii, xii, 143-159 Foucault, Michel, 185, 189, 192, 221 Fraser, Nancy, 220, 225 free time, 50-52 Freud, Sigmund, 101, 187, 197, 199, 219 Friedman, Milton, 177 French, Peter, 139 French Revolution, 25, 238 Fukuyama, Francis, 142, 150, 152-156, 159 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 194, 198, 199, 227, 228, 233, 238, 240, 241, 245 Galileo, Galilei, 196 Garton Ash, Timothy, 6, 141, 142, 156, 158, 159 Gehring, Verna, 132 genocide, viii, 5, 133-140 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of, 133, 140 George, Stephen K., 47

Index Germany, Federal Republic of, xi, 1, 136, 246 Geuss, Raymond, 132 Gibbard, Alan, 169, 172 Giddens, Anthony, 184, 189 Gilbert, Margaret, 139 Glenmore, 103, 105, 108, 116 global warming, 121, 229 globalization, 11, 28, 87, 88, 121, 125, 126, 129, 132, 152, 158, 175, 203, 221, 228, 230, 234, 237, 244 Glorious Revolution, 174 Goodin, Robert, 122, 132 Gorky, Maxim, vii, 5, 103-118 Gray, John, 180 Great Britain, xi, 176, 231 Grossman, Joan Delaney, 118 Gürüz, Kemal, 159 Haass, Richard N., 142, 152-159 Habermas, Jürgen, 20, 195 Han, John J., 40 Harris, W. T., 106 Hart, H. L. A., 163 Hart, Richard E. vii, 2, 38-40, 42, 44, 46, 47, 243 Hayek, Friedrich von, 177, 180 Hechter, Michael, 169, 171, 172 Hegel, G. W. F., xiii, 13, 20, 24, 85, 196, 218, 239, 241, 245 Heidegger, Martin, 192, 195, 225, 227, 233, 241, 245 Heraclitus, 197 Hermant, Emilie, 77 hermeneutics, xiii, 8, 227, 233, 240, 241, 245 Hickman, Larry A., vii, 4, 69, 70, 72, 74, 76, 77, 154, 159, 244 Hitler, Adolf, 138 Hiroshima, 135, 229 Holocaust, 3, 66, 138, 139, 229 Honneth, A., 83, 85, 88

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Hooker, Mildred Bakewell, 116 Horkheimer, Max, 29 Howells, William Dean, 115, 118 Hulsman, John, 159 humanism, 29, 44 Hungary, Republic of, xi, 1, 211, 212, 231, 232, 245 identity, personal, vii, 2, 4, 7, 8, 11, 12, 14, 16, 28, 31, 37, 53, 80, 81, 85, 86, 89-102, 183-185, 189, 209, 246 inquiry, xiii, 21, 46, 61, 62, 69-77, 122, 127, 143, 158, 191, 193, 194, 214, 216 intentionality, 137, 198 international relations, 142, 144, 145, 159, 175 Baroque view of, 144, 149 pragmatist approach to, 151 individual, vii, 2-8, 39-45, 49 James, William, vii, xi, xii, 2, 4, 5, 13, 21, 23, 31-38, 59, 70, 71, 76, 106, 112, 114, 115, 117, 118, 161, 170, 192, 214, 216, 217, 243, 245 Joas, Hans, 79, 81, 88, 177, 189 Judd, Charles H., 108 Kant, Immanuel, xiii, 19, 20, 24, 79, 101, 177, 192, 238, 239 Karadžić, Radovan, 135 Keck, Margaret, 132 Kennan, George, 151 Kierkegaard, Søren, 185, 195 Kissinger, Henry, 151 Knobe, Joshua, 198, 199 Koch, Donald F., 67 Koczanowicz, Leszek, 189 Korsgaard, Christine, 64, 67 Kratochwil, Friedrich, 171 Krstić, Radislav, 135 Kutz, Christopher, 139 Kymlicka, W., 82, 88

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Index

LaFollette, Hugh, 59, 67 Latour, Bruno, 4, 69-78, 192 Lawson, Bill, 65, 67 League of Nations, 152 Leitch, Vincent B., 118 Lemkin, Raphael, 133 Lenin, Vladimir, 104, 116 Lewis, David, 97, 102 liberalism, viii, 8, 16, 20, 52, 79, 131, 146, 150, 178, 179, 201-211, 241 Lieven, Anatol, 159 Light, Margot, 159 Locke, John, 22, 144, 174, 175, 177, 180 loyalty, 49, 50, 52, 66, 122, 129, 151, 154, 158 Lucács, Georg, 114 Lunacharsky, Anatoly, 108 Lyotard, Jean-François, 189 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 173, 180 Mackie, John, 3, 62-67 Malachowski, A., 225 Mann, Horace, 109 Martin, John, 110 Martin, Prestonia Mann, 5, 103, 105, 109, 115, 117, 118 Marx, Karl, 111, 195, 241 McDermott, John J., 47, 243 Mead, George Herbert, 4-7, 12, 16, 31-33, 79-81, 83-89, 102, 134, 138, 165, 167, 171, 188, 214 meliorism, 65 Middle East, 154, 230, 234 Mill, John Stuart, 17, 20, 175, 177, 180, 195 Miller, Arthur, 40, 47 Miller, Dickinson S., 108 Mladić, Ratko, 135 Montague, W. P., 108 Moore, A. W., 70, 77 morality 23, 27, 28, 44, 45, 47, 59-66,

130, 137, 167, 184, 204-206, 208, 210, 217, 218, 238 Moravec, Hans, 102 Morgenthau, Hans, 151 Murray, Clark, 108 Muslims, Bosnian, 135 Nabokov, Vladimir, 195 Nagasaki, 135 nation state, 136, 144, 145, 147, 151 naturalism, 6, 19, 23, 62, 141, 144, 145, 225, 229, 230 neoconservativism, 146, 151, 153, 155 Nice, Richard, 102 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 151 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 185, 187, 192, 195, 197, 199 normativity, 6, 20, 23, 63, 64, 67, 161, 162, 164, 169 norms, social, 6, 161-172 Norton, Anne, 158 Nye, Joseph, 156, 157, 159 Oakeshott, Michael, 218 Opp, Karl-Dieter, 169, 171, 172 Ortega y Gasset, José, 27, 28 Parmenides, 239 Parsons, Talcott, 163 Peirce, Charles Sanders, vii, xi, xiii, 2, 4, 11, 12-29, 70 - 72, 143, 193, 246 Pfaff, William, 159 Plato, 69, 215, 243 Pol Pot, 134 Poland, xi, 1 Popper, Karl, 19, 21, 24, 25, 177 Porter, Marjorie L., 116, 118 Posner, Eric, 164, 171, 172 power, soft and hard, 156, 157, 159 pragmatism, xi,xii, xiii, 1-7, 21, 22, 26, 29,37, 49, 55, 59, 62, 65, 66, 67, 70, 71, 72, 79, 80, 132, 141, 142, 143, 145, 150-153, 157-159, 165, 168-173, 186,

Index 188, 191, 204, 213, 224, 225, 227,235, 243, 244, 245, 246 Pratt, James B., 108 Proust, Marcel, 195 Putnam, Hillary, xi, 87, 88, 168, 169, 172, 192 Rawls, John, 6, 20, 24, 87, 177, 178, 180, 195 religion, 33, 37, 50, 52-55, 65, 74, 84, 104, 105, 112, 115, 134, 205, 228, 230, 231-235, 238 revolution, 16, 25, 50, 103-105, 108-114, 174, 202, 238 Rischin, Ruth, 118 Romania, xi Rorty, Richard, viii, ix, xi, xii, xiii, 1, 7, 8, 168, 169, 172, 185-189, 191-199, 201-225, 227-241, 245, 246 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 23, 175 Russell, Bertrand, 18, 21, 29, 214, 215 Russia (Russian Federation), 229 Rwanda, Republic of, 139 Ryder, John, iii, vii, viii, 1, 2, 4, 6, 8, 102, 141, 142, 144, 146, 148, 150, 152, 154, 156, 158, 159, 244, 246 Sandel, Michael, 177, 179 Santayana, George, 127, 132 Scherr, Barry P., 118 scientism, xii, 245 self, vii, viii, xi, 2-8, 11, 13-28, 31-35, 45, 46, 121, 123, 126-132, 161, 171-180, 198, 215 Sellars, Wilfrid, 8, 204, 211, 215, 217, 218, 223, 224 Serbs, Bosnian, 135 Shapin, Steven, 74, 78 Shapiro, I., 88 Shaw, Bernard, 115 Sherer, J., 116 Shillinglaw, Susan, 42, 43, 47

253

Shusterman, Richard, 7, 185-189 Sider, Theodore, 102 Sikkink, Kathryn, 132 Simmel, Georg, 163 Singer, Beth J., 6, 167, 171 Skrupskelis, Ignas K., 118 Slovakia (Slovak Republic), xi, 1, 246 Smirnov, I.P., 118 Smith, Karen E., 159 socialism, vii, 19, 104, 105, 107, 109, 111, 112, 113, 115, 117, 149, 228, 231, 232 solidarity, viii, 8, 40, 81, 84, 189, 194, 195, 198, 199, 201-207, 210-212, 219, 220, 225 Soviet Union, 137, 231, 232 Spargo, John, 105, 116 Spinoza, Baruch, 19, 246 Srebrenica, 135 Stalin, Joseph, 116, 134-138 Steinbeck, John, vii, 2, 39-47, 244 Steinhart, Eric, 102 stem cell research, 60-62 Stratton, George M., 108 Strauss, Leo, 141, 158 Summerbrook, 110 Tacitus, 239 Taylor, Charles, 85, 118, 177, 179, 184, 189 technology, 50, 51, 71, 74, 102, 152, 238, 244 terrorism, 28, 152, 154, 156, 175, 230 Thompson, Paul B., 44, 47, 246 Timmerman, John H., 41, 47 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 177 Tolstoy, Leo, 104, 105 truth, xi, xii, 7, 14, 20-22, 26, 46, 52, 53, 70, 74, 78, 96, 111, 128, 143, 164, 172, 192-4, 197-199, 209, 211, 218, 224 Tugendhat, Ernst, 217, 218, 224

254

Index

Turkey, 133, 136 Turner, B. S., 81, 88 Ullman-Margalit, Edna, 165, 171 United Nations, 33, 134, 152, 153, 155 utopia, viii, 8, 22, 23, 25, 26, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 118, 201, 202, 203, 204, 206, 207, 210, 222 values, 3, 4, 5, 13, 16-23, 25, 27, 28, 29, 36, 37, 59, 60, 63, 64, 66, 73, 76, 82, 83, 85, 86, 98, 107, 125, 126, 128-131, 142, 146, 150, 169, 179, 183, 185, 207, 232 Vattimo, Gianni, 227, 228, 233 Wallace, Kathleen, , 4, 88, 89, 90, 92, 94, 96, 98, 100, 102, 244, 246 Weber, Max, 163, 177 Wegmarshaus, Gert-Rüdiger, viii, 6, 102, 159, 173, 247 Wells, H. G., 111-115 Westphalia, Treaty of, 144 Will, Frederick L., 166, 171 William of Orange, 174 Williams, Michael C., 159 Wilson, Woodrow, 152 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 192, 197 Woodbridge, Frederick J.E., 108 Wringe, Bill, 139, 140 Yeats, W. B., 196 Young, I. Marion, 83, 88 Young Turks, 136-138 Yugoslavia, 135 Zaika, S.V., 116

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Titles Published Volumes 1 - 170 see www.rodopi.nl 171. Sami Pihlstrom, Pragmatic Moral Realism: A Transcendental Defense. A volume in Studies in Pragmatism and Values   172. Charles C. Hinkley II, Moral Conflicts of Organ Retrieval: A Case for Constructive Pluralism. A volume in Values in Bioethics 173. Gábor Forrai and George Kampis, Editors, Intentionality: Past and Future. A volume in Cognitive Science 174. Dixie Lee Harris, Encounters in My Travels: Thoughts Along the Way. A volume in Lived Values:Valued Lives 175. Lynda Burns, Editor, Feminist Alliances. A volume in Philosophy and Women 176. George Allan and Malcolm D. Evans, A Different Three Rs for Education. A volume in Philosophy of Education 177. Robert A. Delfino, Editor, What are We to Understand Gracia to Mean?: Realist Challenges to Metaphysical Neutralism. A volume in Gilson Studies 178. Constantin V. Ponomareff and Kenneth A. Bryson, The Curve of the Sacred: An Exploration of Human Spirituality. A volume in Philosophy and Religion 179. John Ryder, Gert Rüdiger Wegmarshaus, Editors, Education for a Democratic Society: Central European Pragmatist Forum, Volume Three. A volume in Studies in Pragmatism and Values   180. Florencia Luna, Bioethics and Vulnerability: A Latin American View. A volume in Values in Bioethics   181. John Kultgen and Mary Lenzi, Editors, Problems for Democracy. A volume in Philosophy of Peace 182. David Boersema and Katy Gray Brown, Editors, Spiritual and Political Dimensions of Nonviolence and Peace. A volume in Philosophy of Peace

183. Daniel P. Thero, Understanding Moral Weakness. A volume in Studies in the History of Western Philosophy 184. Scott Gelfand and John R. Shook, Editors, Ectogenesis: Artificial Womb Technology and the Future of Human Reproduction. A volume in Values in Bioethics 185. Piotr Jaroszyński, Science in Culture. A volume in Gilson Studies 186. Matti Häyry, Tuija Takala, Peter Herissone-Kelly, Editors, Ethics in Biomedical Research: International Perspectives. A volume in Values in Bioethics 187. Michael Krausz, Interpretation and Transformation: Explorations in Art and the Self. A volume in Interpretation and Translation 188. Gail M. Presbey, Editor, Philosophical Perspectives on the “War on Terrorism.” A volume in Philosophy of Peace 189. María Luisa Femenías, Amy A. Oliver, Editors, Feminist Philosophy in Latin America and Spain. A volume in Philosophy in Latin America 190. Oscar Vilarroya and Francesc Forn I Argimon, Editors, Social Brain Matters: Stances on the Neurobiology of Social Cognition. A volume in Cognitive Science 191. Eugenio Garin, History of Italian Philosophy. Translated from Italian and Edited by Giorgio Pinton. A volume in Values in Italian Philosophy 192. Michael Taylor, Helmut Schreier, and Paulo Ghiraldelli, Jr., Editors, Pragmatism, Education, and Children: International Philosophical Perspectives. A volume in Pragmatism and Values 193. Brendan Sweetman, The Vision of Gabriel Marcel: Epistemology, Human Person, the Transcendent. A volume in Philosophy and Religion 194. Danielle Poe and Eddy Souffrant, Editors, Parceling the Globe: Philosophical Explorations in Globalization, Global Behavior, and Peace. A volume in Philosophy of Peace 195. Josef Šmajs, Evolutionary Ontology: Reclaiming the Value of Nature by Transforming Culture. A volume in Central-European Value Studies

196. Giuseppe Vicari, Beyond Conceptual Dualism: Ontology of Consciousness, Mental Causation, and Holism in John R. Searle’s Philosophy of Mind. A volume in Cognitive Science 197. Avi Sagi, Tradition vs. Traditionalism: Contemporary Perspectives in Jewish Thought. Translated from Hebrew by Batya Stein. A volume in Philosophy and Religion 198. Randall E. Osborne and Paul Kriese, Editors, Global Community: Global Security. A volume in Studies in Jurisprudence 199. Craig Clifford, Learned Ignorance in the Medicine Bow Mountains: A Reflection on Intellectual Prejudice. A volume in Lived Values: Valued Lives 200. Mark Letteri, Heidegger and the Question of Psychology: Zollikon and Beyond. A volume in Philosophy and Psychology 201. Carmen R. Lugo-Lugo and Mary K. Bloodsworth-Lugo, Editors, A New Kind of Containment: “The War on Terror,” Race, and Sexuality. A volume in Philosophy of Peace 202. Amihud Gilead, Necessity and Truthful Fictions: Panenmentalist Observations. A volume in Philosophy and Psychology 203. Fernand Vial, The Unconscious in Philosophy, and French and European Literature: Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century. A volume in Philosophy and Psychology 204. Adam C. Scarfe, Editor, The Adventure of Education: Process Philosophers on Learning, Teaching, and Research. A volume in Philosophy of Education 205. King-Tak Ip, Editor, Environmental Ethics: Intercultural Perspectives. A volume in Studies in Applied Ethics 206. Evgenia Cherkasova, Dostoevsky and Kant: Dialogues on Ethics. A volume in Social Philosophy 207. Alexander Kremer and John Ryder, Editors, Self and Society: Central European Pragmatist Forum, Volume Four. A volume in Central European Value Studies