Contemporary Pragmatism. Volume 7, Number 2. December 2010

ontemporary CPragmatism

Contemporary Pragmatism Editors

Mitchell Aboulafia, The Juilliard School, USA John R. Shook, Center for Inquiry, USA

Assistant Editor

Russ Pryba, University at Buffalo

Editorial Board

Susana de Castro Amaral, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Randall Auxier, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, USA Richard Bernstein, New School University, USA James Bohman, Saint Louis University, USA Randall Dipert, University at Buffalo, USA Pascal Engel, Université Paris IV–Sorbonne, France Jose Miguel Esteban, Universidad Autonoma del Estado de Morelos, Mexico Nancy Frankenberry, Dartmouth College, USA Nancy Fraser, New School University, USA Jim Garrison, Virginia Tech University, USA Paulo Ghiraldelli, Jr., Centro de Estudos em Filosofia Americana, Brazil Eddie Glaude, Princeton University, USA Russell Goodman, University of New Mexico, USA Judith Green, Fordham University, USA Susan Haack, University of Miami, USA Jürgen Habermas, Johann Wolfgang Goethe University of Frankfurt, Germany Leoni Henning, Universidade Estadual de Londrina, Brazil Hans Joas, University of Erfurt, Germany; University of Chicago, USA Robert Kane, University of Texas, USA Paul Kurtz, Center for Inquiry, USA John Lachs, Vanderbilt University, USA Alvaro Marquez-Fernandez, Universidad del Zulia, Venezuela Joseph Margolis, Temple University, USA James Marshall, University of Auckland, New Zealand Glenn McGee, Albany Medical Center, New York, USA Floyd Merrell, Purdue University, USA Cheryl Misak, University of Toronto, Canada Lucius Outlaw, Jr., Vanderbilt University, USA Michael Peters, University of Auckland, Austr.; University of Glasgow, Scotland Huw Price, University of Sydney, Australia Hilary Putnam, Harvard University, USA Bjørn Ramberg, University of Oslo, Norway Mike Sandbothe, Aalborg University, Denmark Dmitri Shalin, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, USA Richard Shusterman, Florida Atlantic University, USA Jeffrey Stout, Princeton University, USA Claudine Tiercelin, L’Université de Paris-XII, France Celal Türer, Ankara University, Turkey Bas van Fraassen, Princeton University, USA Marcus Vinícius da Cunha, Universidade de São Paulo, Ribeirão Preto, Brazil Cornel West, Princeton University, USA

Contemporary Pragmatism is affiliated with the International Pragmatism Society. See information for subscribers and contributors on the end pages of this issue.

ontemporary CPragmatism Edited by

Mitchell Aboulafia & John R. Shook Volume 7 Number 2 December 2010

AMSTERDAM - NEW YORK, NY 2010

The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence”. ISSN: 1572-3429 ISBN: 978-90-420-3287-3 E-Book ISBN: 978-90-420-3288-0 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2010 Printed in The Netherlands

Contemporary Pragmatism Volume 7 Number 2

December 2010

Contents Articles Frederic R. Kellogg Hobbes, Holmes, and Dewey: Pragmatism and the Problem of Order

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Brian E. Butler Dews, Dworks, and Poses Decide Lochner

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Sor-hoon Tan Our Country Right or Wrong: A Pragmatic Response to Anti-Democratic Cultural Nationalism in China

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Stephen Harris Antifoundationalism and the Commitment to Reducing Suffering in Rorty and Madhyamaka Buddhism

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Eric Thomas Weber On Applying Ethics: Who’s Afraid of Plato’s Cave?

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William Gavin, Stefan Neubert, and Kersten Reich Language and Its Discontents: William James, Richard Rorty, and Interactive Constructivism

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Matthew J. Brown Genuine Problems and the Significance of Science

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Robert Chodat Evolution and Explanation: Biology, Aesthetics, Pragmatism

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Joseph Margolis Pragmatism’s Future: A Touch of Prophecy

189

Review Essay Brian E. Butler Sen’s The Idea of Justice: Back to the (Pragmatic) Future

219

Book Reviews Tibor Solymosi Review of Jay Schulkin. Cognitive Adaptation: A Pragmatist Perspective. 231

Contemporary Pragmatism Vol. 7, No. 2 (December 2010), 1–14

Editions Rodopi © 2010

Hobbes, Holmes, and Dewey: Pragmatism and the Problem of Order Frederic R. Kellogg

Civil wars in England and America were catalysts in forming the jurisprudential views of Thomas Hobbes and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. Holmes’s pragmatism advances a fundamentally distinct view of order from Hobbes’s analytical theory. Holmes replaced the Hobbesian analytical model of law with an endogenous model that assimilates conflict in a process of formal but communal inquiry into discrete types of dispute. Holmes rejected the analytical boundary around law in favor of a holistic fallibilism, which like Dewey’s encompasses all inquiry, legal, scientific, aesthetic, and philosophical, under one ontological roof. Holmes also provided a practical critique of ideology, best known from the words of his famous dissent in Lochner v. New York: “The fourteenth amendment does not enact Mr. Herbert Spencer’s Social Statics”; or, more to the point, “General propositions do not decide concrete cases.”

If pragmatism (as Richard Rorty and others have claimed) has no grand scheme beyond the commitment to deliberative democratic pluralism, does it have some stronger account, as Wilfrid Sellars puts it in defining philosophy, of “how things, in the broadest possible sense of the term, hang together, in the broadest possible sense of the term”? In this paper I will pursue the vision of a distinctly dynamic and transitional concept of order implicit in classical pragmatism, rather than an analytical vision grounded in a fixed cognitive image. Central to this theme is the very different response to human conflict of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., from that of Thomas Hobbes. On 11 November 1862, Captain Holmes wrote from his regiment in Virginia to his sister Amelia despairing that the Confederacy could be overcome by force. He had been wounded twice, in October of 1861 while his regiment was being thrown by a superior force off Balls Bluff into the Potomac River, and again in September 1862 by a bullet through the neck at Antietam. He would soon be hit again at Fredericksburg, his regiment all but decimated. After witnessing the dead piled 5 deep at the Bloody Angle at the Battle of the Wilderness, he declined promotion and resigned his commission in August of 1864 to return to Cambridge to study law.

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Holmes’s despair proved unjustified and the Union did somehow hang together; how barely, he was acutely aware. Philosophical pragmatism – in its classical form – followed the American Civil War. This was only eighty years after the American Revolution, and sixty years after the War of 1812. Emerging in the wake of three fratricidal wars, it is to be expected that within the origins of pragmatism would be some response, if not a distinctive one, to the problem of human conflict. The flip side of conflict is order; and the problems of moral and intellectual order if not inseparable are resistant to separation if we take Sellars seriously. Hume’s task in his moral philosophy, notes Haakonssen, is completely analogous to his task in epistemology: to explain how a common world is created out of private and subjective elements (1981, 4). Holmes, in many ways a successor to David Hume, has not been fully recognized as an original philosopher by legal academics, but a comprehensive reading, in context with his pragmatist contemporaries, adds a distinctive dimension to the making of the moral, and certainly legal, character of that common world. What makes a real community hang together, in the broadest sense of the term? To address this question we may pick up a line of thought developed by Holmes and continue it in Dewey’s extended wake. Dewey’s lifelong project, as Ralph Sleeper has characterized it, was to elucidate a radical pragmatic naturalism as a critique of, and an alternative to, the dominant analytical tradition in logic, epistemology, and ontology (Sleeper 1986). I read Holmes as doing the same for jurisprudence: launching a profound naturalist critique of analytical jurisprudence as it re-emerged with John Austin in the nineteenth century, following Thomas Hobbes in the seventeenth century and continuing today with H. L. A. Hart and Joseph Raz. Holmes’s radical naturalist account highlights critical aspects of Dewey’s project, particularly the precarious nature of democratic order, and the lingering presence of authoritarian models of law. It grounds the often overly abstract conversation about pragmatic models of democracy, and while bringing it down to earth, also suggests a pragmatic agenda in other areas of contemporary philosophy. It does this by exploring, as an aspect of pragmatism, the problem of order as one of addressing and reconciling perennial conflict, which both Hobbes and Holmes made central in all its forms: military, political, moral, and intellectual.1 The difference between them is that Hobbes resolved the problem through authority, while Holmes does so through inquiry and adjustment. How is this related to the origins of pragmatism? Remarkably, on returning to Cambridge Holmes showed no signs of posttraumatic stress disorder. From 1866 into the 1870s he was active in round-robin discussions of philosophy with William James, Chauncey Wright, Charles Peirce, and others; after a disappointing stint at Harvard Law school he worked in a Boston law office; and he read philosophical and scientific works recommended by Wright, as well as the Lectures on Jurisprudence of John Austin and other legal treatises. He eagerly took over from James B. Thayer the

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revision of the encyclopedic legal treatise, Kent’s Commentaries on American Law, a massive task; and he edited and wrote for the American Law Review, eventually tracing a path from which can be devined an original conception of law influenced by Emerson, Wright, Mill, Darwin, Maine, and an immersion in diverse historical and anthropological studies. His conception was the antithesis of Hobbes’s.2 This article examines the mechanism by which Holmes, in the 1870s, came to describe the developing and maintaining of social order. He did not characterize it as such; his subject was law, the common law, and his focus was on cases, rooted in the revision and updating of Kent’s Commentaries. Yet the nature of this mechanism, eventually applied to constitutional law, holds so much in common with the emergent themes of pragmatism that it is illuminating to abstract from it a cognate response to conflict: a pragmatic theory of order, legal in the immediate sense, moral and conceptual by implication. I propose three approaches to elucidate this, in three dimensions: historical, ontological, and practical. By historical I mean Holmes’s replacement of the Hobbesian analytical model of law, designed to address (and presumably suppress) conflict by state control, with an endogenous model that assimilates conflict in a process of formal but communal inquiry into discrete types of dispute. By ontological I mean Holmes’s rejection of the analytical boundary around law, dating to Hobbes and still reflected in the contemporary separation of law and morals, in favor of a holistic fallibilism, which like Dewey’s encompasses all inquiry, legal, scientific, aesthetic, and philosophical, under one ontological roof. The third or practical dimension refers to Holmes’s critique of ideology, best known from the words of his famous dissent in Lochner v. New York: “The fourteenth amendment does not enact Mr. Herbert Spencer’s Social Statics”; or, more to the abstract point, “General propositions do not decide concrete cases.” Having established these three aspects, I hope the reader will agree with me that what distinguishes the pragmatic approach to jurisprudence is that law must be analyzed not as a separate entity but as part of the more general problem, or set of problems, of social ordering. Thereupon we will be in a position to explore pragmatism’s approach to conflict as a dynamic theory of order, distinct from the dominant analytical tradition, and to understand its advantages.3 1. It is well known that Hobbes placed conflict at the center of his thinking about law and government. “My mother gave birth to twins: myself, and fear.” It is also well known that from the premise of inveterate conflict, he deduced in Euclidian fashion a “social contract” by men in the state of nature to cede certain innate rights to the state to establish and maintain civil society. While hardly the first to conceive of law as an autonomous force maintaining and directing

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society, Hobbes gave the tradition a modernist and rationalist rebirth, renewed in succeeding centuries by Bentham, John Austin, H. L. A. Hart, and lately Joseph Raz. It was John Austin’s just-published version of analytical jurisprudence that seized Holmes’s attention in the 1860s, much as it was R. Hermann Lotze’s version of analytical logic that seized Dewey’s by 1903 (Sleeper 1986, 5, 64–5). Accepting for the moment the pervasiveness of conflict, is there a more plausible paradigm than Hobbes’s mythical contract for explaining its relationship to law? Exemplifying a historicist naturalism, Holmes’s model is taken directly from the law books. His is the recorded one of constant disputes, channeled into law courts and thence organized into legal intelligence. For Holmes, litigation, seen all around us, is a key part of the process of social ordering; and I will suggest that he found within it features that are representative of more general relations between dispute and inquiry, between conflict and theory. I suggested that the model was original, but it had important precedents. An earlier version of common law based theory was developed in response to Hobbes by Sir Edward Coke (1552–1634) in the Institutes, and Sir Matthew Hale (1609–1676) especially in his posthumous Reflections, building on Coke. They are the first in the Anglophone tradition to spell out that there is a difference between the form of reasoning implied from the two versions of regulating conflict through law. Law is either exogenous or endogenous.4 Either you control conflict from outside (leading, as the tradition reveals, to formal analytical thinking) or you assimilate it from within, through a frequently inelegant and messy ad hoc system of negotiation and gradual classification. Hobbes, who favored Euclidian elegance, was annoyed by common lawyers like Coke and Hale, who resisted his authoritarian model. Late in life he wrote his Dialogue Between a Philosopher and a Student of the Common Law. Posing as the philosopher, Hobbes asks the student “Would you have every man to every other man allege for law his own particular reason? There is not amongst men a universal reason agreed upon in any nation, beside the reason of him that hath the sovereign power. Yet though his reason be but the reason of one man, yet it is set up to supply the place of that universal reason, which is expounded to us by our Saviour in the Gospel; and consequently our King is to us the legislator both of statute-law, and of common-law.” Hobbes’s attack on Coke was not published until well after his death in 1681; but it was apparently circulated widely enough in manuscript form to come to the attention of Sir Matthew Hale, whose manuscript reply, Reflections by the Lord Chiefe Justice Hale on Mr. Hobbes his Dialogue of the Lawe, was unpublished until 1921 when its importance was recognized by the British legal historian Frederick Pollock, by then an old friend and correspondent of Holmes. Hale begins his Reflections with an elaborate demonstration that reason is by no means univocal as applied to different subjects of inquiry, such as mathematics, physics and politics, and that it must be permitted to assume a

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special meaning in the difficult field of law. This is because “the texture of human affairs is not unlike the texture of a diseased body laboring under maladies, it may be of so various natures that such Phisique as may be proper for the cure of one of the maladies may be destructive in relation to the other, and the cure of one disease may be the death of the patient.” (1921, 503) Though unread by Holmes until much later, it prefigures his own common law based habit of thinking from particular situations, closer to raw experience, while resisting easy general answers. By reasserting an endogenous model against Austin’s analytical scheme, Holmes was obliged to flesh it out and respond to Austin’s more insistent ontological separation of law from morals. Here he would draw on the naturalist, empiricist attitudes of the Scottish Enlightenment that influenced his own education and that of his Harvardgraduated peers like Wright, Peirce, and James. As noted above, Hale’s view was an early challenge to the rationalist approach that Bentham and his disciple John Austin would later elaborate. There was a different response to British rationalism in Scotland in the century after Hale: the moral sense theory of Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Hume and Adam Smith. As the legal historian John Cairns writes, “from the work of Frances Hutcheson ... rationalist natural law theories in the tradition of Pufendorf had been progressively superseded in Scotland by versions of moral sense theory. A follower of the philosophy of Lord Shaftesbury, Hutcheson attempted to ground ethics in observation and study of the thinking and behavior of human beings.... The foundation of moral judgment was not in reason, but in the senses.” (2003) Cairns traces the influence of this on Kames, Hume, Smith and Millar, as well as the influence of Montesquieu on Scottish Enlightenment thinking about law. We may find that Holmes actually reaches into both traditions, that of Coke and Hale as well as of Kames and Smith. He had absorbed Scottish thought as an undergraduate at Harvard through Francis Bowen, who had taught philosophy and political theory to the members of the Metaphysical Club (and even attended some of their meetings). Holmes’s post-war diaries show that he too read Hamilton, Bain, and other Scots, as well as Montesquieu, and of course Darwin, a major influence on all the members of the Club. We might say that Holmes reinterpreted Hale in privileging precedent as the organic body of patterns of decision – or what is beneath, patterns of conduct, eventually translated into legal concepts as they first clashed and then were adjusted and reconciled. He saw common law as pulling moral standards out of conflict resolution, as reworking them and thereby developing and constantly writing and revising the moral component of law. What Holmes does with moral sense theory seems particularly noteworthy. Holmes historicizes Smith’s “impartial spectator” in a way that conditionally validates precedent. Holmes’s “reasonable and prudent man” was the test for negligence, the standard of care. The prudent person is Holmes’s historical spectator. We value precedent because the prudent person has been there all along, in the role of jury and judge, constantly infusing the common

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law with a historically more plausible – even while still highly idealized – version of Scottish moral sense. This simplified explanation hides underlying complexity but serves to sketch the lineage. What it fails to show, yet, are the implications for applying conflicting precedents and resolving disputes. Smith’s impartial spectator had been a device, a trope, originally devised to emphasize Hutcheson’s antirationalist ethics. The prudent man is also a device, but it is drawn from legal history (explicitly introduced into English law in 1781 by Sir William Jones) and it speaks with caution, more than a touch of Humean or Burkean skepticism. While Smith’s theoretical spectator might say, “Aha! I can look inside myself to do the right thing in any doubtful case,” Holmes’s prudent man is a consensus builder: “Whoa, I think this looks right for now, to me, in this instance, but first let’s check the precedents, allow for future variations, and await a consensus before laying down a rule.” Smith thought the impartial spectator could find the universal in the particular,5 but Holmes recognized from Kent that this takes time and experience. The prudent judge looks first to precedent, and only finds the universal when the time is ripe: It is the merit of the common law that it decides the case first and determines the principle afterwards.... In cases of first impression Lord Mansfield’s often-quoted advice to the business man who was suddenly appointed judge, that he should state his conclusions and not give his reasons, as his judgment would probably be right and the reasons certainly wrong, is not without its application to more educated courts (1870). Here the legal decision is described as coming before the reasoning; the analytical matrix of the law, and its a priori rules of decision, would appear surprisingly irrelevant. This surely appears unsound, until we recognize that Holmes is speaking not of the ordinary case, but of the tough case, the novel situation, often representing a new and at first intractable clash of interests. The simplified sketch implies – perhaps too much so – that there is no clear rational itinerary from the written law to the specific decision. More importantly, though, it implies a common-law judicial minimalism, deciding “one case at a time.” This phrase has most recently been deployed by Cass Sunstein, referring to decisions of the Supreme Court that avoid formulae and withhold sweeping generalization (1999). Sunstein, writing of controversies that are in his phrase “not yet fully theorized,” might profitably have cited Holmes for this principle, as Holmes had in 1870 proposed a quite sophisticated model through which common law rules are ideally formulated: It is only after a series of determinations on the same subject-matter, that it becomes necessary to “reconcile the cases,” as it is called, that is, by a true induction to state the principle which has until then been obscurely

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felt. And this statement is often modified more than once by new decisions before the abstracted general rule takes its final shape. A well settled legal doctrine embodies the work of many minds, and has been tested in form as well as substance by trained critics whose practical interest it is to resist it at every step (1870). Holmes called this process “successive approximation.” Legal rules are viewed historically, and Holmes here proposes that they be understood as emerging from classes of activity, or more precisely from classes of disputes within discrete activities. As new cases arise within a given class, for example vehicular accidents or communications among people forming contractual arrangements, they are initially decided on their facts, a case at a time. Eventually a body of decided cases can be “reconciled,” with the laying down of a general rule, after time has permitted sufficient case-specific analysis, probing the relevant varieties and conditions of accidents or contractual communications. Whereas analytical legal positivism emphasizes language and text, which gives the appearance of fixity, the updated common law model emphasizes patterns of conduct, which may be in the process of adjustment and gradual change. While the positivist model sees legal change as possible primarily through legislation, Holmes saw it as ongoing in areas even already covered by statute; and finality of generalization is ever elusive. The introduction of new forms of travel or communication may require new amendments to the rules of travel or contract, as did the airplane and the telegraph in the previous century. And even new legislation will need to be interpreted and applied on a case-bycase basis.6 2. This truncated historical tour brings us short of important developments in the twentieth century, when the analytical tradition was revised by Hart and his disciples at Oxford and elsewhere. The ontological aspect of Holmes's position becomes evident when we consider his conception of the difficult case and compare it to that of Hart and the contemporary legal positivists. Recall that Hale’s comparison of law to a curative introduced into the “texture of human affairs” separated both his notion of reason and his conceptualization of law from those of Hobbes. His “texture” terminology anticipates Herbert Hart’s “open texture” of legal language; but unlike Hart, the texture of interest to Hale is outside the law, a texture of “affairs” or activity, and the element of difficulty would necessarily be located there instead of within the isolated text. We may compare an example made famous by Hart, the famous bicycle in the park case, and its relation to the notion of an “open texture” in legal language. A local ordinance bans vehicles from a public park. Competent users of English are uncertain or disagree about whether bicycles are vehicles. Hart

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infers that the rule banning vehicles from the park has a core of determinate meaning and a penumbra of indeterminate meaning, into which the bicycle would fall. (1994, 123–127) For Hart, deciding the bicycle case requires a court to assign to the rule an increment of determinate meaning that it did not previously have.7 Positivist open texture theory, adopting the conception of metaphorical space in an opentextured entity “law,” either renders the project of legal interpretation impossible or the language of judges and lawyers fraudulent. For the metaphorical space to be truly empty, any gap in a rule must be a gap in the law as a whole, as there would otherwise be someplace else within the law to find an answer. Hence for such gaps there is no possibility of deciding a case by interpreting “the law.” Picture a circle, with the label “LAW” on the inside, and “MORALS” on the outside. This is the conceptual image of positivist analytical jurisprudence – with law and morals separated by a definable boundary. (I use the idea of a circle for clarity. Perhaps rather than a circle, implying uniformity to varying analytical theories, I should suggest an enclosing line with indeterminate shape.)8 The picture is reinforced by language concerning the very question of law’s relation to morals, and of analysis of that question. It forces the conversation about law into an epistemic boundary issue, rather than a question of process. It focuses on the issue of how things inherently (or at least presently) are, rather than of how things come to be. This line of inquiry in analytical jurisprudence is presumed to be a “given,” as an ancient, fundamental, and defining question of jurisprudence. A recent comment by the preeminent European legal philosopher Robert Alexy suggests that all of jurisprudence has been and must always be dominated by this question, the question of whether law is separate from morals: The central problem in the debate surrounding the concept of law is the relationship of law and morality. Notwithstanding a discussion that reaches back more than two millennia, there remain two basic, competing positions – the positivistic and the non-positivistic. (1989, 3) Here the “non-positivistic” position is simply the other alternative given by the analytical picture: the option of somehow putting a moral element inside the boundary. Western jurisprudence is thus overwhelmed by a powerful linguistic bias toward analytical legal theory and method, by a concept of law with a definitive boundary – whether that boundary includes morals or not. If we ignore Hale and accept Alexy’s comment, the pragmatic view is then entirely original – a third “basic position.” It cannot, however, be so simply mapped, as the pragmatist model of law is part of a model of developing intelligence in the context of all experience.

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3. The analytical picture serves to illustrate the practical dimension of Holmes’s critique of ideology. Picture again the circle with “law” on the inside, but put aside for the moment the precise location of “morals.” If law has a boundary, the question arises, what precisely is inside, and what outside? If a question arises for which legal experts cannot find a clear answer from the materials (statutes, cases, authoritative texts, etc.) that are inside, can they look outside for an answer? And what if “moral principles” are believed to be inside, as Alexy, following Ronald Dworkin, has steadfastly maintained? Can such generals be utilized to decide the difficult case? Holmes’s fallibilism resists the idea of a natural conceptual boundary around law. It sees no difficult case as occupying a place inside or outside a legal boundary. Rather, the hard case presents a degree of novelty or uncertainty. Cases come into the legal process from the chaos of life’s complexity. They bring innumerable distinct kinds of uncertainty and difficulty. It is a categorical error to treat all types of legal uncertainty as univocal, of one conceptual kind, an error that seems inevitably to follow from the notion of a boundary, or at any rate from the debate over the ontological separation of law and morals. It is an error that, as Holmes would later complain, may be used to rationalize a judge’s predetermining the outcome of an ongoing controversy by circumventing detail and appealing directly to a “moral principle.” From this perspective, two fallacies have followed from the analytical conception, going back at least to John Austin, that law has a distinct conceptual boundary. One is that a particular case, embodying a specific question, can arise outside the boundary, and hence be legally indeterminate. According to the positivist model, law, considered as an adjudicative matrix, either succeeds or fails on its own. When deciding difficult cases this means the positivist must accept the problematic possibility of a radical “legal indeterminacy.”9 The other fallacy, following from the debate over whether law and morals are separate, is that morals, or moral principles, must be included within the boundary when necessary to resolve the legally indeterminate case. This gives rise to the superficial notion that constitutional rights, as privileged “moral principles,” can be available as trumps over statute and precedent whenever their sweepingly general language permits. If a case represents a prevalent controversy on which a judge has strong feelings, and there is a relevant constitutional value such as free expression, annoying facts that may align the case with prior contrary decisions can be ignored, in favor of a rhetorical recitation of the historic importance of the constitutional right. While this may appear to be a twentieth-century phenomenon, Holmes first encountered a nineteenth-century version of it during his career as a state judge, in the yet unregulated area of labor organization – the tendency to reject picketing as a violation of constitutionally protected freedom of contract.10 Lochner, in 1902, invoked the same right to overrule state welfare regulation, and would be his

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signal encounter with this phenomenon on the Supreme Court. In both cases he dissented, and in both his position has been born out by historical developments. Constitutional rights are important, but they are implemented by raising fundamental questions for society at large, not by dictating, to the individual judge, shortcut answers to new perplexities like union organizing or social welfare legislation. More recent issues in which the temptation exists to avoid complexity are corporate limits on campaign spending, and medically assisted suicide. Why should judges decide such matters on particular grounds, as Holmes counseled, and refrain from reaching into the constitution for a final, irreversible rationale? The simple answer is that law is part of a broad social inquiry, and in the most vexing controversies, inquiry has to run its course before the correct principle, meeting the fully explored contours of a problem, follows in policy as well as language. And, ample room must be given for input from outside the judicial arena. 4. How do things hang together, amidst crisis and serious conflict? Slavery and its aftermath has overwhelmingly been the greatest source of violent dissension in the history of the republic, a clash of deep commitments worked out only through two centuries of gradual and painful adjustment – of habits, practices, beliefs, and even language. The path of that dispute is irreconcilable with a Hobbesian social contract suppressing the operation of conflicting moral views of law. Such a vision could hardly have appealed to Holmes. As a young abolitionist, he was raised on Emerson’s call to personal responsibility, and he felt its sting. For Hobbes, civil war was unmitigated evil to be avoided at all costs, while for Holmes it came to be understood as simply a more explosive manifestation of the constant clash of fundamental interests. We need not condone fratricidal war in recognizing that, in seventeenth century England and eighteenth as well as nineteenth century America, it addressed moral deadlocks that political and legal institutions could not break. This insight plausibly led Holmes to the intimate connection of legal cases with their underlying conflicts, and an emphasis less on analytical legal doctrine than the non-legal dimensions of adjustment. What is missing from Hobbes’s view is the constant need for adjustment in any real scheme of social ordering. It is this that I refer to as the dynamic order characteristic of pragmatism, the transactional and transformative aspect of inquiry found in Dewey’s work. The logic of the law is not the a priori dictate of legal reason but rather, paraphrasing Dewey, the product of inquiry. The dimension highlighted in retrospect through Holmes is the element of constant conflict as a catalyzing force. As Ralph Sleeper notes, Peirce’s doubt-belief formula directed Dewey’s attention to the actual processes of thought. Inherently vague, the idea of doubt

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has always sought specificity in Dewey’s work. For Sleeper the key to Dewey’s logic was understanding inference “as a real event of transformational force and power, causally real in the emergence of new features of things ‘entering the inferential function.’ It takes inference as action, as behavior that causes changes in reality through interaction with things.” (1986, 83). If the real process of inference begins with doubt, the doubt-belief formula needs to acknowledge that doubt is not merely spectral but must have its own physiology and history. From Holmes we gain the insight that legal intelligence is a special case of inference deriving from constant controversies that find their way into the judicial system. Doubt is palpable in the difficult case. The gradual hammeringout of belief through case-specific resolutions is visible in the record of litigation. Flawed and chaotic though it may be, the resolution of conflict by legal problem-solving provides a written record of naturalistic and pragmatic ordering, revealed in its full flawed and chaotic nature. This aspect of knowledge needs to be recognized equally in relation to the dynamic growth of universals and ideals. In an address given to the New York State Bar Association in 1899, Holmes summarized this point in a way that Dewey must have appreciated: It is perfectly proper to regard and study the law simply as a great anthropological document. It is proper to resort to it to discover what ideals of society have been strong enough to reach that final form of expression, or what have been the changes in dominant ideals from century to century. It is proper to study it as an exercise in the morphology and transformation of human ideas. (1899, 212) This extraordinary passage demonstrates that Holmes saw law entirely differently from Hobbes. Rather than an autonomous force suppressing conflict as pathological, it is embedded within the social processes assimilating and meliorating conflict as a natural condition. Rather than viewing legal and political theory as a prophylactic program for a discrete governing entity, legal theory is cognate with the rest of knowledge and law is viewed as a written record offering evidence of social norms and ideas as continuously cogenerated. Ideals are products of this view of knowledge-as-inquiry, and they are constantly developing in response to the changing nature of the human endeavor. In this original vision, legal philosophy is engaged in a radical departure from the analytical positivist tradition, with interesting and illuminating parallels, not so much to other established jurisprudential schools, but rather (as I have suggested elsewhere, 2010) to the post-Kuhnian study of science, which has already become a vital research program generating its own account of “the morphology and transformation of human ideas.”

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FREDERIC R. KELLOGG ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I thank George Browne and members of the Center for Pragmatism and Law at Universidade Federal de Pernambuco in Recife, Brazil; Jeffrey Brand-Ballard, Paul Churchill and the brown-bag-lunch philosophers at George Washington University; Francisco Saffie and members of the Legal Theory Group at University of Edinburgh School of Law; my fellow MacCormick Fellow John Lovett; John Cairns, whom I was privileged to meet in Edinburgh; Larry Hickman; and anonymous reviewers for Contemporary Pragmatism, for their helpful comments and suggestions on previous drafts leading to this paper. This paper is dedicated to Professor George Browne, whose invitation to Recife in 2007 began the process of its formulation.

NOTES 1. See, e.g., Shapin and Shaffer (1985), 15, 99–100. “[S]olutions to the problem of knowledge are embedded within practical solutions to the problem of social order, and different practical solutions to the problem of social order encapsulate contrasting practical solutions to the problem of knowledge. That is what the Hobbes-Boyle controversies were about.” (15) 2. For a full account of this see Kellogg (2007). 3. I am aware that the weight of opinion regarding Holmes has long held that, rather than a pragmatist, he is a positivist within the Hobbes/Austin/Hart tradition. See for example Patrick Kelly, “Was Holmes a Pragmatist? Reflections on a New Twist to an Old Argument,” 14 S. ILL. 427 (1990); and Albert Alschuler, Law without Values (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). As I observed in Kellogg (2007), these sources over-rely on Holmes’s “Path of the Law.” In that essay Holmes writes, “I often doubt whether it would be a gain if every word of moral significance could be banished from the law altogether,” and he mentions “the evil effects of confusion between legal and moral ideas.” Without the insight from earlier texts, this is easily mistaken for an analytical separation of law and morals, as is his emphasis on an external standard of liability in The Common Law, from which his initial consideration and rejection of Austin was omitted as irrelevant. Dissenters from this conventional view who have seen Holmes as a pragmatist notably include Thomas C. Grey, “Holmes and Legal Pragmatism,” 41 Stanford Law Review 787 (April 1989): 787–856 and “Freestanding Legal Pragmatism,” 18 Cardozo Law Review 21 (September 1996): 21–42; see also Rand Rosenblatt, “Holmes, Peirce, and Legal Pragmatism,” Yale Law Journal 84 (April 1975): 1123–1140. 4. Common law reason has been described as “within the law.” It is rooted in conduct and practice. As Gerald Postema has noted, it was “inseparable from the particular situations brought to the law and resolved by it. It is the reason not of rules and principles, but of cases.” It reflects the fact that cases are the byproduct of problematic interaction among humans engaged in social and economic activities, which fall naturally into patterns that might qualify as “custom,” from which reason cannot be detached. It is distinct, then, from the meaning given to the term by Hobbes. (Postema 1986) 5. See MacCormick (2008). 6. Holmes applied this to legislation (1870). Statutes too are the work of many minds, in elected bodies. Diverse circumstances are explored all at once, in legislative committees, instead of seriatim through litigation. Again unclear circumstances remain,

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to be addressed in a case-specific manner by the judiciary, if not through legislative amendment. See, e.g., Roscoe Pound, The Spirit of the Common Law (Boston: Beacon Press, 1921), p. 174; Edward H. Levi, An Introduction to Legal Reasoning (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1949), p. 27; Rosenblatt, “Holmes, Peirce, and Legal Pragmatism,” p. 1133. 7. Hart (1994), p. 127. This reading is reinforced by Hart’s own remarks in the Postscript responding to Ronald Dworkin added to the second edition of The Concept of Law, pp. 252–253, 272–273. 8. How about the non-positivist picture suggested by Dworkin, in which morals are not posited as outside of the putative boundary? This has been described as a nonpositivist conception, but it retains a fundamental similarity, probing the possibilities of a circle that includes within it the element of the “moral,” but nevertheless implying a boundary. The imaginary boundary is still extant, deeply embedded in the conversation, and the attention turns to the explanation of the nature of this distinctive boundary, not whether it exists at all. 9. I use this phrase in its radical sense, not the moderate meaning sometimes given by legal realists. See Kellogg (2009). 10. Vegelahn v. Guntner and Plant v. Woods; see Kellogg (2007), 127–134.

REFERENCES Alexy, Robert. 1989. The Argument from Injustice. Trans. Bonnie L. Paulson and Stanley L. Paulson. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Cairns, John. 2003. “Legal Theory” in The Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment, ed. Alexander Broadie (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press), pp. 222–242. Dworkin, Ronald. 1977. Taking Rights Seriously. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Haakonssen, Knud. 1981. The Science of a Legislator: the Natural Jurisprudence of David Hum and Adam Smith. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Hale, Matthew. 1921. Reflections by the Lord Chiefe Justice Hale on Mr. Hobbes his Dialogue of the Lawe, printed in William Holdsworth, A History of English Law (London: Methuen, 1956), pp. 499–513. Hart, H. L. A. 1994. The Concept of Law, 2nd edn. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Jr. 1870. “Codes, and the Arrangement of the Law,” American Law Review 5 (1870): 1–13, at 1. Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Jr. 1896. “The Path of the Law,” in Collected Legal Papers (New York: Harcourt, Brace), 179. Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Jr. 1899. “Law in Science – Science in Law,” in Collected Legal Papers (New York: Harcourt, Brace), 210.

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Kellogg, Frederic R. 2007. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Legal Theory, and Judicial Restraint. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Kellogg, Frederic R. 2009. “The Construction of Legal Positivism and the Myth of Legal Indeterminacy.” At http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1536124. Kellogg, Frederic R. 2010. “Law and Science as Forms of Inquiry: Toward a Comparison of Legal and Scientific Knowledge.” http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id =1509651 MacCormick, Neil. 1978. Legal Reasoning and legal Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press. MacCormick, Neil. 2008. Practical Reason in Law and Morality. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Postema, Gerald J. 1986. Bentham and the Common Law Tradition. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Shapin, Steven, and Simon Schaffer. 1985. Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Sleeper, Ralph. 1986. The Necessity of Pragmatism: John Dewey‘s Conception of Philosophy. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. Sunstein, Cass R. 1999. One Case at a Time: Judicial Minimalism on the Supreme Court. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Frederic R. Kellogg Centro de Ciências Jurídicas Programa de Pós-Graduação em Direito Rua do Hospício, 371, bloco C, 2º andar Recife, Pernambuco CEP 50060-080 BRAZIL

Contemporary Pragmatism Vol. 7, No. 2 (December 2010), 15–44

Editions Rodopi © 2010

Dews, Dworks, and Poses Decide Lochner Brian E. Butler

Lochner represents a crucial case in American constitutional law. An investigation of the decision highlights important philosophical aspects of the place of law in a democratic society. Analysis of contemporary stances on Lochner, the actual Lochner opinion (including the dissents by Harlan and Holmes) and how judges following the legal philosophies of John Dewey, Ronald Dworkin and Richard Posner (“Dews,” “Dworks,” and “Poses”) would have decided the case shows that Dewey’s theory of law and democracy emerges as the most attractive alternative.

1. Introduction Few cases in the history of United States Supreme Court jurisprudence have been more controversial than Lochner v. New York (1905).1 Members of the legal profession almost universally demonize the case. Further, both liberals and conservatives demonize it. One of the most interesting aspects of the legal reception of Lochner, though, is that there is no real agreement as to why Lochner is properly so despised. What is agreed upon is that Lochner represents a crucial case in American constitutional law. The issues and analysis involved in its decision highlight the question of the proper place of democracy, the common law tradition and the judicial system – especially judicial review – within United States government. An investigation of Lochner highlights, in a manner that few other cases in the history of American constitutional law can, important philosophical aspects of the place of law in a democratic society. To investigate the relationship between conceptions of law and democracy this paper begins with an analysis of contemporary stances on Lochner. After that, Justice Rufus Pekham’s Lochner opinion, along with the dissents by Harlan and Holmes will be outlined. Next, and most central to this paper, Lochner will be viewed through the legal philosophies of John Dewey, Ronald Dworkin and Richard Posner. Using each theorist’s description of the place of law in a democratic society I will construct “Dews,” “Dworks,” and “Poses” – that is, judges exemplary of each theory. The aim is to see what judges utilizing the explicit legal and democratic theories of Dewey, Dworkin and Posner would decide. Ultimately it will be argued that Dewey’s theory of

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law and democracy, as applied by a Dew to the facts of Lochner, emerges as the most attractive alternative among the various theories surveyed. Further, through the use of the legal philosophies of Dewey, Dworkin, and Posner, the true importance of the issues in Lochner can be made manifest. Indeed, from the analysis it will be seen that Lochner is properly controversial and, at least from the perspective offered by Dewey’s philosophy, worthy of placement in the set of notorious “anticanon” Supreme Court cases. 2. The Lochner Legacy The facts and legal issues of the Lochner case were clear and horribly mundane. Lochner, an owner of a bakery in New York, violated an article of New York’s Bakeshop Act because he permitted his employee to work more than sixty hours in one week. The Supreme Court found that the Act’s limitation on hours voluntarily worked was unconstitutional because it unlawfully interfered with freedom of contract protected under the Fourteenth Amendment’s due process clause. This content does not seem to be of such nature to admit Lochner to the set of great anticanon cases that includes such momentous decisions as interning American citizens of Japanese descent for little reason, accepting the concept of “separate but equal” or seeing a human being as essentially property rather than citizen. So why is Lochner in this infamous company? The best place to start to look for an answer is Laurence Tribe’s American Constitutional Law.2 In this monumental work, Tribe describes the Constitution as “an historically discontinuous composition.”3 That is, the Constitution has had different interpretations, and different meanings, during various times in American history. One of the great examples of discontinuity from this perspective is the change from the pivotal “Lochner era” where the Court’s use of substantive due process to strike down economic legislation was at its apex, to a very different constitutional regime after West Coast Hotel v. Parrish when the Court backed off of strong review of economic regulation under the due process clause, upheld minimum wage legislation, and started approving New Deal laws in a wholesale manner.4 The Lochner era substantive due process jurisprudence used, according to Tribe, a notion of “implied limits” founded upon an idea of “natural rights.” The idea grounding this stance was that “regulation of economic affairs was not impermissible per se; it was invalid only where the state moved beyond the sphere of its inherently limited authority by using its powers to help some citizens at the expense of others, rather than to promote genuinely public purposes to benefit the citizenry as a whole.”5 The combination of a realm of economic privacy outside of legitimate governmental regulation combined with a picture of equality that separated legitimate laws from factional grabbing created a notable resistance in Court opinions to many types of legislative acts. As to judgment of ends, the Court used natural and common law “implied limitation notions.” Further, in addition to a legitimate end, the Court also required a “real and substantial” relationship

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between a statute and its objectives. Often, in fact, the Court would inquire as to whether the ostensibly public minded law was better interpreted as pretense for illegitimate aims. If so, it was then deemed invalid by the Court. In short, “the Court interpreted its requirement of a substantial means-ends relationship so as to invalidate statutes which interfered with private economic transactions unless evolving common law concepts demonstrated a proper fit between the legislation and its asserted objectives.”6 In practice this was a quite stringent analysis. Tribe argues that Lochner serves as the representative case of the era because it is the best example of this type of review. Tribe argues, further, that the ultimate problem with this Lochner-style jurisprudence is that the common law/natural law baseline that the Court was using in order to distinguish between private and public realms was unstable. This instability is exemplified in Miller v. Schoene, where cedar trees were found to be infected with a carrier of a fungus which would, if left unabated, destroy the commercial value of a nearby apple orchard.7 The Supreme Court upheld a statute that ordered the cedar tree owners to cut down their trees to prevent contagion. The Court found the public interest required by due process in the value of the apple orchard. As Tribe puts it, “Miller not only indicates that redistribution of property between private parties may be justified in the public interest. The decision also suggests that the state inevitably has a positive role to play, a role whose exercise in either direction will benefit some private actors while hurting others. For the Court opined that, of the state had done nothing and permitted disaster to strike the apple orchards, ‘it would have been none the less a choice’.”8 Therefore, Tribe concludes that, “If one accepted fully the central notion which contributed to Lochner’s decline – that even judicial enforcement of common-law rules of contract and property represents a governmental choice with discernable consequences for the social distribution of suffering, pleasure, and power – then it would be hard to avoid the realization that a judicial choice between invalidating and upholding legislation altering the ground rules of contract and property is nonetheless a positive choice, one guided by constitutional language and history but almost never wholly determined by it.”9 Ultimately, Tribe sees the result in Lochner as showing judicial overconfidence both in the Court’s ability to understand complicated empirical conditions and also in its own conception of the constitutional meaning of liberty. Tribe’s analysis offers multiple reasons why Lochner might serve as landmark antiprecedent in American constitutional law. From those reasons probably the most popular story of Lochner is that it represents a clear case of judicial activism and overreaching. In other words, the majority opinion shows an activist Court finding ways to impose both its own narrow views of legitimate government activity and an aggrandizing view of the Court’s function. Perhaps the clearest defense of this position is offered in Paul Kens, Lochner v. New York: Economic Regulation on Trial.10 Kens finds Lochner to be a clear example of judicial activism based upon an unexamined attachment to

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laissez faire-social Darwinism. Further, Kens argues that dogmatic attachment to laissez faire substantive due process ideology led the Court to ignore multiple reports that documented unsafe conditions in New York bakeries. The Court’s strong attachment to free-market ideology made acknowledging the existence of alternate ideals of the state, and therefore other needs of the public, impossible. The blindness was exacerbated because many members of the Court majority and a large part of the legal profession (wrongly) saw the judges as “legal monks” who acted in the role of “passive oracles” identifying and applying the law as it is as opposed to constructing it. Acting on this conception of the judge’s position in American government was, in turn, conceived of as showing the Court’s commitment to principle and proper protection of the constitutional order. But from Ken’s perspective this story was an ideological construct that could not stand up to the actual facts. Ultimately, the Lochner decision came to represent not only a disagreement about the legislature’s legitimate role but also, and maybe more importantly, a disagreement over the Court’s authority to determine the extent of acceptable state action. Kens claims that the real problem with the decision is that the Court “assumed that it had the right to reign over the legislative domain of the states.”11 This, in turn, shows Lochner to be a properly condemned “illustration of the contrademocratic nature of the Court’s power of judicial review.”12 This analysis therefore concludes much the same as does William Marnell; that the Court, through a social Darwin-based interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment, made it in to a “comprehensive Bill of Rights for corporations.”13 A slightly more benign version of the overreaching conclusion, though without the same awareness that the Court’s own certitude of its central place as protector of the Constitution is questionable, is offered by David Strauss in “Why Was Lochner Wrong?”14 Strauss largely repeats the Tribe analysis, but also notes that the standard argument for the case’s vilification is somewhat paradoxical in light of current civil rights jurisprudence. In his reading the dominant criticism finds Lochner objectionable because the Court has enforced “implied” rights through strong judicial review, rights not explicitly mentioned in the text of the Constitution. Therefore the Court’s problem is one of judicial activism. But this is problematic because the modern Court has recently done much the same thing in the realm of civil rights – for instance finding various implied rights of privacy through penumbras, etc. – yet in the realm of civil rights the Court has not faced the same overwhelming amount of criticism.15 Because of this, Strauss sees the implied rights/activism critique to be unconvincing. Instead, he claims that, “the Lochner-era Court acted defensibly in recognizing freedom of contract but indefensibly in exalting it.”16 Strauss concludes that the real failure of the majority opinion was its lack of humility and inability to face the truly difficult and complicated nature of the issues. This analysis largely accepts that the Court is the proper place for decision as to whether or not such a right should be enforced.

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A different line of critique argues that Lochner was properly decided in its time, but that in the intervening years factors have changed enough so that it is properly seen as bad law today. One example of such an argument is offered by Jack Balkin in “‘Wrong the Day it was Decided’: Lochner and Constitutional Historicism.”17 In his terms, Lochner was not wrong the day it was decided, but more plausibly became wrong because of facts in the world changed. Balkin further argues that Lochner is seen as important because it has come to function as the negative centerpiece of a narrative that legitimated New Deal lawmaking. Another very influential version of this “changing correctness” thesis is Bruce Ackerman’s We the People 1: Foundations.18 Howard Gillman in The Constitution Besieged: The Rise and Demise of Lochner Era Police Powers Jurisprudence agrees with Balkin that the case was decided correctly in 1905.19 Gillman, though, offers a meticulous case analysis and locates the origin of liberty of contract ideas in the antislavery movement and the Court’s Jacksonian suspicion of class or partial legislation. For Gillman, “the decisions and opinions that emerged from state and federal courts during the Lochner era represented a serious, principled effort to maintain one of the central distinctions in nineteenth-century constitutional law – the distinction between valid economic legislation, on the one hand, and invalid ‘class’ legislation on the other-during a period of unprecedented class conflict.”20 Therefore, as opposed to a picture of the justices being willful and aggressive, the Court was actually being faithful to precedent and the framer’s intent. The problem with the Bakeshop Act for the Court majority was that labor legislation was thought to be by its very nature class-based and redistributive. Therefore the Bakeshop Act was contrary to government neutrality. For Gillman the great depression and the rise of modern corporate capitalism ended the ability to believe in the earlier conception of a neutral state. Therefore, “The story of the Lochner era is a story about judicial fidelity to crumbling foundations.”21 Another strand of Lochner criticism argues that the underlying common law assumptions treated as passive and neutral by the majority opinion were active and non-neutral all along. Cass Sunstein, in “Lochner’s Legacy,” offers perhaps the clearest version of this type of argument.22 Sunstein contrasts Adkins, where entitlements are taken as prepolitical given and minimum wage law is described by the Court as an unjustified subsidy to the employee, with West Coast Hotel where low wages paid by an employer are seen as being subsidized by society in order to sustain the employee’s necessities. Therefore, “The expansion of the police power in West Coast Hotel signaled a critical theoretical shift, amounting to a rejection of the Lochner Court’s conception of the appropriate baseline.”23 Sunstein draws the conclusion that “Whether rights are treated as ‘negative’ or ‘positive’ turns out to depend on antecedent assumptions about baselines.”24 Ultimately, the rise of the modern administrative state shows that governmental action outside of common law limits has become so necessary as to make Lochner-style analysis obsolete. Jennifer Nedelsky in Private Property and the Limits of American Constitutionalism: The

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Madisonian Framework and Its Legacy, agrees that the “the Lochner era opinions show more than an endorsement of Herbert Spencer and his fellow Social Darwinists; they show an impressive continuity with the Federalists’ vision of constitutionalism, complete with the rights of property as the central boundary to state power, a suspicion of popular efforts to use democratic power to threaten those rights, and contract as a focus for protecting them.”25 On the other hand, Nedelsky accepts Sunstein’s analysis that the common law baseline is now obsolete. There are also some scholars who argue that the case was decided correctly and is still correct today. Blazing the trail was Richard Epstein in Takings: Private Property and the Power of Eminent Domain.26 He advocates a return to Lochner-like standard of review especially in the realm of the takings clause. His analysis has recently been expanded in Supreme Neglect: How to Revive Constitutional Protection for Private Property.27 Epstein sees the Bakeshop Act as motivated by a goal of eliminating competition and argues that Act exceeded “any rational conception of police power, for its major purpose was not safety, but to alter the competitive balance between competitive forms. The cardinal virtue, therefore, of the much-reviled Lochner decision was that it preserved the operation of competitive labor markets from the corrosive effects of differential state regulation. The police power was idle, because there was no market imperfection to cure.”28 Offering a much more detailed version of this largely libertarian argument with a little less free-market fanaticism than Epstein is David Bernstein in, “Lochner v. New York: A Centennial Retrospective.”29 Here once again is a scholar arguing against the “prevailing myth” that the problem with Lochner is that the justices imposed their own laissez-faire views on to the Constitution through overly aggressive interpretation. Bernstein sees this story as a “morality tale” and a “polemical argument with little factual basis.”30 In actual fact, according to Bernstein, Lochner was largely ignored until it became a leading anticanon case in the 1980s. But since then, “Along with Dred Scott v. Sanford and Plessy v. Ferguson, Lochner has become one of the most reviled Supreme Court cases of all time.”31 Why? This morality tale was largely created through casebook organization – most importantly Tribe’s treatise American Constitutional Law. But, Bernstein claims, scholars “have thoroughly debunked the tale’s historical underpinnings.”32 3. Lochner v. New York, 198 US 45 (1905) The actual facts of Lochner were quite simple and not in dispute. Lochner, the owner of a bakery in New York, violated an article of New York’s Bakeshop Act because he “wrongfully and unlawfully required and permitted” an employee to work more than sixty hours in one week. The work Lochner “required” was voluntary. Therefore all that was claimed is that the employer permitted the employee to voluntarily work over sixty hours during a one-week

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period. The question was as to the constitutionality of New York’s maximum hours limitation on an employee’s labor adopted in the Bakeshop Act. Justice Peckham wrote the majority opinion. Therein the Court found that the language of the Bakeshop Act was the “substantial equivalent” of a law that would require that “no employee shall contract or agree to work” more than ten hours a day. Peckham notes that this keeps an employee by law from earning extra money through extra work if such is desired. Because of this, The statute necessarily interferes with the right of contract between the employer and employees concerning the number of hours in which the latter may labor in the bakery of the employer. The general right to make a contract in relation to his business is part of the liberty of the individual protected by the Fourteenth Amendment of the Federal Constitution. Allegeyer v. Louisiana, 165 U.S. 578. Under that provision, no State can deprive any person of life, liberty or property without due process of law. The right to purchase or to sell labor is part of the liberty protected by this amendment unless there are circumstances which exclude the right.33 Peckham notes that states are allowed to limit the right of contract through their “police powers,” which relate to “the safety, health, morals and general welfare of the public.”34 Indeed, the Court explicitly accepts that property and liberty rights (and therefore contract rights) are “held on such reasonable conditions as may be imposed by the governing power of the State in the exercise of those powers.”35 If the state is exercising its legitimate police powers, then the Fourteenth Amendment does not prohibit such acts. Peckham allows that the Court has indeed upheld state police powers in borderline cases due to the use of interpretive rules “of a very liberal nature.”36 For instance a law limiting Utah underground mine workers to eight hours a day (subject to an emergency exception) was upheld in Holden v. Hardy.37 This law was upheld under the police powers exception because the kind of employees and the type of labor at issue (its inherent danger) made it “reasonable and proper” for regulation to be allowed. Further, for the Court it was thought important that the law affected only a narrow class of laborers and had an emergency exemption. Peckham also distinguishes New York’s Bakeshop Act from the issue in Atkin v. Kansas, where it was held that a state could control work conditions in its own municipal corporations (because this is a part of its own contractual standards), and Knoxville Iron Co. v. Harbison, where an act provided protection for employees when cashing “coal orders” presented to the employer (due to the specific details of the employee/employer arrangements).38 Further, in Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 U.S. 11, the Court allowed for compulsory vaccination for public health reasons.39 But, Peckham continues, there must be limits to the police powers, “Otherwise the Fourteenth Amendment would have no efficacy, and the legislatures of the States would have unbounded power” to regulate any activity

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through citing a “mere pretext” of protecting the moral, health or safety of their citizens.40 The Court’s question is therefore framed as: “is this a fair, reasonable and appropriate exercise of the police power of the State, or is it an unreasonable, unnecessary and arbitrary interference with the right of the individual to his personal liberty or to enter into those contracts in relation to labor which may seem to him appropriate or necessary for the support of himself and his family?”41 Peckham argues that by framing it in this manner the majority is not “substituting the judgment of the court for that of the legislature” but rather is deciding whether the law in question is within the legitimate police power of the state – and therefore is a question of law to be decided by the Court.42 In the case at hand, that of the New York Bakeshop Act, Peckham finds that under this test the Act is mere pretext because the bakers as a class are perfectly competent to make contracts, the law is not necessary to protect the safety, morals or welfare of the public, and the trade of baker is not a specifically unhealthy one. Therefore, because the law doesn’t show a direct enough relation “as a means to an end” there is “no reasonable foundation for holding this to be necessary or appropriate as a health law” and is therefore “an illegal interference with the rights of individuals, both employers and employees, to make contracts regarding labor upon such terms as they may think best, or which they may agree upon with the other parties to such contracts.”43 Given the possibility of pretext, Lochner substantive due process analysis uses the following test: “The purpose of a statute must be determined from the natural and legal effect of the language employed, and whether or not it is repugnant to the Constitution of the United States must be determined from the natural effect of such statutes when put into operation, and not from their proclaimed purpose.”44 Under this test, Peckham, writing for the Court, held that the New York Bakeshop Act is an unconstitutional infringement of contract. Justice Harlan (joined by White and Day) wrote the first dissent. Harlan starts by stating that the State’s legitimate use of police power is universally recognized and “extends at least to the protection of the lives, the health, and the safety of the public against the injurious exercise by any citizen of his own rights.”45 The state, though, “may not unduly interfere with the right of the citizen to enter into contracts that may be necessary and essential in the enjoyment of the inherent rights belonging to everyone.”46 But the finding of undue interference is not simple and, because of this, large discretion is “necessarily vested in the legislature to determine not only what the interests of the public require, but what measures are necessary for the protection of such interests.”47 Once again, the question at issue is what are the outer limits to proper legislative authority? Harlan states: “Upon this point there is no room for dispute, for the rule is universal that a legislative enactment, Federal or state, is never to be disregarded or held invalid unless it be, beyond question, plainly and palpably in excess of legislative power.”48 Because of this:

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If there be doubt as to the validity of the statute, that doubt must therefore be resolved in favor of its validity, and the courts must keep their hands off, leaving the legislature to meet the responsibility for unwise legislation. If the end which the legislature seeks to accomplish be one to which its power extends, and if the means employed to that end, although not the wisest or best, are yet not plainly and palpably unauthorized by law, then the court cannot interfere. In other words, when the validity of a statute is questioned, the burden of proof, so to speak, is upon those who assert it to be unconstitutional.49 Harlan finds plenty of evidence that the New York law can be properly read so as to see the rationality of the belief that working over sixty hours a week baking bread can endanger the health of the laborer. Indeed he cites various studies to that effect. In addition, he sees the statute as a reasonable means to regulate such labor. Further, it clearly related to a health issue. Next, Harlan finds that he is unable to say that the law is beyond doubt a clear invasion of fundamental rights and because there is “room for debate and for an honest difference of opinion” and this should be enough to decide the case in favor of the state regulation.50 Finally, voiding the statute under the Fourteenth Amendment, Harlan predicts, will have broad consequences and “cripple” the states in their police power duties. Therefore, Harlan argues that the judgment of the lower court ought to have been affirmed. Holmes filed a separate and lone dissent in Lochner. In it, Holmes famously claims that the majority decided the case through allegiance to a specific economic theory. Further, he points out that the theory in question is one that many in the United States do not agree with. As to the protection of contracts, Holmes cites multiple ways in which they are legally “interfered” with, such as Sunday laws, usury laws and lottery prohibitions. Further, he notes that the broader idea of a general liberty from interference “so long as he does not interfere with the liberty of others to do the same” is refuted by the example of school laws, the Post Office, and taxes.51 In one of the most famous lines in American law he then states, “The Fourteenth Amendment does not enact Mr. Herbert Spencer’s Social statistics” and continues: But a constitution is not intended to embody a particular economic theory, whether of paternalism and the organic relation of the citizen to the state or of laissez faire. It is made for people of fundamentally differing views, and the accident of our finding certain opinions natural and familiar or novel and even shocking ought not to conclude our judgment upon the question whether statutes embodying them conflict with the Constitution of the United States.52 Therefore, “General propositions do not decide concrete cases. The decision will depend on a judgment or intuition more subtle than any articulate

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major premise.”53 Holmes then offers his alternate test: “the word liberty in the Fourteenth Amendment is perverted when it is held to prevent the natural outcome of a dominant opinion, unless it can be said that a rational and fair man necessarily would admit that the statute proposed would infringe fundamental principles as they have been understood by the traditions of our people and our law.”54 He takes it as needing no effort to conclude that under this test the statute passes. In fact, he allows that it might be reasonable to allow further legislation in the direction of maximum allowable work hours. 4. Dews, Dworks and Poses Decide Lochner Peckham, Harlan, and Holmes all disagreed as to the nature of the law and its application. Harlan and Holmes disagreed with Peckham and the majority’s decision and Peckam and Harlan agree on the Court’s ultimate role as Supreme reviewer. The disagreements between the three opinions are enlightening if one is investigating the place of legislative activity, the legal system and judicial review in a constitutional democracy. By investigating how Dews, Dworks and Poses (judicial followers of the legal philosophy of Dewey, Dworkin, and Posner) would decide Lochner these issues can be brought even further in to focus. For a Dwork, a properly functioning democracy is fully reliant upon proper constitutional law. Dworks advocate a theory of rights as “trumps,” where the individual is expressly protected from the group will, even in the face of policies that are thought to be more beneficial to society as a whole.55 This conception of rights creates the problem of antimajoritarianism, that is, the fact that an elite tribunal can overturn the popular vote. Dworks claim that despite the anti democratic appearance of antimajoritarianism, judges, and law in general, actually have a distinctly foundational role in a democracy. Dworks imagine and to the extent possible emulate an ideal judge, Hercules, who does not always defer to legislative acts because he sees himself as the ultimate protector of real democracy. Indeed, constitutional law is central to a Dwork’s philosophy of law. For him, a strong “moral reading” of the constitution is “practically indispensable to democracy.”56 As opposed to a democracy based upon the majoritarian or statistical premises, where democracy is conceived of as just an aggregation or market device, Dworks advocate a “communal” or “cooperative” constitutional democracy founded upon the aim of treating all members of the state with “equal concern and respect,” as well as having “inherent value” and “personal responsibility.”57 Legal decisions, when made by Hercules, protect the democratic conditions necessary for a properly structured democracy by utilizing these concepts. Judges are, therefore, the supreme “guardians of principle.”58 For a Dwork, “The American conception of democracy is whatever form of government the Constitution, according to the best interpretation of that document, establishes. So it begs the question to hold that the Constitution

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should be amended to bring it closer to some supposedly purer form of democracy.”59 The Constitution is “America’s moral sail,” and Hercules is the United States' moral interpreter.60 What exactly such a communal or cooperative constitutional democracy entails, other than judicial review and a strong moral interpretation of the Constitution, is not really fully conceptualized by a Dwork. There must be structural and relational conditions as well as the assumption of personal moral independence. These conditions include equality and respect conditions. Further, the communal conception of democracy presupposes a type of collective agency. This requires that the whole community can and must see the law as “theirs,” as being properly of “the people.” Once again, Dworks see their theory of law, “law as integrity” as centered around the ideal judge, Hercules. The “hidden structure” of actual judicial decisions that Hercules follows is a scheme of abstract and concrete principles, which in turn provide a coherent justification for the practice of law in every realm. This, in turn is best conceived of as “law as integrity.” Integrity is a type of principled “coherence” or “consistency” in laws. Such laws are described as the opposite of “checkerboard” laws. Principled decision is thought more desirable, but this is not because checkerboard laws are by definition less fair, indeed in many cases they might bring about better results. “Principle,” though, is the central quality that justifies attachment to law as integrity. Principled legal practice requires a general style of argument that treats democratic community as distinct type of community, a corporate moral agent where people “accept that their fates are linked.”61 This, in turn, gives legal decisions moral legitimacy because principled integrity creates the reason for legal obligation. Further, according to Dworks an understanding of law as integrity is properly informed by analogy to the project of writing a “chain novel.” In creating a chain novel, novelists write a novel as a team. After the previous writers have completed the earlier chapters in the order they are to be read, the author in question writes the next chapter so as to make the novel being constructed the best it can be. Each author is to construct the “best” novel through testing upon two dimensions. First, there is “fit.” This conceptual test entails that the next chapter should, as far as possible, “flow” and not leave “unexplained” major aspects of the text as previously constructed (for example it should not ignore already developed major subplots). Second, if after satisfying the fit requirements there are options left over, the author must construct a chapter that is best “all things considered,” or that best “justifies” the previous chapters. Therefore, Hercules as the ideal practitioner of law as integrity practices constructive interpretation. That is, acting as a judge necessarily requires interpretation and construction of the activity at the deepest and most philosophical level. Indeed, “any judge’s opinion is itself a piece of legal philosophy, even when the philosophy is hidden and the visible argument is dominated by citation and lists of fact.” In fact, philosophy of law is the “silent

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prologue to any decision at law.”62 Hercules (and a Dwork) knows that only a community based upon law as integrity “can claim the authority of a genuine associative community and can therefore claim moral legitimacy-that its collective decisions are matters of obligation and not bare power-in the name of fraternity.”63 Indeed, a Dwork believes that when Hercules “intervenes in the process of government to declare some statute or other act of government unconstitutional, he does this in service of his most conscientious judgment about what democracy really is and what the Constitution, parent and guardian of democracy, really means.”64 A Dwork will have much in common with Peckham. First, they both will see the Court’s position as one of protector principle and foundational rights. As Peckham does, so does a Dwork see the Supreme Court as the proper realm wherein to set definite and principled limits to what the legislature may or may not enact. What a democratic process is allowed to do is for both what the Court properly allows it to do. For both the Court is the proper ultimate protector of individual rights as trumps against social legislation, even if the legislation would make the whole society better off. Both accept the image of the Court as the ultimate forum as principle, a forum that should not involve itself with policy because policy is outside the realm of law. Therefore, the issue in Lochner is whether or not the law is properly principled in both fit (dutifully following the proper precedents), and moral vision (holding a proper moral reading of the Constitution). As this is an issue of legal interpretation and not policy, Dworks agree with Peckham that the judges of the Court are not substituting their judgment for that of the legislature but are merely acting in their proper role as deciders of ultimate law. Further, from the prevailing scholarship on Lochner it seems as if precedent was on the side of Peckham and the Court majority. Peckham, as would a Dwork, carefully follows and distinguishes previous cases in order to distill the principle behind previous “chapters” of the Court’s jurisprudence. The majority opinion exemplifies, possibly as well as any other case in American Supreme Court history, a clear and consistent picture (moral conception) of limited government based upon inalienable rights and common-law foundations. In other words, the majority opinion is in many ways a paradigm of principle. Further, a law that just changes the rules of contract in one discreet area of labor, that of baking, and not more universally, so that only one group of laborers or employees lose their neutral right to contract certainly reads as checkerboard. Dworks, therefore, as imagined followers of the principled judge Hercules, have much in common with the assumptions exemplified in Peckham’s opinion. As to Harlan’s dissent, Dworks have less in common. While a Dwork certainly does agree that the legislature may often be able to better determine what the interests of the public require, a Dwork never lets the interests of the public trump the individual rights that are deemed constitutionally essential. And determining what is essential is the domain of the Court. Because of this, Harlan’s deferential stance towards the legislature reads to a Dwork as a

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dereliction of duty, and not an act of judicial virtue. A Dwork asks, “If the justices of the Supreme Court will not protect individual liberties against populist intrusion, then who will?” This question, of course, shows how far a Dwork is from agreeing with Holmes’s dissent. For a Dwork, Holmes allows much too much leeway for democratic (read factional) decision making. Further, Holmes seems to ridicule attachment to talk of principle when he states, “general principles do not decide concrete cases.” Dworks would find this type of statement distasteful and contrary to all that is worthy in law. From the above analysis it appears that a Dwork judge would agree with the majority’s opinion in Lochner and find that New York’s Bakeshop Act was indeed an unconstitutional infringement upon each individual’s right to liberty of contract. In deciding, a Dwork will describe such a decision as standing up for principle and rights in the face of legislative activism. While Dworks place law in a central position and highlight moral principle, Poses see law and democracy largely in terms of limits to the market economy. Poses begin by dividing all democratic theory into two types: concept 1 democracy, an aspirational, utopian or deliberative democracy, modeled upon a faculty workshop; and concept 2 democracy which is “realistic, cynical, and bottom-up,” a democracy based upon the aim of satisfying private interests, and founded upon economic competition.65 Poses advocate for concept 2 democracy because they think it is constructed upon a “unillusioned conception of the character, motives, and competence of the participants in the governmental process.”66 Within concept 2 democracy the private realm of the market is to be left alone as far as possible, and government's limited function is to structure those areas where the price system is seen to be in need of small corrections. Concept 2 democracy sees the democratic process as a competitive power struggle of a political elite for the votes of the masses. This “realistic” democratic and pragmatic liberalism emphasizes “the institutional and material constraints on decision making by officials in a democracy.”67 Ultimately, American democracy is successful because it “enables the adult population, at very little cost in time, money, or distraction from private pursuits commercial or otherwise, to punish at least fragrant mistakes and misfeasances of officialdom, to assure an orderly succession of at least minimally competent officials, to generate feedback to the official concerning the consequences of their policies, to prevent officials from (or punish them for) entirely ignoring the interests of the governed, and to prevent serious misalignments between government action and public opinion.”68 Under this conception democracy largely functions as a means of protecting the private sphere and enabling the public to create laws to curb the external costs of other people’s behavior. This type of democracy is “nonparticipatory,” because “the benefit of voting to the individual is negligible.”69 So, for a Pose, democracy is a particular manner of limited government parasitic upon commercial life. And here, “Not only do philosophical, theological, and even scientific theories have little direct relevance to

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commercial life; they impede it, by drawing resources and attention away from the market and by stirring conflict and animosity.”70 Indeed, too much deliberation is seen as a recipe for social unrest. At the end of the day, “Commercial activity and private life are not only more productive of wealth and happiness than the political life; they are also more peaceable, which in turn reinforces their positive effect on wealth and happiness.”71 Where Poses do seem to agree with Dworks is that their answer to the question of what law is centers around the judge. For a Pose, the main issue in law is how an oligarchic judiciary fits in to the implementation of governmental aims. First, Poses believe that “pragmatism is the best description of the American judicial ethos,” in the sense that judges show a mood or disposition to look to facts and consequences before “conceptualisms, generalities, pieties, and slogans.”72 The Pose judge is a forward-looking antitraditionalist who uses past cases as information, not as a source of duty to be followed. Most important is that the Pose judge doesn’t believe legal formalism is a viable option. “Principle” is not determinative for a Pose, so he or she will need to be better empirically informed than judges traditionally feel necessary. Of course all of this is in service of a picture of society bifurcated into a private realm of market transactions (the “price system”) and a limited public realm where government, and therefore law, is called for when adjustments are needed due to various types of market failure. This leads to the second major part of a Pose’s theory of law; the law and economics theory that judges should make decisions that either further the functioning of markets or, if this is not directly possible, decide in a manner that “mimics” the market. Democracy itself is seen as only a useful means towards a better functioning “private” market. Poses think that Dworks have an insufferably high opinion of themselves and their abilities to come to principled decisions based upon moral reasoning.73 As opposed to seeing judges as central to law and as a foundational force protecting society’s formal democratic ground rules, Poses see themselves as peripheral to the main business of society, which is business. The price system and the market encompass the main system of allocation within society and politics serves, at best, to temper rent seeking activities and correct market failures. Government does this by structuring clear laws and having periodic democratic elections in order to keep the most egregious failures of the market and various rent seeking activities under check. Economic elites contest for the public’s votes and through this process get to pursue their own interests to an extent limited by the proximity of the next election. Poses see this description of liberal democratic society as realistic and unillusioned. They see themselves as “pragmatic” in relationship to this system of “elite” democracy and therefore judge so as to further the virtues of the private market and the limited and limiting factors of representative democracy. This pragmatism is more a toughminded “mood” than a philosophy, but it does entail that the judge must look not just to moral principle but also more directly to policy and empirical fact.

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So how would a Pose decide Lochner? First, a Pose will accept that the right to freely contract does have a place in constitutional law. A Pose treats clear property rights and the market economy as foundational and more important that any strong picture of democratic governance. Therefore a Pose will find the legislature’s interference with traditional property rights and open contracting questionable, and quite possibly an example of rent seeking by a small group of employees or bakeries. But as opposed to the picture of judicial positioning accepted by both Peckham and a Dwork, a Pose does not have the high ground of principle, moral vision or absolute individual rights from which to rule laws unconstitutional. Further, a Pose will look at the relevant precedents for information, but those offered by Peckham do not really help to fill out the specifics of the New York Bakery industry and its employee pool. What is needed according to a Pose, therefore, is less talk of principle and more empirical investigation. This is especially the case if the state police power exceptions to the Fourteen Amendment’s implied limits under the due process clause have to be justified in relationship to the “safety, health, morals and general welfare of the public.” Of course for a Pose, as opposed to a Dwork, the moral aspect of this list is largely irrelevant. But for any judicial decision upon how a law affects the safety, health or general welfare of the public, a Pose will need empirical data and not see this as definable in terms of “the” law. This means that a Pose’s judicial reasoning has much more in common with Harlan’s dissent. A Pose, much like Harlan, would allow that the right to liberty of contract is essential, but that states should have some ability to curb the excesses and faults of the market through the use of police powers. As Harlan emphasizes, the legislature is often in a much better position than the Supreme Court to determine the empirical aspects of safety, health and general welfare legislation. This, in turn, means that in the majority’s search in to both legitimate ends, but more specifically in relation to the proper choice of means, the Court might be exceeding its domain of institutional competence. If the area being regulated is empirically complex and evolving it is an important question to ask of the Court how it is properly to determine that the explicit purpose of a law is really pretext? At the very least an informed opinion will have to look carefully at the social context of the law (as Harlan does in his dissent). If choice of means implicates empirical facts a Pose would agree with Harlan that legislative action should be accorded a large amount of discretion and cannot be decided purely upon legal principle. Finally, as to Holmes’s dissent, a Pose will happily go along with the idea that the Dwork/Peckham appeal to principle and integrity is pretense and that such a picture of legal reasoning is judicial romanticism and idiosyncratic personal judgment wrapped up in the euphemistic garb of morality. This is especially true in relation to areas of the common law that have become economically inefficient due to changing circumstances. On the other hand, a Pose would not be so accepting of the dismissal of laissez faire economic theory or as deferential to popular opinion. A Pose sees modern free-market ideas in the

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form of Chicago School economics to be not based upon the written Constitution, but as the only empirically viable, pragmatic or “realistic” structuring mechanism for a free society. “Democratic” decision-making through regular elections is for a Pose just a safety valve mechanism that keeps the greatest types of market failures in check. Even so, a Pose will often agree that legislative acts are unjustified attempts at rent seeking. Many of these laws might be best left by the Court to society at large to be decided through a Darwinian or Holmesian battle of ideas. But there will be times when a Pose can identify the market breakdown, or that a law is a clear example of rent seeking. In that case, the Pose’s imperative to further the proper activities of the market through enforcing and sometimes creating clear legal entitlements as well as deciding in a manner that best mimics the results of a properly functioning market will put Pose legal reasoning in conflict with that of Holmes’s Lochner dissent. Ultimately, a Pose would want to decide Lochner much like Harlan. A Pose would want to limit legislative intervention to areas where the market through liberty of contract cannot function properly. On the other hand, a Pose acknowledges that courts are often not the proper venue to decide whether or nor legislation is in service of real social needs rather than mere pretence. Because of this, New York’s Bakeshop Act would be held constitutional by a Pose on the grounds that judicial deference is justifiable given the complexity of legal and, more importantly, empirical issues involved. Dews, like Dworks and Poses, start with some core ideas about democracy, law and the proper realm of the legislative branch. First, for a Dew democracy in its most central meaning is a way of life that is social before it is seen more narrowly as a political concept. Democracy to be realized in a meaningful rather than formalist manner “must affect all modes of human association.”74 For political institutions are secondary to, and are the effects of, the underlying culture; “democracy can be served only by the slow day to day adoption and contagious diffusion in every phase of our common life of methods that are identical with the ends to be reached and that recourse to monistic, wholesale, absolutist procedures is a betrayal of human freedom no matter in what guise it presents itself.”75 Dews think that democracy entails pluralistic values and a decentered picture of social institutions. By having plural and decentered institutions as well as a form of life that practices democratic social habits there are multiple avenues that allow for information to be communicated and solutions to be proposed. Dews acknowledge and appreciate the great complexity of causal forces in human society. They think that a “monistic view” just cannot handle the multiple forces that operate in human society. Indeed, they emphasize that one of the great challenges for human society is being able to coordinate, communicate and understand such multiple and diffuse forces. As Dews see the process, social groups feel consequences before being able to label them. Noting and finding ways to control/solve unfortunate consequences of social life demand the construction of symbols. Common

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meanings are created through the construction of symbols which then help animate a public discussion. This whole process is encouraged by the proliferation, interconnection and overlapping of associations. Third, Dews describe the public (or publics) in functional terms. A public is created when social consequences that affect people beyond the immediate group are noted and found to be in need of social control.76 A distinctly political democracy, therefore, comes into being where there is a recognized need to control consequences of social activity. And because problems are in constant change, states need to be continuously “re-made.”77 Therefore the state is best seen as a secondary type of association formed because of perceived externalities of individual or group activities and based upon the given fact of social and intersubjective life. “The only statement which can be made is a purely formal one: the state is the organization of the public effected through officials for the protection of the interests shared by its members.”78 For Dews this view of the state eliminates the possibility that there is an a priori rule or procedure identifiable as sufficient to define democratic government. In a properly democratic state, instead of a top-down constitutional structure determining the parameters of governmental rule, the state reacts to multiple groupings formed upon the basis of interests and acts in order to encourage more socially desirable associations. Further, going back to democracy as a social way of life prior to the political and to the functional idea of the public as formed in relationship to specific and immediate social issues; Dews believe that a living democratic society rests upon experimental intelligence. Dews don’t find this claim controversial because this is only taking a type of intelligence that has proven useful across various human societies and that every human being habitually enacts in everyday life and utilizing it more consistently for the problems of governance. Fear of change and the psychological need for greater certainty have kept society from fully utilizing this greater use of experimental intelligence in social life. Instead, “we have set undue store by established mechanisms.” A blatant example of this is “idolatry of the Constitution.”79 Fifth, the public and its government are institutions based upon real conflict. Democracy is based upon specific problems as problems. It needs no argument to acknowledge that here are real conflicts.80 The only question worth answering is how to settle them in manner that is best for the widest amount of people. Finally, for Dews democracy utilizes both scientific knowledge and creativity for communication and solution. Importantly, social problems cannot be solved solely through allocation of decision-making to technocrats. There are unavoidable problems in the appeal to expertise and “elite” democracy where voting is relegated to the function of safety valve. For example, Dews think that the theory of “elite” representative democracy cannot account for democracy’s usefulness because the populace’s purported inability to understand, deliberate and vote upon the complex and technical issues of the day is not remedied by representation of an elite because the same problems are just replicated one step later (the general claim is that governmental problems

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are too complex for the voters to understand, but why at one step removed and at the level of voting for representatives the issues would be better understood by the voters is unclear and the “elite” become necessarily isolated from the social world and therefore cannot represent the voters needs).81 Law, for a Dew, is seen as just one of multiple social institutions that might, when utilized properly, further the social goal of a truly democratic society. Ultimately, there is one main question; what standard or criterion are we to use to evaluate legal practice? The quest for a standard, though, does not transcend the issues of the period in which the analysis is produced because legal philosophies are products of their time and place and the issues relevant to that specific context. Therefore standards cannot be judged outside of acknowledgement of context. It follows that law “can be discussed only in terms of the social conditions in which it arises and of what it concretely does there.”82 This specificity of context and use “renders the use of the word “law” as a single general term rather dangerous.”83 In good pragmatic fashion, Dews hold that, “A given legal arrangement is what it does, and what it does lies in the field of modifying and/or maintaining human activities as going concerns.”84 Dews believe that much legal theory shows a “confusion of sovereignty with the organs of its exercise.”85 This confuses sovereignty with a specific source of command. Dewsian legal theory, to the contrary, rules out any search for a unifying rule of recognition, and instead allows for plural sources of law. But not every potential source of law is equal. For instance, Dews are quite suspicious of appeals to natural law. Of course natural law has been centrally important in jurisprudential history; in fact in the past appeals to natural law have often served to promote legitimate and progressive human aims. Dews, though, note that “nature” can also be taken as the given, the status quo. This means that injustice may also be supported by an appeal to natural law. Therefore, appeal to natural law may be used to fossilize given values or rules. For Dews, “the effect of any theory that identifies intelligence with the given, instead of with the foresight of better and worse, is denial of the function of intelligence.”86 Dews accept a description of law as emanating from “the minor laws of subordinate institutions – institutions like the family, the school, the business partnership, the trade-union or fraternal organization.”87 This allows for a pluralistic and “bottom-up” conception of the sources of law, one that maps nicely on to traditional legal practice. For instance, it easily handles the casebased and analogical reasoning central to the common-law tradition. It can also handle statutory law as well as the thought that constitutional law is law and not positive morality. But law often arises out of other habits, traditions and customs within society. Importantly though, when law recognizes a custom, it also “represents the beginning of a new custom.”88 Further, Dews believe that “while there would not be laws unless there were social customs, yet neither would there be laws if all customs were mutually consistent and were universally adhered to.”89 Of course law itself is a type of custom, and much of law is made

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up of the concepts it inherits from earlier decisions. So, Dews develop a historicized picture of law that, for example, notes the survival in modern maritime law of the concept of a ship “as personal and responsible being.”90 For Dews, this illustrates that in law, “the old is never annihilated at a stroke, the new never a creation ab initio. It is simply a question of morphology. But what controls the modification in the historic continuity is the practical usefulness of the institution or organ in question.”91 Ultimately Dews believe that law is “social in origin, in purpose or end, and in application.”92 It is historically based and yet contextually varied. Indeed, law as an institution and as a concept “cannot be set up as if it were a separate entity, but can be discussed only in terms of the social conditions in which it arises and of what it concretely does there.”93 Finally, for Dews, because this theory of law is decentralized and flexible it can allow for multiple sources for law and, further “the development of quite new organs of law-making.”94 The end of law is, for Dews, a matter of how and why legal force will be used in society. Law, when properly utilized, can be thought “as describing a method for employing force economically, efficiently, so as to get results with the least waste.”95 Law is not a substitute for force – law is institutionalized force. Law should be justified, therefore, not by its “lawfulness,” but by whether or not it is “an effective and economical means of securing specific results.” If it is not effective and economical, then “we are using violence to relieve our immediate impulses and to save ourselves the labor of thought and construction.”96 Power becomes violence “when it defeats or frustrates purpose instead of executing it or realizing it.”97 Dews realize that this analysis might scare people who admire legal stability and adherence to tradition. But, this analysis doesn’t call for radical changes across the board. For example, experience has shown that it is inefficient for parties to judge their own case, so some type of third part adjudication seems pragmatically warranted. Further, existing legal systems were built up “at a great cost” and constant recourse to other means “would so reduce the efficiency of the machinery that the local gain would easily be more than offset by widespread losses in energy available for other ends.”98 Ultimately, though, for Dews the use of force within a legal system is judged by an external standard. The standard is that of a democratic society and the values this entails. This conclusion entails that the legal profession cannot be fully justified by appeals to an internal perspective, but must always be sensitive to the greater goals of society. Finally, Dews worry about the application of law. For instance, recall the Dew’s suspicion of appeals to natural law. One version of this type of appeal would utilizing Spencer’s laissez-faire theory of human reason as a form of natural law theory and, therefore, not acknowledging alternative possibilities. Dews worry about appeals to any other concepts that in like manner can be read in static or a priori ways. For instance, legal decisions pertaining to ideas of due diligence and undue negligence, wherein reason is used as the standard, and

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personal liability rests upon whether the care and prudence exercised was “reasonable,” might use these terms too passively. Courts, a Dew might note, often equate the word “reasonable” with “the amount and kind of foresight that, as a matter of fact, are customary among men in like pursuits.”99 Further, this use of reasonable is then applied even though the results are undesirable. Dews would redefine “reasonable” functionally as the “kind foresight that would, in similar circumstances, conduce to desirable consequences.”100 Dews are also intensely interested in the nature of legal reasoning and how such reasoning is applied in specific cases. Logic, for Dews, “is ultimately an empirical and concrete discipline.”101 This conception of logic is contrasted with that dismissed in Holmes’s famous line that “the life of law has been experience and not logic.” Dews explain that Holmes is attacking a picture of logic based solely upon “formal consistency,” whereas according to a Dewian conception of experimental logic, “the undoubted facts which Justice Holmes has in mind do not concern logic, but rather certain tendencies of the human creatures who use logic, tendencies which a sound logic will guard against.”102 For a Dew, the formalist picture of logic is dangerous because it distorts the actual reasoning process and gives rise to an unrealistic expectation of certainty. For instance, in the actual activity of legal practice, premises are not just found but “only gradually emerge from analysis of the total situation.”103 Further, the lawyer usually begins with the conclusion that is hoped for, and then analyzes the facts so as to “form” premises. But this is only part of the real story. Courts are also expected to justify their decisions. This is a different type of logic. The judge’s exposition of a decision aims at making the investigatory logic seem clearer, less vague and situational. Courts are therefore tempted to substitute for the “vital logic” which had been used in the process in order to reach the conclusion, “forms of speech which are rigorous in appearance and which give an illusion of certitude.”104 Such exposition may have the salutary effect of strengthening legal stability and regularity, but the packaging also risks confusing a form of apparent logical rigor with stability of practical results in the world. The implication is that law needs to focus much more upon a “logic relative to consequences rather than to antecedents.”105 Dews do not in any way argue that logic is useless, or that there is only the illusion of logical reasoning in law. What is for argued is that there are various types of argumentation in law – various types of logic – and that a conflation of the various tasks and tools used creates mistaken expectations and distorted processes. Dews also note that there are many ways in which legal process can be misused. For instance, Dews believe that “strictly legalistic methods of reasoning” may be used in a manner that allows a procedure to avoid facing the most important issues at question. For instance, one might by splitting the issue into separate and isolated questions create a type of argument by divide and conquer which can allow a procedure to “whittle down the significance of the admitted facts.”106 Further, the ability to shift the standards of evaluation and

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burdens of proof very effectively allows for manipulation. A concrete example might be the ability to change the levels of credibility afforded the various participants. Here Dews show sensitivity to the way alternate legal procedures, different agenda setting strategies and various levels of evidentiary scrutiny, can profoundly change the outcome. On the other hand, legal procedure can also have its proper place. Dews allow that it is often important to define what is inside or outside the professional jurisdiction of judges, for example.107 Here Dews highlight the virtues of legal process and properly constructed evidence laws and therefore argue that it is important to encourage limits to judicial reach. A Dew is not properly read as a full “anti-formalist,” or as against procedure or professional-ism in law. Dews clearly accept the necessity and virtues of institutional rules. What is not accepted, on the other hand, are self-justifying institutional rules untested by empirical and scientific methods. For Dews law is one of a number of institutions that, at best, helps further democractic society. As such, law is evaluated as a system in terms of its effectiveness towards this goal. Dews would decide the Lochner case quite differently than would both Dworks and Poses. As opposed to Dworks, Dews think that appeals to principle, like that of appeals to natural law, might often support good causes, but could also support causes much less just. The problem is that “principle” is a quite vague term with multiple possible conceptualizations. Indeed, the distinction Dworks find perfectly clear between principle and policy, Dews find simplistic and more apt to frustrate proper decision-making than to clarify. Further, Dews are very skeptical of appeals to principle if such appeals are mostly retrospective because this ignores the real important constructive and active aspect of actual legal inquiry. Precedent, for Dews (as for Poses), functions as important data, and as important determinants of social expectations. But, precedent does not carry the moral weight that the Court majority or Dworks hold it to have. In fact, precedent is only one type of information and Dews think it is important to look to a much broader set of sources of information than Peckham or Dworks think relevant. This, of course, means that much of Peckham’s decision is at best useless and probably even untrustworthy from a Dewian point of view. This is because the style of reasoning the majority opinion exhibits might very well cover up the real underlying forces, and falsify the real reasons determining the Court’s decision. Further, instead of seeing judges and the Supreme Court as the ultimate moral guardians of the Constitution as well as the necessary structural conditions of democracy, as Peckham and Dworks do, Dews think such a picture is very naïve. For a Dew, society has to have a democratic set of habits for a democratic government to be possible, not vice versa. To hope that a judicial oligarchy can protect democracy is, from this perspective, absolutely backwards. To believe that a small legal elite can protect democracy is to put a quasireligious worship of text, institution or judge in place of careful empirical inquiry and democratic habits. This quasi-religious worship of text might

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explain why the majority opinion blithely ignores the necessity of factual inquiry. Not only do Dews think that society must have some democratic habits in order to create a democratic political realm, but law, at its best, is for them just one of a number of institutions both political and social that can further democracy. Law is not the ultimate and foundational rule creator or protector of democracy. Instead, social democracy creates the grounding for a political realm wherein law serves a limited role. Further, a constitution is a document that must be constructed in practice, is best seen as a blueprint for experiments, not a tether to the past. From this it can be seen that a Dew’s judicial decision will have very little in common with Peckham’s majority opinion. Peckham sees law as foundational, as is the liberty of contract, and democracy as parasitic upon a common law natural rights baseline largely determined by a retrospective analysis of tradition and precedents. While Dworks will find this very familiar and properly representative of law as integrity, Dews (as well as Poses) find this more a falsely naturalized ideology perfectly fit to justify an oligarchical judicial elite than a plausible description of legal practice in a modern democracy. As for Poses, Dews see them as false pragmatists much too attached to an a priori and non-experimental conception of what is humanly possible combined with dogmatic acceptance of free market ideas. Dews are more humble than Poses in their claims to knowledge of human nature and the relative virtues of disparate social coordination and arrangement strategies. They also are wary of reducing the complexities of human society down to a private realm of market transactions and a public sphere of elite liberal democracy. At the same time, Dews are open to a more ambitious and flexible conception of political aims and arrangements because without fixed assumptions as to what is possible, experiments in governance are encouraged. What should be emphasized are the actual ends in view. Dews will not ignore the need for strong side constraints to certain types of state regulation, but will aim to not prematurely rule out plausible options. This analysis allows a comparison between the Pose’s and the Dew’s evaluation of the Harlan dissent. Poses can largely accept Harlan’s police powers analysis because they are, like Peckham, and Dworks for that matter, still believers in a clear public/private split and the conception of limited government based upon neutral or at least empirically necessary foundations. Therefore the limits upon the various institutions, legal, legislative and executive, can be mapped out in essentialist terms. This, in turn, allows some aspects of the situation to be described as neutral and others to be regarded as affirmative activity. Dews cannot accept this type of institutional essentialism or the conception of baseline neutrality it is founded upon. In this sense, Dews identify much more with the reasoning in West Coast Hotel v. Parrish or Miller v. Schoene. For a Dew, each social institution is constructed in context. In one context common law might have been a progressive social tool, in another situation it might get in the way of essential social programs. In either case the common law is seen as a human construction, an active chore, and is to be evaluated through the results it brings about rather

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than as to whether or not it is living up to some ideal type. Dews may argue, like Harlan, that American courts, and especially the Supreme Court, are not good at factual inquiry and therefore should defer to legislative judgment. But a Dew cannot make this argument based upon any given political, legislative or legal essence. Dews would have to argue this from empirical evidence in light of the democratic aims they deem worthy of pursuit. In addition, Dews are not comfortable in placing the judge in the center of attention, whereas Peckham, Harlan, Dworks, and Poses all are judge-centered in their legal philosophy. A Dew, though, raises the very important question as to whether or not the Court should be deciding anything as to the legitimacy of the legislature’s actions. This sense of skepticism towards any claim of a specifically valuable legal mode of authoritative constitutional interpretation is something Dews have in common with Holmes. Indeed, both a Dewian judge and Holmes in his dissent invert a central claim of the majority opinion and hold that it is the Lochner Court that is indulging in pretext rather than rooting it out. As a Pose does, a Dew will find economic reasoning important to utilize as a tool of analysis though a Dew will be much more sensitive to the limits inherent in such a reductionist analysis. First, as noted above, a Dew will not accept any form of natural law theory as dispositive. This prohibition includes any theory that would see social Darwinism or laissez faire ideas as natural and inevitable. Dews are pluralists and therefore expect multiple values to be present and important to weigh. In this sense Dews have more in common with Dworks than Poses who seem to think that all values can be mapped on to one metric. Further, Dews are cognizant of the shifting issues that create the need for various publics, and are suspicious of any conception of “Law” supposedly able to structure a solution to every need, or to any need in a once-and-for-all fashion. Dews therefore defer to more empirically effective and sensitive branches of government unless they have overwhelming reasons. Once again, all this leads to the conclusion that a Dew will find much in common with the Holmes dissent. So how would a Dew decide Lochner? From the above analysis it is clear that a Dew cannot accept the analysis offered by Peckham or Harlan because they both trade in essentialist arguments about the place of law and liberty of contract in American democracy. A Dew cannot accept this because it naturalizes and treats as inevitable and timeless social institutions that are properly seen as a contextually specific social constructs. The Dew judge has much more in common with Holmes in that both have a healthy skepticism towards the purported “reasoning” of traditional law, as well as the naturalized base-line that advocates of common law accept as neutral. Dews, though, are not actual skeptics about values moral, political or otherwise, and believe that there are ways in which society can be improved through experiments in legislation. What the best means are to the ends in view are, though, not to be found a priori but rather through careful inquiry and sensitive experiments in governance. Therefore, a Dew would most certainly uphold the New York Bakeshop Act’s

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limit on employee hours and agree with Holmes that there may be room for further labor legislation. That is, if a Dew did not deny the Court’s jurisdiction in the matter at all. 5. Conclusion The above analysis shows that the legal theories of Dworkin, Posner and Dewey would entail drastically different conclusions in the Lochner case. This is not to say that the results of the Dews, Dworks, and Poses argued for above map on to the personal beliefs of Ronald Dworkin, Richard Posner, or John Dewey. Indeed, all three theorists find Peckham’s majority opinion to be a mistake. For instance Dworkin argues that Hercules “would not have joined the Lochner majority” and this is “because he would have rejected the principle of liberty the Supreme Court cited in that case as plainly inconsistent with the American practice and anyway wrong and would have refused to reexamine the New York legislature’s judgment on the issues of policy that then remained.”108 As to reasons why Hercules would find this, he cites the “superior constraint of integrity.”109 Later he argues that “Overruling was absolutely necessary in order to protect the coherence of constitutional law as a whole.”110 From the analysis offered in this paper, though, it seems that Dworkin’s own philosophical tools would have Hercules, and therefore a Dwork, ruling opposite of Dworkin’s own personal conclusions. The reasons he gives against the actual Lochner result, that it is inconsistent with the American practice and incoherent (not integral) with the constitutional law of the time, actually all point to the opposite conclusion. Indeed, Tribe, Nedelsky, and Gillman all offer compelling arguments as to why Lochner was consistent with precedent, principled and founded upon a coherent moral reading of the Constitution. Given the more coherent and principled nature of Peckham’s opinion a Dwork would decide Lockner as the majority did, despite Dworkin’s own belief to the contrary. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine how a Dwork would get from attachment to the conception of law as integrity anything but Lochner’s actual result. As to Posner, he thinks Holmes’s dissent in Lochner is the greatest judicial opinion of the last 100 years.111 He also accepts that Holmes was correct in describing the Lochner decision as guilty of deciding the case upon “an economic theory (that of laissez-faire) that much of the nation did not accept.”112 But his own analysis sounds much more like Harlan’s than Holmes’s; “Most economists ... believe that limiting hours of work by law is inefficient. If workers are willing to work long hours, presumably for more pay than if they insisted on shorter hours, then that is the efficient employment contract and refusing to enforce it can only impair the efficiency of the labor market and make the workers themselves worse off.”113 Posner, though, has to balance his attachment to free market ideals with an analysis of the institutional limitations of the court; “Yet there is a pragmatic argument against the result in Lochner.

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The case was decided in 1905, when social legislation of the kind at issue in the case was in its infancy. No one could be confident at so early a date that a maximum-hours law was inefficient. The effect of the Court’s decision was thus to stifle, for a time, potentially worthwhile social experimentation.”114 Therefore, because there is room for debate the Court should defer to the legislature. Of course the other side of this statement is the assumption that today’s economist with new superior knowledge would be justified in seeing the law as inefficient and therefore unlawful. This would have a Pose largely agreeing with Epstein and Bernstein on the virtues of the Lochner decision. Ironically, therefore, Posner can be plausibly read as arguing that Lochner was wrongly decided in its time, but given superior contemporary economic knowledge if the current Court decided a case factually identical to Lochner, it should decide as Peckham and the majority did. This, of course, inverts the conclusion Balkin offers (though it does accept that the meaning of the Constitution changes due, at the very least, to changes in fact or knowledge). It is interesting to note that Posner reads Holmes’s dissent in Lochner as a “Deweyan approach” because “In Dewey’s intellectual universe, invalidating a statute is not just checking a political preference. It is profoundly rather than merely superficially undemocratic” because (a point “missed by many of Dewey’s current avatars in the legal academy”) this gets in the way of “intellectual natural selection” and “democratic experimentation.”115 In this description Posner is largely correct. Indeed, Dewey in the 1932 edition of Ethics uses Lochner as the specific example of the Court contracting state police power. Dewey follows this with a statement that “In the case of legislation affecting wages the issue is between the older individualistic principle of freedom in the wage contract, on the one hand; and on the other the more recently affirmed principle that in the interest of social welfare it may be wise for a state to protect its members against exploitation.”116 This description, it should be noticed, anticipates the ideas adopted by the Court in West Coast Hotel v. Parrish (in effect overruling Lochner) four years later. That Dewey uses Lochner as the example of narrow police powers jurisprudence also leads one to question Bernstein’s own libertarian morality tale wherein a revisionist liberal, Laurence Tribe, highlights a relatively obscure case, a case unnoticed in its own time, and creates a new narrative justifying the New Deal with Lochner at the center. Elsewhere, there is further evidence that Dewey thought Holmes’s dissent in Lochner to be important; such as when he observes that Holmes was properly against an absolutist use of the Fourteenth Amendment because that would prevent social experimentation under a delusion of “exactness.”117 Also, in Liberalism and Social Action Dewey notes approvingly that in the Lochner opinion “Justice Holmes found it necessary to remind his fellow justices that, after all, the Social Statistics of Herbert Spencer had not been enacted into the American constitution.”118 Therefore, all the evidence from Dewey’s own writings is perfectly consistent with the decision a Dew would make. This also maps on to the analysis offered by Sunstein and

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Nedelsky. For them, as for Dewey and a Dew, appeal to neutral baselines is incoherent and factually false. Analyzing Lochner through Dewey, Dworkin, and Posner’s philosophical systems highlights the powerful assumptions that each uses in constructing their theory of law and its relationship to democratic governance. If one accepts the premise that a small group of democratically unaccountable judicial elites are the best protectors of democratic government the Dworkin’s theory of law might be convincing. Yet, if one believes that Chicago school economics has a necessarily privileged spot in governance and democracy is largely useful as a safety valve, then Posner’s work exemplifies a correct theory of law. Alternatively, if democracy is to be the central guiding principle, then neither of the above theories will do. Dewey offers a theory of law that is indeed humbling compared to the other two. This theory places law among other democracy enhancing institutions, not at the top as the organizing principle. It notes that the traditional form of decision-making is attached to a picture of reasoning that is misleading and often falsifying as to the actual process. And it argues for a prospective rather than retrospective form of inquiry. Through analyzing how each theory would affect the outcome of Lochner, Dewey’s theory offers a picture of law that is empirical, non-dogmatic, prospective and compatible with vigorous democratic government. Dewey’s philosophy of law offers an attractive conception of law for a democratic society. NOTES 1. In just the last Supreme Court session two of the most significant and somewhat unpredictable cases, one on takings, Stop the Beach Renourishment v. Florida Department of Environmental Protection, 560 U.S. __ (2010), and another incorporating the current Court’s idiosyncratic take on the Second Amendment right to bear arms through the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment onto the states, McDonald v. Chicago, 561 U.S. __ (2010), are notable for the back and forth accusations whereby variously Scalia (Stop the Beach majority opinion, p. 16), Thomas (McDonald concurrence p. 7), and Stevens (McDonald dissent p. 22, 37) accuse the other justices of various types of “Lochnering.” 2. Laurence Tribe, American Constitutional Law (New York: Foundation Press, 1988), p. 564. 3. Ibid., p. 1. 4. West Coast Hotel v. Parrish 300 U.S. 379 (1937). 5. Tribe, American Constitutional Law, p. 564. 6. Ibid., p. 569. 7. Miller v. Schoene 276 U.S. 272 (1928). 8. Tribe, American Constitutional Law, p. 577. 9. Ibid., p. 584. 10. Paul Kens, Lochner v. New York: Economic Regulation on Trial (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998).

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11. Ibid., p. 100. 12. Ibid., p. 180. 13. William H. Marnell, Man-Made Morals: Four Philosophies that Shaped America (New York: Anchor Books, 1966), p. 257. 14. David A. Strauss in “Why Was Lochner Wrong?” University of Chicago Law Review 70 (2003): 373–386. 15. This analysis is supported by Sunstein’s narrative tracing such an “activist” stance both forward through Roe v. Wade (1973) and backwards to Dredd Scott v. Sanford. Cass R. Sunstein, Radicals in Robes: Why Extreme Right-Wing Courts Are Wrong for America (New York: Basic Books, 2005), pp. 82–86. 16. Strauss, “Why Was Lochner Wrong?” p. 375. 17. Jack M. Balkin in “‘Wrong the Day It Was Decided’: Lochner and Constitutional Historicism,” Boston University Law Review 85 (2005): 677–725. 18. Bruce Ackerman, We the People 1: Foundations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), pp. 64–65. 19. Howard Gillman in The Constitution Besieged: The Rise and Demise of Lochner Era Police Powers Jurisprudence (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993). 20. Ibid., p. 10. 21. Ibid., p. 205. 22. Perhaps the clearest version of this type of argument is offered in Cass R. Sunstein, “Lochner’s Legacy,” Columbia Law Review 87 (1987): 873–919. 23. Ibid., p. 880. 24. Ibid., p. 889. 25. Jennifer Nedelsky, Private Property and the Limits of American Constitutionalism: The Madisonian Framework and Its Legacy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 228. 26. Richard A. Epstein, Takings: Private Property and the Power of Eminent Domain (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985). 27. Richard A. Epstein, Supreme Neglect: How to Revive Constitutional Protection for Private Property (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 28. Ibid., p. 166. 29. David E. Bernstein, “Lochner v. New York: A Centennial Retrospective,” Washington University Law Quarterly 85 (2005): 1469–1528. 30. Ibid., p. 1472. 31. Ibid., p. 1473. 32. Ibid. 33. Lochner v. New York, 198 U.S. 45 (1905), p. 53. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid., p. 54. 37. Holden v. Hardy, 169 U.S. 366 (1898). 38. Atkin v. Kansas, 191 U.S. 207 (1903), Knoxville Iron Co. v. Harbison, 183 U.S. 13 (1901). 39. Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 U.S. 11 (1905), Lochner, p. 55. 40. Ibid., p. 56. 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid., pp. 56–57. 43. Ibid., pp. 58, 61. 44. Ibid., p. 64.

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45. Ibid., p. 65. 46. Ibid. 47. Ibid., p. 66. 48. Ibid., p. 68. 49. Ibid. 50. Ibid., p. 72. 51. Ibid., p. 75. 52. Ibid., pp. 75–76. 53. Ibid., p. 76. 54. Ibid. 55. Ronald Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), p. xi. 56. Ronald Dworkin, Freedom’s Law (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 6. 57. Dworkin, Freedom’s Law, p. 17, see also Is Democracy Possible Here? (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008) pp. 9–11, 133. 58. Ibid., p. 31. 59. Ibid., p. 75. 60. Ibid., p. 38. 61. Ronald Dworkin, Law's Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), pp. 187–188, 211. 62. Ibid., p. 90. 63. Ibid., p. 214. 64. Ibid., p. 399. 65. Richard Posner, Law, Pragmatism, and Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), p. 188. 66. Ibid., p. 385. 67. Ibid., p. ix. 68. Ibid., p. 182. 69. Richard Posner, Overcoming Law (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 26, see also Posner, Economic Analysis of Law (New York: Aspen Law & Business), pp. 773–774. 70. Posner, Law, Pragmatism, p. 31. 71. Ibid., p. 173. 72. Ibid., p. 3, 26. 73. See Richard Posner, The Problematics of Moral and Legal Theory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p.7. 74. John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, in The Later Works of John Dewey, vol. 2, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984), p. 325. 75. John Dewey, Freedom and Culture, in The Later works of John Dewey, vol. 13, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988), p. 187. 76. Dewey, “The Public,” pp. 244–245. 77. Ibid., p. 255. 78. Ibid., p. 256. 79. Dewey, “Freedom,” p. 175. 80. Indeed, it is surprising the number of claims to the effect that Dewey underestimates the kind and amount of social conflict. This is absurd. First, Dewey does not feel the need to “prove” there is social conflict – this is accepted as a given. Second,

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Dewey does not claim that all conflict is, in the end, eliminable. What is claimed is that if it is eliminable in a manner that harmonizes interests, his proposed form of government is best placed to find the solution. 81. Dewey, “The Public,” p. 364. 82. John Dewey, “My Philosophy of Law,” in The Later Works of John Dewey, vol. 14, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988), p. 117. 83. Ibid. 84. Ibid., p. 118. 85. John Dewey, “Austin’s Theory of Sovereignty,” in The Early Works of John Dewey, vol. 4, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1971), p. 73. 86. John Dewey, “Nature and Reason in Law,” in The Middle Works of John Dewey, vol. 7, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1979), p. 63. 87. Dewey, “Austin’s Theory,” p. 87. 88. John Dewey, “Review of Carleton Kemp Allen’s Law in the Making,” in The Later Works of John Dewey, vol. 3, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984), p. 327. 89. Ibid. 90. John Dewey, “Anthropology and Law,” in The Early Works of John Dewey, vol. 4, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1971), p. 40. 91. Ibid., p. 40–41. 92. Dewey, “My Philosophy of Law,” p. 117. 93. Ibid., p. 117. 94. John Dewey, “Review of H. Krabb’s The Modern Idea of the State,” in The Later Works of John Dewey, vol. 17, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990), p. 102. 95. John Dewey, “Force, Violence and the Law,” in The Middle Works of John Dewey, vol. 10, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980), p. 212. 96. Ibid, p. 214. 97. John Dewey, “Force and Coercion,” in The Middle Works of John Dewey, vol. 10, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980), p. 246. 98. Ibid., p. 247. 99. John Dewey, “Nature and Reason,” in The Middle Works of John Dewey, vol. 7, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1979), p. 59. 100. Ibid., p. 59. 101. John Dewey, “Logical Method and the Law,” in The Middle Works of John Dewey, vol. 15, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983), p. 68. 102. Ibid., p. 69. 103. Ibid., p. 71. 104. Ibid., p. 73. 105. Ibid., p. 75. 106. John Dewey, “Psychology and Justice,” in The Later Works of John Dewey, vol. 3, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984), p. 190.

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107. Dewey, “Social realities v. Police Court Fictions,” in The Later Works of John Dewey, vol. 14, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988), p. 243. 108. Dworkin, “Law’s Empire,” p. 398. 109. Dworkin, “Freedom’s Law,” pp. 82–88. 110. Ibid., p. 125. 111. Posner, “Overcoming Law,” p. 195. 112. Ibid., pp. 401–402. 113. Posner “Law, Pragmatism,” pp. 78–79. 114. Ibid., p. 79. 115. Ibid., p. 122. 116. John Dewey, Ethics, in The Later Works of John Dewey, vol. 7, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985), pp. 414–415. 117. John Dewey, “Justice Holmes and the Liberal Mind,” in The Later Works of John Dewey, vol. 3, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984), p. 180. 118. John Dewey, Liberalism and Social Action, in The Later Works of John Dewey, vol. 11, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987), p. 16.

Brian E. Butler Associate Professor of Philosophy Philosophy Department University of North Carolina at Asheville 215 New Hall, CPO #2830 One University Heights Asheville, NC 28804-8520 United States

Contemporary Pragmatism Vol. 7, No. 2 (December 2010), 45–69

Editions Rodopi © 2010

Our Country Right or Wrong: A Pragmatic Response to Anti-Democratic Cultural Nationalism in China Sor-hoon Tan

Since Deng Xiaoping came into power, China has been described as pragmatic in its approach to politics and development, and in the nineties there has been a revival of interest in Chinese cultural tradition. What is the relation between these two phenomena? Do they coexist, separately in mutual indifference, or in tension? Has there been constructive engagement, or at the very least does the potential for such engagement exist? More specifically, what roles, if any, do they play in China’s quest for democracy? Does Dewey’s pragmatism have any relevance to China in the twenty-first century? The issue of cultural tradition was central in the historical encounter between Dewey’s pragmatism and Confucianism in the New Culture movement of early twentieth century. It is still salient in the debates about China’s future and whether it would or should follow the democratic path. This essay will examine anti-democratic tendencies in the rising cultural nationalism in China and, through a philosophical exploration of John Dewey’s views about tradition, it will suggest how Chinese pragmatists today might defend democracy against attacks by cultural nationalists who reject the democratic path as alien and therefore wrong for China.

1. Liberal-Democratic Iconoclasm: May Fourth to June Fourth Although both Communist Party cadres and Chinese scholars have been anxious to draw a line between Marxist emphasis on practice, which is the source of CCP’s “pragmatism,” and the philosophical pragmatism of John Dewey, William James, and C. S. Peirce, some scholars have been arguing that there are significant resonances between Dewey’s pragmatism and Chinese traditions, especially Confucianism.1 A skeptical pragmatist such as Richard Rorty could ask, “Why look to such ancient stuff for solution of present problems? Shouldn’t we be more concerned about the stories present-day Chinese are telling about themselves and the world, if we wish to understand China or influence its

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future?”2 Confucius and Dewey seem to have very different attitudes to cultural tradition, if nothing else. The Master said, “I transmit but do not innovate. I am truthful in what I say and devoted to antiquity.” (Analects 7.1) Traditional ideas are more than irrelevant. They are an encumbrance. (Dewey, Individualism Old and New, LW5.86)3 This difference was central to the historical encounter between Dewey’s pragmatism and Confucianism in early twentieth century China. Dewey’s closest associates during his China visit (1919–1921) were prominent figures in the New Culture movement, known for its iconoclastic attacks on Confucianism and other aspects of traditional Chinese culture.4 Although its aspiration was to bring “science” and “democracy” to China through radical cultural transformation, the New Culture movement has been blamed for destroying Chinese tradition in such a way as to create a “vacuum” that paved the way for the Communist victory. Some might even view the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution as a perverted outcome of the idea of China needing radical cultural transformation in order to free itself from traditional Chinese culture, which some Chinese Communists consider an obstacle to socialism. Certainly Confucianism was a target of the Cultural Revolution, just as it was attacked during the New Culture Movement. Chinese intellectuals who were most closely associated with John Dewey at the beginning of the twentieth century, including those who actually called themselves pragmatists, were often also perceived as cultural iconoclasts determined to destroy Chinese traditions, to demolish “the Confucian shop,” in order to modernize China. Hu Shih (1891–1962), Dewey’s most famous Chinese student and foremost advocate of pragmatism in Republican China, was involved in several debates with cultural conservatives throughout his career.5 Hu was among several Chinese students who studied with Dewey in Columbia University and the Teachers College in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Some of these students arranged a visit to China for Dewey when he was spending a few months in Japan in 1919. What was intended to be a visit of weeks stretched into more than two years, during which Dewey traveled to several provinces, lectured in well-known educational institutions, and gave public lectures attended by thousands of Chinese. His visit coincided with one of China’s most turbulent period of history, as Dewey arrived in Shanghai a few days before the student demonstrations that became the center-piece of the May Fourth Movement.6 The demonstrations were triggered by the events of the Peace Conference in Paris, but Hu Shih saw them as an important milestone in the New Culture Movement, the beginning of which may be traced to the publication of the New Youth (originally titled Youth Magazine) in 1915. Hu Shih published a series of

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articles in this journal in 1917, which started the baihua or vernacular language revolution central to the movement. Disillusioned with the results of the 1911 revolution, New Culture intellectuals argued that China needed a cultural transformation that would replace its obsolete traditions, especially its Confucian legacy, with science and democracy, which epitomize modern civilization.7 Together with articles critical of Chinese traditions, a prime example being Chen Duxiu’s articles attacking Confucianism as antithetical to modern life, the New Youth also published many articles introducing Western ideas, including a whole special issue on pragmatism, just before Dewey’s visit. Hu Shih not only played a key role in the movement’s promotion of vernacular language that transformed China’s literary scene and, from a pragmatic point of view, improved the communicative means for education and other social purposes, but also, after his return from the United States in 1917, was often involved in public debates over traditional ideas and practices in China. Hu and his New Culture friends attacked many Chinese traditional social norms and practices – such as those of chastity and filiality – for destroying or stultifying individuality, which Hu considered the greatest crime in society.8 Traditionally, chastity was considered the highest womanly virtue. Song dynasty Confucian, Cheng Yi, maintained that “starving to death is a small matter, losing one’s chastity is a great matter.”9 Hu Shih was outraged to read Chinese newspaper articles praising a widow who drowned herself as an act of chastity, and a woman who attempted to starve herself to death upon her fiancé’s death.10 The Guomindang government even had rules for official commendations of such acts. While sympathetic to anyone who out of genuine love chose to remain faithful to their dead spouse, Hu attacked those unconscionable views about chastity that encouraged sacrifice of lives as well as criticized their inherent gender inequality, since Chinese men were not held to the same norms of fidelity. By exposing the social ills arising from blindly following tradition, Hu Shih attempted to draw his fellow citizens’ attention to the nature of the problems plaguing China, to draw them into studies of such problems, the solution of which would transform Chinese society into a modern society. Applying what he learned from Dewey, Hu Shih argued for the use of scientific method in criticizing traditions and solving social problems. It is difficult to assess how successful he was in using the scientific method in his own practice more generally. There was, however, at least one specific experiment of reforming tradition which he conducted and wrote about. Upon his mother’s death, Hu Shih did not follow strictly the traditional mourning rituals.11 He reflected that rituals should evolve from the complex to the simple as the increasing complexity of daily life made it impractical to follow every complicated detail of traditional rituals. Moreover, science had revealed certain beliefs to be mere superstitions, while modern thought had enlightened people about the inhumane character or harmful effects of certain actions. Hu Shih argued that rituals such as those for mourning should express genuine and

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appropriate emotions and eliminate all superstitious, harmful, and inhumane elements. In rituals as in any other actions, one should ask “Why?” and seek the answer by critically examining actual experience, instead of blindly following others or obeying tradition (HSQ 1: 674–687). Beyond Hu Shih’s personal practice, the most important experiment of the first encounter between pragmatism and China was the experiment to create the cultural conditions for Chinese democracy through education reforms. Assessment of the role of Dewey’s pragmatism in the modernization of education in China has been generally positive, and Dewey remains a topic of frequent discussion in journal articles and monographs on education in China.12 However, the “Dewey experiment” was not merely an experiment in education, but an experiment in democratizing China. If actual democratization is the criterion by which we measure its success, then the “Dewey experiment” remains a failure. Contrary to historian Barry Keenan, who argued that its failure was due to the inherently flawed “pragmatic method” which advocated political change through education reforms, I have argued elsewhere that the jury is still out on the pragmatic experiment of democratizing China, since it is an unfinished experiment.13 Dewey had seen America as a “great social experiment” in “the ideas of federation and of the liberation of human interests from political domination” (MW11.72), ideas which he believed should be America’s contribution to “world reconstruction” after the First World War (MW11.71). His Chinese students invited him to China as part of their experiment to liberate China from its burden of the past so that it could become a modern nation, epitomized in the ideas of science and democracy. And in this they were more than willing to take America as their model. It is not surprising that during the first encounter between pragmatism and China, the replacement of traditional culture with a new culture was often bound up with the question of Westernization, as New Culture intellectuals generally identified Western culture with the modern. Hu Shih believed that China should learn wholeheartedly from the West, given the latter’s lead in scientific development and democratization. In New Culture intellectuals’ assessment, previous attempts to “learn from the West” had been half-hearted and superficial, limited by a lingering superiority complex, a conviction that the Western imperialistic powers’ strengths lie only in their command of military and industrial technology; and even if their institutions had some strong points, Westerners’ knowledge and practices should not replace the ancient Chinese teachings on personal cultivation, social and political life, that had served the Chinese for more than two millennia. The New Culture movement advocated a more thorough attack on traditional culture and a more comprehensive approach to Western learning. Hu Shih sided with the Westernizers in resisting reactionary defense of Chinese tradition and culture in a series of public debates over Chinese culture in relation to the future of China itself and became known for advocating “wholesale Westernization.”

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A similar cultural iconoclasm and Westernizing orientation was evident also in the Chinese democracy movements of the 1980s. Student demonstrators in the days leading up to June 4th in 1989 explicitly drew on the May Fourth movement for inspiration and wore T-shirts with the old slogans of “Science” and “Democracy.” In an interview in 1989, published in the China Youth, Yan Jiaqi emphasized the relation between science and democracy and their importance for China’s future.14 Earlier, Li Zehou noted the similarity in ideas popular in the 1980s and those of the May Fourth movement.15 Just as the May Fourth movement drew inspiration from the European Enlightenment, many Chinese intellectuals of the eighties saw themselves as Enlightenment intellectuals.16 An argument similar to that of the New Culture movement, that Chinese traditional culture is an obstacle to China’s modernization and Westernization is required to solve China’s problems, lies at the center of a very influential television miniseries, The River Elegy. Those who scripted it self-consciously saw themselves as carrying on the May Fourth intellectual and cultural mission.17 The River Elegy was the center-piece of the nineteen eighties’ “cultural fever” (wen-hua-re 㠖▥䍼) in China, which has retrospectively been dubbed the “new Enlightenment,” referring to the earlier comparison of the May Fourth period with the Enlightenment.18 This “new Enlightenment” which led to June 4th, 1989 inherited the liberal and democratic iconoclasm of the “Chinese Enlightenment” of the May Fourth movement of 1919. 2. Turning the Cultural Tide against Liberal Democracy Not all participants in the “cultural fever” of the eighties were iconoclasts; some took the opposite tack of resisting Western influences and advocating preservation of Chinese “national essence,” understood as China’s cultural heritage or traditions. The debates over what constitutes “national essence,” Chinese tradition or cultural heritage, and its possible roles in the future of China gave rise to a re-evaluation, and then promotion, of Confucianism, reinterpreted to serve the present needs of China. In recovering their Confucian heritage, some Chinese scholars aimed “to promote the democratic essence of Confucianism and fight against its feudal dross.”19 Overseas New Confucians – so called because of their efforts at modernizing Confucianism by learning from modern Western thinking while maintaining the primacy of Chinese culture (with Confucianism as its core) for China and its relevance for other societies in this age of globalization – played a key role in the revival of interest in Confucianism. In the early twentieth century, Liang Shuming (1893–1988, sometimes identified as a New Confucian but not without controversy) rejected the Western liberal democratic path for China’s political development because cultural differences rendered it irrelevant, and proposed an alternative political system based on “rural reconstruction.”20 However, at least one Chinese scholar has

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argued that Liang Shuming actually combined Confucianism and democracy, and that his understanding of democracy was influenced by John Dewey.21 Xiong Shili (1884-1968), another first generation New Confucian, maintained that democracy and science are functions (yong 䞷 ), which in the Chinese context are best served by developing Confucianism, which constitutes the substance (ti ⇢) of Chinese culture. However, the Confucian political system Xiong advocated is closer to a form of moralistic democratic socialism which abolishes private property and wherein everyone behaves like a Confucian gentleman (shijunzi ⭺ ⚪ ⷟ ), rather than capitalist liberal democracy which considers individuals’ morality a private matter.22 Second generation New Confucians, Mou Zongsan (1909–1995), Tang Junyi (1907–1978) and Xu Fuguan (1902–1982), who left mainland China after the Communist takeover, continued Xiong’s line of thought, arguing that, despite the absence of democratic systems, the “seeds of democratic thought” were already present in the teachings of Confucius, Mencius, and Huang Zongxi (1610–1695), in the ideas of “the world being shared by all” (tianxia weigong ⮸ 23 ₚ⃉⏻ ) and individual equality (renge pingdeng ⅉ㫋㄂䷘ ). They were less friendly to socialism than Xiong, and outright hostile to communism, in some cases more or less advocating the values and system of Western liberal democracy (such as individual freedom and human rights); but some of their writings were also critical, or at least highlight the practical difficulties, of liberal democracy such as the common weaknesses of electoral systems.24 Tu Wei-ming, whose visit to the PRC in 1985 was hailed as the landmark event signaling “the return of New Confucianism to its homeland,” has been presenting Confucianism as “global philosophy” to an international audience for a few decades. Tu rejects the characterization of Confucianism as Chinese imperial state orthodoxy, which he labels as “politicized Confucianism.”25 Instead, he views Confucianism as an all-encompassing humanism with personality ideals which can be realized more fully in liberal democratic societies than in either traditional imperial despotism or the modern authoritarian regime in China. Tu looks forward to a “New Confucian Humanism [which], though rooted in the East, draws its nourishment from the West as well as from Asia.”26 While arguing for compatibility between Confucianism and liberal democracy – e.g. on human rights – he also recognizes the tension between Confucian tradition and the Enlightenment mentality which underlies Western modernity. In his studies of East Asian modernization, he examines the post-Confucian thesis – that Confucian ethics has contributed to East Asia’s impressive economic growth, and offers an alternative development model for modernization – and concludes that its cultural resources enable Confucian East Asia to achieve different modernities that are less adversarial, less individualistic and less self-interested than their Western counterparts. According to Tu, Confucianism testifies to the role of cultural traditions in shaping the modernization process and defining the meaning of modernity:

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modernization is culturally differentiated, and there are multiple modernities rather than a singular modernity defined by the West.27 New Confucianism, one of five major phenomena distinguishing the “cultural fever” of the eighties, laid the groundwork for the “national studies fever” (guoxuere ⦌ⷵ䍼) in the subsequent decade, when the changing global and geopolitical situation gave rise to a surge in Chinese nationalism. Theoretically, nationalism may be liberal and democratic, or authoritarian, conservative and xenophobic. Historically in China, it has tended towards the latter, because “nationalist consciousness in China first emerged not in association with liberal or democratic ideas, but was triggered as a painful reaction to foreign invasions.”28 According to Baogang He and Guo Yingjie’s historical study of the clash between nationalism and democracy in China, the CCP government used Confucianism as the basis of a state nationalism to replace Marxism as the party’s ideological prop in the nineties.29 However, the rise of nationalism and the revival of interest in traditional culture are not merely the products of government propaganda. John Makeham has shown that there has been genuine revival of academic interest and a lively discourse and debate among scholars in mainland China, and overseas Chinese scholars, fighting over the “lost soul” of Confucianism.30 Beyond Academia, Confucianism has been popularized (and some would say vulgarized) in various ways to re-package the master’s ancient wisdom for modern consumption. The most famous of such popularisers is Yu Dan, whose book, Reflections on the Analects, has sold nearly ten million copies; she has appeared on national television in the PRC to lecture to huge audiences on the everyday use of Confucian values.31 This indicates a certain level of interest in Confucianism among the Chinese population. Perception of state sponsorship, or worse, orchestration, tends to have a dampening effect on popularity, as witnessed by the way that state promotion of a film on Confucius (starring Hong Kong movie star Chow Yuen Fatt, released in January 2010) alienated a large section of the population, who refused to watch the movie simply because was seen as an “official” film. The new nationalism in China is a combination of state nationalism, popular nationalism, pan-Chinese nationalism and civic nationalism, and many nationalists do not accept the CCP’s claim that the party represents the nation’s will and interest.32 As Prasenjit Duara points out, “nationalism is never fully subsumed by the nation state,” and China’s neo-nationalism has “a plurality of sources of identifications ... which do not necessarily harmonize with one another.”33 Intellectuals generally look toward the “mainstream Chinese culture,” usually understood as Confucian, instead of ethnicity for the basis of nationalism. It is not just state nationalism which is against democracy. Even the apparent “depoliticization” of traditional culture evident in popular appropriation could work against democracy by refusing to question the undemocratic political status quo. In intellectual discourse, cultural nationalism has also been linked to neo-authoritarian and neo-conservative thinking, which is highly

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critical if not outright opposed to democratization, because of the historical association of Confucianism with authoritarianism. The “return to traditional culture” in China was part of a wave of “Asian exceptionalism,” dating back to the eighties, arguing that Asian civilizations have values which render Western ideas of liberal democracy unviable and undesirable for Asian societies. Even though attempts have been made to reconcile Confucianism with democracy theoretically, Confucianism remains a convenient tool in what Zheng Yongnian calls “the politics of civilization,” in which it is deployed in resistance to democratization.34 Ben Xu criticizes the “new national studies” as a manifestation of intellectuals “retreating from the public” in the 1990s and argues that cultural studies in China in the 1990s have abdicated its responsibility to democratization.35 This may be too pessimistic. Rather than total “disenchantment with democracy,” what we witness in China over the past two decades may represent a deeper understanding of the variety and complexity of democratic theories and practices, in an ongoing inquiry rooted in their own problems, with their own unique contexts. Rather than the facile assumption that Western liberal democracies have the blue print for progress or success, there has been a realization among those who still hope to see democracy in China that the process will take much longer, requiring efforts in many dimensions. The path ahead is by no means clear, and it remains to be seen what role Chinese traditional culture will play in the future. 3. Chinese Pragmatism in the Nineties The “return to tradition” has not precluded growing interests in a wide variety of Western ideas and theories, including pragmatism. Liu Fangtong’s article “Reassessment of Pragmatism” and the National Conference on Pragmatism in Chengdu in 1988, “signified an important turn in the Chinese philosophers’ appreciation of pragmatism.”36 Study of pragmatism in China has made significant progress in the last two decades. Politically correct Marxist posturing has all but disappeared from the more scholarly works. Several new editions of Dewey’s translated works and new translations have been published since the eighties. The Center for Dewey Studies established in 2004 at Fudan University in Shanghai has undertaken to translate the critical edition of Dewey’s Collected Works. Several contemporary Western studies of John Dewey, and works by Western pragmatists and neopragmatists have been translated.37 Conferences and articles on Dewey and pragmatism in Chinese academic journals have increased significantly in recent years. In addition to the perennial interest in his philosophy of education, discussions of Dewey have become more varied in subject matter, including his naturalism, individualism, liberalism, aesthetics, ethics, anti-dualism, concept of social democracy, philosophy of value, under-standing of truth, exploration of the future of American capitalism, and even his view of religion. Besides

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inclusion in survey works on Western philosophy, several monographs on Dewey’s philosophy and pragmatism have also been published by Chinese academics.38 Before we rush into the conclusion that “the political and philosophical pendulum in China has clearly swung from Marxism to pragmatism in recent years,”39 it should be noted that most of what passed in public discourse under the description of “shiyong zhuyi ⸭ 䞷 ⃊ ⃘ ,” the preferred translation for “pragmatism,” has little to do with Dewey’s philosophy. The term has been used to describe Chinese consumers’ car purchasing pattern, to mean “follow the crowd,” preference for old to new models, and listening to others’ opinions rather than use one’s own observation.40 It was linked with “fast food mentality” as signs of the decline of the reading habit and attention to the “serious life.”41 The “new pragmatism” that Zhang Fa, Zhang Yiwu, and Wang Yichuan identified as one of three major tendencies in cultural discourses of the 1990s “emphasizes daily life and individual satisfaction,” which “provides legitimacy for consumer culture and maintains ‘a necessary indifference’ to ideology and utopias.”42 A “caricatured” pragmatism has become what Wang Xiaoming called the “new ideology of the 1990s.” In the 1990s, reform seemed merely to mean the creation of an economic system whose only standard would be profit. All it now aimed for was efficiency, competition and wealth, and all it promised was improvement of material welfare. Nothing else – not political democracy, environmental care, ethical norms, cultural education – lay within its scope.43 In addition to social malaise such as unscrupulous pursuit of wealth and power, and the various forms of corruption involving abuse of power and other immoral or criminal behavior, Pragmatism has been held responsible for university students’ neglect of theory in their studies, and for nihilism and pessimism replacing idealism among the young.44 David Kelly observed that “China is often caricatured as a nation of quintessential pragmatists, absorbed in the pursuit of material interest at the expense of any other.”45 But serious scholarly interest and understanding of Dewey’s philosophy remain limited to a very small minority in China. While cultural nationalism is a major intellectual trend in China since the nineties, most studies of the Chinese intellectual scene of past few decades do not pay attention to “pragmatism,” and the revival of “pragmatism” is also affected by the prevailing nationalistic attitude towards cultural encounters. Even those who understand and appreciate Dewey’s pragmatism would not take “American democracy” as a model for China today. Whereas President Wilson’s promise to “make the world safe for democracy” had enthused Chinese intellectuals looking West for “science and democracy” to save China, President George Bush’s certitude that American democracy offers a global model, to be imposed on other countries by force if necessary, has alienated many. Sun

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Youzhong’s critique of the Bush Administration’s unilateralist strategy of globalizing democracy points out that it is reductionist “to equate American liberal democracy with democracy itself.”46 Sun’s view on democracy is probably representative among Chinese pragmatists. ...democracy as a universal ideal of human civilization is not a closed, fixed or uniform political system of any existing type applicable to all nations, but a “way of living,” the nature and implications of which are to be cooperatively constructed and constantly ameliorated by peoples of all nations according to their particular conditions, needs, and wishes as defined by their particular historical, economic, cultural, and political contexts.47 Pragmatic democratization would not impose a universal norm in the sense of prescribing fixed absolute political norms for all to follow, and Dewey himself would be sympathetic to the Chinese people’s desire to have a distinctively Chinese democracy growing out of their experience and best suited to the unique conditions of their communities in different ways at different times. However, in the midst of rising cultural nationalism, Chinese pragmatists who share Dewey’s commitment to democracy as a way of life have to address the challenge of anti-democratic culturalism, which either asserts that China cannot democratize because of its traditional culture, or argues that China should not democratize because democracy is incompatible with its cultural traditions. Such culturalism is often “pragmatic” in a crass instrumentalist sense of using “culture” as a tool in the “politics of civilization,” to serve a purpose which has very little to do with the Deweyan understanding of culture as a dynamic, changing way of life, consisting of ideas, practices, and artifacts shared and transmitted in a process which at its best develops the imagination, refines tastes, and deepens intellectual insights. I have argued elsewhere that anti-democratic culturalism tends to adopt a reductionist, essentialist, static, totalizing, and hegemonic conception of culture, which results from seeing culture as the answer to questions rather than an ongoing ever-changing problem that needs solving. My reconstruction of the concept of “culture” based on Dewey’s works attempts to show that democracy is a cultural problem, not in the sense that some universal (Western) culture must be imposed on all, but rather that the different components of each particular culture and their interconnections need to be reconstructed to create a democratic national-and-global culture, which does not yet exist.48 The cultural problems that need to be solved in any pragmatic experiment of democracy in China are about the way traditions connect past, present, and future. What would be a pragmatic approach to the role of tradition in China’s on-going search for democracy?

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4. Dewey’s Lectures in China on Tradition According to one commentator, in the hands of New Culture intellectuals, “Dewey’s pragmatism undoubtedly hastened the disintegration of traditional culture and values.”49 Although often modestly claiming ignorance about China to his Chinese audience, Dewey occasionally provided examples drawn from Chinese life and thought as he learned about China from personal observation and from his association with the Chinese, and he sometimes referred to the local situation when lecturing in China and published several articles on China in American journals during and after his visit. Did Dewey share his Chinese students’ iconoclastic views about Chinese tradition? Dewey did not speak or read Chinese. Although he spoke to many people through interpreters, it is not surprising that his closest Chinese associates had a strong influence on his understanding of the situation in China, including its traditions and philosophies. When lecturing on social and political philosophy in Beijing, Dewey remarked that theory producing stability “may conduce either to good or evil,” and gave a Chinese example of the latter possibility. Many Chinese institutions, under the aegis of Confucianism, have remained unaltered and unchallenged for more than two thousand years. When theory results in rigidity rather than in stability, it interferes with progress, and can thus prove dangerous. (LC 1973, 50) He saw Confucius as a conservative who “held that all institutions had their ideal standards, and that if men would rediscover and act upon these ideals there would be no need to destroy or replace institutions” (LC 1973, 52). Dewey’s lectures on Ethics at Peking University included a comparison between Western and Eastern thought. He found Eastern thought more concrete and practical and Western thought more abstract and intellectual. While the concrete and practical approach facilitates comprehension, “it lacks the flexibility needed to enable it to meet the demands of changing situations.”50 Though mainly based on Western experience, Dewey’s discussion of “the bad effects which old-fashioned theories of knowledge had on education” used “quoting from the Shih Ching or Confucius” as an example of “making the sayings of the ancients the basis of criticism ... without even asking about the regards in which the needs of the past and of the present are the same and the regards in which they are different” (LC 1985, 176). With or without local examples, Dewey’s discussion of the bad effect of “developing a predisposition to obey the ancients” as well as treating knowledge as an already constituted product that could be transmitted through memorization, recitation and examination, and “breeding an aristocracy of learning,” would have struck a familiar chord among his Chinese audience at the time. In another lecture at the National Peking Academy of Fine Arts, Dewey identified two great dangers confronting “the Orient,” one of which being “the people who feel threatened by

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a materialistic civilization, and want to resist it. They want to preserve the thought and habits of a conservative society, and hope that it will not be affected by materialism” (LC 1985, 191). While admitting that “preoccupation with material progress” is among the defects of Western civilization (LC 1985, 190), Dewey emphasized that the West had more to offer than mere technology. To him, “the development of the scientific spirit and the cultivation of a new attitude toward life are far more important” (LC 1973, 235). He advocated applying the scientific method to social problems in place of the traditional method, which “depends too much on conventional customs and prejudices” (LC 1985, 49, 60, 66). Quite a few of Dewey’s lectures in China were about science and the scientific method, and its relevance to social and moral problems. “The Authority of Science” was the topic of one of his lectures on social and political philosophy. He also lectured on “Science and the Moral Life” and “Science and Education” (LC 1973). He was more than willing to help his Chinese students with their efforts to promote science and democracy against the superstition and tyranny of tradition. Dewey’s writings and letters for the American audience also mention the conservatism of the Chinese and their attachment to tradition as obstructing progress. He identified the “inelastic system of memoriter education” as a cause of conservatism in China, which was “not native or natural” (MW12.25). Dewey described the fight over the use of vernacular language instead of the literary language of the Chinese Classics, “the speech of two thousand years ago, adorned and frozen,” merging “into one between conservatives and liberals in general, between the representatives of the old traditions and the representatives of western ideas and democratic institutions” (MW12.25). He observed in the Chinese disregard for foreigners’ opinion a complacency and conceit which “has enormously retarded the advance of China and made for a conservative hugging of old traditions, and a belief in the inherent superiority of Chinese civilization in all respects to that of foreign barbarians” (MW11.209). In the only article he ever published on Chinese philosophy, he described the Daoist “doctrine of the superiority of nature to man” and “the doctrine of non-doing” as congenial to habits of life associated with China’s long history and unparalleled success as an agrarian society, for many centuries able to continue producing without depleting the soil, which “helps explain the conservatism of the Chinese, their laissez-faire reverence for nature and their contempt for the hurried and artificial devices of man’s contriving” (MW13.222). According to Dewey, The general point of Confucianism is the opposite of that of Taoism ... Yet in many respects the actual effect of Confucianism has been like that of Taoism. In inculcating reverence for the classic literature of the past as the well-spring of wisdom, it supplied intellectual reasons for conservatism. (MW13.224)

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Dewey found the conservatism of the Chinese people worthy of deeper inquiry, as it has been blamed for China’s backwardness. Conservatives they doubtless are. But nevertheless their history is not a history of stagnation, of fixity, as we are falsely taught, but of social as well as dynastic changes. They have tried many experiments in their day. (MW12.52) Instead of materialist or idealist explanations, Dewey’s analysis offers a relational or interactionist alternative by locating the cause of Chinese conservatism in “the extraordinary and long-continued density of population” (MW12.53). Such living conditions meant that every little action by one individual could affect others, and therefore could and would be watched by others, perhaps attracting undesirable counter-actions. This bred a mentality of “Don’t rock the boat” (MW12.55). Mistakes are often costly, and therefore, “Mind your own business, don’t interfere, leave things to those whose express business it is to look after them, is the rule of living” (MW12.57). Dewey did not condone or excuse such conservative attitudes. His analysis led him to point out that, given its cause, such conservatism cannot be “remedied by expostulation, exhortation and preaching.” In Dewey’s view, a change of environment through introduction of industrial production is required. Increase of wealth and of constructive appliances, that is modernization in the form of economic and scientific development, would enable the Chinese to discover a way “to turn personal friendliness, unfailing amiability and good-humor into general channels of social service” (MW12.59). What China needed was not merely improvement in material life. The notion that, by the mere introduction of western economy, China can be “saved,’ while it retains the morality, the old set of ideas, the old Confucianism – or what genuine Confucianism had been petrified into – and the old family system, is the most utopian of sentimental idealism. (MW13.103) Like his students active in the New Culture movement, Dewey believed that China can adjust to the impact of the West “only by a readjustment of her own age-long customs, that she has to change its historic mind and not merely a few of her practices” (MW11.205). The real problem of China, Dewey wrote in 1921, was “that of adapting Old China to new world conditions” (MW13.98). “A new mind must be created” (M13.95). Dewey believed that the New Culture movement, as an intellectual movement, would help to unify China’s mind, just as better means of communication would unify and strengthen the country. “It also makes a great deal of difference whether the mind when unified looks to the past or is in sympathy with modern thought in the rest of the world”

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(MW13.119). Dewey is in sympathy with the New Culture movement in believing the latter to be the right path for China. 5. Dewey’s Critique of Western Traditions Lest anyone thinks that Dewey was recommending complete Westernization of China, Dewey’s China lectures were also critical of Western traditions. Dewey would maintain that blind following of tradition obstructs moral growth in both East and West. If we were always to behave exactly as people before us behaved, our conduct would be mechanical and without life, like an automobile or a locomotive. How could we, in such case, claim that our conduct was moral? The social situation changes from day to day. If morality is to fit the demands of society, we should consciously seek new experience and develop new concepts to meet the needs of the new situation. We cannot afford to follow blindly traditional modes of behavior. (LC 1985, 70) His critique of traditional morality, as accidental and prone to misuse by “men of evil intent ... to seduce the people and gain control of society” (LC 1985, 119) since it does not encourage or even permit independent reasoning, was based on Western experience (using examples of the Romans and Greeks, and American Indian tribes). Such morality, deriving their standards from prevailing social norms, also ignores the individual will and motive, judges actions solely by external consequences, and “serves to solidify the social system and render it impervious to change” (LC 1985, 121). It was with regard to formal schooling and education for literacy in the West that he warned of the danger of “becoming overly preoccupied with the conservation and transmission of the cultural heritage, to the exclusion of other matters with which it ought also to be concerned” (LC 1973, 186). Dewey believed that among the benefits of democracy is “a radical change in outlook, namely that rational legislation should replace the ‘legislation’ of tradition, custom and habit” (LC 1973, 147). However, despite Western experience with democracy for a few centuries, “the most pressing social problem in the modern world is that of replacing the authority of tradition with the authority of science” (LC 1973, 167). The selection of these topics and problems to focus on in his lectures indicates which areas Dewey and his Chinese advisors believed Western experience could serve as lessons for China during the nineteen-twenties. Dewey was critical of tradition long before his visit to China. Writing about logical theory in 1891, he maintained that “any theory which somehow presupposes a first-hand contact of mind and fact (though it be only in isolated, atomic sensations) is surely preferable to a theory which falls back on tradition, or on the delivery of dogma irresponsible to any intellectual criticism”

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(EW3.130). His textbook on Ethics was critical of customary or traditional morality (Ethics, MW5 and 2nd edn LW7). Those who approach religion and education from the side of unconstrained reflection, not from the side of tradition, are of necessity aware of the tremendous transformation of intellectual attitude effected by the systematic denial of the supernatural; they are aware of the changes it imports not merely in special dogma and rites, but in the interpretation of the world, and in the projection of social, and, hence, moral life. (MW4.167) Placing “the authority of tradition in place of the authority of natural facts and laws” would “reduce the individual to a parasite living on the secondhand experience of others” (LW8.307). The hold of tradition on education in a rapidly changing and expanding world leads to a failure “to educate [the student] for the present, and then when the future comes upon him leave him either stranded or wrecked” (EW5.220). According to Dewey, “schools are so peculiarly subject to the power of tradition and of uncriticized custom that they embody the subjects and ends of the past” (LW13.264). Dewey’s philosophy of education advocated treating the school as “an experimental station in education” to counter the weight of tradition – it will then “permit and encourage freedom of investigation; that will give some assurance that important facts will not be forced out of sight; conditions that will enable the educational practice indicated by the inquiry to be sincerely acted upon” (MW1.68). Dewey insisted that instead of blindly following traditional practices, education should be approached as a scientific, intellectual and philosophical problem. Experimental education requires a new understanding of psychology, a new psychology bringing the new method of experiment to supplement and correct the old method of introspection (EW1.53). Dewey played a key role in challenging pre-scientific traditional psychology in his efforts to approach education and other social problems scientifically. The “conflict of scientific conceptions of the world with beliefs hallowed by tradition and giving sanction to morals and religion” is one reason why a philosophy of education is needed (MW7.299). “Philosophy was born out of the inability of custom to maintain itself as a final standard of life, and out of the attempt to do by reflection the work previously done by tradition” (MW6.23). But philosophy as a human endeavor has its own traditions, and Dewey was critical of various philosophic traditions (e.g. that which separate theory and knowledge from practice, body from mind) in several of his works, especially Reconstruction in Philosophy (MW12), Experience and Nature (LW1), and The Quest for Certainty (LW4). Dewey often contrasted tradition with reflective thinking or thoughtful inquiry, intelligence, pragmatic reason, and science. “Science is a name for knowledge in its most characteristic form ... knowledge is distinguished from opinion, guesswork, speculation, and mere tradition” (MW9.196). He noted that

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during the Enlightenment, “humanists and scientists had often set themselves against dogma and tradition” (MW5.154; LW7.145) – and agreed with Francis Bacon that “like deceitful images or obsessions the ‘idols’ of the tribe, of the cave, of the market, and of the theater – due to instinct or habit, to language or tradition – prevent reason from doing its best work” (LW7.145). In Dewey’s view, tradition, instruction, imitation – all of which depend upon authority in some form, or appeal to our own advantage, or fall in with a strong passion – are responsible for [thoughts which] are prejudices, that is, prejudgments, not judgments proper that rest upon a survey of evidence” (MW6.184; also LW8.116). Reflection sets us free from tradition to pursue genuine knowledge that pays attention to evidence (LW8.277). Traditions in social and political life often have been aristocratic and authoritarian; they have reinforced the power of vested interests (LW9.107); “despotism while it lasts has sanction of tradition and general custom” (MW15.270); and “dominant class interests” were often “the chief force that maintained the tradition against which the new method and conclusions in physical science had to make their way” (LW9.108). The modern age marks a liberation from “the heavy hand of precedent, tradition and government” (LW1.357). It is as true of the history of modern science as it is of the history of painting or music that its advances have been initiated by individuals who freed themselves from the bonds of tradition and custom whenever they found the latter hampering their own powers of reflection, observation, and construction. (LW11.142) Such liberation can never be complete. Even in the most scientifically advanced and modern Western societies, “There is always a rearguard of ignorance, prejudice, dogma, routine, tradition, which fights against the spread of new ideas that entail new practices” (LW6.146). The application of science to moral and social life advocated by pragmatists has been retarded not just in China, but even in Western societies which, despite “extensive and precise control of physical energies and conditions, ... leave the social consequences of their operation to chance, laissezfaire, privileged pecuniary status, and the inertia of tradition and old institutions” (LW6.59). Keeping the social field “as a preserve sacred from the free use of experimental procedure” ... has resulted in “unbalance, distortion, and the misuse of the physical fruits of science” (LW8.67). Even as Dewey worried about the partial view the Chinese had of science as mere technology, he saw his own society, with much less excuse, similarly afflicted. In an address delivered

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in 1934 at the University Club, Boston, Dewey had this to say about the situation in the United States: There are, indeed, courses in science installed in high schools and colleges ... the scientific attitude, the will to use scientific method and the equipment necessary to put the will into effect, is still, speaking for the mass of people, inchoate and unformed. (LW9.99) 6. A Pragmatic Approach to Old and New, Past, Present, and Future Despite his frequent critique of tradition(s), Dewey is not an iconoclast. There can be no total rejection of tradition. As a fact, tradition has always been operative (MW7.357). Our responses to others, the basic forms of nurture and care so critical to the continuation of our species, are themselves dependent upon tradition, custom and social patterns (LW2.243). “Tradition and custom, especially when emotionally charged, are a part of the habits that have become one with our very being” (LW9.11). In Dewey’s understanding, tradition is custom – a habit which is common to the members of a society – regularized, systematized, and consciously insisted upon (LC 1973, 85). Tradition, as a conscious principle of organization, continuity and evaluation of experience, is indispensable to human existence. Referring to the “truth-function” of the university, Dewey recognized that “At one time it may be more concerned with the tradition or transmission of truth, and at another time with its discovery. Both functions are necessary, and neither can ever be entirely absent” (MW2.55). Dewey maintained that “knowledge is a function of association and communication; it depends upon tradition, upon tools and methods socially transmitted, developed and sanctioned” (LW2.334). Tradition is part of the context of our thinking and acting. There is no thinking which does not present itself on a background of tradition, and tradition has an intellectual quality that differentiates it from blind custom. Traditions are ways of interpretation and of observation, of valuation, of everything explicitly thought of. They are the circumambient atmosphere which thought must breathe; no one ever had an idea except as he inhaled some of this atmosphere. (LW6.13) In fact, Dewey wrote, “The things which a man experiences come to him clothed with meanings which originate in custom and tradition” (LW1.383). In the education of artisans through their work, “the customs, methods and working standards of the calling constitute a ‘tradition,’ and that initiation into the tradition is the means by which the powers of learners are released and directed” (LW2.57). In art,

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Tradition can be an enhancing and liberating tool; but if it becomes a fixed and absolute constraint, if it loses its reflective and creative capacity, then it turns restrictive and enslaving. To advocate wholesale rejection of tradition would be to fall into a dualism of old and new, of past versus present and future. Iconoclasm is unpragmatic. The pragmatist sees the world and human existence as “a conjunction of the precarious and the assured, the incomplete and the finished, the repetitious and the varying, the safe and sane and the hazardous” (LW1.66– 67). These general traits of experience are manifested in a series of polarities, such as “structure and process, substance and accident, matter and energy, permanence and flux, one and many, continuity and discreteness, order and progress, law and liberty, uniformity and growth, tradition and innovation...” (LW1.67). Pragmatic philosophy is concerned with “the choice and administration of their proposed union,” because “the issue of living depends upon the art with which these things are adjusted to each other” (LW1.67). Iconoclasts view the old and new, past, present, and future in dualistic opposition, rejecting one totally in favor of the other; pragmatists recognize their continuity and interdependence, and that each specific context decides which should be emphasized. The iconoclastic approach treats tradition as purely static and passively received, something “currently accepted in a community which is handed down from generation to generation, being accepted on the authority of its past currency rather than because of any independent examination and verification” (MW7.356). The pragmatic approach recognizes that such static traditions obstruct progress in their tendency “to create the closed and dogmatic mind” (LW11.573), to obscure our “observation of what is actually going on” (LW13.102), and to deceive us into believing that all information is here and all the evidence known. However, the pragmatic approach also realizes that tradition is indispensable as a process “used to cover the entire operation of transmission by which a society maintains the continuity of its intellectual and moral life” (MW7.356). Tradition looks forward as well as backward. To transmit the powers and achievements of our own day to the future is as important as to transmit the past to the present. Indeed, the more aware we are of the fact that we are builders of a future world, the more likely are we to be intelligent in

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our attitude to the past and in our estimate of the values we inherit from it. (LW14.271) The forward-looking meliorism of pragmatic philosophy is inseparable from an intelligent appreciation of the past as an instrument to help us deal with present problems and future possibilities, although the past is not merely an instrument for Dewey (LW11.573). We need to reorganize our heritage from the past and the insights of present knowledge into a coherent and integrated imaginative union (LW10.340). Dewey approached his own cultural heritage not as an iconoclast, but as a “critic and reconstructor of tradition” (LW14.8). He was convinced that the “vital cultural problems – which ultimately decide important philosophical problems – now centre about the reworking of traditions (institutions, customs, beliefs of all sorts), to bring them into harmony with the potentialities of present science and technology” (LW14.8). In Dewey’s view, the philosopher cannot ignore traditions. “If he ignores traditions, his thoughts become thin and empty. But they are something to be employed, not just treated with respect or dressed out in a new vocabulary” (LW3.131). Dewey did not advocate demolishing tradition in toto, an impossibility in any case; he was only against unexamined and uncritical traditions (LW13.273; LW15.26). The iconoclast’s complete rejection of tradition also errs in treating tradition as if it is an indivisible whole, whereas Dewey insists that tradition is, or rather traditions are, pluralistic in composition. Moreover, “There are bad traditions as there are good ones: it is always important to distinguish” (LW2.20; also LC 1985, 73). Getting the distinction right is vital to achieving the best balance between old and new, to ensuring progressive continuity between past, present, and future. Although the earlier sections focus on his critical remarks about Chinese and Western traditions, Dewey did find good traditions in both. The “great American tradition,” for him, is the democratic tradition, and his stand on sociopolitical problems “frankly accept the democratic tradition in its moral and human import” (LW8.76; LW13.299). While there is much in China’s past, in her traditions, that hobbled her efforts to cope with new conditions, Dewey recognized that there were also many good things in the old order (MW13.94). Dewey approved of “the traditional concept of the state’s obligations to protect its people, as this was propounded by Mencius” (LC 1973, 154). He found the modes of life of the Chinese masses democratic (MW11.197, 212). There are, so to speak, three Chinas. There is the China which generates friction and antagonism among the nations, the China of international relationships. There is domestic China, torn, distracted, factional, largely corrupt in government. And there is the China of the Chinese people, populous, patient, industrious, self-governing by nonpolitical methods, solid, enduring and persistent beyond the power of the Western

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Dewey did not side with the Chinese radical who “is not interested in improving what exists, but advocates replacing it with something entirely new and different” (LC 1973, 51). Instead he recommended a “third philosophy” that avoids the “dependence on sweeping generalizations” common to both conservatism and radicalism (LC 1973, 53). This third philosophy, which looks for particular kinds of solutions by particular methods for particular problems which arise on particular occasions, is concerned with “the ways in which human behavior can be controlled and guided by human knowledge and intelligence” (LC 1973, 53), and intelligence is “the power of using past experience to shape and transform future experience” (MW11.346). Revolution, cultural or political, is not the only means to social progress; Dewey preferred developing “a system of habits, customs, conventions, traditions, and institutions flexible enough to permit adjustment to changing environments and conditions” (LC 1973, 87). In education, what is needed is “to conserve and transmit the best of our traditional cultural heritage, and ... to cultivate personalities which can cope successfully with their environment. ... We must reconstruct the traditional aims, methods, and subject matter of education so that it may adequately serve the needs of our age” (LC 1973, 188; see also 212). Although sometimes overly optimistic, Dewey was well aware that unfortunately for China, the old and new were sometimes mixed in a social chemistry that yielded an explosive or poisonous compound, and “the task of reorganization, of transformation, of union of old and new, is so vast, so appalling in its complexity, that neither any wholesale forecast of the future nor any simple remedy is worth the paper it is written on” (MW13.95). Written in 1921, these remain words of wisdom today, even though China’s circumstances have changed tremendously. Instead of the iconoclasm at the beginning of the century, we see a revival of Confucianism and other Chinese traditions in China towards the end of the twentieth century and into the new millennium. Iconoclasm of the last century and the social and political upheavals have significantly loosened the hold of traditional practices and beliefs in Chinese society, to the extent that we are talking about deliberate recovery rather than preservation of certain traditions. Not all that were lost were bad, and not all that are bad have been discarded. The balance between old and new, tradition and novelty, remains an important problem that must be grappled with in charting the future course of China. To some observers, revival of traditions, especially Confucianism, still has a tendency to ally itself with political conservatism, even authoritarianism, certainly if the Chinese Communist party were to appropriate such a revival, but even in the hands of those who sought an alternative to the current Communist regime.51 However, if traditions have an indispensable part to play in the continuity of spiritual and moral life, rejecting all traditions out of hand, even

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polemically or as a matter of strategy, is not the best method for dealing with the problem. A pragmatist would expose attempts to appropriate traditions for purposes hostile to improving associated living, warn of the dangers of combinations of the old and the new that will not work, and propose alternative combinations and modifications that would ensure the vitality of particular traditions in meeting the needs and characteristics of a new age. NOTES 1. Examples of works which found resonance between the pragmatist and the Confucian traditions include: David Hall and Roger Ames, Democracy of the Dead: Dewey, Confucius and the Hope of Democracy in China (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999); Robert Cummings Neville, Boston Confucianism: Portable Traditions in the Late Modern World (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000); Warren Frisina, The Unity of Knowledge and Action: Toward a Nonrepresentational Theory of Knowledge (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002); Sor-hoon Tan, Confucian Democracy: A Deweyan Reconstruction (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004); Hai-ming Wen, Confucian Pragmatism as the Art of Contextualizing Personal Experience and World (Lanham Md., Lexington Press, 2009). 2. Richard Rorty made this remark about the recovery of Confucianism at a Conference in Shanghai in July 2004 on “Rorty and Chinese Philosophy.” Selected papers from that conference are published in Rorty, Pragmatism, and Confucianism, ed. Yong Huang (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009). 3. Standard references to John Dewey’s work are to The Collected Works of John Dewey, 1882-1953, Jo Ann Boydston ed. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969–1991), in three series as The Early Works (EW), The Middle Works (MW) and The Later Works (LW). LW5.86 refers to The Later Works, vol. 5, p. 86. 4. Barry Keenan has given an in-depth study of the Chinese pragmatists’ efforts at education reforms and cultural transformation in The Dewey Experiment in China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977). See also Sun Youzhong, “Dewey in China: Yesterday and Today,” Transactions of Charles Sanders Peirce Society 35 (1999): 69–88. A more recent discussion of Hu Shih’s pragmatism and reevaluation of the “Dewey experiment” is Sor-hoon Tan, “China’s Pragmatist Experiment in Democracy: Hu Shih’s Pragmatism and Dewey’s Influence in China,” Metaphilosophy 35 (2004): 44– 64; and Richard Shusterman, ed., The Range of Pragmatism and the Limits of Philosophy (Malden, Mass., Blackwell, 2004). 5. For a sympathetic yet critical intellectual biography of Hu Shih, see Jerome Grieder, Hu Shih and the Chinese Renaissance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970); also Min-chih Chou, Hu Shih and Intellectual Choice in Modern China (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1984). 6. The best study of the May Fourth Movement remains T’se-tsung Chow, May Fourth Movement: Intellectual Revolution in Modern China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960). 7. For a study of the iconoclasm of New Culture intellectuals, see Lin Yu-Sheng, The Crisis of Chinese Consciousness: Radical Anti-Traditionalism in the May Fourth Era (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1979).

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8. Standard references to Hu Shih’s works are to Ji Xianlin (ed.), Hu Shi Quanji (Hu Shih’s Complete Works), (Hefei, China: Anhui Education Press, 2003), 44 vols., henceforth referred to as HSQ, followed by volume and page numbers. 9. Cheng Yi (1033–1107). Er Cheng Quanshu (Complete Works of Cheng Brothers), Sibu beiyao 161 (Shanghai: Zhonghua, 1935), juan 22B, p. 3a. 10. Hu Shi, “Problem of Chastity,” The New Youth (1918), HSQ 1: 633–642. 11. This was not undertaken lightly, as Hu Shih was a very filial son and had great respect and affection for his mother, who was widowed when Hu Shih was only five years old. 12. Su, Zhixin, “A Critical Evaluation of John Dewey’s Influence on Chinese Education,” American Journal of Education 103.3 (1995): 302–325; Zhou Hongyu and Xiang Zongping, “The Spread of Dewey’s Educational Thought in China and its Influence,” Journal of Hebei Normal University, Educational Science 3 (2001): 59–65, at p. 64; Wu Jianmin, “Influence of Dewey’s Educational Thought on Education Reforms in Twentieth Century China,” Critical Review of Education 6 (2001): 58–60; Dong Yunchuan, “Dewey and Scholarship,” Academic Exploration, series 1 (2001): 182–184; Peng Jianbiao and Fan Kai, “Dewey’s Pragmatist Educational Thought and the Direction of Reforms in China’s Education,” Journal of Gansu Education College, Social Sciences 18.1 (2002): 78–82. 13. Keenan, op. cit., p. 76, p. 150; Tan, “China’s Pragmatist Experiment,” pp. 44– 64. For other assessments of the “Dewey experiment,” see Chow, May Fourth Movement, p. 241; Nancy Sizer, “John Dewey’s Ideas in China, 1919–1921,” Comparative Education Review 10.3 (October 1966): 390–404; Maurice Meisner, Li Ta-chao and the Origins of Chinese Marxism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), p. 10;, John E. Smith, “Pragmatism at Work: Dewey’s Lectures in China,” Journal of Chinese Philosophy 12 (1985): 231–259; Julia Ching, “China’s Responses to Dewey,” Journal of Chinese Philosophy 12 (1985): 261–281; Liu Fangtong, “Pragmatism and its Destiny in China,” in Reflections on May Fourth (Shanghai: Huadong shifan daxue chubanshe, 1988), pp. 31–39; Robert B. Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991), pp. 249–250; Zhang Rulun, “Dewey’s Fate in China,” Reading no. 7 (2003): 126–132. 14. Yan Jiaqi, Moving Towards Democratic Politics (Taipei: Shibao chuban, 1990), pp. 29–36. 15. Li Zehou, “The Double Variation of Enlightenment and National Salvation” in On the History of Chinese Thought, 3 vols. (Hefei, China: Anhui wenyi chubanshe, 1999), vol. 3, 823–866, at p. 859. 16. Vera Schwarcz, The Chinese Enlightenment: Intellectuals and the Legacy of the May Fourth Movement of 1919 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); Xu Jilin, Another Kind of Enlightenment (Guangzhou: Huacheng chubanshe, 1999), p. 257. 17. River Elegy, Documentary produced by China Central Television (China: Zhongguo dianshi guoji fuwu gongsi, 1988); Su Xiaokang et al., ed., From May Fourth to the River Elegy (Taipei: Fengyun shidai chuban, 1992), p. 420. 18. Xu, Another Kind of Enlightenment, pp. 8–9, pp. 250–262. One of the many journals founded in that period was The New Enlightenment. Xu singled out 1984 as the beginning of the “new Enlightenment” of the 1980s (ibid., p. 254). In his survey of contemporary Chinese thought, Wang Hui held up “new enlightenment” thought as the “most dynamic intellectual current of the 1980s.” Wang Hui, “Contemporary Chinese Thought and the Question of Modernity,” in Whither China? Intellectual Politics in

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Contemporary China, ed. Xudong Zhang (Durham, N.C.: Duke University, 2001), pp. 161–198. 19. Song Xianlin, “Reconstructing the Confucian Ideal in 1980s China: the ‘Culture Craze’ and New Confucianism,” in New Confucianism; A Critical Examination, ed. John Makeham (New York: Palgrave, 2003), pp. 81–104, at p. 85. The efforts to modernize Confucianism could be traced back to the nineteenth century. See Sor-hoon Tan, “Modernizing Confucianism and ‘New Confucianism,’” in The Cambridge Companion to Modern Chinese Culture, ed. Kam Louie (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 135–154, at pp. 135–141. 20. Liang Shuming, Key Elements of Chinese Culture (Taipei: Zhengzhong, 1977); Theory of Rural Reconstruction (Shanghai: Shanghai Shudian, 1992); See also Guy Alitto, The Last Confucian (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979). 21. Gu Hongliang, “Liang Shuming’s Conception of Confucian Democracy and John Dewey,” in Confucian Life World (Shanghai: People’s Press, 2008), pp. 111–118, a paper presented at a 2006 workshop on “Democracy as Art, Belief, and Culture,” held at the National University of Singapore. Liang definitely had read Democracy and Education, gave a lecture on it, and cited from it in his works. Liang also visited the Xiaozhuang Experimental Village Normal School, established by Tao Xingzhi, one of Dewey’s students who tried to apply Dewey’s ideas of “Life is education” and “Learning by Doing.” 22. Xiong Shili, Tracing Confucianism (Shanghai: Longmen lianhe shuju, 1953); Main Points in Reading the Classics (Taipei: Guangwen, 1960). 23. Chang, Carsun, Development of Neo-Confucian Thought (New York: Bookman, 1962), vol. 2. The “Manifesto for a Reappraisal of Sinology and Reconstruction of Chinese Culture,” signed by Carsun Chang, Mou Zongsan, Tang Junyi, and Xu Fuguan, is often considered the landmark document of New Confucianism. 24. Xu Fuguan, Confucian Political Thought and Democracy, Freedom, Human Rights, ed. Xiao Xinyi (Taipei: Student Press, 1988); Tang Juniyi, “Realization and Objective Value Consciousness of Democratic Thought,” in Complete Works, 8:102–141, at p. 138. 25. Tu Wei-ming, Confucianism in Historical Perspective (Singapore: Institute of East Asian Philosophies, 1989), p. 3. 26. Tu Wei-ming, ibid., p. 39. 27. Tu Wei-ming, Confucian Ethics Today: The Singapore Challenge (Singapore, Curriculum Development Institute of Singapore, 1984); “Core Values and the Possibility of a Fiduciary Community,” in Restructuring for World Peace, ed. Katharine and Majid Tehranian (Cresskill, N.J.: Hampton Press, 1992), pp. 333–346; Confucian Traditions in East Asian Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996); “Human Rights as a Confucian Moral Discourse,” in Confucianism and Human Rights, ed. W. Theodore De Bary and Tu Wei-ming (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), pp. 297–307; “Multiple Modernities: A Preliminary Inquiry into the Implications of East Asian Modernity,” in Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress, ed. Samuel P. Huntington and Lawrence E. Harrison (New York: Basic Books, 2000), pp. 256–267. 28. Suisheng Zhao, ed., China and Democracy (New York and London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 255–257. 29. Baogang He and Guo Yingjie, Nationalism, National Identity and Democratization in China (Brookfield, Vt.: Ashgate, 2000), pp. 28–30.

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30. John Makeham, Lost Soul: “Confucianism” in Contemporary Chinese Academic Discourse, Harvard-Yenching Institute Monographs 64 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2008). 31. Daniel Bell, while positive about Yu’s efforts in some ways, calls it “a Daoistinspired effort to depoliticize” Confucianism. See Bell, China’s New Confucianism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008), p. 170. Bell’s use of the term “New Confucianism” has little to do with the well-known movement in Chinese intellectual history discussed above, but simply refers to the many new forms Confucianism has taken in discourse and practice, in PRC today. 32. He and Guo, Nationalism, p. 112. 33. Duara, Prasenjit, “De-Constructing the Chinese Nation,” in Chinese Nationalism, ed. Jonathan Unger (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1996), pp. 31–55, at p. 32, p. 44. 34. Yongnian Zheng, Will China Become Democratic? Elite Class and Regime Transition (Singapore: Marshall Cavendish, 2004), chap. 3. 35. Ben Xu, Disenchanted Democracy: Chinese Cultural Criticism after 1989 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), p. 80. 36. Liu Fangtong, “Reassessment of Pragmatism,” in Modern Foreign Philosophy, 10 (1987): 1–23. The 1988 conference was the direct result of interest generated by Liu’s article when it was first presented at a conference in Guiyang in 1986. See Zhan Xufang, “Changes in the Attitude of Chinese Philosophical Circles towards Pragmatism,” Studies in Soviet Thought 38 (1989): 99–104, at pp. 102–103. 37. Including works by Beth Singer, Richard Rorty, Richard Shusterman, Larry Hickman, James Campbell, Thomas Alexander, Robert Westbrook, Steven Rockefeller, and Steven Fesmire. Explorations of affinities between pragmatism and Chinese philosophy, such as the translated works of David Hall and Roger Ames, have also drawn considerable attention. 38. Some examples are Liu Fangtong’s New Explorations of Pragmatism, Yang Wenji’s New Discussions of Pragmatism, Zou Tiejun’s Master of Pragmatism: Dewey, Gu Hongliang’s Misreading of Pragmatism: Influence of Dewey’s Philosophy on Modern Chinese Philosophy, and Sun Youzhong’s The Symbol of the American Spirit: a Study of Dewey’s Social Thought. 39. Su, “Critical Evaluation of John Dewey’s Influence on Chinese Education,” p. 314. 40. “Pragmatic Chinese-style care purchase” at http://news.xinhuanet.com/auto/ 2009-04/07/content_11141706.htm (accessed on 9 July 2009) 41. “Serious living in an era exalting fast-food spirit and pragmatism” at http://www.showchina.org/zixun/200902/t259852.htm (accessed 10 July 2009). 42. Zhang Fa, Zhang Yiwu, and Wang Yichuan, “From ‘Modernity’ to ‘Chineseness’,” Wenyi Zhengming 2 (1994): 10–20, at p. 17. 43. Xiaoming Wang, “A Manifesto for Cultural Studies,” in One China, Many Paths, ed. Chaohua Wang (New York: Verso, 2003), pp. 274–291, at p. 284. 44. Qiu Zhongxin, “Analysis of the Wave of Pragmatist Philosophical Thought and its Influence in Reality,” Songliao Journal 65 (1994): 102–106, at p. 106; Jiang Chuangang, “We Must Overcome Pragmatists’ Attitudes Toward Seeking Truth from Facts,” Theory 2 (1999): 33–35, at p. 34; Qi You, “Emphasizing Consequences and Pragmatism,” Frontline 8 (2003): 59–60, at p. 60; Luo Bingseng, “On Seeking Truth from Fact and Pragmatism,” Journal of Philosophy and Social Sciences, Yunnan Normal University 27.5 (1995): 1–5, at p. 1; Ni Ke, “Pragmatism Influences and Guides

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Contemporary University Students,” Journal of Guangxi Youth Leaders College 12.2 (2002): 19–21, at pp. 20–21. 45. David Kelly, “Philosophers Revisited,” China News Analysis 1453 (1992): 1–9, at p. 1. 46. Sun Youzhong, “Globalizing Democracy: A Deweyan Critique of Bush’s Second-Term National Security Strategy,” in Democracy as Culture: Deweyan Pragmatism in a Globalizing World, ed. Sor-hoon Tan and John Whalen-Bridge (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008), pp. 53–62, at p. 58. 47. Ibid., p. 53. 48. Tan and Whalen-Bridge, chap. 3. 49. John Dewey, Lectures in China, 1919–1920, trans. Robert W. Clopton and Tsuin-chen Ou (Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1973), p. 13, henceforth referred to as “LC 1973” in the text. Some may find Dewey’s China lectures crude and simplistic compared to his other philosophical writings, but the translations from detailed records taken in Chinese show that these lectures, intended for a general educated public rather than professional philosophers, are clearly Deweyan in direction, and constitute an important link between Dewey’s early philosophy and the social and political philosophy he developed after his China visit. 50. John Dewey, Lectures in China on Logic, Ethics, Education and Democracy, trans. Robert Clopton and Tsuin-chen Ou (Taiwan: Chinese Culture University Press, 1985), p. 132. Henceforth referred to as “LC 1985” in the text. 51. This is true of Jiang Qing’s “Political Confucianism” which understands the “kingly way” to limit political responsibility (and therefore power) to the true king “who has an awakened sense of moral consciousness,” and thereby avoiding the problem of “granting political power to the amoral masses.” His program, including a national “Chinese morals revival movement,” popularizing recitation of canonical texts at various levels, establishing a new civil service examination system, a rujiao university and ruxue colleges, rujiao newspapers, journals, publishing houses, radio and television channels, internet websites, as well as propaganda overseas offices, and church-like “lecture halls” at local, provincial and national levels, has led one commentator to call it “a utopian vision that is tantamount to return to the middle ages (or even earlier!).” Jiang’s work has not been translated in to English, but has been discussed in Makeham, Lost Soul, pp. 271–275, and Bell, China’s New Confucianism, appendix 2, pp. 175–191. The evaluation that Jiang’s proposed Confucian political system is authoritarian in tendency is my own and may not be shared by Bell and Makeham.

Sor-hoon Tan Associate Professor of Philosophy Philosophy Department National University of Singapore Singapore

Contemporary Pragmatism Vol. 7, No. 2 (December 2010), 71–89

Editions Rodopi © 2010

Antifoundationalism and the Commitment to Reducing Suffering in Rorty and Madhyamaka Buddhism Stephen Harris

In his Contingency, Irony, Solidarity, Richard Rorty argues that one can be both a liberal and also an antifoundationalist ironist committed to private self creation. The liberal commitments of Rorty’s ironists are likely to be in conflict with his commitment to self creation, since many identities will undercut commitments to reducing suffering. I turn to the antifoundationalist Buddhist Madhyamaka tradition to offer an example of a version of antifoundationalism that escapes this dilemma. The Madhyamaka Buddhist, I argue, because of his careful analysis into the unsatisfactory nature of existence, is motivated to adopt only identities that are committed to eliminating the suffering of self and others. Therefore, his compassion for others is not in tension with a commitment to private self-creation.

In his Contingency, Irony, Solidarity (CIS), Richard Rorty argues that one can be both a liberal, and an antifoundationalist ironist committed to private self creation. In the first section of this essay, I highlight a tension implicit in Rorty’s development of the liberal ironist. On the one hand, as a liberal, she is committed to reducing the suffering of others. On the other, as an ironist, she desires to recreate herself, a process requiring redescription of what Rorty calls our final vocabulary, the value terms we use to understand ourselves and our projects. Such redescription, I will argue, endangers the ironist’s liberal commitment to removing suffering, since as Rorty himself acknowledges, redescribing another’s final vocabulary can inflict the suffering of humiliation on others. Further, her commitment to refashioning her identity may often conflict with her commitment to liberalism, since some of the identities we might adopt may actually be committed to increasing the suffering of others. In the second section of this essay, I examine how an antifoundationalist tradition committed to removing the suffering of others, that of Madhyamaka Buddhism, avoids this dilemma. Like Rorty, the Madhyamaka does not believe we can appeal to language independent reality as a way of deciding what values we ought to accept. Like Rorty, the Madhyamaka places great emphasis on

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reducing the suffering of others. However, Buddhists would claim that Rorty’s own analysis of pain is impoverished. If we pay close enough attention, we will see that all of our ordinary experience is a subtle form of suffering. As a result of this insight, for the Madhyamaka, the dilemma of Rorty’s liberal ironist does not arise. This is because she is not tempted by the siren call of private self creation. The Bodhisattva is not tempted to adopt private identities conflicting with her commitment to removing suffering because she realizes all such identities would be permeated with suffering themselves. 1. The Divided Liberal Ironist Throughout much of his writing, Rorty has argued that the idea of accurately describing essences, either of the world, or of human nature, is misguided. Rather, we should “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” (CIS, 6). Truth is made rather than found, since “languages are made rather than found, and that truth is a property of linguistic entities, of sentences” (CIS 6). Investigating the nature of truth is unprofitable (CIS 30). Rather, we should accept that “anything could be made to look good or bad, important or unimportant, useful or useless, by being re-described” (CIS, 7).1 Although language does not describe language transcendent reality, Rorty claims that every human has his own set of what he calls final vocabulary, “a set of words which they employ to justify their actions, their beliefs, and their lives” (CIS 73). Our final vocabulary, words like “true”, “good”, “right”, “beautiful”, “decency”, “kindness”, “progressive”, “rigorous”, “creative”, are used to explain and evaluate our world (CIS 73). They are final “in the sense that if doubt is cast on the worth of these words, their user has no noncircular argumentative recourse” (CIS 73). The terms of our final vocabulary, then, are the bedrock we hit, beyond which inquiry can go no further. Our final vocabulary does not accurately represent the world, and the world will never act as mediator among various final vocabularies. (CIS 9) A final vocabulary is anchored in societal institutions, and is restricted only by our interactions and conversation with other humans. Rorty, however, is insistent that passionate commitment to our values does not require a belief that these values correspond to mind independent reality. Even if we acknowledge that our ideas of justice and virtue are socially constructed, Rorty believes, we can care about them with enough passion to die for them. In his own writing, Rorty often defends two commitments one gets the sense he would be willing to die for. First, he affirms the Romantic tradition’s emphasis on the importance of creation of one’s own idiosyncratic identity, a process which requires modifying the final vocabulary one has inherited. I will refer to this as the goal of autonomy. Second, he affirms the liberal values of reducing cruelty and increasing personal freedom. I will refer to this as the goal of liberalism.

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Closely tied to the goal of autonomy is Rorty’s conception of the ironist. An ironist “has radical and continuing doubts about the final vocabulary she currently uses,” and “she realizes that arguments phrased in her present vocabulary can neither underwrite nor dissolve these doubts”(CIS 73). She accepts that there is no metavocabulary to mediate between final vocabularies, and “does not think that her vocabulary is closer to reality than others” (CIS 73). Ironists accept that “anything can be made to look good or bad by being redescribed”, and are never able to take themselves seriously, since they are aware “the terms in which they describe themselves are subject to change” (CIS 73–74). Essentially, an ironist realizes that all terms of value, including the ones she has adopted, might be made to look bad by redescription. Irony is essential to the goal of autonomy, because being autonomous, for Rorty, means choosing one’s own final vocabulary, and this requires escaping from the final vocabulary one inherits. Rorty invokes Coleridge in suggesting that an ironist seeks to “create the taste by which he will be judged” (CIS 97). Ironists “are afraid that they will get stuck in the vocabulary in which they were brought up”, so they recreate themselves by experimenting with alternate final vocabularies, redescribing their situation by playing one final vocabulary off against another “to make the best selves for [themselves] that [they] can” (80). To the extent that she accepts the terms of an inherited final vocabulary, then, the ironist will give them a radically new sense. She is the revolutionary who reconfigures the past to conform to her own idiosyncratic fantasies. Rorty invokes figures like Heidegger, Nietzsche, Derrida, and Hegel as prototypical ironists, persons who radically reconceptualized the history of Western thought.2 Irony is essential to the goal of autonomy, then, because creating a new final vocabulary requires rejecting or reconceiving the final vocabulary one inherits. If Picasso had not doubted his inherited artistic norms, he would not have developed Cubism. If the ancient Athenians were not ironic about their inherited government, Democracy would not have developed. Rorty’s goal of liberalism, by contrast, requires accepting some final vocabulary with little modification. Rorty follows Mill in holding the purpose of government is to balance preventing suffering with leaving people alone to live their private lives. (CIS 63)3 However, liberal institutions depend upon a subset of a final vocabulary to function, terms like “justice”, “liberty”, “human rights”, “impartiality”, and a liberal conception of what it means to be prosperous.4 An ironist realizes the liberal final vocabulary is socially constructed, and her quest for autonomy tempts her to redescribe these terms. For liberal values to prevail, then, the ironist must be prevented from redescribing such vocabulary in ways that would undermine the functioning of liberal governments. However, being autonomous requires redescribing inherited final vocabulary. Rorty’s commitments, it seems, preclude each other. Rorty acknowledges the potentially corrosive effects of irony on public institutions.

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STEPHEN HARRIS I cannot go on to claim that there could or ought to be a culture whose public rhetoric is ironist. I cannot imagine a culture which socialized its youth in such a way as to make them continually dubious about their own process of socialization.5 (CIS 87)

Rorty’s solution is to suggest “that the ironist’s final vocabulary can be and should be split into a large private and a small public sector” (CIS 99–100). The public sector contains the final vocabulary relevant to the welfare of others, including the vocabulary necessary for the functioning of a liberal democratic government. Such vocabulary is off limits to any redescription which would inhibit its effectiveness at promoting the liberal goals of reduction of cruelty, and personal liberty.6 The rest of a person’s final vocabulary, what is grouped under the larger private area, is up for grabs. An ironist artist, for instance, may reconceive the meaning of terms like “beauty” and “harmony” however she sees fit, and the ironist novelist may reinterpret norms of narrative structure.7 Let us pretend that Thomas Jefferson was an ironist, and believed that nascent American ideals arose as a result of historical contingencies. As an ironist, Jefferson would possess lingering doubts about whether his final vocabulary of “rights,” “liberty,” and “equality,” would really prove better than alternatives at promoting worthwhile human lives. Nevertheless, the ironist Jefferson would believe such values provide the best shot we have at founding a worthwhile society. In asking the ironist Jefferson to privatize his irony, Rorty is pointing out that we cannot interweave public self doubt into our political institutions without inhibiting their ability to function. Consider the beginning of the Declaration of Independence: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. Imagine if Jefferson had supplemented these lines with a moment of public irony, adding, “but of course we can’t be sure that these values will turn out to be worthwhile in the long run, and besides our nascent democracy will probably end up marginalizing a lot of people.” Instead of a declaration upon which a country may be founded, we would have an ineffectual piece of waffling. In the same way, ironist poll workers must not turn away voters from the polls as a result of lingering doubts about the final vocabulary of universal suffrage. Privatizing irony is motivated by an acceptance that certain liberal rhetoric is necessary to enable governmental functioning. If we affirm values like the reduction of cruelty promoted by liberal democracies, then we must be willing to protect liberal final vocabulary from irony that would undermine its effectiveness.8 A number of critics have argued that dividing our final vocabularies into public and private realms is unrealistic. Nancy Fraser, for instance, claims

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Rorty’s position is flawed, since “it stands or falls with the possibility of drawing a sharp boundary between public and private life” (Fraser, 264). However, this is impossible. “Many cultural developments that occur at some remove from processes officially designated as political are nonetheless public.” Further, “cultural processes help shape social identities which in turn affect political affiliations” (Fraser, 264).9 Fraser is correct in pointing out that private experience can influence public policy. Attending a liberal church may make one more likely to expand voting rights to marginalized persons. Likewise, reading a biography of a lesbian may make us more likely to advocate gay rights. However, it is implausible to interpret Rorty as conceiving of the public private divide as an airtight line that must never be crossed. According to Rorty, the public final vocabularies of liberal governments were themselves the result of past private idiosyncratic fantasy. Political revolutionaries, for Rorty, are strong poets who found “words to fit their fantasies, metaphors which happened to answer to the vaguely felt needs of the rest of the society” (CIS 61).10 Public final vocabulary, then, is private final vocabulary that catches on with a society.11 For this reason, I think it better to conceive of the distinction between public and private as a boundary protecting certain final vocabulary, including that upon which the functioning of liberal governments depends, from the effects of corrosive ironic redescription. Moreover, Rorty need not deny that private creation can help us modify our liberal final vocabulary. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and the writing of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, for instance, helped us see that our conception of human rights and suffrage was impoverished, and needed to be expanded.12 However, these core liberal commitments of kindness and toleration themselves should not be subjected to public irony; rather, we should modify concepts like freedom and dignity to more closely align with them. A related complaint often brought against Rorty is that the private public distinction will not do the work it is introduced to do, because there are some private identities that are simply incompatible with liberal values. Rachel Haliburton, for instance, suggests Rorty’s claim that we can be “Nietzsche in private and J.S. Mill in public” is “both bizarre and implausible” (Haliburton, 61). If we adopted some Nietzschean attitudes, Haliburton points out, we would presumably act on them, thus undermining our commitments to public liberalism. (Haliburton, 61) In a similar vein, Robert Foelber argues that one could not “be both a private Dahmerian torture ([or] rabid anti-Semite racist) and a good liberal democrat” (Foelber, 34).13 Such objections are similar to a complaint against his position Rorty himself considers: [This] is a suggestion that the public-private split I am advocating will not work: that no one can divide herself up into a private self-creator and a

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STEPHEN HARRIS public liberal, that the same person cannot be, in alternate moments, Nietzsche and J. S. Mill (CIS 85).

He suggests this objection is identical to the following: [It] is psychologically impossible to be a liberal ironist – to be someone for whom “cruelty is the worst thing we do,” and to have no metaphysical beliefs about what all human beings have in common. (CIS 85) However, these objections are distinct. The second is the claim that it is impossible for an individual to be committed to liberal values unless she believes there is transhistorical support for these values. According to this objection, one could not be psychologically committed to removing pain unless one believed, not only that all humans suffer, but also that by nature all humans ought to care about the suffering of others. CIS as a whole may be taken to be Rorty’s response this charge. Rorty’s claim, in brief, is that one can believe one’s values are contingent upon historical circumstances, and still be willing to die for them.14 The first objection, which is essentially the one made by Haliburton and Foelber, highlights the tension of affirming both the goal of autonomy and the goal of liberalism. Autonomy, for the ironist, means redescribing yourself in terms that reject the final vocabulary you have inherited. Autonomy means creating a new private identity for yourself. However, some of these identities will be incompatible with liberal values. A Neo-Nazi rejects the final vocabulary of equality for a fantasy of ethnic superiority. Above, I suggested we view the public private distinction as marking a boundary around liberal final vocabulary that should not be subjected to irony. Here, it becomes apparent that some private identities provide no reason to respect this boundary. If the Neo-Nazi’s private identity is committed to the overthrow of liberal democratic government, then he will want to make public liberal final vocabulary look as ridiculous as he can. These objections, then, point out that some private identities will be incompatible with public liberal final vocabulary. This does not mean autonomy is incompatible with liberalism. There are many private identities that one may create for oneself, and many idiosyncratic fantasies one may pursue, that would not interfere with one’s liberal commitments. However, a commitment to liberalism acts as a constraint on our pursuit of autonomy. If we want to keep our liberal commitments, there are simply some identities we cannot choose.15 How then does the liberal ironist choose when her commitment to private self creation interferes with her commitment to liberalism? Rorty believes there are no non question begging reasons that can be given to choose one position over the other:

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[Liberal Ironists give] up the idea that liberalism could be justified, and Nazi or Marxist enemies of liberalism refuted, by driving the latter up against an argumentative wall – forcing them to admit that liberal freedom has a “moral privilege” which their own values lacked. (CIS, 53) Further, there is no causal explanation of why we have the values that we do that will give us moral ground over our opponents. We cannot look back behind the processes of socialization which convinced us twentieth-century liberals of the validity of this claim and appeal to something which is more “real” or less ephemeral than the historical contingencies which brought those processes into existence. (CIS, 198) Moreover, Rorty acknowledges that there will be times when private attempts at self creation conflict with our public obligations. In such cases, our commitments to liberalism have no automatic priority over self creation. Another central claim of this book, which will seem equally indecent to those who find the purity of morality attractive, is that our responsibilities to others constitute only the public side of our lives, a side which competes with our private affections and our private attempts at selfcreation, and which has no automatic priority over such private motives. Whether it has priority in any given case is a matter for deliberation, a process which will usually not be aided by appeal to “classical first principles.” Moral obligation is, in this view, to be thrown in with a lot of other considerations, rather than automatically trump them. (CIS 194)16 The liberal ironist, then, must negotiate between her desire to recreate herself and her desire to remain a good liberal.17 Moreover, her ironist urges may tempt her to recast her liberal values. Nietzsche, for Rorty, provides the epitome of a commitment to private self creation. To fail as a poet – and thus, for Nietzsche, to fail as a human being – is to accept somebody else’s description of oneself, to execute a previously prepared program, to write, at most, elegant variations on previously written poems. So the only way to trace home the causes of one’s being as one is would be to tell a story about one’s causes in a new language. (CIS 28) These causes that must be retold, presumably, would include inherited liberal values. The urge for self creation, then, would provide a constant temptation to redescribe the inherited values of social progress, justice and liberalism18.

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In this section, I have shown that Rorty’s conception of the liberal ironist who divides her vocabulary into public and private domains is not incoherent, but is dangerously unstable. On the one hand, her commitment to liberalism entails that she protect the final vocabulary upon which liberalism depends from ironic redescription. On the other, her desire for autonomy tempts her to reject her identity as a liberal and reconceive all inherited vocabulary. The liberal ironist, then, teeters on the edge of a precipice. One way to rescue the liberal ironist from her dilemma would be to return to metaphysics, to attempt to locate a transhistorical non question begging ground which she may appeal to as justification for her liberal commitments. This, of course, is a solution Rorty would never accept. Further, it is not the only solution to her dilemma. In the concluding section, I will examine the case of the antifoundationalist Bodhisattva, the ironic saint of Madhyamaka Buddhism, who both rejects intrinsic essence of reality, and remains firm in his conviction that the elimination of suffering is the only thing worth striving for. 2. Why the Ironic Bodhisattva is not Divided Central to Rorty’s conception of liberalism is his insistence that for a liberal, cruelty is the worst thing you can do. Pain, for Rorty, is nonlinguistic, and the ability to experience pain is shared amongst humans and animals. (CIS 88, 94,177) However, human beings have our own distinctive kind of pain, which Rorty calls humiliation. Humans can be “humiliated by the forcible tearing down of the particular structures of language and belief in which they were socialized (or which they pride themselves on having formed for themselves)” (CIS, 177). Rorty offers the example of a small child who takes delight in his toys, but then realizes his possessions look ridiculous next to those of a rich child. (CIS, 89) Humiliation occurs when our final vocabulary is made to look ridiculous by another’s redescription. All humans and animals, then suffer, and humans can suffer from the distinctive pain of humiliation. However, there is no transhistorical reason why we must infer from this fact that we ought to care about the suffering of others. For Rorty, “feelings of solidarity 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” (CIS 192). One is a liberal, then, because one has adopted a final vocabulary which recognizes the suffering of others as important to us, words such as “equality” and phrases like “universal human rights.” However, we could have focused on other similarities as being the morally significant ones. Romans, for instance, focused on Roman citizenship as the distinguishing factor for who was worthy of legal protection. Foreigners, by contrast, might be fed to lions without moral compunction.19 As we have seen in the last section, the liberal ironist’s commitment to reducing suffering must also compete with her desire for private self creation. Irony requires redescribing final vocabulary, and redescribing final vocabulary

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of other persons often humiliates them. Further, some private identities require inflicting physical and psychological pain on others. Not only the sadist and the boxer, but also the comedian and satirist inflict pain and humiliation on others for their own satisfaction. The Madhyamaka Buddhist, like Rorty, would affirm both that pain is nonlinguistic experience, and that there is no transhistorical essence that can be appealed to as grounds for our ethical commitments. However, a Buddhist would claim that Rorty’s analysis of pain is impoverished. For the Buddhist, if we pay close enough attention, we will see that all of our ordinary experience is a subtle form of suffering. As a result, for the Madhyamaka, the dilemma of the liberal ironist does not arise. This is because she is not tempted by the siren call of private self creation. The Bodhisattva is not tempted to adopt private identities conflicting with her commitment to removing suffering because she realizes all such identities would be permeated with suffering themselves. I next briefly analyse Madhyamaka antifoundationalism, and then pass to a more detailed treatment of the Buddhist analysis of suffering, and finally to an account of how this analysis undercuts the desire for private self creation.20 3. Madhyamaka Antifoundationalism One of the most famous Madhyamaka arguments against essence (svabh
va) is given by the 7th century Buddhist master Candrak
rti. In the argument, Candrak
rti argues a chariot has no essence, or intrinsic existence (svabh
va), that is it does not exist independently of its relations with other things. Instead, it exists only as a result of conceptual labeling by a mind in accordance with its purpose for human affairs. The conclusion is that chariots have no independent essence; “chariot” is merely a term we label a certain configuration of chariot parts that serves our purposes. This result is generalized to all other objects, including persons. 6: 151 We cannot claim a chariot is other than its parts, Nor that it is their owner, nor identical with them. It is not in its parts; its parts are not contained in it. It’s not the mere collection of the parts nor yet their shape. 6: 158 Thus this sevenfold reasoning reveals, In ultimate or worldy terms, that nothing is established. But if phenomena are left as found, unanalyzed, They are indeed imputed in dependence on their parts. (Padmakara, 89–90)

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The underlying assumption of Candrak
rti’s analysis is that if an object has an essence (svabh
va), we should be able to locate it under conceptual analysis. Another way of stating this point is to claim that there must be sufficient and necessary identity conditions of being a chariot. However, no such essential nature of the chariot can be located. Candrak
rti makes this point by considering the relation between the chariot and its parts. If an object had an intrinsic identity/essence, then we should be able to state the relation between this essence and its parts. However, he argues, this is impossible. Verse 151 considers the seven possibilities, assumed to be exhaustive, of the relation between the chariot and its parts. First, we cannot claim a chariot is other than its parts, for then the chariot would exist independently of its parts, which is absurd. Nor does the chariot own the parts, nor is it identical to them. If it owned the parts, there would have to be something that could be named “chariot” that stood apart from its parts as their possessor. However, no such item can be located. If the chariot were identical to its parts, then when a part was removed, the chariot would cease to exist. But this obviously is not the case. If the chariot was contained in its parts, then it could be located somewhere amongst the parts, but on analysis no such chariot can be found. Nor can the parts of the chariot be contained in the chariot, for we can identify no independently subsisting chariot in which chariot parts are locatable. The chariot cannot be said to be simply a collection of chariot parts, for simply throwing the requisite chariot parts in a heap does not create a chariot. Finally, the shape of the chariot is not the chariot, since a cutout of a chariot also has the shape of a chariot.21 If the chariot had an essence, a whatness that it was independently of our purposes, then we should be able to specify its relation to its parts. However, such a relationship cannot be specified. In verse 158, Candrak
rti draws his conclusion. Logical analysis reveals the objects of our everyday world have no intrinsic essence. However, such phenomena continue to function in everyday life. We should conclude, therefore, that such phenomena are merely imputed in dependence upon their parts, as an aid to our practical activity in the world. The term “chariot” names a useful configuration of chariot parts that may be used to engage in the function of rapid movement. Moreover, each of the chariot’s parts can be subjected to a similar analysis. The relation between the wheel of the chariot and its spokes and hub, for instance, cannot be specified, and therefore the term “wheel” also is merely a useful designation to label an arrangement of parts that has a useful function. The argument by which the inherent existence of the chariot was deconstructed could be applied to any other entity, including persons. All entities exist only by convention, in dependence on their parts, and conceptual labeling motivated by pragmatic purposes.22 A comprehensive evaluation of the similarities and differences between Madhyamaka and Rortian antiessentailism is beyond the scope of this essay. However, we can briefly note that Candrak
rti joins Rorty in insisting that any

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view of language mapping onto a mind independent universe is ill conceived. Instead, Candrak
rti insists language is used only for pragmatic effect: Words are not like policemen on the prowl: we are not subject to their independence. On the contrary, their truth lies in their efficacy (akti); they take their meaning from the intention of the one using them. (Sprung, 38) Like Rorty, then, for Candrak
rti arguments do not attempt to obtain a translinguistic truth, but rather are used for practical purposes. The wise do not give a reasoned account of the everyday experience of the ordinary man. Rather, adopting for the sake of enlightening others, and as a means only, what passes for reasoning in the everyday world, they work for the enlightenment of the ordinary man. (Sprung, 50–51) Madhyamakas like Candrak
rti, then, are antifoundationalist about language in holding the universe will not mediate between competing truth claims. Rather, language is used as a tool to convince others of one’s own views. So like Rorty, the Madhyamaka claims no transhistorical essence of humans or the universe need be appealed to as grounds for our ethical commitments. Further, like Rorty, the Madhyamaka is passionately committed to the welfare of other beings. Rorty’s humanism takes the form of political liberalism, a commitment to reducing suffering and increasing individual liberty. By contrast, the Madhyamaka does not focus on individual liberty, and as a monastic order, places relatively little emphasis on social reform. However, like Rorty, the Madhyamaka emphasizes the importance of removing suffering. In fact, the Madhyamaka’s commitment is much more radical than that of Rorty. Consider two of the concluding verses of the 8th century Madhyamaka, ntideva’s Bodhicary
vat
ra: 10: 55: For as long as space endure and for as long as the world lasts, may I live dispelling the miseries of the world. 10: 56: Whatever suffering there is for the world, may it all ripen upon me. May the world find happiness through all the virtue of the Bodhisattvas. (Wallace and Wallace, 144) The Bodhisattva is a Buddhist saint who is reborn countless times, working to lead all other sentient beings from suffering. In verse 55, ntideva prays to take rebirth until all suffering is eliminated. In verse 56, he strengthens his conviction, asking to take on all suffering of all sentient beings. Sentient beings for the Buddhist include all animals.23 So the Bodhisattva radicalizes Rorty’s liberal commitments. Rorty wants to raise sensitivity to the suffering of

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others as a means of reducing cruelty. The Bodhisattva wants to do this as well, but she is sensitive to the suffering of all living beings, commits to removing all suffering whatsoever, and accepts an expansive view of human potential, including the possibility of multiple rebirths in which this can be done. Of course, Rorty would not share the Buddhists belief in rebirth, nor her optimism that suffering may be completely removed. However, Rorty would certainly endorse ntideva’s commitment to increasing our sensitivity to the suffering of others. 8: 90: One should first earnestly mediate on the equality of oneself and others in this way: “All equally experience suffering and happiness, and I must protect them as I do myself.” (Wallace and Wallace, 100) Here, ntideva urges us to open ourselves to the realization that the pain experienced by other persons is like our own, in feeling negative. Rorty might well add the Bodhicary
vat
ra to the list of texts he affirms as being efficacious in sensitizing us to the suffering of others. I concluded the first section of this essay by highlighting the precarious position Rorty’s liberal ironist finds herself in. On the one hand, she is committed to the goal of liberalism, including reducing suffering. On the other, she affirms the importance of irony, of redescribing one’s inherited values and conceiving one’s identity anew. The ironist’s desire for autonomy, I suggested, will tempt her to abandon the final vocabulary upon which liberalism depends. Like the liberal ironist, the Madhyamaka Bodhisattva is an antifoundationalist; she realizes her final vocabulary, terms like compassion (karun
), liberation (nirv
na), and altruistic intention to liberate others from pain (bodhicitta), are adopted for pragmatic purposes, and are not grounded in the transcendent nature of the universe. The ironic Bodhisattva, however, is not tempted to abandon her commitment to freeing others from pain by temptations to indulge in personal self creation. This is because her analysis of suffering runs much deeper than does Rorty. The Buddhist understands the nature of ordinary human experience to be suffering; idiosyncratic private fantasies are not alluring to her, for she realizes any such desire merely continues the unending cycle of pain. For the Madhyamaka Buddhist, the only identity worth affirming is one in which the public and private come together: that of the spiritual saint working tirelessly to eliminate the suffering of all beings. 4. The Buddhist analysis of Suffering (duhkha) The Sanskrit word duhkha is often translated suffering, but this is somewhat misleading, since duhkha can also refer to much subtler unsatisfactory experience. The traditional Buddhist analysis of duhkha (suffering) is divided into three types. First, there is the suffering of suffering (duhkha duhkha), intense

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physical or mental pain, the kinds of experiences we generally refer to as suffering. Second, there is the suffering of change (viparinama duhkha), the suffering we experience as a result of losing something we care about. In this sense, even things experienced at the moment as joyful are also unsatisfactory (duhkha), since they are the conditions for suffering in the future. Ice cream tastes good, but it can lead to cavities. Close relationships bring joy, but such happiness is unstable, since all relationships must end in separation, or ultimately death. The final type of suffering, sankhara duhkha, is the most subtle. Often translated as the suffering of conditioned existence, this is the unsatisfactory condition of existing in a universe that is transient and unstable.24 This is the sense in which, for a Buddhist, all existence is suffering (sarva duhkham). Consider this verse from the early Pali cannon: 555: It’s only suffering that comes to be Suffering that stands and falls away Nothing but suffering comes to be, Nothing but suffering ceases. (Samyutta 230)25 Our experience of the world is one of objects that serve our needs. However, ultimately the elements which make up these objects are all unsatisfactory (duhkha), because they are unstable and give way. This is true of all the events, persons, and objects that we naively believe bring us joy. 25: It is as with a hungry dog who gnaws a bone; Thought tasted, never give they satisfaction. Since they are thus a mass of dry, old bones Who, self-possessed, would take delight in sense-desires? 29: Gained at the price of many bitter efforts, They are destroyed here often in a moment. Since thus they are mere dream-enjoyments, Who, self-possessed, would take delight in sense-desires? (Conze, 85–86) We think pursuing empirical enjoyments will bring satisfaction, but the nature of existence is that temporary satisfaction will always give way to future craving. To use a modern example, ordinary beings are like heroin addicts. When she has the drug she needs, an addict goes through periods of bliss and rapture (viparinama duhkha) followed by the agony of withdraw from the drug (duhkha duhkha). However, from an outside perspective, the whole series of seeking and taking the drug all shows up as a horribly impoverished way of existing (samsk
ra-duhkha). Likewise, all of our experience is contaminated by

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a subtle clinging towards inherently transient elements of experience that can never bring real satisfaction. The ironic Bodhisattva, then, is not tempted to indulge in private self creation, because she knows that acting out novel identities will be saturated by suffering. The only project that is truly worthwhile is that of removing suffering. The Madhyamaka author, ntideva often explicitly invokes the inevitability of death and the unsatisfactory nature of human existence as ways of undercutting motivation to undertake any project other than those conducive to liberating oneself and others from suffering. 2: 60: What of value has remained with me from earlier experience which have disappeared, and engrossed in which I neglected the counsel of spiritual mentors?” (Wallace and Wallace, 30) 6:59: Even though I have acquired many possessions and have enjoyed pleasures for a long time, I shall depart empty-handed and naked as if I had been robbed.” (Wallace and Wallace, 68) Pleasure and satisfactions experienced are transient, and do not bring lasting joy. Further, death, always, approaches. 8: 33: A person is born alone and also dies alone. No one else has a share in one’s agony. What is the use of loved ones who create hindrances? (Wallace and Wallace, 93) In the following verses, ntideva asks us to imagine ourselves in a charnel ground, contemplating the rotting corpse of our beloved. 8: 46: Jealous one, why do you not protect what was guarded from the glances of others, as it is being eaten now? 8: 51: You had this passion for it even when it was covered, so why do you dislike it when it is uncovered? If you have no use for it, why do you caress it when it is covered? 8: 52: If you have no passion for the impure, why do you embrace someone else, who is a skeleton of bones tied by sinews and smeared with a mire of flesh? Rorty claims that humans are susceptible to a certain type of pain, humiliation. We are humiliated when the final vocabulary we have inherited, or chosen, is made to appear worthless. (CIS 90) The final vocabulary of most humans includes terms like romantic love, marital fidelity, and passion. Here, ntideva offers a redescription of romantic love intended to humiliate us, in

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Rorty’s sense. Romantic love is seen as a farce, since it is conducted between two beings that will soon perish. Putting our happiness in social institutions like marriage, ntideva points out, is relying on bodies and minds that will soon be eaten by worms in a graveyard. Although such humiliation causes suffering, ntideva is trying to humiliate us to reduce our pain in the long run. It is only when we accept that the desires of ordinary existence can bring no lasting happiness that we can focus on the Buddhist path to salvation which can remove all pain. Rorty and the Madhyamaka both accept that pain is nonlinguistic experience. However, for Rorty, the fact that we suffer offers relatively little constraint on the final vocabulary we can adopt. Pain experienced is balanced out by the pleasure of privately pursuing idiosyncratic fantasies. By contrast, the Madhyamaka understands all ordinary experience to be pervaded by suffering. Such an understanding humiliates, in Rorty’s sense; it strips away the significance of most of the final vocabulary upon which private pursuit of satisfaction depends. His understanding of suffering, then, constrains the Madhyamaka in the final vocabulary he accepts. Only terms relevant to eliminating this pervasive suffering, terms like compassion and desire for liberation, can be seen as worthwhile once the unsatisfactory nature of our experience has been understood. We can understand, now, why, unlike the liberal ironist, the Bodhisattva is not divided. She does not alternate between her commitment to the welfare of others, and desires for novel self creation, because she understands all such indulgences take place within the cycle of suffering characterized by continual birth and death. The only private identity worth affirming, for the Bodhisattva, is the public identity of working to remove the suffering of all sentient beings. Rorty can respond that the Buddhist account is nihilistic, overestimating the unsatisfactory nature of existence, and underestimating the aesthetic joy of ironic redescription. Candrak
rti and ntideva, in turn, will reply that Rorty has not paid enough attention to suffering, that belonging to others and his own.

NOTES 1. See Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature for a detailed description of how Rorty came to accept these views. 2. Although Rorty is not explicit about this, it’s helpful to identify two levels of the goal of self creation. For many people in a liberal society, this means for the most part, choosing amongst identities offered to one by society. A student might study to become a lawyer, or a teacher, and in his free time might take up established recreational activities like bowling or going to the movies. Generally, such persons would not be ironists, and would not pursue the goal of autonomy, since to a large extent they accept the final vocabularies they inherit. Such persons would still benefit from the liberal’s commitment to allowing persons to choose their own identities. The ironist, by contrast, is not content with fitting into the mold she has inherited; she creates a new mold for her

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identity. This distinction allows us to make sense of Rorty’s claim that “in the ideal liberal society, the intellectuals would still be ironists, although the nonintellectuals would not” (CIS, 87). 3. Another major influence on Rorty’s conception of Liberalism is Judith Shklar, whose definition of liberals as “people for whom cruelty is the worst thing” he cites with approval. See CIS, 74. 4. Rorty’s commitment to the value of personal self creation, and his commitment to the liberal values of democracy are tightly linked. Liberalism is a means of ensuring everyone has the opportunity to develop their identities as they choose, constrained only by an agreement to let others also develop as they choose. “The social glue holding together the ideal liberal society described in the previous chapter consists in little more than a consensus that the point of social organization is to let everybody have a chance at self-creation to the best of his or her abilities, and that that goal requires, besides peace and wealth, the standard “bourgeois freedoms” (CIS, 84–85). 5. Rorty goes on to claim “Irony seems inherently a private matter.” (CIS, 87) For reasons that will become apparent as we progress, I think this must be interpreted as an overstatement. For the liberal ironist, irony needs to remain a private matter, but there is no reason it cannot be applied to the public sector. 6. As Rorty puts it, “What binds societies together are common vocabularies and common hopes.” What characterizes modern liberal societies is “the hope that life will eventually be freer, less cruel, more leisured, richer in goods and experiences, not just for our descendants but for everybody’s descendants” (CIS 86). The ironist realizes these hopes can be made to look bad by redescription. Nietzsche offered descriptions wherein lessening cruelty was a sign of humanities retrogression, rather than its progress. A liberal ironist, then, must ensure her redescriptions do not corrode public liberal hope. 7. Rorty offers Proust as the prototypical example of the private ironist. See CIS, 98–103. 8. In CIS, Rorty places great emphasis on Mill in support of his belief that liberal government should be concerned with reducing cruelty and respecting private freedom. Therefore, it would be easy to assume that Rorty intended, by the public sphere, the sphere of politics. Nancy Fraser, amongst others, has taken this to be his meaning. See Fraser (1988). However, in later works, he explains that by public he means anything “having to do with the suffering of other human beings.” (Rorty 1998, 307–308, footnote 2). I think that such a broad understanding of the public realm is problematic, since it would seem that most ironizing would, to some extent, contribute to the suffering of other humans. Rorty’s exemplar of privatized irony, Proust’s novel Remembrance of Things Past, might well have created considerable suffering amongst those who felt humiliated by their depiction within. Privatizing irony, then, would be, for the most part, impossible. Perhaps the most charitable way of viewing Rorty’s proposed distinction, is to hold that we ought to minimize the suffering our ironizing does to others. This means that final vocabulary important to others should be respected, to the extent this is possible. This would, as I have argued in this essay, mean that a liberal ironist would not undermine socially useful political final vocabulary. 9. See also Koopman (2007), O’Neill (2000), and Marsonet (1996) for similar complaints. 10. Cf. CIS 77. “[The ironist] thinks of final vocabularies as poetic achievements rather than as fruits of diligent inquiry according to antecedently formulated criteria.” 11. Cf. CIS 37–38.

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12. Likewise, Rorty conceives of the writing of Nabakov and Orwell as serving to sensitize us to the suffering of others. See CIS chaps. 7–8. 13. Cf. Marsonet, 395. 14. See here especially CIS chaps. 3 and 4. One of Rorty’s arguments for this view is that abandoning our belief in God has done nothing to corrode our liberal commitments. Our metaphysical beliefs, presumably, could also be abandoned without ill effect. See CIS 85–88. Although I am sympathetic to Rorty’s views in this regard, it is not the purpose of this essay to evaluate them. Rather, I am interested in the tension arising between Rorty’s merely historically contingent commitments to both liberal ideas and private Romantic self creation. 15. Rorty makes this point by developing the contrast between the private ironist novelist, and the ironist theorist. The ironist theorist wants “the sublime and ineffable, not just the beautiful and novel – something incommensurable with the past, not simply the past recaptured through rearrangement and redescription.” They are not satisfied with “the effable and relative beauty of rearrangement,” but instead desire “the ineffable and absolute sublimity of the Wholly Other; they want Total Revolution.” The ironist theorist will reject the final vocabulary upon which liberalism is founded. By contrast, the ironist novelist is “content with mere difference.” They realize that “private autonomy can be gained by redescribing one’s past in a way which had not occurred to the past. It does not require apocalyptic novelty of the sort which ironist theory demands” (CIS, 101). For the sake of liberal values, then, Rorty asks ironists to take the ironist novelist as an exemplar, and refrain from the corrosive public irony of the theorist. 16. See also CIS 197. 17. Also helpful here is Rorty’s account in “Trotsky and the Wild Orchids” in Philosophy and Social Hope, esp. 12–13. 18. See also CIS, 73–74. “The ironist spends her time worrying about the possibility that she has been initiated into the wrong tribe, taught to play the wrong language game. She worries that the process of socialization which turned her into a human being by giving her a language may have given her the wrong language, and so turned her into the wrong kind of human being.” 19. This, also, provides the answer to the objection sometimes made that Rorty contradicts his anti-essentialism by construing the ability to experience pain and humiliation as the essence of humans. For Rorty, all humans do experience pain, but it is merely a result of historical contingencies that we focus on this fact as being morally significant. Saying there is no essence to being human, for Rorty, does not mean there are no features all (or almost all) humans share. Rather, it means there is no transcultural reason we must focus on any one of these shared features as being particularly significant. See Garland, 212–213 and Haber, 70, for versions of this objection. 20. Rorty acknowledges that there will be some persons “for whom the search for private perfection coincides with the project of living for others” (CIS, 49). Rorty’s own example is that of the Christian saint. However, the Christian saint is not an antifoundationalist: he grounds his commitments to others in the transcendent. The Bodhisattva, by contrast, is an antifoundationalist. One purpose of this section, then, is to illustrate how one’s private and public lives may be unified, even without resorting to foundationalist assumptions. 21. Candrak
rti and Rorty are alike in rejecting the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic properties. As Rorty puts it, we need to reject the “distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic – between the inner core of X and a peripheral area of X which is constituted by the fact that X stands in certain relations to the other items which make up

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the universe. . . For pragmatists, there is no such thing as a nonrelational feature of X, any more than there is such a thing as the intrinsic nature, the essence, of X. So there can be no such thing as a description which matches the way X really is, apart from its relation to human needs or consciousness or language.” (Rorty, 1999, 51). To say an entity has no nonrelational features is to say, with Candrak
rti, that is has no intrinsic existence (svabh
va). 22. The Madhyamaka, therefore, is antifoundationalist. However, it is not clear that a Madhyamaka is an ironist exactly in Rorty’s sense. For Rorty, the ironist must have continuing doubts about the effectiveness of his final vocabulary. A Bodhisattva, certainly, seems to have no doubts about whether her commitment to liberating all beings from suffering is a worthy goal Nevertheless, as already argued, the Madhyamaka does not think the terms of her final vocabulary correspond to any mind independent reality. Further, she is willing to adopt alternate final vocabulary when to do so will help liberate other beings. The Buddha, for instance, is held to have offered teachings contradicting core Buddhist tenets as a skillful means for the sake of his audience. See Hungtington (1989) for a Rortian inspired reading of Candrak
rti. 23. Rorty points out that humans share with animals the ability to feel pain. He suggests that we can either extend moral vocabulary to cover animals, or identify a distinctive kind of human pain to act as the morally relevant factor. Rorty chooses the second option, identifying humiliation as a kind of pain experienced only by humans. Buddhists, in contrast, choose the first, extending moral vocabulary to cover animals. See CIS 92 and 177. 24. On the three types of suffering, see Dgha Nik
ya (iii, 217). 25. Much of what follows draws upon sources from the early Buddhist canon. Early Buddhists were not necessarily antifoundationalist; however, the early Buddhist analysis of experience as being pervaded by suffering has been accepted by the Madhyamaka.

REFERENCES Bhikkhu Bodhi, trans. 2000. The Connected Discourses of the Buddha (Samyutta Nik
ya). Boston: Wisdom Publications. Cndrakirti. 2004. Madhyamak
vatara. Padmakara Translation Group, trans. Boston: Shambhala. Cndrakirti. 1979. Lucid Exposition of the Middle Way: The Essential Chapters from the Prasannapad
of Candrakrti, trans. Mervyn Spring and T. R. V. Murti. Boulder, Col.: Prajn Press. Conze, Edward. 1956. Buddhist Meditation. London: George Allen and Unwin. Foelber, Robert E. 1994. “Can an Historicist Sustain a Diehard Commitment to Liberal Democracy? The Case of Rorty’s Liberal Ironist.” Southern Journal of Philosophy 32: 19–48. Fraser, Nancy. 1988. “Solidarity or Singularity? Richard Rorty Between Romanticism and Technocracy.” Praxis International 8: 257–272.

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Garland, William. 1996. “Private Self-Creation and Public Solidarity: A Critique of Rorty’s Vision of Human Life.” Southwestern Philosophy Review 12: 207–215. Haber, Honi. 1993. “Richard Rorty’s Failed Politics.” Social Epistemology 1: 61–76. Haliburton, Rachel. 1997. “Richard Rorty and the Problem of Cruelty.” Philosophy and Social Criticism 23.1: 49–69. Huntington, C. W., Jr., with Geshé Namgyal Wangchen. 1989. The Emptiness of Emptiness: An Introduction to Early Indian M
dhyamika. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Koopman, Colin. 2007. “Rorty’s Moral Philosophy for Liberal Democratic Culture.” Contemporary Pragmatism 4.2: 45–64. Marsonet, Michele. 1996. “Richard Rorty’s Ironic Liberalism: A Critical Analysis.” Journal of Philosophical Research. 21: 391–403. O’Neill, Shane. 2000. “Private Irony and the Public Hope of Richard Rorty’s Liberalism.” In Public and Private, ed. Mauizio Passerin and Ursula Vogel. London and New York: Routledge. Rorty, Richard. 1998. Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Rorty, Richard. 1999. Philosophy and Social Hope. London: Penguin Books. Rorty, Richard. 2008. Contingency, Irony, Solidarity. New York: Cambridge University Press. Rorty, Richard. 2009. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 39th anniversary edn. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. ntideva. 1997. A Guide to the Bodhisattva Way of Life (Bodhicary
vat
ra), ed. Vesna Wallace and Alan Wallace. Ithaca, N.Y.: Snow Lion Publications. Walshe, Maurice, trans. 1995. The Long Discourses of the Buddha (Dgha Nik
ya). Boston: Wisdom Publications.

Stephen Harris PhD candidate, Department of Philosophy University of New Mexico MSC 03 2140 Albuquerque, NM 87131 United States

Contemporary Pragmatism Vol. 7, No. 2 (December 2010), 91–103

Editions Rodopi © 2010

On Applying Ethics: Who’s Afraid of Plato’s Cave? Eric Thomas Weber

The present paper is a response to Gerald Gaus, who has argued that philosophers should not apply ethics. After a critical evaluation of Gaus’s arguments, I present several ways which Sidney Hook has outlined for philosophers to bring their skills to bear fruitfully on public policy matters. Following Hook’s list, I offer three of my own suggestions for further ways in which philosophers can positively contribute to the application of ethics and of philosophy generally. Finally, I propose the venue of consultancy as a way in which philosophers can begin to use the many skills they have to offer for confronting the problems people face outside of the academy.

In “Should Philosophers ‘Apply’ Ethics?” Gerald Gaus (2005) presents four challenges to applied philosophy. The present paper is a response to each of his challenges. In closing the paper, I summarize the helpful ways in which Sidney Hook has suggested that philosophers can contribute to discussions of public policy, which is my area of applied ethics, and I offer three of my own ideas about what else philosophers have to offer. Finally, I mention briefly two of the ways I believe philosophers can learn and help others through an engagement with people outside of academic philosophy departments. I believe and will argue that philosophers can contribute to public policy and some ought to do so. In A Community of Individuals, John Lachs diagnoses a great challenge for philosophers who seek grant funding (Lachs 2003, 9). The problem is that so often philosophers undermine one another and fail to agree on even the fundamental assumptions of each others’ work. I believe that by and large Lachs is right. The fact that we cannot agree on even the basics of philosophy has given other disciplines some weight to their belief that philosophy does not achieve new knowledge, while their own fields, building and refining basic shared understandings, do yield it. While there is a danger in undermining others’ work, I think that there are two reasons to engage in it. First, some people hotly challenge the bases of my work, which is at least psychologically motivating. Second, and more seriously, as a philosopher I welcome the challenge to my basic assumptions that philosophers levy. It seems to me that if

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I know well enough what I am talking about, I must have thought about serious challenges, or I might know my field and justify my work better if I recognize the most substantive challenges my work might face. Thus, while I think that Professor Lachs is right about a problem plaguing the field of philosophy, I feel compelled to address a philosopher who believes that I am wrong not only with regard to an assumption underlying one of my current projects, but about even the goal of my very employment. I am Assistant Professor of Public Policy Leadership at the University of Mississippi. As a philosopher, I was hired to teach ethics and public policy, along with critical thinking and other political philosophy and applied ethics courses. My work and my job, therefore, are grounded on the idea that students of public policy might benefit from the application of philosophical insight in the areas of ethics and political philosophy to real-world problems in public policy. I hope it is understandable, then, when I say that Gerald Gaus is someone whom I must answer. Professor Gaus, James E. Rogers Professor of Philosophy at the University of Arizona, published an essay which he has posted prominently on his academic website. His essay “Should Philosophers ‘Apply Ethics’?” has the suggestive follow-up question immediately after the title: “By ‘applying ethics’, do philosophers actually succeed in corrupting philosophy?” This article, published in Think in 2005, is evidence of a changing of the guard in the field of academic philosophy. Some who held the purse strings and influence of the mainstream philosophy departments tended to dismiss ways of thinking not their own at academic meetings and in hiring practices. So tragic is the change from this practice for Gaus that he opens his essay with a discussion of the job market for philosophers. Gaus writes, “ ‘Applied ethics’ is the growth industry in philosophy. Many philosophy departments, starved for students, have found a new, and apparently lucrative, market in teaching applied ethics” (Gaus 2005, 63). So tenuous is the field of applied ethics that Gaus uses scare-quotes around the term several times that he mentions it. Also, his implication is clear that departments exhibiting growth in applied ethics were ones generally that were unsuccessful in attracting interest in philosophy. The further implication in reference to the market as lucrative is also a sly way of slandering applied philosophers, suggesting avarice. Gaus further diminishes applied ethics programs when he writes that “then there are the ‘problems’ of applied ethics” which he believes to be a fanciful and opportunistic description of real life problems only set in this way to benefit mediocre, false, and even “corrupt” philosophers (Gaus 2005, 63). Stated most directly, Gaus is arguing that unsuccessful philosophers starved for success are chasing money in the name of applying ethics. One response I could have to Gaus’s way of thinking about the movement of applied philosophy would be to ignore him and to go on with my work. While I certainly do my work, I also take Gaus’s challenge seriously for three reasons. He is extremely intelligent. He focuses an entire essay on arguing a view that

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challenges the fundamental assumptions of my work. Finally, I believe I can gain from Gaus’s challenges if I can answer them. While it may come as no surprise, I wholeheartedly disagree with him. The quick of Gaus’s challenge is that he conceives of philosophy as only one half of what I see in Plato’s call. The philosopher must exit the cave into the light, to be sure. He or she must not forget as Gaus seems to do, however, the philosopher’s responsibilities to those left behind, nor the reasons why we seek to leave the cave. To embrace the philosopher’s responsibilities includes venturing back into the murky cave. Now, on my own account, it may not be necessary for each and every philosopher to do so, but it is the case that some ought to do it. Sidney Hook made a similar point in his essay “Philosophy and Public Policy” (Hook 1970). Not everyone must be a fireman or a police officer, but some people must be. Gaus’s first challenge concerns what he thinks philosophers should be doing. If they are good philosophers, he believes that they should be pursuing two things, truth and justification. Presumably, philosophers should be pursuing philosophical truths. If we do not classify which kinds of truth we should be pursuing and which kinds of justification, I should be able to get tenure by counting the fibers in my rug, offering justification for my beliefs about the numbers and kinds of fibers present. One thing is clear in Gaus’s understanding of the motivations of proper philosophers. He believes that philosophy’s goal is “to get things right, not to make the philosopher (or others), richer, healthier or happier” (Gaus 2005, 63). In other words, philosophy should not be undertaken for the benefits it brings. Gaus does not clarify why it is we are after truth, though many answers could be suggested here, such as that we seek it for the curiosity it satisfies. In any case, according to Gaus truth should be pursued even if it will end in achieving less happiness. Here I take issue with Gaus’s assumptions. First, his paper does not specify that counting rug fibers is insufficient for good philosophy. There is a reason it would be silly to do it. It almost always does not matter! Unless a murder occurred in my hotel room, or unless the rug in my room is to be appraised for replacement value, what could the number of fibers possibly contribute to human happiness or enhanced, helpful knowledge? The answer seems to be nothing. Essentially my challenge to Gaus is that we inevitably value certain areas of inquiry over others, and we do so for a reason beyond curiosity. Interest infuses curiosity, and most generally we are interested in things that make us happier to learn about. My second response is again to invoke Plato. His message is familiar, in the voice of Socrates: “the life which is unexamined is not worth living.” It seems plain to me here that to engage in philosophy involves an activity which is undertaken for a crucial element of happiness. If I want to avoid a life not worth living, it seems I must engage in philosophy, in self-reflection. Thus, if one wants to help others to live more meaningful lives, one way to help is to bring philosophy to them. If I think that philosophy contributes to rendering lives worthy of being lived, it is difficult to see the illegitimacy of aiming

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philosophy at the improvement of the lives of people. My assumption, which I think is right, is that a life worth living is better than a life that is not. The lingering question to which Gaus returns in concluding his essay is whether in thinking as I do I am corrupting philosophy. Gaus explains that to corrupt philosophy is to “sacrifice the idea that philosophy is impartial in that its goal is simply to get things right” (Gaus 2005, 64). Here I believe that Gaus would need to say more before I could properly address his concern. It appears to me that he is identifying a way of thinking about philosophy with the class of all good philosophy, and then calling all other ways of thinking about philosophy bad. An assumption underlies his challenge here. I believe that Gaus must have some answer to why it is we pursue truth. Why do we want it? The quick answer I have suggested is that we are curious beings. It is our inclination to look and find things out. If we often learned things that hurt us, however, might our inclinations not have conditioned human beings against inquiry? Was it not the greatest strength of human beings over other animals and natural and social challenges that we can inquire into problems and fix them? It seems to me that inquiry is our most powerful tool for living happier, longer, more pleasant lives, even if some people employ inquiry in the hopes of hurting others. A second assumption is worth attention here, though it may be a wellworn critique. If one asks how many coffee cups I have on my desk, the concept of there being a right answer is straightforward. There may be debate about whether to include disposable cups along with the reusable ones, but whichever approach one chooses, there could be a correct answer that follows. When one inquires into beauty, however, or into better ways of living, even among some easy distinctions of right and wrong there often arise many issues about which it is difficult to think that correctness is the appropriate measure of meaningful inquiry, versus categories of better or worse, or in some cases equally reasonable yet conflicting answers. Just as in the difference between deductive reasoning and inductive, certain contexts appear to have categorical separations and others have differences of degree. If this is true, “getting things right” appears to me to be a way of thinking that inclines towards the categorical. Some philosophers may think that is better philosophy, but this is by no means self-evident. In fact, if it is right that some answers in philosophy are better and worse rather than right and wrong, then applying the “getting things right” standard seems to get things wrong. To summarize my response to the accusation of corruption, if I agree with these assumptions that Gaus announces uncritically, then surely I would consider myself to be a corrupter of philosophy. For the reasons I have mentioned, I reject these premises. I also wonder how Gaus reconciles his own inner demons when he publishes work in books on applied ethics, such as “Dirty Hands” in The Blackwell Companion to Applied Ethics (Gaus 2003). Gaus is not alone in committing what Habermas has called a “performative contradiction” (Habermas 1992). It is clear, however, that Gaus is presenting no joke in his essay. Anecdotally speaking, I have met many philosophers who have expressed

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to me their views that Gaus embodies in his “Should Philosophers ‘Apply Ethics’?” essay. As a result, then, it would seem that Gaus’s critique here, though flawed, should raise questions about why it is he appears to participate in this activity which he condemns as bad philosophy. Gaus’s second challenge to applied ethics concerns the problems of bias. He writes, If philosophy is to possess intellectual activity – if it is not to be (merely) a playful activity, then it cannot rest content to propose plausible philosophical explanations... If what you want to believe is relevant, then philosophical positions will, at least in part, reflect different wants... Or, to be less kind, philosophy will be ideological: the persuasiveness of your philosophical explanation will depend on the wants, values, and ends of your advocacy. (Gaus 2005, 64) There are several steps to Gaus’s challenge here. First, he implies that it is important for philosophy not to be “merely” playful. It seems reasonable to me to think that there can be good philosophy that is merely playful. That depends, of course, on the parameters of what is mere. How do we isolate any activity that is “merely” playful. Children running outside may be playful, but they are also exercising. Couch potatoes watching mere entertainment may learn some things from watching Jeopardy. Second, it is unclear what Gaus means by “resting content.” I once heard an essay at a conference that had a conditional thesis whose antecedent, it seemed to me could not possibly be right or better than another way of thinking. I asked the philosopher why on Earth he wanted to make that argument. He answered that he was curious about the subject. In my own way of thinking, there may be other more fruitful areas of inquiry, but what he was doing was acceptable philosophy. It is Gaus who raises the more controversial claims of exclusivity in the practice of philosophy. It is a crucial step of inquiry to figure out what are the plausible ways of thinking about an issue. Certainly one of the reasons to do so is to inquire further into the greater weight of one way of thinking over another. In cases in which one answer or a small number of answers will be in some sense right and others wrong, it would behoove scholars to take that next step and to figure out what distinguishes the ways of thinking as such. It is not clear, however, that the people who propose ways of thinking must be the same persons who compare and evaluate them. Some evaluation is almost always done, but frequently without finality. That is true for four reasons. No one scholar can be exhaustive. The proposal of a way of thinking itself can be hard work. Proposing ways of thinking involves different skills from comparing and contrasting them with others. Finally, there are subjects about which rightness and wrongness are not appropriate categories. Must one eat peas with a fork or is a spoon permissible? Surely the answer depends on one’s context and on the purposes of the

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individual in question. The non-contextual, invariant truth of the matter is something in this case that could only be a fiction. The third challenge that Gaus presents seems the most important and in my view the most misguided. Gaus believes that when we want to believe something, we are led astray or corrupted philosophically. Nietzsche’s famous maxim comes to mind. He proclaimed often that “convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies” (Nietzsche 1996, I, Aphorism 483, 234). I think certainly that one can blind oneself with conviction. At the same time, however, if a researcher studies diabetes because his family has suffered and lost members to the disease, it seems perfectly plausible to think that the researcher may be one of the best to study his or her field. One researcher I know runs a major laboratory with the hope and convictions and inspirations of great interest in helping people get healthier, in combating the disease that killed his family members, and that may bring him financial gain should he find the best cure or treatment yet available. His conviction is that he can help if he works hard to find the cure. Incentive systems as their own category of interesting problems regarding medicine aside, this researcher may be more likely than any dispassionate person I have ever met to discover the best treatment or cure for diabetes. It seems perfectly counter to Gaus’s challenge to applied philosophy here that this should be so. The researcher could be motivated only by money, but he is not. Should he discover that someone else’s method for treating diabetes is better, he would want people to know about it, and he would want to improve as far as possible upon it rather than his own ideas. At the same time, interests, biases, wants, all these things deeply motivate him to inquire, and human happiness is a powerful drive for him. From the philosopher’s point of view, a further response is possible. William James’s views on temperament challenge Gaus’s assumptions. James would say that what Gaus is worried about is already and always happening. He would say that given people’s temperaments, they are already inclined to prefer certain philosophical outlooks and conclusions. One may think this a bad thing, but that would be like saying it is too bad that we must consume calories. Life would be easier if we did not have to eat, but it would not be life as I can recognize it. The Jamesian answer here would not be one which gives up care for inquiry, of course. Rather, it demands that we recognize how inquiry works, what motivates people to think and act, such that we can work to alleviate the ill-effects of the way things work. Gaus may not be happy with this way of thinking, but if his standards are impossible, the error is his own. Gaus’s third challenge is that ethics in real life are murky. If they are messy things, no good philosophy can come from them. He writes, As David Ross pointed out in The Right and the Good, although we may be able to obtain knowledge of abstract principles of right, particular judgments and specific issues involve conflicting principles, and it is exceedingly difficult to provide answers to these questions that have any

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claim to being clear and definitive.... When we apply ethics – e.g., when we seek to determine how our principles concerning freedom, respect for life, the metaphysics of persons and so on relate to aborting a fetus in the fifth month – there simply is no powerful argument that demands acceptance by all. (Gaus 2005, 64-65) A trouble here in Gaus’s analysis is the same as before. It appears as though his standards for good philosophy are clarity, definitiveness, and arguments so powerful that they command acceptance by all. If philosophy is only good when it meets all of these criteria, it may be that there is then no good philosophy. That seems troubling to me for two reasons. First, I think there is a great deal of good philosophy. Second, that means that Gaus’s own arguments in his essay are not good philosophy. They certainly do not demand acceptance by all, and in my own view are not definitive. So here again, it seems we are left with a question begging argument. Gaus’s fourth challenge to applied ethics is the presentation of an example of overly quick thinking and argumentation that the popular New York Times Magazine’s column “The Ethicist” committed. Whether or not that culumnist was doing good philosophy is no real challenge to the whole field. I write some bad papers. I write some that are better than others. My worst essay is not reason to deny that my best essays are philosophy. Simple and accessible philosophy could be a great thing if done right. One example from the New York Times does little to challenge the field as a whole. To close my analysis of Gaus’s arguments against applied ethics, here are his own words. He writes, So should philosophers apply ethics? As citizens, they have every right to. Philosophers need not leave public policy debates over these matters to theologians and ‘professional ethicists’. However, when applying ethics in this way they are not doing philosophy, any more than are good journalists, public officials (including the bureaucracy), policy analysts, and other citizens when they think clearly about these matters.... But philosophers are at risk in ways other citizens are not. For participation in public controversy masked as philosophy corrupts philosophy, and this is the crux of the danger in applying ethics. (Much political philosophy is corrupting for many of the same reasons). A sophisticated, rational, ideological advocacy is conducted as if it were philosophy, giving the impression (both to ourselves and our students) that philosophy is a [sic] merely an intellectual game in which you defend what you want to believe. (Gaus 2005, 67) Finally, he writes, “Providing reasoned defences of these positions and their opposites is valuable for democracy. They are not, though, good philosophy” (Gaus 2005, 65). The simple answer that I think we can offer Gaus

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is to say that philosophy can be more than simply getting things right. We can also say that interests and wants are powerful motivations for innovation, that Plato’s own most famous metaphor implied a responsibility to do more than pursue the truth – he wanted us to return to our friends in the cave – and that avoiding a life not worth living appears to be a powerful motivation that is focused on the positive consequences of inquiry. For these reasons, I think it is crucial for at least some philosophers to consider what they can offer to people outside of professional philosophy departments, especially in areas where we meet ethical dilemmas. Moving on from my critique of Gaus’s challenges for applied philosophy, it is reasonable to ask how it is philosophy can contribute to public policy or to any field of applied ethics. Fortunately, Sidney Hook offered an excellent start to answering this question with five suggestions. To these five, I add three of my own. In “Philosophy and Public Policy,” Hook explains that any researcher must study extensively all the relevant facts of a case or area to the best of his or her ability. Thus, if you ask a strong historian, political scientist, and philosopher about rights sought in the civil rights movement in the United States, such scholars would know as much as they can about the particular context of the debate between them. In this instance, the philosopher is not bringing unique knowledge to the table when approaching an issue of public policy regarding civil rights, except perhaps facts as seen somewhat differently through the philosopher’s lenses, but just as in copy editing, the more eyes on a text, the more mistakes or interesting issues are usually caught. In short, the first offering that a philosopher contributes to debates in public policy is his or her common scholarly care for the relevant facts. The second strength that philosophers bring in analysis of problems for public policy is an unusually strong ability to unearth and examine underlying assumptions, usually tacit presuppositions. Though I was raised in a highly educated household, I first encountered the word “presupposition” in my introduction to philosophy course. Uncovering assumptions is somewhat like solving puzzles. The more practice you have at combing through the pieces, the better you are at finding things that are generally hard to see. Philosophers sniff out assumptions, study implication and logic, and notice when support for ideas is weak and unnoticed as such. Hook next identifies philosophers’ strengths at clarifying and sharpening the points at issue for debate as a further contribution we commonly make in interdisciplinary debates. Drawing distinctions is a remarkable specialty we learn and use when we test universal claims. We see the general categories of things fitting in our conceptual frames for the most part, but philosophers know exceptionally well how to look for those examples that do not quite fit. They are therefore acutely capable of clarifying the different kinds of things people talk about in debates, establishing new distinctions, and cutting out those elements repeated in debates that clutter our view of the landscape of relevant ideas.

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Following the tasks of sharpening points for debate is the next charge that philosophers can ably fulfill. That is to question the logical consistency of explicitly held beliefs and underlying assumptions that have previously gone unnoticed. We can also question well the newly sharpened points at issue for debate once we lay them out more clearly than they were found to be before. Philosophers are so good at this step that we have systems of translation and signs for logical operations to make sure that even the most complex of codependent propositions and derivations can be assessed with a system of tables, the counterexample method, and truth trees. Finally, Hook argues that philosophers can contribute in the form of ethical theorizing. Perusal of the various texts concerning ethics that are released in the disciplines of business administration or political science yields quick evidence that philosophers are needed outside of our own professional settings. Consider as further evidence of the value of philosophers’ knowledge of ethics the many new kinds of demand for us. Hospitals employ bioethicists. The United States has from time to time assembled Presidential committees to study ethical implications of research and other activities. Schools all over are building into their professional curricula the study of ethics, such as at medical schools, schools of journalism, accounting, law, business, and others. The more that rigorous, professional philosophers are the ones to fill these seats, the more we see quality work emanate from their schools. It often occurs, furthermore, that philosophers hold more than one degree relevant to their posts. Take for example Professor Carl Elliott of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Bioethics. He holds a Ph.D. in philosophy and an M.D. as well. Elliott and others like him easily qualify in the first contribution that Hook raises and they substantially deepen the ethical contributions to debates that only philosophers can offer in public policy. To these five points, I add three suggestions regarding what philosophers can offer in applying ethics. The first among these concerns conflict resolution. John Rawls described a common notion in alternative dispute resolution – overlapping consensus. Just as philosophers are good at noting tacit assumptions, they can demonstrate to competing groups which of their tacit interests are shared across party lines, allowing the cultivation of solutions to shared problems. One example came to me from a discussion with a conservative student. He thought he was greatly in conflict with environmental groups, not realizing that he shares many interests with environmentalists, but would simply prefer to call himself a conservationist. He is a hunter and assumed that environmentalists would criticize him for hunting, and thus he was critical of their efforts. Perhaps the language of conservation sounded appealing to a self-proclaimed conservative. At the same time, he wants to put controls on industrial pollutants, limiting business’s freedoms to some extent, in order to protect the natural environments he loves. There may be groups that will butt heads directly, but sometimes simple differences in labels can raise conflicts

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where there are few. Noting and pointing out overlapping consensus in cases like this one are crucial for good conflict resolution. The next area to which philosophers could contribute substantially concerns agenda setting, or policy prioritization. All too often philosophers focus on particular policy debates, under the reasonable assumption that narrowing one’s focus is a good thing. At the same time, many groups must decide how to spend their time, such as in the U.S. Supreme Court’s decisions on which cases to accept for review. Utilitarian theorists would say that a policy agenda that will address the greatest good either of the most people or the vastly greater good of a smaller group would be the better choice in setting priorities than another way of proceeding. Deontological theorists might argue that the rights of individuals that are grossly violated ought to be the first problems addressed in governmental consideration. We see the latter concerns in Rawls’s The Law of Peoples (Rawls 1999). Along these lines, philosophers can note and evaluate reasons and assumptions involved in policy prioritizations. Finally, philosophers are good at reconceiving ideas and problems. They do so with their creative abilities to imagine counterexamples to rules and to envision new conceptions of things such as persons, responsibilities, justice, virtue, duty, and more. This process is the frequently necessary task of reformulating the problems to be addressed in public policy. I mean here something different from philosophers’ abilities to clarify muddled ideas or confused principles. I mean something bigger. Philosophers are often quite good at speculation and invention in the realm of ideas. Consider how different are the views of what a person is that you can find in Hobbes, Rousseau, Descartes, William James, Josiah Royce, and Paul Churchland, just to name some varied western thinkers. Countless others could be listed here. My point is that philosophers from the first are trained to consider and suggest alternate ways of unifying a variety of experiences, properties, things, and processes into conceptions. Philosophers could contribute substantially to that vital component of public leadership that we call vision. Philosophers in some ways are among the most imaginative people concerning the realm of possible ideas. The various speculations and ideations of the kind that Gaus finds frivolous are important, I believe, in the imaginative task of envisioning the possibilities of intelligent progress. An important question arose in discussion about the present paper at the Eastern meeting of the American Philosophical Association in 2008. While these are the skills that philosophers may bring to bear in applied ethics debates and public policy deliberations, the questioner at the conference asked what real payout there is for those who invite philosophers’ participation. What might someone who hires a philosopher gain in instances of ethical conflicts? I answered with an example. A philosopher working at a hospital may serve a valuable function beyond the uses I have mentioned thus far. Quite often hospital administrators rush to their legal teams in cases of conflict, hoping to

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find the best and swiftest solution to problems. While seeking legal counsel is often necessary, the interesting thing about medicine concerns all the problems for which we have no preset policies. Just as Gaus suggested, following David Ross, there are situations that seem murky, and that is because they are. If there is no clear law about what to do in a situation, lawyers can try to predict the option involving the lowest projected cost to the hospital should lawsuits be filed. One could at least imagine a circumstance, however, in which what appears to be the right thing to do in a case is different from what a lawyer will predict to be the minimal legal, probable cost of lawsuits. Even if one does not have such insight or inclination to think one decision better than another, is it the ethical thing to do to decide primarily on the basis of projected financial costs? Consider the decision about automobiles that was so scandalous involving the Ford Pinto (Lee 1998). If you could pay out less money from lawsuits and settlements than it would cost to fix a problem, is the lower costing measure the right one to choose? If it were found out that the lower costing measure were always the one taken, can we not imagine the terrible outcome of a lawsuit that would challenge the error of this system? One way for a hospital to deal with this matter would be to do the best job that it can reasonably be expected to do in searching for the most ethically justifiable decision in a given case. I will call this notion ethical due diligence (EDD). If a hospital had a team of three ethicists, one or more of which was educated with a medical doctorate on top of his or her training in philosophy, and those three people conferred with the patient, his or her doctor, family, and relevant persons, if time allowed, and then rendered a decision about what they could decide would be the most reasonable course of action, it would seem that the hospital did at the very least the best that it could do with the resources available to address the problem. Thus, hospitals might not only protect the bottom line, but at the same time might be less liable for the decisions they make as a result of sincere EDD. Surely there could be controversy over the ways in which the ethicists deliberate, but a great deal of policy has been established, some of which has been helpful at preserving individuals’ liberty as a result of the Belmont Report, even if it has since needed some updating (The Belmont Report: Ethical Principles and Guidelines for the Protection of Human Subjects of Research 1979). At the Eastern meeting of the American Philosophical Association, I heard philosophers bemoan the fact that although they were presenting suggestions that they had carefully crafted for the President-elect to adopt with regard to foreign policy challenges, there was little to no chance that the new President will either hear or follow such suggestions. Philosophers sometimes value the focus on applied issues that they take up, yet feel that their efforts are futile. One proposal I have is to move from the long, carefully articulated papers that we write for journals and books, to write short, one-page and five-page briefs about the arguments we have put forward with regard to the challenges our nation faces. Then, with an attached cover letter, philosophers so inclined

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can send their addressed policy proposals to their representatives, governors, Senators, President, newspapers, television news stations and more. If we do not tell our representatives what our ideas are, how can we reasonably complain about our own futility? A measure that I intend to take after further planning and preparation is more novel still than one-page briefs. As a faculty member with students interested in how what we learn in the classroom can apply to the real world, I envision a student and faculty project, perhaps initially for a class, which would offer free consultancy to a community or group of morally conflicted people. What I have in mind near where I live would be to send out letters to small communities around the university, asking whether the people in those communities might benefit from the attention, interviews, and careful analysis of a group of students and faculty members willing to serve as consultants. The demand for consultancy is enormous. The attention that newspapers and other news media might give, along with the attention of the consulting students and faculty members, will help those who feel they lack a voice regarding their problems. It could also allow for a laboratory-like testing ground for the value of philosophical and ethical analysis. I see great potential for learning and for calling attention to the problems of people in municipalities near universities. If philosophers can succeed at showing their value in this way, grant money could be sought. Support could target the expenses that might include course releases for the necessary time the process might take, for the writing of papers and policy briefs describing the processes employed and lessons learned. The overall aim of such a program would be to establish and maintain an innovative and exciting way of rendering philosophy palpably helpful. I hope that this essay and its many practical ideas have clarified ways that philosophers can rigorously and fruitfully applying the lessons of philosophy and ethics, both inside and outside the classroom. REFERENCES The National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research. 1979. The Belmont Report: Ethical Principles and Guidelines for the Protection of Human Subjects of Research. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. Online at http://ohsr.od.nih.gov/guidelines/belmont.html. Gaus, Gerald. 2003. “Dirty Hands.” In The Blackwell Companion to Applied Ethics, ed. R. G. Frey and Kit Wellman. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 169–179. Gaus, Gerald. 2005. “Should Philosophers ‘Apply’ Ethics? By ‘applying ethics’, do philosophers actually succeed in corrupting philosophy?” Think, Spring: 63–67.

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Habermas, Jürgen. 1992. “Discourse Ethics: Notes on a Program of Philosophical Justification.” In Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, trans. Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 43–115. Hook, Sidney. 1970. “Philosophy and Public Policy.” Journal of Philosophy 67.14: 461– 470. Lachs, John. 2003. A Community of Individuals. London and New York: Routledge. Lee, Matthew T. 1998. “The Ford Pinto Case and the Development of Auto Safety Regulations, 1893-1978.” Business and Economic History 27.2: 390–401. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1996. Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, trans. Marion Faber with Stephen Lehmann. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Rawls, John. 1999. The Law of Peoples. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rawls, John. 2000. A Theory of Justice, rev. edn. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Eric Thomas Weber Assistant Professor of Public Policy Leadership Department of Public Policy Leadership The University of Mississippi 105 Odom Hall University, MS 38677 United States

Contemporary Pragmatism Vol. 7, No. 2 (December 2010), 105–130

Editions Rodopi © 2010

Language and Its Discontents: William James, Richard Rorty, and Interactive Constructivism William Gavin, Stefan Neubert, and Kersten Reich

The discussion in this essay is the result of a dialogue between William Gavin and the Cologne program of interactive constructiveism. First, we give an introduction to language in James and Rorty combined with constructivist reflections. Second, we provide an extended and deepened exploration of the relation of language and experience. Here we expand the discussion and also include perspectives from Dewey. Third, we draw conclusions to the important philosophical issues of relativism and arbitrariness as questions to which pragmatism as well as constructivism must give constructive responses.

The discussion in this essay is the result of a dialogue between William Gavin and the Cologne program of interactive constructivism. We indicate this dialogical structure by using abbreviations. We discuss the tension between language and experience as reflected in the works of William James, Richard Rorty and interactive constructivism. This involves an account of classical pragmatist and neopragmatist debates as well as a constructivist interpretation. This essay draw attentions to the relevance of (neo)pragmatist approaches for understanding language in experience. A special focus in this connection will be on the limits as well as possibilities of linguistic expression. This double focus is likewise important for interactive constructivism. First, we give an introduction to language in James and Rorty combined with constructivist reflections. Second, we provide an extended and deepened exploration of the relation of language and experience and also include perspectives from Dewey. Third, we draw conclusions about the important philosophical issues of relativism and arbitrariness as questions to which pragmatism as well as constructivism must give constructive responses. 1. Language in James and Rorty – an Introduction and Constructivist Reflection B.G.:1 Civilization, as Freud saw it, was rather a mixed blessing. It brought its own achievements, in terms of long term gain over immediate satisfaction, but

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always at a price.2 Furthermore, it didn’t seem possible to return to the past, to nature over nurture, desirable as that might sometimes seem to be. Language, for William James, was a bit like civilization was for Freud. That is, he could not live without it, and yet it seemed at least most of the time to sour whatever it referred to, to change or ossify reality. Percepts were turned into concepts, oftentimes replacing the “pure experience” he longed to expose and highlight. This resulted in a certain amount of “unhappiness” or “discontent.” Let us flesh this out in some detail. William James did indeed seem to have a love-hate relationship with language. On the one hand he tells us that “Language is the most imperfect and expensive means yet discovered for communicating thought.”3 And again, he cries out “What an awful trade that of a professor is, – paid to talk, talk, talk! I have seen artists growing pale and sick whilst I talked to them without being able to stop.... It would be an awful universe if everything could be converted into words, words, words.”4 In The Principles he laments the fact that language is too sluggish and too atomistic in nature. “[L]anguage works against our perception of the truth. We name our thoughts simply, each after its thing and nothing else. What each really knows is clearly the thing it is named for, with dimly perhaps a thousand other things.”5 These negative statements tend to build in James’s work, and they have ontological implications. James lashes out against “vicious intellectualism,” which, he says, consists in the “treating of a name as excluding from the fact names what the name’s definition fails positively to include.”6 How, we might well ask, did intellectualism become vicious? Is it an intrinsic property of concepts or language that it corrupts or distorts in the very process of being used? James’s answer to this question in complicated and nuanced in nature. He tells us in A Pluralistic Universe that: Intellectualism in the vicious sense began when Socrates and Plato taught that what a thing really is, is told us by its definition. Ever since Socrates we have been taught that reality consists in essences, not of appearances, and that essences of things are known whenever we know their definitions. So first we identify the concept with a definition. And only then inasmuch as the thing is whatever the definition expresses, are we sure of apprehending the real essence of it or the full truth of it. So far no harm is done. The issue of concepts begins with the habit of employing them privately as well as positively, using them not merely to assign properties to things, but to deny the very properties with which the things sensibly present themselves.... It is but the old story, of a useful practice first becoming a method, then a habit, and finally a tyranny that defeats the end it was used for. Concepts, first employed to make things intelligible, are clung to even when they make them unintelligible.7

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Although James continued to highlight the limitations of language, there are texts in his work which indicate that language, while inadequate, was not completely dispensable. He says, for example, that “If we lost our stock of labels we should be intellectually lost in the midst of the world.”8 Going further, James had some quite positive things to say about language. He recognized that meanings vary from context to context. He suggests that if “language must ... influence us the agglutinative languages, and even Greek and Latin with their declensions would be better guides. Names did not appear in them inalterable, but changed their shape to suit the context in which they lay.”9 James offers the reader some examples of this linguistic contextualism. In The Principles of Psychology he says: When I use the word man in two different sentences, I may have both times exactly the same sound upon my lips and the same picture in my mental eye, but I may mean, and at the very moment of uttering the word and imagining the picture, know that I mean, two entirely different things. Thus when I say: “What a wonderful man Jones is!” I am perfectly aware that I mean by man to exclude Napoleon Bonaparte or Smith. But when I say: “What a wonderful thing Man is!” I am equally well aware that I mean to include not only Jones, but Napoleon and Smith as well.10 This quotation develops both the intentional and contextual aspects of language. In either case a main point seems to be that language is not simply an objective copy of reality. A much more subtle relationship would seem more adequate. There is a sense in which a person creates reality by naming it, by molding it linguistically. This may pose new problems, but it renders inadequate the doctrine that the only purpose of language is the impartial description of events. Another example is the text in Pragmatism where James tries to articulate the meaning of a statement such as “The world is one”: Granting the oneness to exist, what facts will be different in consequence? ... Many distinct ways in which a oneness is predicated of the universe might make a difference, come to view ... 1. ... [as] one subject of discourse ... 2. [as] continuous .... 3. ...Lines of influence can be traced by which they hang together ... 4. [in terms of] causal unity ... 5. [as] generic unity ... 6. [in terms of] unity of purpose ... 7. [as] esthetic union, 8. [in terms of] one Knower ... “The world is One,” therefore, just so far as we experience it to be concatenated. One by as many definite conjunctions as appear. But then also not One by just as many definite disjunctions as we find ... It is either a universe pure and simple nor a multiverse pure and simple.11

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The meaning of ‘one’ is not univocal for James, nor is it simply equivocal; there exist rather concatenated “family resemblances” among all of the above meanings of “one,” but a reductionism cannot be performed. The only way to ascertain the meaning of “one” is contextually. The emphasis is on richness as opposed to reductionism. Language then seemed to James to be both attractive and repellant; it produced a type of “malaise.” Richard Rorty solves the discomfort, or the “problem”, so to speak, by arguing that language does “go all the way down, i.e. that there is no ‘ineffable reality’ existing outside of language and waiting to be ‘named.’”12 This is the well-known linguistic turn, resulting in “neopragmatism.” James occasionally seems to argue as if language does go “all the way down.” At one point, for example, he says that “radical empiricism” is just a “methodological postulate.”13 But for the most part James remains a champion of the ineffable. He not only believes that “namelessness is compatible with existence,”14 but also that this should be embraced and constantly reaffirmed. I.C.: Richard Rorty shares James’ Anti-Platonism. In contrast to James, however, his relation with language seems to be more clearly a love relationship. Rorty avoids using experience as a fundamental concept and he insists more emphatically on the indissoluble interwovenness of experience with language. For him there is no experience unaffected by language. Therefore he rejects what James still hopes to find, namely relations “given immediately in experience.”15 Both, James and Rorty, convincingly argue against traditional correspondence theories of truth because they rest on a fallacious model of copying reality like in a “mirror of nature.” But Rorty also criticizes James’ pragmatic understanding of truth, because for him, James too much appeals to an idealized claim of linguistic coherence that should support truth claims.16 For Rorty, the very idealization of coherence leads to error because coherence is always relative to language games. Therefore truth for him involves complexities beyond naturalistic or universalistic approaches. Since his Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) and Consequences of Pragmatism (1982) Rorty has elaborated the view that language cannot be understood as a means for representing or mirroring an outer or independent reality or nature. That image of language seems much too naïve even for a classical pragmatist like James because they see truth not as something out there to be discovered but rather as something to be made and constructed by the actions and inquiries of humans. Rorty has a more definite understanding that humans are always linguistic beings with regard to truth. This even applies to supposedly pure experiences which for him can never be pure in the sense of unmediated by language. Therefore, Rorty stresses the unavoidable ethnocentrism involved in all truth games because language is always pregnant with cultural contexts. In Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989) Rorty suggests that we should replace the traditional quest for universal consent by a sharper realization of contingency in our language games. Since Wittgenstein language can be

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understood as a practice of like-minded world-makers that produce viable truth claims. In their practice they need as well as make forms of solidarity that, from Rorty’s perspectives, take the place of earlier universalistic orientations. In cultural history we find diverse groups of like-minded world-makers with different language games and forms of solidarity and different consequences for viability of truth claims. For Rorty, this is a relativism that we have to accept after the linguistic turn. His philosophical response to this situation is his famous image of the ironist. From this position we are called upon to engage in a necessarily self-critical perspective that always takes into account the limits of our own orientations, norms, values, truth claims and other linguistic constructions which become obvious when we look on other language games. The Rortyan ironist will accept that the linguistic constructions of other groups or communities than his own might be equally real or true and that there is no meta-perspective that we might take to find last words in a commensurable framework. If we now turn to a constructivist discussion of the role of language in James and Rorty, it seems worthwhile to us to use an example taken from Searle that will help us to introduce interactive constructivism’s view on language and reality. John R. Searle relies in his book The Construction of Social Reality on a realistic approach that in some aspects resembles a pragmatic perspective. His book is about a problem that had puzzled Searle for a long time, as he says: ... there are portions of the real world, objective facts in the world, that are only facts by human agreement. In a sense there are things that exist only because we believe them to exist. I am thinking of things like money, property, governments, and marriages. Yet many facts regarding these things are ‘objective’ facts in the sense that they are not a matter of your and my preferences, evaluations, or moral attitudes. I am thinking of such facts as that I am a citizen of the United States, that the piece of paper in my pocket is a five dollar bill, that my younger sister got married on December 14, that I own a piece of property in Berkeley, and that the New York Giants won the 1991 Superbowl. These contrast with such facts as that Mount Everest has snow and ice near the summit or that hydrogen atoms have one electron, which are facts totally independent of any human options.17 Let us take the example of Mount Everest as a starting point here. In contrasting the facts about Mount Everest with the other examples Searle obviously wants to introduce a distinction between socially constructed facts or data and facts that are intrinsic to nature. He captures this distinction as the difference of two worlds, one consisting of features that are intrinsic to nature and independent of human observers and the other consisting of observer-

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relative i.e., socially constructed features. If we talk about Mount Everest, to which world does it belong? 1.

The realist argues that no intelligent human being can deny the fact that Mount Everest does exist and has snow and ice on its summit whether we or anybody else observe it or not. Facts like these are therefore not observer-relative. Searle calls them intrinsic to nature.

2.

The realist concedes however that if we talk about Mount Everest with regard to e.g., questions of how to climb it, how to represent it esthetically, how it functions in cultural and religious systems of belief, or stories about its discovery and so forth, we are in the field of representations that are relative to the intentionality of observers.

Following James we could challenge the realist by asking how in both cases we can understand the relationship between the claimed features and the processes of experience from which these claims emerge and are justified. Following Rorty we can even radicalize this challenge by introducing the idea of language-games and asking in how far the distinction between two worlds is relative to a specific language-game. Both, James and Rorty, will first help us to bring to the fore the relation of truth and human activities. If we apply even the classical pragmatist understanding that the truth of an idea lies in its possible consequence for experience and that truth is always something we act upon rather than something we merely receive, Searle’s world one features become problematic even in the relatively trivial case of talking about Mount Everest. Interactive constructivism connects with the pragmatic theory of truth and further develops this perspective by introducing the distinction between observers, participants, and agents. From this perspective, all truth claims must be scrutinized and critically reflected with regard to (i) observer positions and relations in experiencing and the experienced, (ii) conditions, limitations, possibilities, and consequences of participating in interpretive communities and time-bound cultural contexts, (iii) fields and forms of action and roles of agents with their attendant selectivity and omissions in doing and undergoing. Applying this distinction we can articulate the criticism against Searle still more sharply. For what Searle completely neglects in his separation of world one from world two is that even with regard to the first there are always relevant contexts in which claims are made and that these contexts imply positions of observers, participants, and agents in culture. If we neglect this contextuality, so the constructivist criticism, we become naïve with regard to

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reductionist and simplistic versions of reality, blind with regard to the implications of cultural history, and short-sighted with regard to the consequences of taking facts as ready-made nature. Who, after all, is the observer to make descriptions of world one or even distinguish it from world two? As Searle puts it, we get the impression that the truth claims attendant to world one are somehow mystically inscribed into things. But who is in the position to read them off? If we do not want to take refuge to a traditional god’s eye view we will have to put all human beings independently of their cultural contexts into that position, at least potentially. But is such a picture of how to approach reality not altogether too simple to be convincing? It seems to us that this picture relies on an idealization of practices in the natural sciences that totally fades out the concrete and specific cultural and historical conditions in which discourses even in the hard sciences take place. Here it is one thing to take Mount Everest as an example with which Searle from the start chooses a relatively uncontested topic. It would be quite another thing to take examples like the splitting of the atom or the greenhouse effect which are much more contestable with reference to the blind spots of scientific and technological discourses. But even with Mount Everest we always need an observer to detect, describe and climb the mountain. And as observer he or she will of necessity be a participant affected by culture, language, and experience. The position as participant, however, gives the lie to claims about intrinsic truths. This is an important argument of pragmatism as well as constructivism against reductionist realism. Both approaches also insist that we must take the position of agents into account when talking about truth. Against this background, Searle’s position at best appears as a half-hearted pragmatism because he only concedes these qualifications with regard to the construction of the social world but overtly denies them for the facts of “external realism” like Mount Everest. For him the world is always neatly divided into intrinsic and observer-relative components, but he never gives us a sufficient explanation of how we get to the statements about the former in relation to our contexts of life. For him it seems as simple as the following list suggests: 1.a. intrinsic: That object is a stone. 1.b. observer relative: That object is a paperweight. 2.a. intrinsic: The moon causes the tides. 2.b. observer relative: The moon is beautiful tonight. 3.a. intrinsic: Earthquakes often occur where tectonic plates meet. 3.b. observer relative: Earthquakes are bad for real estate values.18 It seems that for Searle the a-positions are simply self-evident and emerge from the issues themselves. In this connection, Searle totally neglects a pragmatic and constructivist account of meaning. A stone, for example, is a thing that we use as a stone. If we concede this qualification, we immediately have to admit at least implicitly that observers, participants and agents are

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involved even in the simple descriptive sentence “this object is a stone.” Pragmatists and constructivists would be much more critical than Searle about the contingency and relativity of scientific discourses and the vicissitudes of paradigm shifts that show scientific practices as deeply embedded in culture. The history of science has taught us to regard even apparently simple scientific statements as time- and context-bound. They emerge from practices and cannot justify their claims without relying on these practices. This is crucial for a pragmatist and constructivist understanding of objectivity. The objectivity of stones is not articulated by stones themselves but always the result of intersubjective practices of inquiry that involve cultural specific ways of partaking, cooperating, communicating, deliberating, decision making and the like.19 Against the background of this rejection of realism, we still have to discuss the question of how constructions of reality relate to an obviously observer-independent world. Even constructivists cannot claim that their reality constructs are all there is because this would lead to exaggerated forms of subjectivism or solipsism. Interactive constructivism uses a theory of the real to deal with this problem. The real as an event has to be distinguished from constructed realities. We encounter the real in experience as a temporal lack of sense and meaning when we undergo events that are not yet symbolically understandable or imaginatively expectable and therefore escape our capacities of interpretation. Taking us by surprise and entering our experience and perception unexpectedly, real events time and again mark the boundaries of our symbolic and imaginative search for meaning and identity. Real events as understood here are events that do not easily fit into our realities. In this sense the real stands for those situations in which we experience the obstinate eventfulness of our world that cannot be easily integrated and transformed into elements of a culturally viable understanding. There is something that could not be foreseen, something alien, strange, incomprehensible. With an eye on Searle we might even add that these qualities of the real might precisely be what fascinate us about Mount Everest. They move us to change our symbolic thinking or imaginative horizon about snow and ice on the summit or something else. However, we speak of the real strictly in the sense of a void signifier. In contrast to Searle interactive constructivism does not seek to articulate an ontological account of the real. We content ourselves with using this signifier to denote a limit of our constructive capacities as observers, participants and agents. For us there is no best or final observer as to the real. That is to say, we cannot know what the real really is without incorporating and assimilating it into our symbolic and imaginative constructions of reality. In other words, the real is but a construct that we devise in order to remind us that there is a world independent of our constructions. The world is never totally captured by our observer perspectives, however sophisticated and refined these may be. Our relative openness to the real is a question of our being sensitive and vulnerable

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to the world in which we live. The intrusions of the real are often described as events of confusing, dumbfounding, perplexing loss, lack, or failure, like witnessing the unexpected death of someone we loved or feeling a sudden pain in our body without having any explanation. What these examples highlight is the dramatic extent to which real events may take us unawares and render us speechless, for a moment or even for longer. Thus the real is always relative to observer positions, cultural contexts of participants, actions and experiences. This account of the real seems to us to be more convincing as well as less reductionist than Searle’s exposition of an external realism. It especially stands for the continuation and further development of the pragmatic criticism of unnecessary dualisms between subject and object, mind and world, concept and reality. James’s wrestling with language is instructive and shows how close pragmatism is to constructivism in this regard. James has an acute awareness of the necessity to pay respect to the real as a limiting condition of capturing experience. If he laments that language often sours what it talks about and tends to ossify reality, we can interpret this complaint as a protest against the forgetfulness of the world beyond language that often goes with “vicious intellectualism.” He aptly reminds us that a universe in which everything could be symbolically articulated and put into words would be a nightmare for us. We see the concept of the real as a suggestion for continuing and further developing this critical perspective in Jamesian pragmatism. At the same time, we think that Rorty, despite his differences to James, can be helpful to sharpen our views on language, its possibilities and limits. Rorty especially explores the contingency of language and language-games, final vocabularies and their potentialities for world making and limitations against other final vocabularies. He is always aware of the necessary ambivalence that is endemic to language and language games. Insofar he extends James’ critical sense of language but also gives us a more positive account of the role of language than James. Especially, Rorty surrenders any attempt to look for pure experience unaffected by language games. He insists that whenever we talk about experience we use language, even if we search for supposedly “pure experiences” (James) or “intrinsic meanings” (Searle). In conclusion, we can say from a constructivist viewpoint that we need to look at the world of acting in order to overcome traditional dualistic images of inner concepts that are taken and outer realities that are given. This is a position that we share with all versions of pragmatism. Like Rorty, we think that the very idea of pure experiences is problematic in this connection. We argue that, although experience is never completely covered by language, the latter is nevertheless a necessary precondition in and for all our constructions in experiences which can therefore never be pure in the sense of linguistically neutral. Similar to the way that Freud analyzed the endemic ambivalence of civilization as a necessary precondition of cultural criticism we think that a pragmatist and constructivist approach to cultural theory must discuss the endemic ambivalence of language. On the one hand, language is indispensable

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in our reality constructions and a necessary means for cooperation and communication. But on the other hand, language fails our expectations of fully and inclusively grasping our experience and reality. This is what James sometimes lamented about when he focused more on the hate-aspect of his relationship to language. From a constructivist perspective we can add that the limits of language are inextricably linked with the limits of our positions as observers, participants and agents in experience and culture. We therefore adopt the constructivism implied in the pragmatic theory of language, meaning and truth. The philosophical ambivalence with language reflects the discontents that emerge from its failure to fulfill the expectations of final, universal, permanent, or absolute truths. But at the same time we radicalize this constructivism in that we replace James’ quest for pure experience with a more cautious concept of the “real” as a border category or void signifier. 2. Language and Experience Let us now turn to a more detailed discussion of the relation between language and experience in James, Rorty and interactive constructivism. How shall we today interpret this relation? Should we share James’ sometimes harsh discontent or Rorty’s ironic agreement with linguistic limitations? B.G.: The evidence that language is not sufficient, though perhaps necessary, seems pervasive in the Jamesian corpus. We will confine ourselves to a few examples. First, James makes continuous use of metaphors and similes. One thinks immediately of the “stream of thought,”20 of knowledge described as a “grease spot,”21 of its growth being akin to that of a “snowball,”22 of new truths arriving “stewed down in the sauce of the old,”23 etc. James, in short, seemed incapable of not using metaphors when speaking or thinking. Metaphors reveal and conceal simultaneously. They disclose, but indirectly and incompletely. Second, in The Varieties of Religious Experience, James carefully distinguishes between first person discourse and third person discourse.24 The latter is descriptive but the former is confessional in nature. The first cannot be turned into the second without encountering significant loss of an experience “had,” even if the experience undergone cannot be completely described in language. Perhaps James’s ultimate metaphor was “pure experience,” a term best viewed as referring to the realm of primordial flux, richness and nondifferentiation. In a sense “pure experience” is a word, i.e. a concept for pure experience itself, i.e., for that level of reality which precedes identity and order. We, by contrast, live in a world of “impure experience,” one which has been “infected” by language and which is often too neat and tidy in nature. Initially, James seems rather pessimistic about the possibility of recovering pure experience, even if only momentarily. He says it is available only to “new-born babes, or men in semi-coma from sleep, drugs, illnesses or blows.”25 Ultimately, however, he decides that the real enemy is not consciousness per se but rather

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“language.” This re-articulation of the problem allows for a more optimistic approach. This is so because it is much easier to advocate a position where one needs to “pass language by,” than it is to suggest one urging that we pass by consciousness itself. Examples of the former might include but not be limited to: mystic experience, aesthetic experience (e.g., dance); performance in a sport where one is momentarily so good as to be “unconscious;” and the Emersonian type of bonding with nature which James himself occasionally got from his treks into the mountains. I.C.: The position that James articulates here seems of enormous relevance even today. This is because we can immediately sense in our experiences the insufficiency of language. Symbolic representations leave us with the ambivalence between our incapacity of exhaustive expression and our desire to attain this. From our constructivist perspective, James uses the term “pure experience” to deal with precisely this ambivalence. It is a name for that which exceeds language. This may be an immediate impression, feeling, imagination, vision etc. Language, especially in its metaphorical use, like the “stream of consciousness,” can be helpful in revealing such dimensions in our experience. But James also takes pains to remind us that even such metaphorical use of language is at the same time concealing because the symbolic forms can never fully do justice to the “flow of experience” or what interactive constructivists call the “real” in experience. In interactive constructivism we further introduce in addition to the perspective of the real two other important observer perspectives: the imaginative and the symbolic. We suggest that for a constructivist interpretation of James all three perspectives can be very useful. The imaginative represents a dimension of experience that appears in James as a vague but persistent premonition. The imaginative26 stands for all those visions, dreams, desires, fantasies, impressions etc. that do not readily translate into language. This is an especially important dimension of our experience with regard to interaction and communication with others. In this respect, the core concept in interactive constructivism to understand imagination is “mirror experience.” We use this concept to denote the necessarily mutual encounter of images and desires between self and other that have to do with felt characteristics of lived relationships. The imaginative prevents us from being able to see others the way they “are,” but it makes possible for us to encounter them with desire, selective interests, and motives. In our relationships we depend, most of all, on our imaginations by means of which we connect or disconnect with others. But as a mirror experience there is always some element of illusion in such connection or disconnection because we cannot immediately enter the experience and imagination of others. People in love are, above all, so hard to put up with for their environment because they exaggerate the illusion of blind understanding. On the part of observers not directly involved, this tends to engender jealousy for such bliss, on the one hand, and a distancing

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rationalization of this experience, which is regarded as transitory, on the other hand. However, such love is but one of the protagonists of the imaginative. What urges us to do certain things? Why do these and not any others? What is it that causes preferences, omissions, sympathies and antipathies etc.? How often would we like to control our fellow humans’ imaginations (and is not advertising the increasing evidence hereof)? In our daydreams, so many things work which neither count nor are possible in the world. The symbolic helps us to delimitate our imaginative exuberance without necessarily destroying the powers of imagination. This is the essential function of the symbolic. No culture in its diverse manifestations like aesthetics, art, religion, science etc. can do without it. The symbolic delimitations may often hamper the imaginative, but they also provide the necessary ends-in-view and objects for imaginative desire. The symbolic represents ways of dealing with the imaginative through which we learn to systematically observe it, reflect on it, talk about it with ourselves and others and view it from a critical distance. It helps to filter and sort out the imaginative to make its immediate impulsions comprehensible, conceivable and communicable. Statements about beauty and pleasant feelings, about positive or negative experiences etc. are thus made possible. Nevertheless, a one-sided and exaggerated dominance of the symbolic may also lead to the ossification of the imaginative. Then the overwhelming presence of ready-made significance locks the imaginative up in a prison of symbolic order that may discourage the imaginative powers in general. This is precisely what James lamented about when he talked of the hate aspects of his relation to language. The real, as we discussed above, stands for those events in our experience in which we encounter the unavoidable limits of all our imaginative and symbolic constructions. It appears in the gaps and disruptions that lead to astonishment, in the immediate presence of something unexpected which fails our imaginative wishes as well as our symbolic expectations. What appears as real depends on the self- and/or distant-observers in the cultural contexts of their actions and participations. When we encounter real events we most often cannot help but attempt to involve them into the imaginative and symbolic. We will try to make them part of explanations and narratives to understand them. However, this is always a process after the event and it does not ever capture the presence of the real as immediately experienced. The realities we construct are always potentially subverted by the real which we cannot control. When we talk about realities, the real is the background which reaches out into the uncertain, unconscious, still open fields of observation and action. Taken together, the three perspectives of the imaginative, the symbolic and the real help us to discuss in more details and with clearer distinction what James gave us as a rather vague impression. This interpretation is not contrary to his intention, but helps to penetrate more deeply and more critically into the ambivalences of language and experience. Especially, it helps us to be more cautious with regard to claims to purity of experience since seen through the

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lens of our constructivist perspectives we can never dissolve the real from the imaginative and the symbolic. This is a lesson that Rorty, in his way, taught us as a consequence from the linguistic turn. In his influential book, The Mirror of Nature (1979), Rorty offers a fundamental critique of the traditional philosophical dualism of body and mind, reality and representation. He concludes that the very metaphor of the mirror leads us to error because it all too much neglects action and the world of events and champions reflection without sufficient regard of experience. Our ideas never literally correspond to a ready-made and observer-independent reality but emerge as products from and within our actions. As constructivists, we here talk about constructions of reality and we think that we do not misinterpret Rorty when we speak of a strong implicit constructivism in his approach. The idea of correspondence is deficient, among other things, because there are no innocent and exhaustive mirrors of nature. What we get from reflecting on our world is always our interpretation interwoven with our actions, observations and participations. From this view, the philosophical quest for certainty appears as an outdated tradition. In place of certainty we get what Dewey calls “warranted assertibility” or what Rorty calls “justified claims.” According to Rorty, the task of philosophy is to provide arguments to keep the conversation about values of civilization going. Any such talk, for him, has a necessarily ethnocentric dimension to it. It is always relative to contexts of history, culture, and language. However, there remains the distinction between good and bad argument in any given discourse even if we cannot claim a last or superior observer position from which to fully evaluate different discourses against each other. For Rorty, language is necessarily an open game with no final solutions. He is an expert who gives us a highly elaborated account of the philosophical language games especially of the twentieth century. Following the tendency of philosophical development in the second half of the century, he focuses his attention mostly on language, but one must not forget that his complete interpretation of the debates he addresses is articulated from a pragmatic viewpoint. Therefore some sense for the imaginative and the real, to use our constructivist concepts here, can be found in Rorty even if on the surface he seems to talk primarily about the symbolic. Pragmatists who champion the classical concept of experience often tend to misunderstand Rorty at this point because for them he seems to provide a rather reductionist discourse that is oblivious of experiential dimensions beyond language. Seen from the perspective of interactive constructivism, we concede to these criticisms that Rorty, like many postmodern philosophers, indeed focuses too one-sidedly on language games. But we should also insist that what we can learn from this onesided focus is a sharpened attention to the unavoidability of the symbolic. The latter is not all there is in experience, but it does go all the way down in its interpenetration with the imaginative and the real. From a particularly German point of view we may add that Rorty has helped, in our debates, to prepare the renaissance of pragmatism and pave the way for “post-metaphysical thought.”

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The latter term comes from Habermas who has been in a productive controversy with Rorty for many years. Rorty’s linguistic critique of universalistic truth claims even in their sophisticated manifestations as discourse theory has helped to open the doors for pragmatic thinking in many philosophical discussions. On the side of political philosophy, Rorty connects the tradition of American pragmatism with an actualized version of liberalized politics in times of postmodern contingency, irony and solidarity. Like James, he uses metaphors to convey some of his most fundamental and complex ideas. In the foreground in Rorty’s view on politics stands the female figure of the liberal ironist that is supposed to represent a modest attitude informed by a strong awareness of the relativity of even one’s own most fundamental convictions and believes. His pragmatism exceeds the narrow linguistic focus when he talks, for example, about processes of self-creation and the role of poets in culture. This has a strong connection with the pragmatic theory of democracy in the wake of Dewey with its emphasis on diversity in experience and plurality of interests within a democratic society. In all these aspects, we think that Rorty is closer to James and classical pragmatism than some of his commentators seem to suppose. It is striking to see how near he gets to a (social/cultural) constructivist approach by drawing consequences from the linguistic turn against the background of the pragmatic tradition. Here a circle of argumentation comes to a close that had already begun with Dewey’s 1931 essay “Context and Thought” (LW6:1–21) which develops important consequences from his 1925/1929 book Experience and Nature (LW1).27 It seems to us that with regard to the theory of experience, Dewey has already taken an important step beyond James and moved towards a linguistic and cultural turn. Dewey substituted James’ “pure experience” with the more sober term “primary experience.” From a constructivist perspective, the latter name seems more appropriate because it avoids the problematic connotations of the idea of purity with regard to experience. In “Context and Thought” as well as crucial passages of Experience and Nature, Dewey provides deep insights into the linguistic and cultural contexts that saturate and pervade experience. In comparison to James, his much more elaborated cultural view suggests that the idea of purity in the sense of linguistic and cultural unaffectedness or innocence of experience is an illusion – except in the case of a newborn who has not already acquired some cultural meanings and habits through symbolic interaction with other and more mature human beings. For all of us who live in culture, context is always already there, although we are not always necessarily aware of it. The unavoidability of context constitutes a fundamental relation of experience, language and culture: “We grasp the meanings of what is said in our own language not because appreciation of context is unnecessary but because context is so unescapably present.... Habits of speech, including syntax and vocabulary, and modes of interpretation have been formed in the face of inclusive and defining situations of context.... We are not explicitly aware of the role of context just because our every utterance is so saturated by it that it forms

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the significance of what we say and hear.” (LW6:4) But Dewey does not reject the idea of “immediate experience.” The latter is, of course, at the very heart of his essays on “immediate empiricism” (see MW3:158 ff) that drew so much from James and were so important for the development his own mature philosophy of experience. In Experience and Nature he captures the idea of “immediate experience” within his larger distinction between “primary” and “secondary experience.” On the primary level experience is directly had, while on the secondary level it is reflected upon, interpreted, filled with meanings and saturated with cultural contexts. Dewey insists that for life-experience in culture the two levels can never be separated from each other. They presuppose each other and necessarily point to each other. Against this background, even what seems to be “pure experience” in the Jamesian sense – Dewey prefers terms like “fresh” or “naïve empirical material” or “first-hand experience” – is already “filled with interpretations, classifications, due to sophisticated thought, which have become incorporated ... results of past reflection, welded into ... first-hand experience.” (LW1:40) For instance, Dewey here thinks of “the intellectual habits we take on and wear when we assimilate the culture of our own time and place.” (Ibid.) For him, experience can be immediately had, but not pure in the sense of culturally unaffected. “We cannot achieve recovery of primitive naïveté. But there is attainable a cultivated naïveté of eye, ear and thought, one that can be acquired only through the discipline of severe thought.” (LW1:40) If we interpret such “naïveté” as a cultivated openness to experience as immediately had – or to the “real” in the terminology of interactive constructivism –, then we can say that, according to Dewey, this openness always already presupposes language and culture. But Dewey also insists that primary experience is never swallowed up by language (or the symbolic in the sense discussed above). Within the indissoluble relation of experience, language and culture, language occupies a crucial position because it is the outstanding cultural instrument for rendering experience meaningful. Dewey even calls it “the tools of tools” and argues that “As to be a tool, or to be used as means for consequences, is to have and to endow with meaning, language, being the tool of tools, is the cherishing mother of all significance.” (LW1:146) But like James, he is also a champion of the ineffable. “Immediacy of existence is ineffable.” (LW1:74) Language (or the symbolic) is limited because it cannot fully capture the stream of experience. This especially applies to the moments of becoming and reconstruction that are crucial for genuine inquiry as well as educational growth. There is an inbetweenness of meaning for Dewey that evades symbolic articulation: “When an old essence or meaning is in process of dissolution and a new one has not taken shape even as a hypothetical scheme, the intervening existence is too fluid and formless for publication, even to one’s self. Its very existence is ceaseless transformation. Limits from which and to which are ... stateable; not so that which occurs between these limits. This process of flux and ineffability is intrinsic to any thought which is subjective and private.” (LW1:171)

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In a word, what we find in Dewey is a tensional yet indissoluble relationship of experience, language and culture. He praises communication as “the most wonderful” affair (LW1:132), but also reminds us that it is necessarily limited. In comparison with James, his relation to language altogether has a stronger emphasis on the love than on the hate side. He seems more sober and willing to accept the limits of language as a cultural tool and more reluctant to try to jump outside of language and culture in search for “pure” experiences. Insofar he is somewhat in a midway position between James and Rorty. If we interpret all three positions, James, Dewey and Rorty, from the perspective of interactive constructivism, we can say that Rorty provides us with the most elaborate account of the relativity of language games. This position has become indispensable for a more qualified and critical understanding of the naturalism implied in James’s “pure experience” and even Dewey’s “primary experience.” This seems to us to be one of Rorty’s most important advantages over classical pragmatism. It rests on crucial developments of late 20th century philosophy and integrates them into a pragmatic view. As we have suggested above it does so at the cost of an often narrow linguistic focus that too much fades out other dimensions of experience. Here we see an advantage of classical pragmatists like James and Dewey and their rich theories of experience. Interactive constructivism suggests that pragmatist reflections on language and its discontents can be fruitfully interpreted and further developed through application of the three perspectives of the symbolic, the imaginative and the real. 3. Language, Relativism and Arbitrariness B.G.: All of this suggests that language has different functions to perform, but that its role is limited. We might say that language describes but that it also distorts, distracts and defers (in a Derridian sense).28 James struggled with language for years; finally, or non-finally saying that he is giving up on at least one type of language, namely “logic.” In A Pluralistic Universe James says: For my own part, I have finally found myself compelled to give up the logic, fairly, squarely, and irrevocably. It has an imperishable use in human life, but that use is not to make us theoretically acquainted with the essential nature of reality... Reality, life, experience, concreteness, immediacy, use what word you will, exceeds our logic, overflows and surrounds it. If you like to employ words eulogistically, as most men do, and so encourage confusion, you may say that reality obeys a higher logic, or enjoys a higher rationality. But I think that even eulogistic words should be used rather to distinguish than to commingle meanings, so I prefer bluntly to call reality if not irrational then at least non-rational in its constitution, – and by

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reality here I mean reality where things happen, all temporal reality without exception. I myself find no good warrant for even suspecting the existence of any reality of a higher denomination than that distributed and strungalong and flowing sort of reality which we finite beings swim in. That is the sort of reality given us, and that is the sort with which logic is so incommensurable.29 James realized that logic, or language, ironically enough, was necessary, even though sometimes insulating. The quotation above indicates as much; furthermore, James was quite willing to ascribe a “primarily theoretical function to our intellect”30 and not condone a simple reductionism. But he believed that the intellect as such could not deal with the whole of reality, though it cannot avoid dealing with “part” of it. “Thought deals thus solely with surfaces. It can name the thickness of reality, but it cannot fathom it, and its insufficiency here is essential and permanent, not temporary.”31 In this position reality is greater than the conceptual. More important, it is greater than the possibly conceptual. Reality cannot be completely put into thought, or more specifically, onto language. Yet language, as James shows by self-example, is necessary to deal with reality or pure experience. It follows that reality is available only through language, but the language user must transcend the limitations of language, must show the insufficiency of language itself. In A Pluralistic Universe James brings matters to a head, suggesting both that language be renounced, and that this can’t be done – at least not completely. He tells the reader: As long as one continues talking, intellectualism remains in undisturbed possession of the field. The return to life can’t come about by talking. It is an act; to make you return to life, I must set an example for your imitation, I must ... deafen you to talk, or to the importance of talk, by showing you, as Bergson does, that the concepts we talk with are made for the purposes of practice and not for purposes of insight. Or I must point, point to the mere that of life, and you by inner sympathy must fill out the what for yourselves.32 While James says he’s giving up on language here, there is something very “ironic” about his statement. For James does not give up language – he remains talking, i.e., writing up until the very end. Indeed he calls his last book “a beginning of an introduction to philosophy.”33 He is either being disingenuous, or there is both a good and a bad way of using language. Language used as descriptive is incomplete, and will always be so. Although Peirce might term this “blocking the road to inquiry”34 for James the universe was too “wild and game flavored as a hawk’s wing”35 to be completely “named.” Language is better viewed as “directional” in nature. Words point or

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should point beyond themselves, serving as “inspirations,” to use Emerson’s term,36 as wedges back into the tissue of experience. What’s the difference, the pragmatic upshot, so to speak? I think that language viewed as directional and incomplete requires us to exercise a certain amount of “humility,” as opposed to arrogance, regarding our verbal attempts to capture nature or pure experience. It also allows for possibility, i.e., for the continual renaming of the really real. Something always escapes. “Ever not quite” must be the philosopher’s last confession concerning reality.37 We must, as James urged, resist the temptation to “settle the universe’s hash” once and for all.38 Does James make any progress on the issue of the relationship of language to pure experience? Yes, but it is progress more along the lines of “aporia” as this “virtue” was exhibited by Socrates long ago, i.e., as “knowing that I don’t know what I once thought I knew.” In closing, language used badly freezes reality or pure experience; focuses upon the perchings of consciousness rather than the flights; results in “vicious intellectualism”; and promotes the idea that what cannot be named does not exist. Language, used well, upholds the intentional and efficacious aspects of discourse; highlights the contextualism of discourse; utilizes metaphors to reveal and conceal simultaneously; and foregrounds the difference between first person and third person discourse. There is for James a “really real” termed “pure experience.” It can’t be completely named but language used directionally can “point toward it.” This pointing cannot be done once and for all. The “rub” comes with the realization that we cannot do this perfectly all the time. Such a “herculean” task would require too much of us. So we must remain “human, all too human.” Thus the Jamesian “promethean” self is tempered via a marriage to humility – rocky as that marriage might sometimes be. I.C.: Here we see a close affinity between James and Rorty who connects his arguments about the limits of language with James’ discussion of religious experience. However, in Rorty the main drift of argumentation is clearly a move from naturalism to relativism. He criticizes James for the search of naturalistic claims about experience. Therefore he is skeptical about the very term “pure” in connection with experience. The basis of Rorty’s criticism is of course his conclusion from the linguistic turn that the access to experience is necessarily through language and can never be innocent (pure) of linguistic implications that pervade even the most immediately had experience. On the other hand Rorty’s relativism has often been accused of being close to arbitrariness and therefore self-defeating as a philosophical position. However from the perspective of interactive constructivism we believe that contemporary pragmatism can learn some important lessons from him. Especially against the background of European history of philosophy, there are many aspects in his thought that we appreciate as substantial resources in the necessary struggles against the metaphysics of last words, ultimate reasons, absolute and eternal truths, dualistic

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views of reason and experience, neglect of linguistic and cultural contexts. All these, to our mind, are necessary positions of relativism that find new articulation in Rorty while connecting with the pragmatic tradition of philosophical criticism. To us it is a misunderstanding and misinterpretation of Rorty to delimit the recognition of his relativism to the dangers of arbitrariness without seeing the positive features of his relativism in the battles against the metaphysical clubs. Rorty’s famous new interpretation of the role of philosophy as a discourse not primarily of foundation but of therapeutical intervention, to our minds, must be seen in this context. It is an ironic play with the “true” role of philosophy in postmodernity as well as a serious reflection about the loss of closed world views. In this context, Rorty uses the word “true” in an empirical sense to demonstrate the adequacy of scientific research as constructed by humans in linguistic and cultural contexts. Insofar this position relativizes truth games, but it does not dissolve them in mere arbitrariness. In Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity Rorty writes: “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 the describing activities of humans – cannot.” (Rorty 1989, 5) Rorty combines truth with an ironic sense for the relativism of language and discourses. From a constructivist perspective we think that this position of relativism is not necessarily ad odds with the pragmatist notion of inquiry and warranted assertibility. It may be helpful at this point to spell out in some more details the three perspectives of construction, reconstruction and deconstruction that have already repeatedly been used above. Before doing so we should emphasize that, from the view of interactive constructivism, the three perspectives actually indicate three different, yet highly interrelated phases in the construction of realities. That is to say, they do not only refer to each other, but each perspective presupposes the others in every comprehensive experience. Although the emphasis may at one point be more on the construction side and at another point more on the reconstruction or deconstruction side, it is always the complex interplay between all three phases that we must keep in mind. Construction: Interactive constructivism stresses the active involvement of observers in the construction of their own realities. Such construction work comprehends more than merely linguistic activities. It is a transactional affair in which we experience ourselves and others, experiment with and inquiry into our world, and form our own constructions out of our activities. We turn our constructions into objects by means of production, and we turn them into language by means of symbolic articulation. Insofar we, as humans, can be seen as the inventors of our realities. The emphasis on the constructive potentials of observers has its subjectivist implications in that each individual constructs her/his symbolic and

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imaginative reality in a somewhat unique and personal way that can never be completely and exhaustively commensurated with the realities of others. For interactive constructivism, though, the recognition of these subjectivist aspects must be qualified by the assumption mentioned above that every observer is at the same time an agent within cultural contexts and a participant in interpretive communities. Thus the construction of reality is not only a subjective endeavor, but a discursive and life-worldly process as well. As an activity, it involves interaction and participation; as a construction, it relies on co-constructions within a community of interpretation; as a self-determined process, it presupposes communication and coordination with others in a social environment. Such interaction, co-construction, communication and coordination would of course be impossible if each individual had to invent her/his reality completely on her/his own. Fortunately, they do not have to and fortunately for interactive constructivists, they do not hold such a solipsistic position. Education as a re/constructive process always implies the use of cultural resources that precede an individual’s experience. They provide the indispensable means of each individual’s constructions of reality. Reconstruction: Commenting on reconstruction we first have to explain that in the Cologne program of interactive constructivism the German word Rekonstruktion is used in a somewhat different sense than “reconstruction” is commonly understood in English. Rekonstruktion refers first of all to the re-production of previously established constructions. This may be an act of discovery or reinvention that is itself highly constructive in nature. However, the emphasis in Rekonstruktion is more on the aspect of reproduction than on the aspect of renewal. Such reconstruction may be undertaken deliberately, but to the extent that culture has us before we have it, it will to a large degree take place incidentally by ways of socialization. It may in any case imply some degree of renewal since the reconstructed is always something that is constructed anew in a somewhat different context and situation – e.g., think of the child who constructively learns and understands some mathematical formula already well known to others but uniquely new to the child in his/her present experience. The important point here is that in the processes of reconstruction, observers/participants/agents come to discover the abundant richness and wide variety of reality constructions that have already been accomplished and established by others in their culture. Thus the arbitrariness of constructions is limited through reference to already warranted cultural reconstructions that represent standards which help us to assess the viability and sustainability of any new construction. The more mature and experienced persons around us may laugh at our innocence and selfconfidence when we believe that we have invented something all by ourselves that is already well-known to them. And the more experienced we ourselves become in the symbolic systems of our culture, the more cautious we may be in claiming and proposing our own approaches. Often the very exuberance and

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inscrutability of the knowledge already constructed by others stifles our sense for the potency and significance of our own re/constructions, especially when we are newcomers to any field of relevant cultural reconstructions. From a constructivist viewpoint it seems crucial, against this background, that we learn through reconstruction not only to penetrate into the contents of knowledge, but also to understand the selective interests and cultural contexts that were relevant and decisive for observers, participants and agents in a specific field in their time and place as well as the interests and contexts that are urgent in our own. Cultural history shows us the abundance of reality constructions that have already been attained by others and now serve us as important cultural resources for our own constructive endeavors and explorations. We can use them as helpful tools, but we also take the risk of being captured by them in the traps of established customs and habits that tend to bar new ways and opportunities of acting. It is through the reconstructive discovery of cultural resources, values, goods, vocabularies, languages, and the various techniques and products of the arts of living (including scientific principles, explanations, and theories) that learners come to appropriate the symbolic resources they need for becoming responsible selves endowed with competencies for dealing with the social and cultural environments in which they live. But they also have to critically reconstruct and reinvent those cultural resources in light of their own characteristic contexts of living. This is a prerequisite for effectively and critically partaking in the symbolic representations and discourses of a society – including participation in fields like politics, science, arts, economics, and consumption. Interactive constructivism insists that the reconstructive side in the construction of realities plays a crucial role with regard to both the contents and relationships of learning in every human society. Deconstruction: A third necessary perspective besides constructions and reconstructions is the viewpoint of deconstruction which reminds us that, in an open and pluralist universe, our so far achieved cultural re/constructions of reality are always incomplete “versions of world-making.” They rest on procedures of selection and omission. They tend to exclude other possible perspectives and interpretations. The deconstructivist – sometimes ironically – suggests that just when we think we have understood something properly and thoroughly, it might be helpful to look at things from a different and hitherto neglected viewpoint. Such deconstructions make the familiar look strange, if only for a moment. They disturb the certainty of our taken-for-granted beliefs, understandings, and prejudices. Constructivists think that at times such disturbances or “perturbations” are a precondition for the release of new constructive and reconstructive interests and powers. Deconstruction in this sense is never an end in itself; it is no “-ism.” Rather, it constitutes a moment of alienation and relativization that serves as a means for enlarging and liberating the scope of our possible reality constructions. Deconstruction oftentimes begins with asking

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supposedly “silly” or “unnecessary” questions. It is very easy to overhear its inchoate articulations or simply dismiss them as irrelevant or annoying. Indeed, the deconstructivist is often a troublemaker in that s/he questions and disturbs beliefs that seem obvious to everybody else. S/he prevents us from being satisfied with an achieved solution; s/he makes things more complicated; s/he insists on unconsidered and apparently irrelevant implications that no-one knows where they will lead to. But in hind-sight we often find that successful new constructions (both in our individual and collective lives) were first prompted by tentative deconstructions of habitual and customary perspectives that held us captives until some unexpected move opened a new horizon of observation and interpretation. Education as process of deconstruction reveals and partly unmasks such captivities implied in our symbolic constructions of reality. Against the background of these three constructivist perspectives we can say that there is a necessary relativism of all human actions and meaning making. This applies especially to truth claims and scientific inquiries. But pragmatism as well as interactive constructivism still can and need to be critical of self-defeating forms of relativism and be on their guard against the menace of arbitrariness. The classical Deweyan concept here is “warranted assertibility” which still applies even for a constructivist understanding of cultural viability. Rorty’s postmodern rendering of the issue is his phrase of justified claims within language games. In an interesting reflection on his own practice as a university professor dealing with students with religious background, he situates his own position and gives arguments to justify it without taking refuge to a final observer position: It seems to me that the regulative idea that we heirs of the Enlightenment, we Socratists, most frequently use to criticize the conduct of various conversational partners is that of ‘needing education in order to outgrow their primitive fear, hatreds, and superstitions’.... It is a concept which I, like most Americans who teach humanities or social science in colleges and universities, invoke when we try to arrange things so that students who enter as bigoted, homophobic, religious fundamentalists will leave college with views more like our own.... The fundamentalist parents of our fundamentalist students think that the entire ‘American liberal establishment’ is engaged in a conspiracy. The parents have a point. Their point is that we liberal teachers no more feel in a symmetrical communication situation when we talk with bigots than do kindergarten teachers talking with their students.... When we American college teachers encounter religious fundamentalists, we do not consider the possibility of reformulating our own practices of justification so as to give more weight to the authority of the Christian scriptures. Instead, we do our best to convince these students of the benefits of secularization. We

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assign first-person accounts of growing up homosexual to our homophobic students for the same reasons that German schoolteachers in the postwar period assigned The Diary of Anne Frank.... You have to be educated in order to be ... a participant in our conversation.... So we are going to go right on trying to discredit you in the eyes of your children, trying to strip your fundamentalist religious community of dignity, trying to make your views seem silly rather than discussable. We are not so inclusivist as to tolerate intolerance such as yours.... I don’t see anything herrschaftsfrei [domination free] about my handling of my fundamentalist students. Rather, I think those students are lucky to find themselves under the benevolent Herrschaft [domination] of people like me, and to have escaped the grip of their frightening, vicious, dangerous parents.... I am just as provincial and contextualist as the Nazi teachers who made their students read Der Stürmer; the only difference is that I serve a better cause.39 Two things become evident from this quote. For Rorty, there is still the possibility of taking one’s position and claiming justification of one’s own believes and practices. Truth has not simply vanished. At the same time, he concedes the contextualism of observer perspectives and applies it to his own experience. This is the point in his liberal irony that deprives his approach from claims to universality and spoils any search for last words in the sense of metaphysical foundations. There is a relativism in the heart of this pragmatist insistence on the necessity of context. But we must take context seriously in the double sense that it relativizes but at the same time also gives substance to positions that are viabel in certain contexts. This is what some of the sharp critics of Rorty sometimes underestimate. There are contexts like democracy, liberalism, the modern state, separation of powers, human rights etc., that Rorty takes as a substance of his liberal position. Therefore it is not just a question of anything goes but rather an issue of making productive and relevant specific contexts that we choose over others. The very point in Rorty’s relativism, though, is that we cannot and should not hope for a last word about what contexts to choose. We can only hope for a democratic future in which a majority of people will opt for the contexts we mentioned above. From the perspective of interactive constructivism we think this hope has from the start been at the heart of pragmatism. It represents a fundamental component in the ethos of democracy. It is the very reason why the Deweyan link between democracy and education is so important. To sum up the constructivist interpretation with regard to James, Dewey and Rorty on language, we suggest that the distinction of perspectives like construction, reconstruction and deconstruction can be helpful to better understand and critically discuss the discontent with language. Especially, it can be fruitful for balancing out the tensional relational between language and experience. This seems to us to be of particular importance given the current

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debates between pragmatism and neopragmatism much of which turns precisely around this point. With an eye on James we may be more cautious and reluctant to talk about “pure experiences,” but with an eye on Rorty we should at the same time be cautious to avoid a too narrow focus on language that neglects aspects of experience which pragmatism as well as constructivism should not forget. Interactive constructivism here introduces three further perspectives which we have discussed above, namely the distinction between the symbolic, the imaginative and the real. This distinction expresses consequences from the linguistic turn on which Rorty for his part insists so much. But it also makes it possible for us to think about experiences in the broader sense of James and Dewey. This may be a starting point for a new approach to classical pragmatism as well as Rorty’s neopragmatism. It helps us to clarify what is involved in the construction, reconstruction and deconstruction of experience and language. There remains a sense of ambivalence with regard to language and experience for which both pragmatism and constructivism have found ways of articulation: language is a necessary component of any construction of reality. In this sense it does go all the way down through experience. Yet, language does not exhaust nor ever give full justice to the realities of observers, participants and agents. But even to tell this story we cannot do without language. This necessary ambivalence is what we tried to discuss here from different perspectives and through the eyes of James, Dewey and Rorty about language and its discontents. NOTES 1. B.G. is Bill Gavin, while I.C. stands for interactive constructivism (Stefan Neubert, Kersten Reich). 2. See Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, translated by James Strachey (New York: W.W. Norton, 1961). 3. Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William James (Boston: Little, Brown, 1935), vol. 2, p. 203. 4. The Letters of William James, edited by his son, Henry James (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1920), vol. 1, pp. 337–338. 5. William James, The Principles of Psychology (1890; repr., New York: Dover, 1950), vol. 1, p. 241. Hereafter referred to as PP. 6. William James, A Pluralistic Universe, in Essays in Radicalism Empiricism and A Pluralistic Universe (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1967), p. 60. Hereafter referred to as PU. Essays in Radical Empiricism is hereafter referred to as ERE. 7. William James, PU, pp. 218–219. 8. William James, PP, vol 1, p. 444. 9. Ibid, p. 236. 10. Ibid, p. 472. 11. William James, Pragmatism (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1908), pp. 132–148. Hereafter referred to as Prag. 12. See Richard Rorty, “Truth without Correspondence to Reality,” in Philosophy and Social Hope (London: Penguin Books, 1999), pp. 23–46.

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13. William James, ERE, p. 160. 14. William James, PP, vol. 1, p. 251. 15. Cf. Richard Rorty, Truth and Progress, Philosophical Papers vol. 3 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press 1998), p. 291. 16. Cf. Richard Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, Philosophical Papers, vol. 1 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press 1991), p. 127. He writes: “The error is to assume that the ‘true’ needs a definition, and then to infer from the fact that it cannot be defined in terms of a relation between beliefs and non-beliefs to the view that it must be defined in terms of a relation among beliefs. But, as Hilary Putnam has pointed out in his ‘naturalistic fallacy’ argument, ‘it might be true but not X’ is always sensible, no matter what one substitutes for X” (Ibid.). 17. John R. Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (New York: Free Press 1995), p. 1f. 18. Ibid., p. 12. 19. Larry Hickman discusses objectivity in pragmatism and constructivism with Kersten Reich and Stefan Neubert in John Dewey between Pragmatism and Constructivism (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009). 20. William James, PP, vol. 1, p. 239. 21. William James, Prag., p. 168. 22. William James, Prag., p. 225. 23. William James, Prag., p. 169. 24. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1902), pp. 379–429. 25. William James, ERE, p. 93. 26. Note that the English translation of the Lacanian term for this concept is “imaginary.” 27. John Dewey, The Collected Works of John Dewey, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967–87). Citations are to the The Early Works (EW), The Middle Works (MW), and The Later Works (LW). For example, LW5.86 refers to The Later Works, vol. 5, p. 86. 28. See Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1978). 29. William James, PU, pp. 212–213. 30. William James, PU, p. 249. 31. Ibid, p. 250. 32. Ibid, p. 290. 33. William James, Some Problems of Philosophy: A Beginning of an Introduction to Philosophy (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1911). 34. Cf. Charles Sanders Peirce, “The Scientific Attitude and Fallabilism,” in Philosophical Writings of Peirce, ed. Justus Buchler (New York: Dover Publications, 1955), p. 54. 35. William James, The Will to Believe and other Essays in Popular Philosophy (New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1897) pp. viii–ix. Hereafter referred to as WB. 36. Cf. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar,” in Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. William Gilman (New York: New American Library, 1965), p. 228. 37. See William James, WB, p. viii. 38. See William James, Writings: 1902 – 1910 (New York: Library of America, 1987), p. 1344. Here James says: “I am convinced that the desire to formulate truths is a

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virulent disease. It has contracted an alliance lately in me with a feverish personal ambition, which I never had before, and which I recognize as an unholy thing in such a connection. I actually dread to die until I have settled the Universe’s hash in one more book.... Childish idiot – as if formulas about the universe could ruffle its majesty...” 39. Richard Rorty, “Universality and Truth” in Rorty and his Critics, ed. Robert B. Brandom (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 21f.

William Gavin Professor of Philosophy Philosophy Department University of Southern Maine P. O. Box 9300 Portland, Maine 04104-9300 United States Stefan Neubert Faculty of Human Sciences University of Cologne Gronewaldxstr. 2 50931 Köln Germany Kersten Reich Faculty of Human Sciences University of Cologne Gronewaldxstr. 2 50931 Köln Germany

Contemporary Pragmatism Vol. 7, No. 2 (December 2010), 131–153

Editions Rodopi © 2010

Genuine Problems and the Significance of Science Matthew J. Brown

This paper addresses the political constraints on science through a pragmatist critique of Philip Kitcher’s account of “well-ordered science.” A central part of Kitcher’s account is his analysis of the significance of items of scientific research: contextual and purposerelative scientific significance replaces mere truth as the aim of inquiry. I raise problems for Kitcher’s account and argue for an alternative, drawing on Peirce’s and Dewey’s theories of problemsolving inquiry. I conclude by suggesting some consequences for understanding the proper conduct of science in a democracy.

1. Introduction My topic for this essay will be the social and political constraints on the operation of science. Modern science is a large-scale social and institutional endeavor, and in order to understand it, we need to understand its role within society and amongst our political institutions. What will be the research agenda for science? How should we distribute funding amongst potential and ongoing scientific projects? How should science be arranged in order to be just? What are the social and political responsibilities of scientists qua scientists? To many scientists and philosophers of science, these questions will seem inappropriate. It has been a widespread belief that science is an essentially value-free activity, especially in philosophy of science after World War II.1 When it functions well, it provides for us a store of objective truths. When moral, political, and social values enter in, they are essentially corrupting – Lysenkoism is a stock example. Technology, on this common view, is just the application of science and instrumental rationality towards some goals – while values enter in, it is only as goals set from the outside. This view is generally shared both by the boosters and debunkers of science, differing over whether actual science manages to live up to this ideal or whether science has become “corrupt.” It is becoming harder and harder to deny that values – not just so-called “cognitive” or “epistemic,” but moral, social, political values – play an essential role in science, and that science is essentially a social activity. At the same time,

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many now argue that this need not threaten the integrity of science. A growing number of philosophers are attempting to craft a new image of science, in which the role of values of science are not corrupting, in which they might even play a positive role. In such efforts it is common to explore the social nature of science, determine the proper relation of science to democracy, and problematize the simple dichotomy between science and technology. John Dewey also rejected the view of science as value-free that later became the orthodox view; unlike many present-day philosophers of science, he was not trained under the subsequent orthodoxy. His work provides a useful starting point for trying to understand values in science and science in democracy, in part because Dewey does not face the threat of falling into old, bad assumptions about science (he was never taught to make them). By taking the lead from Dewey, I hope to start from a position free from the mistaken assumptions and false starts of the tradition in philosophy of science. In this essay, I will analyze recent work by Philip Kitcher in which he works towards an image of science as value-laden. Kitcher has in recent years begun to draw on a variety of pragmatist ideas and espouse some distinctively pragmatist views. I will analyze Kitcher’s presentation in his Science, Truth, and Democracy (2001), which sets out a two-part theory of the relation of science to democracy and the social, political, and moral constraints on science: First, he provides an argument for viewing science as context-dependent but nonetheless objective, in which the concept of scientific significance plays a major role. Scientific significance is supposed to capture the knowledge that a scientific community or discipline has about what areas of research are important, of interest, or worthy of attention. Second, this context-dependent representation of scientific significance is used as an input to an ideal democratic deliberation procedure, in which ideal representatives of the preferences of citizens deliberate and attempt to reach consensus in order to determine the ideal research agenda for science (in our liberal democracy). He calls this ideal “wellordered science.” The philosophical-epistemic story about what is significant about science is thus a first step in a socio-political ideal of science. This ideal will be useful, e.g., in funding decisions and decisions of individual scientists in what research to pursue, because we can compare the actual situation and future options to the ideal.2 I’m going to focus here on the first part of the story, the account of scientific significance. This paper will challenge, and attempt to improve on, that account, and then trace briefly the consequences for the relation of science to democracy. The main challenge is that Kitcher’s account of significance leaves out too many of the concrete features of the contexts that give the sciences their significance. Kitcher captures some of the conditional or relational components of what makes certain scientific pursuits or claims significant. I argue that these are not enough, however, and that he leaves out components of significance that are immediate or inherent in the practice itself.

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John Dewey’s pragmatist theory of how problems arise and spur inquiry provides part of the missing story. By analyzing how problems arise from concrete situations, by understanding when and how such problems are genuine, we can also get a better picture of how significant they are. Dewey said that it was the neglect of the “context which controls the course of thought” (Context and Thought, LW 6:6)3 which was the most serious and pervasive fallacy of philosophy. Kitcher does much to avoid the problem, but not enough. I will try to take the project one step farther. I first summarize the motivations for Kitcher’s search for an account of the significance of science, and in particular, motivate the type of contextualist account Kitcher is after. I then give an overview of Kitcher’s account and raise some objections. I next outline the main features of the pragmatist theory of inquiry common to Charles S. Peirce and John Dewey, which I use to construct an alternative account of scientific significance which avoids the mentioned problems. I conclude by indicating the consequences that would follow for the second part of Kitcher’s project: understanding the relation of science to democracy. 2. Why Significance? Kitcher is not the only philosopher of science to have searched for an account of the significance of science. The positivists sought criteria of “cognitive significance” that would rule out all non-scientific statements as meaningless. More recently, Joseph Rouse has argued that an account of the significance of scientific practices ought to be a category at the forefront in science studies, helping analyze every level of practice (Rouse 1996, 25ff). Kitcher’s project, like Rouse’s,4 aims to answer a range of questions, some of which were traditionally filled by less modest traditional notions such as “objectivity” and “objective explanation.” Kitcher’s project also bears similarities to Larry Laudan’s analysis of the evolving aims of science in Science and Values (1984), though the latter attends exclusively to so-called “cognitive” values. One way Kitcher motivates the need for an account of “significance” over and above mere truth is by an analogy to maps. One might imagine that the ultimate goal of cartography is the production of an ideal atlas, a set of maps which can be used to serve any purpose. Kitcher thinks the possibility of such an atlas that is sufficiently comprehensive and practically useful is absurd: “There is no good reason to believe in the ideal atlas” (60). The wide variety of actual and possible aims served by map-making, the competing constraints, the need for selectivity in crafting useful maps, and the finitude of resources, casts doubt on the realizability and even the coherence of an ideal atlas. The only map with sufficiently rich information for all purposes is the territory itself; but the territory itself is not a map at all. To see why this is so, consider three different maps: a topographic map, an electoral map, and a subway map. The topographic map contains many

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geographical and geological features, and is especially informative about changes in elevation. On the other hand, one would have a difficult time navigating a city based on a topographical map, since so little of the available information is relevant. An electoral map – of the sort so many of us were obsessed with throughout the latter half of 2008 – contains precious little in the way of the information on the topographic map. There are no roads, no landmarks, no cities; no changes in elevation, rivers, or lakes. About all the map shows are political divisions – states, counties, districts – and the predicted or actual pattern of voting within those divisions. A subway map bears some resemblance to an electoral map: its geographic features are distorted, it contains little information about streets or natural landmarks. These simplifications are necessary to the effectiveness of the map, and even the basic relations of northsouth, east-west are optional (and sometimes left out in the ones on the subway car itself). These examples give a clear picture of the way in which constraints of map-making compete, and how intimately tied up they are with our purposes. These capture just three of a potentially infinite variety of maps serving our potentially infinite variety of purposes (to say nothing of things like star maps and maps of abstract spaces). So we must understand maps as representing territory in a way that picks out the significant features for our particular purposes. As it goes for maps, so too for science. Science does not merely seek truth, but significant truth. Mere truth is no good: most truth is uninteresting (the infinity of truths about the contents and arrangement of my office over time, for example), and some of it is unwelcome or dangerous. What we want is significant truth, the significance of which, Kitcher argues, is highly contextual and interest-relative: “[W]hat counts as significant science must be understood in the context of a particular group with particular practical interests and a particular history” (61). It is important to point out what significance is and is not supposed to capture for Kitcher. It does not provide an answer to the old “demarcation problem.” Whether some truth or some line of inquiry counts as significant is not meant to tell you that it is or is not “scientific.” I will follow Kitcher and presume from the outset a rough-and-ready understanding of what science is, and that we are talking about the sciences already. What this talk about “significance” is meant to capture is the relative importance of different parts of science. For Kitcher, this importance must be understood in terms of our goals, purposes, and interests. Further, though everyone should recognize that practical ends play an important role in attributing significance to certain scientific projects, what is needed is a portrayal of a goal that is distinctively epistemic. The objectivist or strong realist might try to avoid Kitcher’s move by seeking an objective goal for science. They would thus account for which truths are scientifically significant in a context-free way, as being those truths that contribute to the objective goal. Kitcher considers several traditional views on the epistemic or theoretical aim of science, including identifying laws of nature, providing a unified account of nature, or discovering the fundamental causal

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processes (66). Each of these fails, because of the difficulty of answering for each, “What would be so valuable about gaining that?” (66). Once we rule out practical and theological justifications, it is hard to find any justification for these goals. According to Kitcher, the most promising traditional view is: “The (epistemic) aim of science is to achieve objective understanding through the provision of explanations” (66). Objective understanding in this sense is not based in the activity of explanation that responds to actual questions, but is the recognition of whatever special facts or relationships exist that grounds particular explanations (if they are genuine or objective). The reasons that this view fails, according to Kitcher, are neither subtle nor complex. We are seeking an understanding of scientific significance that will help us pick out important parts of science from the myriad of banal facts. Thus, the aim of science, if it is to be “an all-purpose explanatory device” that is context-independent, it must be systematic. It will fail “if it is simply a long list of potential explanations, one for each context” (68) because then it will fail to sort the epistemically significant from the significant, including everything somewhere on the list. The easiest way to guarantee this sort systematicity is to defend some sort of Unity-of-Science view,5 in which intertheoretic reduction of some sort could be attained between the various special sciences, including definitions that could link the diverse vocabularies of the various disciplines (69). The failures of these views is familiar: the successful cases of reduction from which the movement drew inspiration were of a fairly limited class involving individual or small clusters of laws, whereas it is difficult to imagine that much of biology or psychology could take this form; there is much science that has little or nothing to do with general laws at all (69); linking definitions between theoretical vocabularies seems a near-impossible goal for disciplines like psychology (69); the crucial features of many sciences involves “the form of [the] processes, not the material out of which the things are made” (70–71), and these forms are quite diverse and explanatory, in many situations in which a reductive explanation would have zero explanatory power; consider Kitcher’s example of trends in the number of births of males versus females: an “explanation” in terms of the psychiochemical basis of this trend would not advance our understanding at all, whereas a non-reductive explanation in terms of selection pressure would be much more helpful. Just as the idea of an ideal atlas to serve all possible cartographic purposes is untenable, so too the Unityof-Science view fails.6 One might argue that the failures of this view, instead of signaling the impossibility of objectively sorting significant from insignificant truths, merely shows that it is an open project for philosophy of science to discover what notion of objective understanding will serve the purpose (73).7 But again, this approach will fail if all kinds of “mundane truths” are counted as significant (73). It won’t be the case that everything in the store of information in which objectively complete answers lie, the store that picks out the truths that are significant, will be relevant to any question, because of the failure of the Unity-

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of-Science view. So we will need a way to filter just the truths that are “pervasive” (but not completely so) from the banal (74). One possibility is to say that whatever truths play a role in a complete causal narrative of an event are the objective explanatory resources for the event, but this fails because often the causal history doesn’t give us the explanation we need (as in cases in which structural features or equilibrium conditions do the explaining) (74), and indeed any truth will figure in some causal narratives (74–75). One could try to solve the filtering problem by counting the number of explanations that each truth might play a role in, but this will fail because any true statement will figure in an infinity of possible explanations (continuum many, if time is continuous) (75). The general problem here is that our actual, everyday explanations are quite heterogeneous both in the questions they answer (not just “Why?” but also “How?,” “What?,” “How is it possible?,” etc. (73)), in the kind of information (causal or otherwise) that they rely on, and in what determines what is relevant to that explanation. Explanation is a task that is too context-dependent to be given a context-independent foundation. It is not that there is no such thing as objective explanation (in line with the ideal of objectivity that Kitcher pursues in Chapter 3): Objective explanation goes on in the sciences, then, but only against the background of our questions and our interests. The most we can expect from a theory of explanation is some understanding of how these questions and interests shift as our inquiries, and the complex environments in which they occur, evolve. (75–76) Hence the need for a theory of the significance of science: we want to know the aim and importance of inquiry; “discover truth” will not do, as most truth is banal and insignificant; none of the accounts in terms of laws, causes, unification, or objective explanation that is free from considerations of context and interest will do; thus, we need to understand how our questions and interests, both practical and theoretical, work to pick out certain things as significant. 3. Kitcher’s Theory of Significance: Significance Graphs Kitcher’s explanation of how elements of science count as significant proceeds from his insights into the complex interconnectedness of science. We are naturally interested in a number of broad questions, such as “What were our hominid ancestors like?” and “How do single-celled organisms regulate their metabolism?” (76). In addition, much of science is concerned not with general laws or broad questions, but with rather narrow issues and very particular results (76). Large projects and more mundane accomplishments are interconnected (76–77), but the flow of significance should not simply be seen as going from

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the theoretical top to the particularistic bottom (77). Epistemic and practical interests are interwoven (76). So a treatment of significance ought to provide a picture in which “the connections that confer significance seem to radiate in many different directions” rather than being a simple hierarchy (77). Kitcher uses an apparatus he calls “significance graphs” to capture the way that different parts of science get their significance. They are directed graphs that show connections between the research projects, questions, problems, claims, techniques, parts of the natural world, and practical goals dealt with by a scientific field. (See Figure 1 for a toy example which traces the significance of some areas of thermodynamics.)

Figure 1: Toy Significance Graph. Practical goals are outlined in square boxes, and questions about which we might be naturally curious are outlined by clouds (my addition). See figures 1 and 2 in Kitcher (2001, 79–80) for more detailed examples.

Significance graphs display the ways in which particular scientific efforts come to inherit significance from other projects. They are indexed to a particular time and will change dynamically as the field in question develops. The significance graph is meant “to make explicit what workers in the field know at the time” (78); they are part of what we might call the “disciplinary matrix” of the field.8 Notice that the information these significance graphs capture is relational or conditional. These graphs trace the ultimate source of significance to either practical questions (boxes) or questions that stem from “natural curiosity” (clouds). The latter is the basis of the epistemic component of significance in Kitcher’s account. Everything else has significance only derivatively, via an

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inheritance arrow drawn to it from a practical concern, a natural question, or another scientific concern. Thus, the significance of most scientific concerns is a mix of practical and epistemic components, deriving ultimately from these sources. There are many ways the inheritance can work: a more technical question must be answered in order to help answer a larger question; data can serve as evidence for a claim; new experiments are suggested by a comprehensive theory. Not only does the explanation of scientific significance by way of significance graphs account for all the insights and concerns above, but the significance-graph framework also takes into account the variety and the complex interconnections of scientific activities, and the fact that significance is dynamic and historically situated. 4. Problems for Kitcher’s Theory The major problem for Kitcher’s theory is the weakness of his account of the epistemic sources of significance. While Kitcher is committed to practical and epistemic sources of significance being interwoven, he does not want to reduce all significance to practicality. The only other source, on Kitcher’s account, is the contribution of “natural curiosity.” This is a weak peg on which to hang the significance of science.9 Recall the test that Kitcher applied to other candidate accounts of the aim of science: “What would be so valuable about knowing that?” When we ask this of one of these “natural” questions, Kitcher has little to say. He insists that Human beings vary ... with respect to the ways in which they express surprise and curiosity.... But ... we do count some of our fellows as pathological, either because they obsess about trifles or because they are completely dull. In claiming that sciences ultimately obtain their epistemic significance from the broad questions that express natural human curiosity, I am drawing on this practice of limited tolerance, on our conception of “healthy curiosity”.... (81, my emphasis) This story about “the ultimate source of epistemic signifance” he says, is “commonplace and disappointing to those who expect a grand theory that will invest the sciences with overriding importance” (80). Not only is it commonplace and disappointing to those who exalt science unduly, it is difficult to see how the significance of scientific projects, even on a modestly pro-science account, can have its source entirely in practical questions and curiosity. Are the questions and projects at the bleeding edge of science all ultimately of interest only through the practical projects they might relate to and the very general questions about which we are “naturally curious”? If epistemic significance comes down to a purely subjective feeling of curiosity, natural though it may be, the whole project of distinguishing scientific from mere utilitarian significance hangs on just a feeling. By pushing back the explanation

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to items of natural curiosity, his account of significance hangs on a claim that I find doubtful: that people will, without further reason, agree on a broad swath of what they find interesting. Put another way, Kitcher’s ideas will radically underestimate the significance of many projects in science. The mere fact that some or even many people feel a bit curious about some topic counts for very little in the face of our pressing needs. Practical significance will undoubtedly wash out the effects of curiosity. Kitcher’s criticisms of traditional accounts of the context-independent aim of science turn on their inability to answer the question “What would be so valuable about gaining that?” Could they not answer in the same way that Kitcher has? Why can they not simply reply that those who cannot see the inherent value in such pursuits are dull and incurious? If the answer is not satisfactory in their case, it will not work in Kitcher’s, either. A related and more familiar situation might be trying to explain the significance of technical work in philosophy by referring to general questions that people should obviously be naturally curious about, like “What is knowledge?” or “How are scientific concepts related to the world?” I have found that in the face of such claims, many people remain pretty unimpressed. Perhaps most of the non-philosophers I know are just dull, but the suggestion is at least impolite and at worst overwhelmingly elitist – a bad start for an attempt to communicate with laypersons10 about the significance of science. What’s more, Kitcher also underestimates the potential for idiosyncrasy of curiosity. A significance graph crystallizes the implicit knowledge of a discipline as to what is significant in that field. The broad, “natural” questions in their significance graph then need not necessarily be natural for everyone. The questions that drive my basic curiosity might only be “natural” for people like me in certain respects, and that respect might be what draws people to say, physics, but not to microbiology. The questions that most physicists are “naturally” curious about might be quite idiosyncratic. For example the microbiologist and nobel laureate Salvador Luria (1984) “confess[es] a lack of enthusiasm ... in the ‘big problems’ of the Universe or of the early Earth” (119).11 The questions of supposed “natural curiosity” which drive astronomy, physics, or even much of biology would be of little interest to Luria, as compared with the concrete problems facing microbiologists, about which it is possible to make obvious progress. In such a case, Kitcher will either devalue the field (who cares what those physicists are curious about? ), or become an elitist (such that only physicists determine or have access to whether their projects are significant), which is in tension with his attempt to subject scientific aims to what ideal democratic layperson-deliberators would choose. Of course, there is no reason that curiosity can’t or shouldn’t play a role in attributing significance; but it is inadequate to carry so much of the project. To sum up, the problems with Kitcher’s use of “natural curiousity” as the basis of epistemic significance are:

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1. It fails his own test for candidate aims of science: “What would be so valuable about knowing that?” As a result, his defense of natural curiosity undermines his criticisms of other, anti-contextualist approaches. 2. Curiosity seems too subjective to account for the epistemic significance of science. 3. Practical problems count for much more than curiosities, and thus the epistemic significance of science will be washed out by practical significance. 4. There are reasons to think that curiosity might be idiosyncratic to a scientific field or even within a field. To the degree that curiosity is idiosyncratic, Kitcher faces the dilemma of degrading the epistemic significance of vast swaths of science or falling into extreme elitism about whose curiosity counts. In the face of these problems,12 I suggest an alternative approach, based on the pragmatist views of Peirce and Dewey. Their theory of inquiry can help us further understand the problems with Kitcher’s theory, as well as pointing the direction towards fixing it. 5. The Pragmatist Model of Inquiry: Peirce’s Insight It is worth setting out some key features of the pragmatist theory of inquiry developed in detail at this point, with an emphasis on those features of the theory relevant to the question of the significance of science and the value of various lines of inquiry. I will begin with Peirce’s somewhat simpler way of putting the point, by way of introduction, before explaining Dewey’s view and showing how it should be developed. This requires a divergence from addressing the main topic – significance – to which I will return in §7. One of the founding insights of Peirce’s pragmatism was his analysis of the structure of belief-formation,13 which provides an important distinction between genuine doubt that leads to inquiry and new belief, and paper doubt that is often used for pernicious philosophical purposes. The basic idea is the familiar difference between the experience of an actual, pressing problem or a real, nagging uncertainty, versus the posing of an idle question, the seemingly silly questioning of what’s obvious without any reason behind it.14 Peirce claims that all inquiry begins with genuine doubt. One way Peirce offers for understanding genuine doubt is by contrast to the methodological doubt of Descartes. Such doubt is complete and schematic, and, Peirce thinks, feigned. According to Peirce, this method is fruitless, because genuine doubt requires more than just putting a question on paper: Some philosophers have imagined that to start an inquiry it was only necessary to utter a question whether orally or by setting it down upon paper.... But the mere putting of a proposition into the interrogative form

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does not stimulate the mind to any struggle after belief. There must be a real and living doubt, and without this all discussion is idle. (EP 1: 114– 115)15 What distinguishes genuine doubt is that, first, it must be felt or experienced. The feeling that Peirce talks about is variously characterized as one of unease, surprise, or novelty. Second, it is not merely a feeling, but also a practical obstacle, in a very broad sense of “practical”: it is an obstacle to the continuation of some human activity. Without these new beliefs, one is unable to move forward. It is an experience that breaks up old beliefs and habits, and leads one to struggle after new beliefs. A simplistic example is coming to an unexpected fork in one’s path through the woods. You are surprised, and perhaps uneasy about which way to go. You must settle at least on a tentative belief about which way to go before you can move forward. Peirce argues that the formation of all beliefs has a complex logical and temporal structure, and no belief can arise immediately.16 Peirce’s model, which we might call the doubt-belief model of inquiry, proceeds from genuine doubt into inquiry and finally to settled belief. This is the core of Peirce’s theory of inquiry. Genuine doubt must precede (or be an early stage in) any genuine inquiry. The temporal development of inquiry, when it is successful, moves away from this doubt and towards some resolution. 6. Dewey’s Elaboration of the Model John Dewey takes up Peirce’s line of thought in his own writings on logic and inquiry: The function of reflective thought [i.e., inquiry] is ... to transform a situation in which there is experienced obscurity, doubt, conflict, disturbance of some sort, into a situation that is clear, coherent, settled, harmonious. (How We Think, LW 8:195, my emphasis) The affinity with Peirce is clear, in that inquiry takes us from a situation that is (among other things) doubtful to one that is settled, but Dewey elaborates and transforms Peirce’s insight. The most crucial transformation is from Peirce’s terminology of mental-states like doubt and belief to Dewey’s discussion of “situations.” A situation is not merely personal and subjective; it includes the whole person or group of persons and the constituents of their environment relevant to the inquiry or practice at hand.17 Problems of inquiry do not arise as purely intellectual matters, but rather due to “incidents occasioning an interruption of the smooth, straightforward course of behavior and that deflect it into the kind of behavior constituting inquiry” (“Reply to Albert G. A. Balz,” LW 16:282). An indeterminate or problematic situation for Dewey is a “breakdown” of practice, as it is for Heidegger, and in both cases it is what

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makes reflection and knowledge possible.18 The unit of analysis is not the mind but behavior or practice. We do not begin inquiry with an already set problem, but with some problematic situation. Dewey uses the phrase “problematic situation” in order to emphasize that the location of a perplexity is not simply in the mind of the inquirer, but in the whole situation. A problem, or a problem-statement, is an explicit formulation of the source of what is problematic about the situation, i.e., it states what the difficulty is and which factors contribute to it. It is hard work to get the problem right: “A problem well-put is half-solved” (LW 12:112). And in fact, we should say also that a problem completely-well-put is entirely-solved. That is, we can never quite set a statement of the problem in stone until we’ve found its solution, since it could always be that to find the solution we might need to reformulate the problem. Consider a common situation in medical practice. A patient comes in showing familiar symptoms, and the physician prescribes the usual antibiotic. If everything works out fine, the smooth course of behavior continues; there is no “inquiry,” properly so-called. On the other hand, if the antibiotic doesn’t seem to work,19 there is a disruption of the habitual course of activity. As the physician, looking at what you have in front of you, it isn’t clear which way to go, what the features of this situation signify. You must dig for more evidence, consider alternative explanations, and try to sort out what to do before proceeding with a course of treatment. A second difference between Dewey and Peirce is the phenomenological richness of the terms of Dewey’s account, the elaboration of the qualities that characterize the initial and final moments of inquiry. Thought begins with a situation that is obscure, doubtful, conflicted, disturbed, etc., and it terminates when the situation attains clarity, coherence, settledness, harmony. What Dewey provides here we might call an aesthetics of logic, an analysis of the nature and role of qualities in the production and guiding of inquiry.20 Unlike Peirce’s terminology of “belief” and “doubt,” which connote subjective, individual mental states (despite Peirce’s own understanding of such terms in terms of habits and practices), Dewey rigorously avoids presupposing fixed dichotomies of mind/body and individual/world in laying out his phenomenological description of problems and inquiry. Dewey considers all human activity to be a species of embodied life-activity, in which an organism is always engaged in transactions with an environment. In this situational picture, qualities of the situation like “doubtful” or “indeterminate” describe the transactions between organism and environment, the particular character of the goal-directed, situated activity of an embodied creature. “We are doubtful because the situation is inherently doubtful” (Logic, LW 12:109, my emphasis). The indeterminacy of the situation is not merely a subjective feature, but rather an objective imbalance or disequilibrium in the organism/environment system. Subjective states of doubt that are not evoked by a “doubtfulness” or instability in the situation are pathological (ibid.).21 Furthermore, Dewey allows us to leave

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open the possibility that the inquiring agent is not an isolated individual who doubts or believes, but an entire social group that responds jointly to a doubtful situation and works to resolve it. Indeed, such a possibility is necessary if the theory of inquiry is to be useful in understanding science, which is essentially social. The difference between curiosity and a doubt or problematic situation must be emphasized. The difference is not that doubt is a more practical affair that curiosity, in Kitcher’s sense (that would collapse the practical-epistemic distinction into the practical, and beg the question against Kitcher). Rather, the difference lies in the fact that curiosity seems far more intellectually idle, a question posed in a moment of fancy and speculation, while doubt arises in the course of activity, and presents a blockage of such activity. The activity may be as “unpractical” as you like, as far removed from the immediate needs of getting food or a living, from application in engineering or industry: composing a concerto or constructing an axiomatic mathematical system. Doubt is a hesitation in the vital beliefs that structure that activity and that press for solution. Doubt is a discoordination that is not merely a subjective feeling; hence, Dewey’s use of the term “problematic situation.” This is not to diminish the importance of curiosity, especially as a personal or social tendency. Indeed, the curious mind is the one that asks questions that may lead us to discover dubious ideas and unstable situations, and so allow us to resolve problems before they catch us unawares. But it is in the process of creating real and living doubts that curiosity becomes significant. The mere questioning of a thing does not make that question significant in any degree. There is another reading of “curiosity” which makes it equivalent to doubt or perplexity in the pragmatist sense.22 If Kitcher had mean this, however, there would still be reason to fault his account. On the pragmatist theory of inquiry, there are no “natural” curiosities just as there are no universal doubts. Doubt, curiosity, perplexity, or problematic situations are individual, particular, and situational. If understood in this way, curiosity is not so much the locus of Kitcher’s problem, but the quasi-foundational attempt to find context-free, universal (though human) sources as grounds for the epistemic significants of particular projects. I will now indicate how the pragmatist theory of inquiry bears on the question of scientific significance. 7. Genuine Problems and Scientific Significance There are two ways we can connect the previous remarks on inquiry and genuine problems to Kitcher and the question of how to assess scientific significance. The first is to make genuineness a necessary condition on a problem having any significance. The second is to look more deeply at the factors which make a problem a genuine problem, and see if that can give us a lead on how to assess degree or amount of significance. First, I’ll use these two

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general ideas to diagnose what is dissatisfactory about Kitcher’s account, then I will fill out the alternative view. The first problem with Kitcher’s account is that just because one can trace out some logical connections between what is going on in the field and some new question, that doesn’t really make the question a significant one. To put it in the pragmatist idiom, you could sit down and draw out a significance graph for many a “paper problem,” but that doesn’t make it a real problem. Surely, Descartes’ evil daemon has certain connections to any area of inquiry whatsoever; if the evil daemon exists, then we can’t trust the results of any observation or reasoning. And yet, this isn’t a serious worry for any scientist or scientifically-minded philosopher, and not because skepticism has been directly refuted. In other words, having significance-graph connections a’plenty is not a sufficient condition for significance. The second problem is that Kitcher seems to deny the possibility that truly novel areas of inquiry can arise and still be significant. It seems possible that a whole new area of inquiry might open up in an area of practice hitherto unproblematic, or even in an area not known before to exist.23 Such an area might have thin connections on a significance graph to prior scientific pursuits, or even to narrowly practical application and natural curiosity, and yet capture our attention in a way that makes it quite significant. It seems then that being thickly connected via significance-graphs isn’t even necessary for being very significant. The crucial problem with Kitcher’s account is that despite aiming at a contextual account of scientific significance, the significance-graphs only relate the particular context of an inquiry or project to context-free, quasi-universal sources of significance: practical advances that meet basic human needs and wants and questions about which all human beings are naturally curious. While practical advances can be more clearly understood in the context of particular, current, culturally-situated projects, the force of epistemic significance in Kitcher’s account depends upon the dubious universality or naturalness of general curiosities. A contextualist account of significance of scientific projects should turn away from these generalities and look to the particular features of the problem-situation to derive the significance of those projects. These features will still include systematic and historical connections to other human concerns, but those distant features will not exhaust our account of significance. While Kitcher has shown the way in demonstrating the need for a context-dependent theory of the significance of science, much work is left to be done in providing an adequate answer. He needs yet a stronger grounding in the concrete features of the situation in order to limn the significance of scientific pursuits. In other words, we need to understand not only the intellectual-historical context of items of science, but the concrete situational context that constitute the problems that science aims to resolve. Here’s how I think the account ought to go: Inquiries have significance in virtue of addressing some genuine problem. The conditions of genuine problematicity tell us whether some pursuit is

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significant. In other words, it is a necessary condition on attributing significance to some inquiry that it address a genuine problem, and any work on mere “paper problems” is disqualified from being counted as significant. Abstract skeptical worries don’t count as significant problems. Problem sets in a college physics course aren’t significant scientific research. Secondly, the amount of significance depends on the features of the context or situation that make a problem genuine. Remember, a genuine problem is based on a real problematic situation. A situation is defined by a certain practice, and the situation becomes problematic when that practice is disrupted. The key questions for determining how significant the problem is, I want to suggest, depend on just what is the practice, the situational transaction, that is disturbed. How important is that practice, and so what is the urgency that we resolve the disturbance? And how much is it disturbed? (See Figure 2).

Figure 2: Measure of Immediate Significance. In addition to the kind of relational information about significance captured by Kitcher’s significance graphs, we must take into account the degrees of immediate significance of an inquiry. Problematic situations can arise from greater and lesser degrees of disturbance of some standing practice, and the practice itself has some importance that indicates the urgency that disturbances of it be resolved.

We can imagine a small disturbance in a quite important practice may be very important. For example, suppose that we become aware of even a relatively small flaw in the practice of vaccination, such as a very low level uncertainty about its side effects. Because of the importance of vaccinations to modern medicine, this presents itself as a crucial matter. Second, consider a rather large disturbance in a much less important practice. Suppose you put very little stock

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in research in high energy physics.24 Nevertheless, a problem which shakes that area at a fundamental level might be quite significant indeed. Kitcher’s significance graphs cannot capture the qualitative differences between these cases, nor will they attribute the right degree of significance unless these factors always lead to greater numbers of connections to other parts of science, which seems doubtful. Convincing others of the significance of a problem that occupies you looks very different according to this alternative. For Kitcher, it should be enough to trace logical, causal, or historical connections between your concerns and basic practical applications and questions that excite natural curiosity. All it should require is an accurate significance graph. On this alternative account, you have to make three kinds of argument. You have to show that you do, indeed, face a genuine problem, rather than a mere paper problem. You have to provide positive reasons for doubt or show that the practice really fails to provide a sure plan of action in the present circumstances. Second, you have to convince them that it is a serious rather than minor disturbance in the practice. Finally, you may have to argue that the practice itself is important. Kitcher’s significance graphs will not work as a way of representing the full significance of inquiry, but they may serve other useful functions in understanding and communicating about scientific significance. They do succeed in providing due recognition to the complex connectedness of science, and they may provide for us a spur to new inquiries, helping us discover new problematic situations that have not yet come to our attention. But they are not the right starting-point in understanding the significance of inquiry. Kitcher over-intellectualizes the problem of significance; in his account, it is the problem-formulations themselves that matter, not the indeterminate situations that lie behind them. What’s crucial is that we begin with practices that matter,25 and the more or less serious problems that arise in the course of those practices. This is what makes the problem-solving endeavors of science significant. This pragmatist alternative to Kitcher’s framework for assessing the significance of science avoids the problems that plague Kitcher’s own account: 1. It stands up to Kitcher’s test by answering “What would be so valuable about knowing that” in the following fashion: resolving genuine problems is always valuable in that it removes a difficulty for a practice that matters or, in the worst case, shows that that practice is ultimately unworkable and must be abandoned or replaced. 2. It is not too subjective, because genuine problems are never merely the result of subjective factors. It is not by mere fantasy or appearance that the transactions between the world and the practitioner become discoordinated. 3. Epistemic significance does not reduce to practical significance, in Kitcher’s sense of “practical.” Many of the scientific practices that constitute established scientific disciplines, during the pursuit of which

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problems arise and inquiries are spurred, have an importance that far exceeds their distant connections to practical results. How these practices come to matter is a complex historical affair; that they matter is a much more certain thing than is any reductionist attempt to explain why they matter in more fundamental terms. However, all scientific significance is “practical” in a much broader sense, the sense connected with the meaning of the term “pragmatism,” meaning merely that it is connected with the practices and activities that constitute life. 4. Is significance on my account idiosyncratic? Yes and no. No, in the sense that whether a genuine problem exists is not just a matter of personal preference; no amount of desiring it to be otherwise will make it go away, and no amount of questioning an unproblematic situation will make it problematic. On the other hand, a genuine problem might be idiosyncratic in that it might be a problem for a practice that you’re not engaged in or don’t care about. But these sense of idiosyncrasy will have some impact on the importance of the practice, and so significance and idiosyncrasy will vary in the right way. One nice feature of this framework is that it nicely tracks some of the features of a method already in place for evaluating the merits of scientific projects for pursuit. It is common to evaluate grant proposals based on both their relevance to solving problems that are important to the progress of a field or fields and also to consider the importance of that advancement, including intellectual, educational, and social benefits. The latter is important as a consideration relevant to the second stage of Kitcher’s account: the democratic ranking of projects. It is to the implications for this part of Kitcher’s project that I will now turn. 8. Consequences for Science and Democracy Attempting to trace out the consequences of these criticisms and alternatives for Kitcher’s project of providing a framework for understanding the social and political constraints on science, or providing an ideal of “well-ordered science” in a liberal democracy, would require an additional essay, perhaps a whole book. I will point to some fairly obvious consequences, which seem to me also to improve upon Kitcher’s account. First, I hope it is clear that fully comprehending the significance of some part of science is going to require much more intimate knowledge about the situational context of that part than is available in Kitcher’s significance graphs. The “importance of practice” in my replacement framework for analyzing significance captures much of what Kitcher is after with his idea of well-ordered science. Unlike Kitcher’s account (but like the view that Simon (2006) thinks Kitcher is necessarily but unfortunately committed to), social values already come in at the point of assessing significance. Also, assessing the significance of

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particular research requires an understanding of the larger practice. This makes carrying out Kitcher’s project much harder than it would be on his original account. Kitcher’s significance graphs are suppose to make key information for assessing significance accessible to lay deliberators; democratic assessment of science would thus be possible. Unfortunately for Kitcher, this can’t be done in the schematic way that he hopes. Kitcher wants a short-cut solution to a hard problem, but such attempts in philosophy, while common, tend to create more troubles than they the resolve. There are rarely, if ever, such easy ways out. I’ve told a story about how to get “significance” right, necessary for engaging with the policy, and engage we must! No simple diagrams or idealized democratic deliberation-processess will set the research agenda for science. A more complex process will be necessary. Of course, I’ve provided equally or more simplistic representations of my own, but my graph is not meant to be a full story. I’m not suggesting that the added component of significance can be captured by a two-dimensional vector space and assigned Cartesian coordinates. Rather, I think that in order to be able to understand concretely a claim such as Figure 2 represents, you need to know about the standing practice in question and the way in which the problem disrupts that practice, as well as having some sort of sympathetic connection to the practitioners in question and the way in which they experience that disruption to be confusing, troubling, etc. This means that, insofar as information about significance is supposed to “tutor” the preferences of our ideal deliberators, that process will have a significantly more human face. In fact, I think the whole discussion needs to sound less like an ideal Rawlsian fairytale and more like an actual human discussion. Second, I think that the demarcation between significance, which comes from the scientists’ side, and the image of well-ordered science, produced on the basis of ideal representatives of the interests of layperson groups, becomes untenable. Assessing the significance of a particular part of science will depend on the significance of the practice of which it is a part. To oversimplify, the problems that arise in physics depend on the significance of the ongoing tradition of work going on over there in the physics department. However that gets cashed out is going to depend in part on complex relations of science as a practice to the rest of human life and affairs, and a necessary part of that story is going to be social, ethical, and political values. The way in which significance “informs” debates about science is going to be a more iterative, more reciprocal process. Science and social policy cannot be set apart and interact with each other in a thin way. We need to understand more closely the relationship between scientific practice and social problems, a project that Dewey called for long ago.26

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I thank P. D. Magnus, Paul Churchland, Nancy Cartwright, Gerald Doppelt, the members of the UCSD Philosophy of Science Reading Group, and the attendees of the Center for Inquiry conference on Pragmatism and Science for valuable feedback on earlier drafts of this essay. I have also benefitted immensely from the feedback of an anonymous referee for Contemporary Pragmatism.

NOTES (2009)

1. See Richardson (2002, 2003); Howard (2003, 2007); Reisch (2005); Douglas

2. Or, to be more precise, since Kitcher’s procedure doesn’t produce an actual research agenda, but instead points to the kind of procedure that would produce one, it would be more accurate to say that what Kitcher provides is a ground for arguments about what would or wouldn’t be on the agenda. The judgments one would be able to make would necessarily be fairly coarse (e.g., pursue research on third-world disease rather than more advanced liposuction techniques). 3. According to standard practice, references to John Dewey’s work are parenthetical citations to Dewey (1991), cited according to sub-collection: The Early Works (EW), The Middle Works (MW), and The Later Works (LW). Citations are made with these designations followed by volume and page number, along with essay or manuscript title where this is not clear from context. 4. Kitcher does not cite Rouse, but their way of putting the problem is uncannily similar. A likely common source is Popper (though only Kitcher cites him as a source of his ideas on significance, in the bibliographic notes to chapter 6). Rouse seems more keenly aware of the specific issues of scientific practice as such. 5. Kitcher’s discussion of the “Unity-of-Science movement” may depart drastically from the actual historical movement headed by Otto Neurath. See Reisch (2005) and Cartwright et al. (1996). 6. One may find fault with Kitcher’s characterization of the Unity-of-Science view, or find his criticisms lacking. There are certainly many careful and sustained critiques of the idea. Kitcher refers the reader to Fodor (1974); van Fraassen (1980, 1989); Kitcher (1984); Dupré (1993); Cartwright (1999). Dewey’s own critique and reinterpretation of the Unity of Science (as an anti-reductionist opposition to supernaturalism) can be found in his contribution to Volume 1 of the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, “Unity of Science as a Social Problem” (LW 13:271– 280). Paul Feyerabend was widely critical of such a view, arguing for the necessity of metaphysically and conceptually incommensurable theories and an antagonistic theory of scientific progress along the lines of Mill’s On Liberty. See also Galison and Stump (1996). Despite the difficulties of the issue, I suspect a quite simple argument will serve Kitcher’s purpose. We ought to believe that science actually provisions explanations, and that we are currently able to make reasonable judgments about significance. However, science at present does not form the unified edifice dreamed of by the Unity-of-Science movement, nor does it even approximate it. Therefore, any explanation of the significance of science applicable to science as it actually exists at present cannot depend on this far-off ideal of the Unity of Science.

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7. This is one way to understand much recent work on “models” and “mechanisms” which treat those as general schemes of scientific explanation. 8. Following Kuhn (1970, p. 271). 9. P. D. Magnus has raised a variety of problems for Kitcher’s use of “natural curiosity” in an unpublished manuscript (Magnus 2008), which are related but independent. 10. Even idealized ones! 11. Quoted in Feyerabend and Terpstra (1999, p. 148) and Feyerabend (1988, p. 35). 12. Further problems arise when one attempts to use Kitcher’s analysis of significance for Kitcher’s own project of reconciling science and democracy. See Simon (2006). 13. The locus classicus being his 1877 series of essays in Popular Science Monthly, especially “The Fixation of Belief” (Peirce, 1877). 14. The lack of a good reason for doubt is crucial to the idea of a paper doubt. Part of what Peirce and Dewey are after is an explanation of what counts as a good reason for doubt. 15. “The Fixation of Belief” (Peirce, 1877). Citations of Peirce will refer to Peirce et al. (1992) according to (EP volume:page), and citations in this paper refer to Peirce (1877) unless otherwise noted. 16. Belief here should be understand in its dispositional, not occurrent sense. 17. In Dewey’s usage, a situation is not a mental state, subjective experience, or collection of sense-data, nor is it merely a spatio-temporal region or the physical surfaces of apparent objects. It is not singular object or set of objects, but a contextual whole. A situation for Dewey is an “environing experienced world” (Logic, LW 12:72–73). It is essentially subject-centered or subject-relative, without being subjective. It is a context or a perspective, which must be understood relative to a subject, but which is not subjective in a problematic way, though unlike “context,” which sometimes notes the latter side of the figure-ground relationship, situation encompasses both. See Giere’s Scientific Perspectivism for an argument about why we should not be worried by science being perspective-dependent. 18. See Koschmann et al. (1998). 19. And such failures aren’t a familiar occurrence for which there is another immediate response. 20. This is especially developed in Dewey’s essay, “Qualitative Thought” (LW 5: 243–262). 21. Both Peirce and Dewey think it is a characteristic of the scientific attitude to seek out problems, not merely passively wait for them to occur. See Bernstein (1966, p. 105) and Browning (1994). 22. See, for example, Dewey’s discussion of “curiosity” in this sense in How We Think (LW 8:141–144). 23. While it is doubtful that any inquiry is possible that is completely disconnected from prior practical and scientific investigations, and it seems unlikely that any significant area of research could arise without many such connections, there do seem to be several candidates for areas of inquiry whose significance far surpasses the relatively thinner connections to prior questions, problems, results, etc. of earlier science, as well as practical application and natural curiosity: Darwinian evolutionary theory, cellular automata theory, chaos theory, computer science, mathematical logic, and climatology, especially in the earlier days of those sciences, are quite novel in terms of

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their problems, subject-matter, and methods. Unlike Kitcher’s favorite examples, it seems difficult to explain the intense level of interest in these areas at the time of their inception in terms of significance graphs; the significance of these cases appears to precede their dense connectedness on Kitcher’s graphs. 24. Along the lines of Luria (1984), discussed above in §4. 25. My thanks to Nancy Cartwright for suggesting this apt phrase for describing my view. 26. See, e.g., the penultimate chapter of Logic: The Theory of Inquiry on “Social Inquiry” (LW 12:481–505) or “Unity of Science as a Social Problem” (LW 13:271–280)

REFERENCES Bernstein, Richard. 1966. John Dewey. New York: Washington Square Press. Browning, Douglas. 1994. “The Limits of the Practical in Peirce’s View of Philosophical Inquiry.” In From Time and Chance to Consciousness: Studies in the Metaphysics of Charles Peirce, ed. Edward C. Moore and Richard S. Robin (Oxford: Berg Publishers), pp. 15–29. Cartwright, Nancy. 1999. The Dappled World: A Study of the Boundaries of Science. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Cartwright, Nancy, Jordi Cat, Lola Fleck, Thomas E. Uebel, eds. 1996. Otto Neurath: Philosophy between Science and Politics. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Dewey, John. (1969–1991). The Collected Works of John Dewey, 1882–1953. ed. Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Douglas, Heather. 2009. Science, Policy, and the Value-Free Ideal. Pittsburgh, Penn.: University of Pittsburgh Press. Dupré, John. 1993. The Disorder of Things : Metaphysical Foundations of the Disunity of Science. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Feyerabend, Paul K. 1988. Farewell to Reason. London: Verso. Feyerabend, Paul K. 1999. Conquest of Abundance: A Tale of Abstraction versus the Richness of Being. ed. Bert Terpstra. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Fodor, Jerry. 1974. “Special Sciences, or Disunity of Science as a Working Hypothesis.” Synthese, 28(2):97–115. Galison, Peter and Stump, David J., eds. 1996. The Disunity of Science: Boundaries, Contexts, and Power. Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press.

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Howard, Don A. 2003. “Two Left Turns Make a Right: On the Curious Political Career of North American Philosophy of Science at Midcentury.” In Logical Empiricism in North America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), pp. 25–93. Howard, Don A. 2007. “Better Red than Dead – Putting an End to the Social Irrelevance of Postwar Philosophy of Science.” Science & Education, 18(2):199–220. Kitcher, Philip. 1984. “1953 and all that. A tale of two sciences.” Philosophical Review 93(3): 335–373. Kitcher, Philip. 2001. Science, Truth, and Democracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Koschmann, Timothy, Kari Kuutti and Larry Hickman. 1998. “The Concept of Breakdown in Heidegger, Leont’ev, and Dewey and Its Implications for Education.” Mind, Culture, and Activity, 5(1):25–41. Kuhn, Thomas. 1970. “Reflections on My Critics.” Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, ed. I. Lakatos and A. Musgrave (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press), pp. 231–278. Luria, Salvador E. 1984. A Slot Machine, a Broken Test Tube: An Autobiography. New York: Harper and Row. Magnus, P. D. 2008. “Regarding scientific significance.” Unpublished. Retrieved from SUNY Digital Repository, September 17, 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/1951/48222. Peirce, Charles S. 1877. “The Fixation of Belief.” Popular Science Monthly, 12(1):1–15. Peirce, Charles. S. 1992. The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, vol. 1, ed. Christian J. W. Kloesel and Nathan Houser. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Reisch, George A. 2005. How the Cold War Transformed Philosophy of Science: To the Icy Slopes of Logic. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Richardson, Alan. 2002. “Engineering Philosophy of Science: American Pragmatism and Logical Empiricism in the 1930s.” Philosophy of Science, 69(S3):36–47. Richardson, Alan. 2003. “Logical Empiricism, American Pragmatism, and the Fate of Scientific Philosophy in North America.” Logical Empiricism in North America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), pp. 1–24. Simon, Jeremy. 2006. “The Proper Ends of Science: Philip Kitcher, Science, and the Good.” Philosophy of Science, 73(2):194–214. van Fraassen, Bas C. 1980. The Scientific Image. Oxford: Clarendon Press. van Fraassen, Bas C. 1989. Laws and Symmetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Genuine Problems and the Significance of Science Matthew J. Brown Assistant Professor of Philosophy Center for Values in Medicine, Science, and Technology University of Texas at Dallas 800 W Campbell Road, JO31 Richardson, TX 75080 United States

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Editions Rodopi © 2010

Evolution and Explanation: Biology, Aesthetics, Pragmatism Robert Chodat

Recent discussion of the arts has grown increasingly sympathetic to evolutionary psychology, a trend vividly captured in Denis Dutton’s recent book The Art Instinct. Yet evolutionary psychologists have paid startlingly little attention to pragmatism, despite the fact that pragmatists also work in Darwin’s wake and often interrogate the “two cultures” divide. An extended comparison of pragmatist and evolutionary aesthetics can help us recognize the more layered notion of “nature” running through pragmatism, and help us articulate what matters most for us in the understanding of literary and other aesthetic phenomena.

1. Just How Many Cultures Are There? Near the start of Richard Powers’s 1995 novel Galatea 2.2, a cognitive scientist named Philip Lentz turns to a novelist trained in literary studies and poses a blunt question: “Tell us. What passes for knowledge in your so-called discipline?” Shortly afterward, the writer meets another, less confrontational scientist who seems to know an unusual amount of information about his life as a budding young author, prompting the novelist to ask: “Where the hell is the Two Cultures split when you need it?”1 In context, both questions are clearly meant as jokes. But they haunt the whole of Powers’s novel, which tracks Lentz’s self-described “reductionist” effort to prove that consciousness “is a deception,” “a glorified, fudged-up Turing machine.” And indeed, these questions about “so-called knowledge” and “the Two Cultures split” haunt not only Powers’s novel, but very broadly speaking much of the literature and criticism of the last two hundred years. Poetry has of course always been contrasted with history and philosophy (think of Aristotle or Sidney), but with the rise of the natural sciences – the elimination of final causes, suspicion toward “first principles,” a general “disenchantment” of nature – poets have felt even more reason to be defensive. Beginning at least with the Romantics, writers and readers have expressed considerable anxiety about the perceived murder-to-dissect impulses of modernity, and have to one degree or another been willing to canonize

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Dostoevsky, Eliot, Lawrence, and other later writers whom C. P. Snow called “natural luddites.”2 Snow is of course the source for Powers’s phrase “the two cultures,” and his short 1959 book of that title wasn’t meant to flatter the literary side. For in calling modern writers “natural luddites,” he was accusing them of failing to appreciate the enormous technological advances of modernity, advances that had helped provide for the first time what he called the “primal things” to enormous populations: “years of life, freedom from hunger, survival for children” (TC 74). No doubt scientists are impoverished, said Snow, but literary intellectuals are impoverished in their own way, and “perhaps more seriously, because they are vainer about it,” imagining as they do that poetry, music, drama, and so forth constitute the whole of culture (TC 20). Such claims generated a hostile retort from literary scholars, most notably F. R. Leavis, but whatever its perceived flaws, Snow clearly crystallized tensions that extend well beyond the early years of the Cold War.3 Indeed, in the decade and a half since Powers’s novel, Snow’s laments about the two cultures have been updated, and again not to the advantage of those who spend their lives thinking about literature and the arts. “A 1950s education in Freud, Marx, and modernism,” says the agent and editor John Brockman, “is not a sufficient qualification for a thinking person” today, yet “traditional American intellectuals are ... increasingly reactionary, and quite often proudly (and perversely) ignorant of many of the truly significant intellectual accomplishments of our time.”4 In a similar spirit, the biologist Steve Jones has remarked that “if you aren’t someone who can talk in general terms about scientific as well as nonscientific issues, you aren’t civilized,” and the theoretical physicist Lee Smolin has complained that literary intellectuals are “still caught in the trap of Nietzsche, playing with death and violence and negativity, playing out some old and obsolete notions of the world.”5 But unlike Snow, these recent commentators have not only asked intellectuals to get “on speaking terms” (TC 67) with their scientific colleagues. They have also actively argued that the findings of cognitive science, neuroscience, and evolutionary psychology can contribute significantly to – indeed, reshape – traditional literary and humanistic debates about meaning, interpretation, ethics, and politics. Such aspirations are often associated with what is called the “third culture” – to cite the title of the 1999 collection of essays that Brockman edited, and which includes essays not only by Smolin and Jones, but also by Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, and Daniel Dennett.6 And increasingly, this “third culture” has made inroads into the study of art and literature. As a growing number of conferences, websites, essays, and books attests, more and more scholars are being persuaded to discard the by-now heavy emphasis on the specificity of cultures, the variety of cultural practices, the historicity of cultural artifacts, the instability of our interpretations, and so on, and to direct their attention to the scientifically validated, evolutionarily developed universals of human nature that our art and literature express.7

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Such is the thrust of Denis Dutton’s recent book The Art Instinct (2009), which in an exemplary third-culture blurb Pinker claims “marks out the future of the humanities – connecting aesthetics and criticism to an understanding of human nature from the cognitive and biological sciences.”8 In describing how he came to write the book, Dutton explains how, entering the Peace Corps in the late 1960s, he believed what his college professors had told him: that widespread cross-cultural understanding was impossible, that the “paradigms” used by different groups and sub-groups were fundamentally incommensurable, and that trying to learn about other cultural practices amounted to a form of imperialism. Arriving in rural India, Dutton did encounter phenomena he had never imagined while growing up in southern California (strict caste systems, Dravidian language, etc.). Yet while his early musical experiences back home had been limited mostly to canonical European texts for piano, Dutton also gradually learned to play the sitar, and this experience allowed him to realize that “the lure of rhythmic drive, harmonic anticipation, lucid structure, and divinely sweet melody cuts across cultures with ease” (AI 10–11). As he began to understand, “the fundamental human categories – the hopes, fears, vices, follies, and passions that motivate life – were entirely intelligible,” despite all the unusual things he found in his village. And these categories, he says, included “much of their art”: the qualities praised in a work of art, the gifts praised in an artist, closely resembled those lauded in most criticism of Western art (AI 11). Over time, Dutton’s experiences in India were confirmed by his experiences in other corners of the world, and he grew ever more convinced that our interest in and interpretations of art, far from being the products of our local cultures and historical moments, are grounded in the universal preferences endowed to us by evolution. Dutton’s experiences in India are recounted early in The Art Instinct, but I want to begin here from a different personal moment that appears much later in the book, and which concerns later stages of his education. In his acknowledgements page, Dutton writes: I owe much to the many people whose advice and inspiration have helped me bring this project together. Alexander Sesonske, Noel Fleming, and Herbert Fingarette incited interests in aesthetic theory. Sidney Hook was a fine teacher and a brilliant example of independent thinking. Ellen Dissanayake, a scholar far ahead of her time, showed the way to a Darwinian aesthetics, inspiring my early forays into this territory. Steve Pinker is in some respects a polar opposite of Ellen, but his lucid and analysis and insistent interrogations have left marks all over this book, including its title. (AI 245). The first three names Dutton cites are unsurprising: they are each emeritus faculty in the philosophy department at the University of California at Santa Barbara, where Dutton did his doctorate. Dutton’s last two names are equally

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unsurprising, especially for anyone who has just finished reading his book. Dissanayake has published several books on the evolutionary underpinnings of human creativity, beginning with What is Art For? (1990), and Pinker is perhaps the most prominent evolutionary psychologist in the world, with books that blur the line between best-seller and scholarly tome.9 But the middle name on Dutton’s list, Sidney Hook, will strike many readers as more surprising. Hook was Dutton’s graduate instructor at New York University before Dutton finished his degree in California, but more importantly, of course, Hook was the foremost mid-century spokesman for American pragmatism, the most prominent person to have kept the pragmatist flame alive when its influence waned in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Indeed, in quite concrete ways Hook united the two most influential pragmatists standing at either end of the twentieth century: John Dewey, Hook’s teacher and mentor from the 1920s onward, and Richard Rorty, who sat on Hook’s lap as a child, listened to his advice about colleges, and eventually helped initiate the pragmatist revival that has marked the last three decades.10 Why is Hook’s appearance in the back pages of The Art Instinct surprising? It is surprising not because Hook is never invoked in the main discussion of The Art Instinct; Hook’s status as an authority isn’t what it used to be. It is surprising instead because Dutton makes no reference anywhere in the book to any other major figure commonly associated with American pragmatism: not Charles Peirce, not William James, not John Dewey, not W.V.O. Quine, not Rorty, not Richard Bernstein, not Hilary Putnam – no one. And this absence of pragmatism becomes even more notable when we remember that, from the early meetings of Metaphysical Club to the mature writings of Dewey to the more recent work of neo-pragmatists, pragmatism has often been as self-conscious about its debt to Darwin as contemporary evolutionary psychology is, relentlessly viewing human beings as evolved creatures adapting to their environment. In the opening paragraph of “The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy” (1910), Dewey claimed that Darwin marks the seminal “intellectual revolt” of our age, and in more recent years, Robert Brandom, Rorty’s most eminent student, has claimed that Darwin’s work inaugurated a “second Enlightenment.”11 The absence of pragmatism from Dutton’s book becomes still more glaring when we recall that pragmatism has a long history of questioning the science/non-science divide, and accordingly has always had a good deal to say about the arts, literature, interpretation, language, and performance. Art as Experience (1934) was one of the major works of Dewey’s later years, and at least since Rorty called for an “edifying” hermeneutic philosophy in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979), the history and methods of pragmatism have received renewed attention among literary and cultural critics. To be sure, the Sidney Hook who was Dutton’s teacher in his final years at NYU was not exactly the Sidney Hook who was Dewey’s prized student. But even in his later years, Hook never stopped seeing himself as a pragmatist educator; in the

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memoir he wrote in his final years, Dewey’s name is continually invoked as his major intellectual touchstone.12 So Dutton would surely have been exposed to American pragmatism from a relatively young age, whether by Hook himself or others in his orbit, and would surely have learned about the prominent role the arts play for many pragmatists. And given the number of essays on pragmatism that have appeared in recent years in Philosophy and Literature – the journal of which Dutton is the founding editor – one can safely assume that he is all too familiar with the recent explosion of interest in pragmatism across the disciplines.13 Dutton is only the most conspicuous case of such neglect among evolutionary psychologists: one combs the books of Pinker, Dissanayake, E.O. Wilson and others without finding any extended consideration of Peirce, James, Dewey, and their descendents.14 In what follows I want to explore just what it means for evolutionary psychology, and Dutton in particular, to have ignored pragmatism in their discussions of biology and aesthetics. By the end of my discussion I will be offering what can be understood as a pragmatist critique of evolutionary aesthetics, but my goal here will not merely be to continue the ongoing recovery of pragmatism. Richard Poirier is right to say that American writers, eager “to avoid the appearance of provinciality,” have been often hesitant to announce their indebtedness to American predecessors, and it is probably still true, nearly two decades after his remark was made, that such fears partially account for the continued prominence of European figures in literary and cultural studies today.15 But given the hostility among evolutionary psychologists to much of this European tradition – we’ll return to this presently – their neglect of pragmatism obviously arises from something other than a fear of looking unfashionable. So my larger goal in juxtaposing pragmatism and evolutionary psychology is to clarify, at least in a preliminary way, some of the issues that any adequate discussion of biology, art, and literature would need to confront. In recent decades, suspicions about the alleged “autonomy” of art and literature have led commentators to address a huge range of seemingly “non-literary” or “non-aesthetic” discourses: economics, politics, sociology, philosophy, history, and so on. But it is hard to deny that, whatever else we are, we human beings are biological creatures, and until we’ve scrutinized the matter, there is no obvious reason to think that our biological history shouldn’t be included in these discussions of how works are produced and understood. As I’ll be suggesting, bringing pragmatists into conversation with evolutionary psychologists is one useful way of reflecting on some of the challenges such a discussion must face, and in turn a way of gauging just how many cultures – one, two, three, or more – our future debates might encompass.16

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Let me begin by sketching some of Pinker’s major claims, since they are so important for Dutton and because, as Dutton realizes, Pinker gives one of the most ambitious, synthetic, and influential third-culture attempts to defend what he calls “the new sciences of human nature.” In The Blank Slate (2002), Pinker argues that human beings should be regarded as the complex outcome of evolutionary adaptations, the result of genes struggling to survive the pressures of their environments. Among our most basic capacities are those of our perceptual apparatus: if the eyes and tongues of our ancestors could not adequately process information about their environment, if they couldn’t distinguish harmful from harmless items in the world, then none of us would be here today. And something similar, says Pinker (adapting Chomsky), holds for language. Underlying natural local languages such as French or Chinese is a more basic language, a “language of thought” that humans never need to learn, and which forms the foundation of more specific and observable linguistic behaviors. But Pinker’s description of human nature aspires to much more than saying how our vision or syntax operates. Knowing that we are the product of genes fighting to replicate, he argues, allows us to understand the roots of the most persistent problems of human existence. Rather than seeing war as unnatural, for example, we should recognize that aggression is partly what has allowed us to survive as a species. Men are especially prone to aggression, given their particular role in human replication, and this means male violence (including rape) should be recognized as a universal product of natural selection rather than simply poor living conditions, pornography, or bad television (BS 359–371). For this reason, too, according to Pinker, we should accept that the different levels of power and wealth that have typically distinguished men from women reflect not merely unjust patriarchal arrangements, but also different biological roles in propagating the species. Gender differences aren’t as arbitrary as the decision to drive on the right side of the road. Women everywhere have more intimate social relationships and are more attentive to an infant’s crying, whereas men everywhere have competed with one another over physical superiority and sexual rewards. So we shouldn’t be surprised to learn that nowadays men’s self-esteem is usually more closely tied to social status, or that, statistically, contemporary women choose to work in nonprofit organizations more regularly than in corporations (BS 337–371). The power of our genes forces us furthermore to recognize that intelligence and personality are dependent neither on how our parents raise us nor on our home environments generally. These traits are also primarily a matter of inheritance, as studies of twins, separated twins, and adopted children suggest (BS 372–399). You become your parents, like it or not. Pinker doesn’t deny, of course, that our social arrangements are imperfect or that parents should treat their kids well, and his claims about violence, gender

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differences, and intelligence are based on statistical averages, not specific cases. Nonetheless he is eager to take aim at those who explicitly or implicitly ignore what he regards as universal human nature. Such deviants include thinkers who believe, with Marx, that “All history is nothing but the transformation of human nature” (qtd. BS 155). They also include many feminists, who, with Margaret T. Gordon and Stephanie Riger, claim that female fear results partly “from what women as a group have imbibed from history, religion, culture, social institutions, and everyday social interactions [as well as] social institutions like the school, the church, the law, and the press” (qtd. BS 365–366). Pinker also criticizes anyone naïve enough to think, with Lyndon Johnson, that violence in modern societies is caused by “ignorance, discrimination, slums, poverty, disease, not enough jobs” (qtd. BS 292). All these people have deceived us, says Pinker, into thinking that human nature is malleable, and to this list of culprits Pinker adds another group that is conspicuous in the present context: namely, many of the experimental artists of the last hundred years. The final chapter of The Blank Slate is devoted to the arts, which in Pinker’s diagnosis are in critical condition. Three symptoms stand out: the loss of new work done in traditions of “high art” such as classical music and ballet; the waning influence of critics and “cultural gatekeepers”; and last but certainly not least, the scholars who discuss artistic works in the cryptic patois of postmodern theory (BS 403). Pinker sums up the failings of modern art by pointing to the famous remark from Virginia Woolf: “on or about December 1910 the nature of human character changed.”17 Modernists such as Woolf, says Pinker, “proceeded as if human nature had changed”: All the tricks that artists had used for millennia to please the human palate were cast aside. ... In literature, omniscient narration, structured plots, the orderly introduction of characters, and general readability were replaced by a stream of consciousness, events presented out of order, baffling characters and causal sequences, subjective and disjointed narration, and difficult prose. In poetry, the use of rhyme, meter, verse structure, and clarity were frequently abandoned. (BS 409–410) The goals and strategies of Postmodernism, he claims, are still more radical, still more dubious. Postmodernists have been “even more aggressively relativistic, insisting that there are many perspectives on the world, none of them privileged,” denying “even more vehemently the possibility of meaning, knowledge, progress, and shared cultural values,” and “asserting that claims to truth and progress were tactics of political domination which privileged the interests of straight white males” (BS 411). In the arts, postmodernism means abandoning true representations of human nature for clever self-reflexivity – artificial forms emphasizing their own artificiality and thereby undermining any belief in the possibility of accurate representation.

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Pinker’s aesthetic judgments lead us back to The Art Instinct, which also begins by announcing the successes of evolutionary psychology. Modern science, claims Dutton, has constructed “a valid picture of something that ... has been sought after by philosophers since the Greeks: human nature, with its innate interests, predispositions, and inclinations in intellectual and social life” (AI 3–4). But the innate capacities that most interest Dutton are confined to “tastes in entertainment and artistic experience” (AI 3–4), and on this score Dutton differs from Pinker in important ways. In The Blank Slate Pinker argues that the arts should be seen as by-products of adaptation rather than adaptations in their own right. Art arises, says Pinker, from a mental “toolbox,” one that can be used “to assemble Sunday afternoon projects.” Or, as he puts it in a more notorious analogy, it can be seen as cheesecake for the mind: “We enjoy strawberry cheesecake,” says Pinker, “not because we evolved a taste for it,” but because we have evolved neural circuits that give us “trickles of enjoyment from the sweet taste of ripe fruit, the creamy mouth feel of fats and oils from nuts and meat, and the coolness of fresh water.” Cheesecake, in other words, “packs a sensual wallop unlike anything in the natural world because it is a brew of megadoses of agreeable stimuli which we concocted for the express purpose of pressing our pleasure buttons” (qtd. in AI 95). Dutton agrees that we didn’t evolve a taste for cheesecake specifically, and agrees that we should steer clear of “hyper-adaptationism” – the idea that every one of our activities (badminton, square dancing) has somehow been designed by evolution. But as he also notes, cheesecake is no more “unnatural” than any other sweet concoction our Pleistocene ancestors may have whipped up with honey, fruit, nuts, and mastodon fat. A better way to talk about cheesecake, then, is to say that it satisfies ancient nutritional and gustatory preferences. Similarly with the arts: rather than saying they are mere by-products of a natural evolutionary process, a disposable “add-on” feature, a properly Darwinian aesthetics would show “how their existence and character are connected to Pleistocene interests, preferences, and capacities” (AI 96). Only by seeing art in these terms – as codifications of our innate interests and capacities, ways of serving and extending them – do we begin to capture the central role they have played in every human culture.18 Building off these claims, chapter three of The Art Instinct enumerates what Dutton sees as the most salient criteria for “art” worldwide. Art objects, he says, are things that create direct pleasure: they initiate “layered” experiences unfolding over time, and are pleasurable in their own right rather than useful or pleasurable for something else (AI 52). They show specialized skills and virtuosity: individuals who have them “stand out by virtue of special talent or mastery” (AI 53). They are objects and performances with “style,” made against a relatively predictable, relatively “normal” background that allows artists to create elements of expressive surprise (AI 53). They involve “novelty and creativity,” enabling both the “attention-grabbing function of art” and “the artist’s perhaps less jolting capacity to explore the deeper possibilities of a

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medium or theme” (AI 54). They engender criticism: part of the art instinct, according to Dutton, is a language of judgment and evaluation, ranging from the shoptalk of artists themselves to the public discourse of scholars and critics (AI 54). They typically involve the representation of real or imaginary experiences of the world, be it in sculpture, paintings, or narratives, or sometimes even music. Artworks involve a “special focus,” by which Dutton means not an inflated aestheticist notion of absolute autonomy, but a general tendency toward being “bracketed off from ordinary life, made a separate and dramatic focus of experience,” what Dissanayake calls “making special” (AI 55). Art involves what Dutton calls “expressive individuality”: despite the popular claim that only Westerners prize individuality, cultures around the world honor artists blessed with distinctive talents and qualities of mind.19 Art is also, to one degree or another, “shot through with emotion,” be it the emotions incited by the thing or scene depicted (the pathos of a painting’s scene, a poem’s vision of death) or the mood pervading the work itself (which may be somewhat different from the mood of what’s being represented). Artworks typically involve “intellectual challenge,” demanding that an audience stretch its ordinary perceptual and mental capacities. They partake in one way or another in a culture’s artistic traditions or institutions, a backdrop of historical practices. And lastly, art objects involve “imaginative experience,” or what Kant called a “presentation.” “All art,” says Dutton, “happens in a make-believe world,” a “theater of the imagination” that is “decoupled” not only from “the constraints of logic and rational understanding,” but also from the very genuine novelties and virtuoso skills one might see in other domains, such as a chef’s kitchen or the World Cup. As Dutton persuasively observes, a Harlem Globetrotters game is a “true artistic event,” designed to entertain an audience, but the Super Bowl is sport, an activity whose considerable aesthetic attractions are secondary to what’s on the scoreboard at the end of the game. Now, in enumerating this list, Dutton doesn’t say that every artifact ever deemed “art” will completely meet every criterion, and he acknowledges the existence of many borderline cases. But he also anticipates a host of objections, and argues forcefully that his list can accommodate works as diverse as Hindu jyonti paintings and Duchamp’s Fountain. There isn’t enough space here to spell out each of Dutton’s arguments, but a couple claims deserve special attention. One appears in chapter six, “The Uses of Fiction,” where Dutton explains how fiction-telling and fiction-understanding would have conferred advantages in the ancestral environment. Creatures that could describe and imagine counterfactual information, that could be “supposition-makers and thoughtexperimenters,” were capable of considering what might be lurking in the next cave, and were thus able to live longer and pass on their genes. Stories, as Dutton puts it, offered a “low-cost, low-risk surrogate experience” for an audience, and thus allow people to experiment with answers to “what if?” questions. Stories can also be “richly instructive sources or factual (or putatively factual) information,” and thus provide vivid ways to transmit news about the

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environment and advice about how to deal with it. (As Dutton points out, citing Eric Havelock, the idea that Homeric rhapsodes were “entertainers” is deeply misguided; they were in fact more like teachers, providing lessons in how individuals and institutions had flourished or failed in the past [AI 116]). And crucially, stories encourage listeners to explore the perspectives, motivations, beliefs, and values of other human minds, extending our “mind-reading capabilities.”20 All of these features would have allowed early humans not only to survive longer, but also eventually to explore “the larger possibilities of human intellectual and emotional life,” and thus to outgrow the largely instinctual behavior of their proto-human ancestors (AI 120). What is often regarded as the “play” dimension of fiction is the ability to temporarily inhabit another being’s point of view, with all the emotional coloring and motives of that other’s perspective, and this process provides paradigms for how to map one’s own emotional life. As Dutton puts it, “imaginative stories, pleasurably experienced and remembered by both maturing and adult human beings,” would provide not only a “complex and useful set of templates and examples to guide and inspire action,” an elaborate and ultimately more powerful way of providing strategic rules and edifying maxims of the “Look before you leap” sort (AI 111). They would also – and here Dutton follows the literary scholar Joseph Carroll – widen our sense of human possibilities, allowing audiences to grasp, regulate, and expand their personalities.21 This claim about fiction and human personalities is related to a second notable assertion in Dutton’s book, which begins in chapter seven, “Art and Human Self-Domestication.” This concerns not the way skills and capacities evolve for an organism’s survival, but for its reproduction. The key thought here is that art can be seen as a kind of peacock’s tail. A peacock’s tail is, as Dutton explains, hard to explain in terms of adaptive survival mechanisms, and it puzzled Darwin himself for years. It is biologically expensive to grow, requires energy that could otherwise be used by the organism, and weighs the peacock down in ways that make it more vulnerable to predators. But the elaborateness of the peacock’s tail is more understandable when we see it as part of the sexual selection side of evolution, less a way for species members to cope with their immediate external environments than a way to attract one another and thus pass on their genes. This is the origin, argues Dutton, of art’s association with a sense of style, uniqueness, accomplishment, intelligence, and creativity. Why are works of art worldwide so often made of rare or expensive materials? Why are they so routinely thought of as being time-consuming to create, and requiring rare skills? Why do we associate art with special intellectual or creative abilities? Why are they often associated with the superfluous, the excessive, the extravagant? The reason, Dutton argues, is that these various traits can be seen as fitness signals, signs that the artist is mentally and physically flourishing. Whereas other theories have seen the mind as a blank slate, a bundle of perceptions, a hydraulic system, or a computer, Darwinism helps us to see the

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mind as a sexual ornament, a “gaudy, overpowered Pleistocene homeentertainment system, devised in order that our Stone Age ancestors could attract, amuse, and bed one another” (AI 151). When art is seen in these terms, we recognize anew the power of Thorstein Veblen’s claim about conspicuous consumption. In describing the urge to display wealth and pointless possessions, Veblen was not merely evoking Gilded Age capitalism. Diamonds, roses, expensive chocolates – exhibiting such useless and deliberately wasteful objects is precisely the mark of an organism with enough health and wealth to squander. Moreover, seeing art in these terms allows us to recognize one of Freud’s major shortcomings in his discussions of art. The sexual component of art, claims Dutton, is not to be found in the alleged symbolism of a work (convex shapes standing for some tumescent body part, etc.), but rather in the act of making the art itself, the urge to impress one’s peers by expending enormous amounts of energy on “objects of the most extreme elegance and complexity,” from the massive symmetry of the Pyramids to the poignancy of Schubert’s Quintet in C. Sexual selection, claims Dutton, “explains the will of human beings to charm and interest each other” at the most fundamental level, and art is a leading – not the only, but a leading – forum for such charms and interests, one of the most powerful ways that humans display “self-domestication” (AI 163).22 3. Rhythm, Metabiology, Troping, and Somaesthetics “Where Shakespeare and Proust could only crawl, Pinker gallops”: so went the assessment of one philosopher reviewing The Blank Slate, and it’s not hard to imagine critics wondering if Dutton, too, sometimes shows all the hesitation of a messianic prophecy.23 But humanists resistant to Pinker’s and Dutton’s arguments about biology and aesthetics cannot afford to fall into the sort of ad hominem attacks or “general parochialism” that Lionel Trilling identified in Leavis’s response to Snow.24 Given the influence of evolutionary psychology today, given the competition for funds and smart students, given the respect that figures such as Pinker have earned among prominent philosophers and psychologists and powerful college presidents,25 literary scholars and humanists in general can’t afford to ignore Dutton’s arguments and others like them, in the hopes that they will simply wither away. The question posed in Powers’s novel, recall, is “Where the hell is the Two Cultures split when you need it?” and we shouldn’t be afraid to ask how “minimal Darwinism” – the belief, as Dennett puts it, that culture isn’t a “miracle” or “gift from God” – complicates the ways we dig our present intellectual trenches.26 Dutton’s ideas about fiction and fitness signals are not prima facie implausible, in particular when we keep in mind the sheer massiveness of the time scales he is considering. As he points out, the Pleistocene period, the 1.6 million years during which human beings developed, lasted about eighty thousand generations. By contrast, the period between Plato and us is only around one hundred generations. When that eighty thousand generations is one’s “historical context,” one not only realizes that

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human evolution is a much more complex and adventurous narrative than the God-made-the-world-in-seven-days story. It also becomes not completely unreasonable that instincts developed in this period are indeed somehow relevant for understanding the art and literature of the last couple millennia. A great deal lies in this adverb “somehow,” however, and it is here that I want to return to Dutton’s neglect of American pragmatism, a neglect that, as I noted at the start, is also characteristic of evolutionary psychology generally. The Art Instinct is hardly averse to citing historical precedents for its arguments. Aristotle, for example, comes up for regular praise, and understandably so. Chapter four of the Poetics ties the interest we adults have in drama to the pleasure a child innately takes in play-acting and representations (we are, as Aristotle says, “the most imitative of living creatures”), and in a later passage Dutton cites, Aristotle observes that people enjoy contemplating the most precise representations of corpses, vile animals, and other things whose actual sight is painful to us (qtd. AI 33) – an argument crucial, of course, to the Poetics’ larger claim about the pleasure and understanding we gain from watching tragic events. But Dutton’s willingness to credit philosophical predecessors doesn’t extend to James, Dewey, Rorty, Putnam, or any other pragmatist, despite the fact that pragmatists, like evolutionary psychologists, are deeply attuned to the animal nature of the human Lebensform.27 Earlier I cited Dewey’s claim that Darwin marks the great “intellectual revolt” of modernity, but pragmatism’s Darwinian impulses can be traced to the earliest meetings of the Metaphysical Club. As Louis Menand has explained, Chauncey Wright, the “Socrates of Cambridge,” was an early convert to The Origin of Species, and enthusiastically discussed Darwin with Peirce, who immediately recognized a connection between Darwin’s theories of natural selection and his own developing ideas about probability.28 Commentators have never tired of contrasting the rigorous Peirce with the fuzzy James, but the latter’s investigations into psychology and religious experience were no less deeply impacted by the Darwinian revolution.29 More recent pragmatists have sometimes been able to take Darwin for granted in ways the classical pragmatists never could – Darwin is rarely a major theme in Putnam’s work, for instance, or in Brandom’s30 – but other contemporary pragmatists have continued to place themselves in the Darwinian lineage. Rorty may not always be satisfied with Dewey’s particular uses of Darwin, but he is eager to celebrate what he calls the “post-Darwinian ability to see inquiry as continuous with practical deliberation,” and in an exchange with Barry Allen, another of his former students, he even acknowledges that his earlier work had occasionally overstated the discontinuities “between ourselves and the brutes,” between beings capable of propositional attitudes and those who are not.31 Still more outspoken than Rorty has been Dennett, who has described himself as being, with Rorty, “really in the American pragmatist tradition,” a tradition that, as he characterizes it, “supposes that even the highest reaches of philosophy are just an extension of the everyday world of practical matters.” Since the mid-1990s,

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Dennett has been the most philosophically astute and ambitious defender of Darwinism, going so far as to nominate Darwin’s theory of evolution “the single best idea anyone has ever had.”32 Given these formative connections to Darwin, it is unsurprising that, like evolutionary psychologists, pragmatists have consistently questioned the gulf between the “two cultures,” “humanistic” and “scientific” training, “interpretation” and “experimentation,” Wordsworth and Galileo.33 Nor should we be surprised, given these connections, that pragmatist discussions of art often sound many of the themes Dutton pursues in The Art Instinct. The very title of the opening chapter of Dewey’s Art as Experience gives one immediate indication: “The Live Creature.” Dewey’s starting point is the direct continuity between our experience of art – the “heightened vitality” and alertness of experience at its most meaningful (AE 19) – and our biologically evolved animal capacities. “The primeval arts of nature and animal life,” he says, “are so much the material, and, in gross outline, so much the model for the intentional achievements of man” (AE 25). “To grasp the sources of esthetic experience it is, therefore, necessary to have recourse to animal life below the human scale,” to the skills and spontaneity one sees in “the activities of the fox, the dog, and the thrush” (AE 18–19). It is likewise telling that the central chapter in Art as Experience is entitled “The Natural History of Form,” where Dewey frequently echoes Dutton’s realization, as a young man in India, that the attraction to harmony and melody cuts across cultures. Dewey’s term for these universal drives and structures is “rhythm,” the “ordered variation of changes” (AE 154). “There is,” he says, “rhythm in nature” – dawn and sunset, day and night, rain and sunshine – “before poetry, painting, architecture, and music exist,” and these natural patterns “cannot have escaped the notice of man as soon as he became conscious of his occupations and the conditions that rendered them effective.” Were nature’s dynamic designs not already in place, then “rhythm as an essential property of form,” the harmonious movement of a melody or the light and proportion in a cathedral, would be “merely superimposed on material, not an operation through which material effects its own culmination in experience” (AE 147). Like the rhythms of the natural order, the most vibrant and vital rhythms of art are something other than mere order and regularity, what Dewey at one point calls “serenity” (AE 160), but instead involve “resistance” and “tension,” making the artwork neither flatly monotonous nor pure unordered flux. Affinities between Dewey and Dutton are noticeable elsewhere as well. Much like Dutton, Dewey takes himself to be describing art as such, not simply modern Western art: “Because rhythm is a universal scheme of existence ... it pervades all the arts” (AE 150); “The universality of use of intervals in works of art is significant” (AE 158). Much like Dutton, Dewey recognizes the “conspicuous consumption” element of art, or what he calls, following Santayana, its “costliness”: “Rarity counts to intensify expression whether the rarity is that of infrequent occurrence of patient labor, or because it has the glamour of a distant clime and initiates us into hardly known modes of living”

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(AE 140). Much like Dutton, Dewey also suggests that the impulse to make art goes hand in hand with the impulse for criticism, which arises, he says, from a “phase of reflection” that is part of the “rhythm of aesthetic appreciation” (AE 146). And perhaps most importantly, Dewey regularly claims, again like Dutton, that the perceptual, cognitive, and emotional capacities demanded by art are not a neatly demarcated set of skills. They are instead something in place whenever we – Dewey’s key term – “experience” something as “rounded out,” “consummated,” “played through,” whether that something is a conversation, the Manhattan skyline, home furniture, a popular song, or a Degas painting.34 In the years after Dewey published Art as Experience, Kenneth Burke commended William James in the introduction to Attitudes Toward History (1937), and began fusing Jamesian pragmatism with the study of rhetoric, again in ways that anticipate the work of evolutionary psychologists. The opening chapter of Permanence and Change (1935) is titled “All Living Things Are Critics,” by which Burke means that “all living organisms interpret the signs around them” – as when a trout, for instance, learns to avoid the bait hanging on the hook.35 For Burke, the trout’s “revised judgment” is a primitive version of what human beings do in much more “methodical” ways. Burke is thus attuned to the continuities of human beings across social structures, and proposes that, since “man’s neurological structure has remained pretty much of a constant through all the shifts of his environment,” we should expect “a corresponding constancy in the devices by which sociality is maintained” across cultures (PC 159, 162). Which means, as he puts it more epigrammatically, our theories should aim “less at a metaphysic than at a metabiology” (PC 261). Indeed, Burke not only anticipates the evolutionary psychologist’s emphasis on the biological bases of human action, but his vocabulary of strategy and purpose closely resemble Dutton’s account of the adaptive functions of story-telling, most audibly in his oft-anthologized essay “Literature as Equipment for Living” (1938). Here Burke presages Dutton’s comparison between homey “Look before you leap” maxims and the more elaborate narratives of literary art, reading texts like Madame Bovary as extended “parables” that name a characteristic pattern of actions and help readers develop a set of attitudes toward it.36 Burke’s work has been a major touchstone in the work of Richard Poirier, whose The Renewal of Literature (1987) and Poetry and Pragmatism (1992) are often credited with having inaugurated the pragmatist revival in literary studies.37 So it is appropriate that in these books, too, we hear anticipatory echoes of The Art Instinct. Like his pragmatist forbearers, Poirier is keen to question the various ways literary art has often been cordoned off from the workaday problems of everyday life. But whereas Dewey and Burke were defying late Victorian aesthetes, Poirier interrogates less genteel, more philosophical critics of his own generation, such as Paul de Man, who claimed that literature, “unlike everyday language,” is “free from the fallacy of unmediated expression.”38 Particularly striking are moments when Poirier seems to foresee Dutton’s accounts of human self-domestication. For Poirier, literary

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texts should be seen first and foremost as performances, the “turnings” and “tropings” of which are more important than the alleged “content” of a text. Pace T. S. Eliot and others, readers of Joyce should be occupied not with “the substance but rather the act of allusiveness or schematization” (RL 107), and criticism more generally “should engage itself not with rendered experience but with the experience of rendering; it must always go back to acts of rendition” (RL 111). Literature is, says Poirier, “the Olympics of talk and of writing” (RL 132) – a metaphor that itself may derive from a remark by Robert Frost, quoted in Poirier’s The Performing Self (1971): “The whole thing is performance and prowess and feats of association. Why don’t critics talk about those things – what a feat it was to turn that that way, and what a feat it was to remember that, to be reminded of that by this? Why don’t they talk about that? Scoring. You’ve got to score.”39 To treat literature as a “feat,” a way to “score,” is to regard it as what Thoreau calls a “deed,” or what Emerson calls “superfluous” – a phrase that for Poirier is synonymous not with triviality or wastefulness, but an “excess” that is “more important than necessity, energy more lasting than any meanings it may toss out to the intellectually sedentary” (PP 37). Poirier’s work has paved the way for a range of younger literary critics and scholars, but the athletic metaphors of “Olympics” and “scoring” lead us to one last important contemporary extension of pragmatism, namely the “somaesthetics” of Richard Shusterman. In the revised edition of Pragmatist Aesthetics (2000), Shusterman includes a “disciplinary proposal” outlining a new subfield within philosophy, or perhaps even a new field in its own right. When Alexander Baumgarten first founded modern aesthetics, observes Shusterman, his goal was much broader than discussion of the arts and aesthetic judgment: he wanted “an entire program of philosophical self-perfection in the art of living.”40 But Baumgarten’s program, unlike those of the ancient Greeks, unfortunately omitted any reference to the cultivation of the body, the methods by which fit bodies can “provide sharper perceptions and more discipline and versatility for adapting oneself in thought, attitude, action” (PA 268). And this resistance to the body has continued to this day, most clearly in our preoccupation with questions of proper aesthetic judgment and interpretation. Shusterman’s “somaesthetics,” by contrast, addresses “the critical meliorative study of the experience and use of one’s body as a locus of sensory-aesthetic appreciation (aisthesis) and creative self-fashioning. It is therefore also devoted to the knowledge, discourses, practices, and bodily disciplines that structure such somatic care or can improve it” (PA 267). Within this expansive definition, Shusterman identifies three distinct dimensions and areas of research: “analytic somaesthetics,” a description of the practices and genealogies that have surrounded the body, roughly in the mode of Michel Foucault or Pierre Bourdieu; “pragmatic somaesthetics,” the normative reflection on how to remake the body and society’s treatment of it, through the analysis of art, meditation, athletics, or other somatic experiences; and “practical somaesthetics,” the actual practice of yoga, Feldenkreis, dance (“a somaesthetic art par

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excellence”), or other intelligently disciplined body work. In staking out these claims, Shusterman sees himself as building in particular on Dewey, who, as Shusterman describes at length in more recent work, was a lifelong practitioner of the bodywork method known as the Alexander Technique, which focuses on strengthening one’s back and posture.41 And in adopting Dewey, Shusterman’s “proposal,” like the other pragmatist claims I’ve mentioned here, winds up echoing many of Dutton’s themes. Most particularly, much as Dutton emphasizes art’s ability to “satisfy” our innate preferences and urges, Shusterman highlights the ways art is always continuous with other corporeal activities, some of which are more beneficial – beneficial to us qua human animals – than others. Aesthetic experience is always part of a wider biological experience and development, part of the effort, he says, to “make the quality of our experience more satisfyingly rich, but also to make our awareness of somatic experience more acute and perceptive” (PA 273). Like Dutton, Shusterman is aware that an emphasis on bodily and experiential cultivation brings the greatest symphonies and most brilliant paintings oddly close to the realm of decoration and cosmetics, but like Dewey and Burke and Poirier before him, he argues persuasively that identifying continuities between “low” and “high” works, “elite” and “popular” culture, isn’t the same as leveling every all differences between works or experiences. The point in seeing continuities between forms and traditions is not to equate them, but to remind us of why we turn to art in the first place, of the heightened vitality it embodies, and why the consummations and enriched experiences of art are nothing if not eventually put in the service of living.42 4. On Second Nature; or, Invention is the Mother of Necessity My high-altitude survey of Dewey, Burke, Poirier, and Shusterman is probably enough to suggest how, from classical pragmatism and rhetorical theory to contemporary literary criticism and philosophical aesthetics, pragmatists have never shied away from what are today the basic concerns of evolutionary psychology. Indeed, intellectual historians of the future may find it significant that the revival of pragmatism coincided quite closely with the rise of sociobiology, which gained widespread attention with E. O. Wilson’s Sociobiology (1975) and On Human Nature (1979).43 At issue for pragmatists is precisely the question that Brian Boyd has attributed to evolutionary theory: how the human “appetite for the useful,” an appetite that clearly should be at the heart of any plausible evolutionary history, can co-exist with art and many other human activities that seem to have no obvious evolutionary or utilitarian benefit.44 Moreover, my review of pragmatist aesthetics is probably enough to indicate how, again like evolutionary psychology, it goes somewhat against the grain of much of the most influential literary theory of the last forty or so years. As Winfried Flück has observed, Dewey could hardly be confused with the New Critics, but his aesthetics nevertheless exhibits a “tacit, involuntary organicism,”

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with regular metaphors of balance and growth, all reinforcing the ideal of successful “consummation.”45 To one extent or another, such ideals are at odds with many of the most influential accounts of art and literature since the rise of High Modernism, in particular those that emphasize fragmentation, the endless indeterminacy of meaning, existential nothingness, and so forth. Dewey seems to intuit such differences when he says (in a remark that coincidentally recalls an American novelist, Faulkner, who had an enormous impact on twentieth-century European fiction and thought): “Only one frustrated in a particular object of desire upon which he had staked himself, like Macbeth, finds that life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing” (AE 194). Similar intuitions could be said to underlie Poirier’s and Shusterman’s more recent, and more overt, expressions of distrust toward literary theory and continental aesthetics.46 But here our story takes an important turn. For it is symptomatic of the pragmatist tradition generally that Poirier’s and Shusterman’s distrust is typically expressed less as outright anger than as ambivalence, even indifference. And while this reaction can appear flippant on the surface, it ultimately, I think, allows pragmatists to pursue a more measured, thoughtful, and consistent response to aesthetic phenomena than Dutton, Pinker, and their colleagues. The key pragmatist challenge to the Pinker-Dutton line of evolutionary psychology can be summed up, for reasons I’ll explain, in a witty aphorism that Burke credits to Veblen: “invention is the mother of necessity.” A trout, says Burke, may be sophisticated enough to revise its judgment about the bait that dangles before it, but the more “methodical” tendencies of human beings allow us a more flexible range of responses, allows us to “greatly extend the scope of the critical process.” Yet this “greater critical capacity” in turn engenders its own new of dilemmas. For the same intelligence that gives a wider range of “solutions” at our disposal than the trout is also precisely what makes us create and confront a far wider range of “problems” (PC 5). Let me unpack Burke’s remark by returning briefly to Dutton. Earlier I quoted Pinker’s complaints that much early twentieth-century fiction cast aside “all the tricks that artists had used for millennia to please the human palate,” replacing omniscient narration and well-structured plots with disjointed narrations and difficult prose. Postmodern art, he says, has gone further, abandoning “true representations” just as postmodern philosophy has denied the “possibility of meaning, knowledge, progress, and shared cultural values” (BS 411). The Art Instinct extends the thrust of Pinker’s polemic, with the result that, as Alexander Nehamas has said in a review, Dutton writes “in effect, two different books” – “one of which, on the prehistory of art,” is “a novel and important work,” and the other of which betrays a very specific “art-critical agenda.”47 Dutton’s Pinker-like attitude toward experimental art and art theory is particularly audible in his discussions of story structure and of the place of authorial intention. In discussing stories, Dutton praises Aristotle for recognizing the “the substance of drama is action and the emotions that animate

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it” (AI 131), and while not endorsing a full catalogue of archetypal narratives, he does praise Christopher Brooker’s Jungian claims about the nine basic plots of human storytelling. Whatever its particular limitations, argues Dutton, Brooker’s account combats the “prevailing social constructionist givens of the last few generations” and recognizes “that the ambiguities and cynicism of modernism have driven literature away from the moral edification seen through most of storytelling history” (AI 129). The basic themes and situations of narrative, claims Dutton, “are a product of fundamental, evolved interests human beings have in love, death, adventure, family, justice, and overcoming adversity” (AI 132). So a text that challenges these constants, a text lacking clear causal structures or strong character motivation (presumably Dutton is thinking here of, say, Beckett or Barthelme), runs the risk of becoming merely “a Dadaist experiment” or “an illustration of an obsessive disorder” – more an “anti-story” than a story proper (AI 131). About intention Dutton is no less categorical. Chapter eight of The Art Instinct addresses both New Critical arguments about “the intentional fallacy” and post-structuralist claims about the “death of the author,” and finds little in either worth recommending. “From an evolutionary psychological standpoint,” Dutton concludes, “all the disputes seem overwrought” (AI 172), since language has at least three distinct functions: a communicative/descriptive function, an “imaginary” function, and a fitness indicator function. Whereas the first two functions often exclude one another, the fitness indicator function underlies them both, since speakers will always seek to show skill, style, and intelligence, whatever their other goals. This third function, asserts Dutton, provides “an ever-present voice” behind every text, “whispering to us that one kind of truth always matters: the truth about the sobriety, knowledge, intelligence, seriousness, or competence of the fact-teller or the fiction-maker” (AI 175). Such a view, Dutton believes, means we cannot accept any substitutes when we make references to “authorial” intention: notions like “postulated author” and “implied author” will “always fail,” he says, because when we talk about the fitness function of writing we must “in the nature of things” be “pulled back to assessing the capacities of a historical writer” (AI 176). Historical works are created by historical people, and “as evolution demands,” it is the “genius” of these concrete individuals that “animates” a text and that we as audience members revere (AI 176). A moment from Poirier indicates how a pragmatist response to these strong claims might take shape.48 Late in The Renewal of Literature Poirier considers two passages of the very sort that Pinker and Dutton would denounce, passages that seem to evoke the impermanence of human nature or the eradication of “the human” as we now know it. In the first selection, the wellknown conclusion of The Order of Things, Michel Foucault describes what would happen if our current arrangements “were to disappear as they appeared,”

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if some event of which we can at the moment do no more than sense the possibility – without knowing either what its form will be or what it promises – were to cause them to crumble, as the ground of Classical thought did, at the end of the eighteenth century, then one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea. (qtd. RL 186) In Poirier’s second selection, from “Truth and Lies in an Ultra-Moral Sense,” Nietzsche imagines how human beings would look when seen to exist in “some remote corner of the universe.” When regarded from such a perspective, says Nietzsche, all our knowledge will be exposed as a fiction, truth will seem an army of mobile metaphors, and humans will seem no more worthy of honor or respect than a mosquito: One might invent such a fable and still not have illustrated sufficiently how wretched, how shadowy and flighty, how aimless and arbitrary, the human intellect appears in nature. There have been eternities when it did not exist; and when it is done for again, nothing will have happened. For this intellect has no further mission that would lead beyond human life. It is human, rather, and only its owner and producer gives it such importance, as if the world pivoted around it. (qtd. RL 189–190) In brief, all the themes that make an evolutionary psychologist bluster: knowledge is invented, historical eras “crumble” abruptly without any cause or progress, perspectives are wholly relative, narratives are infinitely malleable, human lives are “aimless and arbitrary” – all making human nature impossible to fix. Poirier’s readings of these passages, however, are remarkable precisely because they express none of the anxiety or exasperation that Pinker or Dutton typically exude when confronted with the sort of claims Foucault and Nietzsche present. In Poirier’s eyes, concentrating on “acts of rendition” rather than “rendered experience” allows us to recognize that any talk about the evaporation of the human, any claim about the extinction or disappearance of the subject, is itself one more expression of human energy, one more effort to articulate the human self-image. The passages from Foucault and Nietzsche, Poirier observes, exhibit “an audible excitement,” and their “rhetorical audacity” should lead us beyond what they ostensibly say – “since that is obvious enough,” he remarks casually – and to ask instead about the “efforts with language” required to write them (RL 193). When read along these lines, claims Poirier, the passages don’t presage any sort of cultural apocalypse. Readers are compelled instead to “recognize in such writing not the negation of the human but a brave putting forth of a kind of human feeling that is unsanctified and unsponsored” (RL 195). This urge for a hitherto unsponsored set of feelings is itself, Poirier implies, a kind of human universal, part of what he calls “the human desire” to “elude any

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definition of the human” (RL 194). It is in this sense that, as odd as it may seem at lazy first glace, one can actually “get excited by the prospect of the end of man,” can recognize that such excitement could be “just as ‘noble’ as getting excited by projects for the continuation of man in his present form, enhanced or spiritualized” (RL 195). What we hear in Foucault and Nietzsche, and in all the various artistic projects that they both took as inspiration and in turn inspired, “is evidence that human beings can exercise a capacity to wish themselves radically other than what they are” (RL 196). Poirier, then, would not only agree with Nehamas that, if Dutton believes there are adaptive advantages to be gained from storytelling, then modern literature – with all its antiheroes, plotlessness, and moral ambiguities – might have a good deal to teach us.49 Nor would he simply ask why, when discussing experimental modern writers, Dutton refuses to acknowledge that they, too, exhibit much of the sobriety, knowledge, intelligence, seriousness, and competence that Dutton himself claims constitutes the “one kind of truth [that] always matters” when assessing speakers. Poirier would say, more pointedly, that the examples of Foucault and Nietzsche draw attention to one of the persistent dangers of evolutionary psychology: namely that, for all its detailed attention to “nature,” for all the crafted surveys and empirical studies it designs to elicit the “nature” of human beings, its working conception of nature can be surprisingly one-dimensional. Dutton and Pinker continually confront their readers with a stark choice: either we believe human thought and behavior arise from “nature,” or we endorse “constructivism” and “relativism.” Poirier’s use of terms like “human desire” and “human being” is by comparison much more nuanced. In saying that humans have “a capacity to wish themselves” something other than what they currently are, in claiming that the performances of Nietzsche and Foucault are themselves a remarkable exhibition of human imagination and desire, he not only acknowledges the patterns of thought and habit that are species-wide (hence, for instance, his unembarrassed use of the term “human”), but also recognizes that our shared cognitive and creative powers can make us understand ourselves in startlingly variable ways at different times and places. Poirier’s discussion of Foucault and Nietzsche, that is, helps draw attention to a crucial distinction that tends to be elided in the most popular evolutionary-psychological accounts of human behavior and creative activity. What demands attention when we broach such topics is not merely “nature” in the sense of those capacities and systems that developed during the Pleistocene period. What needs consideration is also what we can call, using an Aristotelian idea that John McDowell has in recent years put into circulation, second nature: the deeply habitual stores of wisdom about what to say or do, the repertory of appropriate responses to a given situation, the habits that arise when character is formed and the practical intellect takes a determinative shape.50 Practical intellect, in these terms, is defined in part by appropriate conceptual responses: when someone says “It’s sunny outside,” one typically knows that it isn’t

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raining. But it is also defined by the acquisition of appropriate moral responses: when someone says “He’s a wanton child-molester,” we feel revulsion. Obviously such conceptual and moral responses would never be possible without our peculiarly sophisticated biological existence, in particular the fantastically complex human brain. We should, with Dennett, accept “minimal Darwinism”; that’s the point of referring to second nature as second nature. And certainly over time the conceptual and moral responses of second nature can come to have what seems the force of necessity. (We’re shocked when someone feels no revulsion toward a child molester.) But first nature, the domain of evolutionarily developed physical dispositions, massively underdetermines the shape this second nature can acquire. Which is to say that second nature has some degree of autonomy from first nature, and can be described in at least partially independent terms. Human beings, says McDowell, are “born mere animals,” but “they are transformed into thinkers and intentional agents in the course of coming to maturity” (MW 125). Maturation occurs not just when the human animal grows older, but when we are initiated into what McDowell, following Wilfrid Sellars, calls “the space of reasons,” the warranted linkage of inferences, implication, probability, and justification that only full-fledged conceptual creatures are able to occupy. As embodied by a natural language, says McDowell, this space of reasons “serves as a repository of tradition, a store of historically accumulated wisdom about what is a reason for what,” a tradition that is “subject to reflective modification by each generation that inherits it” (MW 126). To describe this initiation – “having one’s eyes opened to reasons at large by acquiring a second nature” – McDowell places at center stage a term for which there is no easy English equivalent: Bildung (MW 84). Put negatively, a failure of first nature is the failure of functional teleology, the failure of what’s good for the organism qua organism, be it a tree or toad or toddler; it’s what allows us to have intelligible concepts of “disability” or “disease.” Failure at the level of second nature involves a markedly different set of breakdowns: the weakening of norms, the lapse of a certain set of responses or justifications, the dissolution of an evolved, shared social practice.51 It is, I would argue, this realm of second nature, and especially the potential for second nature to grow pale and reflectively modified, the possibility that some new aspect of second nature will seem “unsponsored,” that Poirier hears evoked in Foucault and Nietzsche. The rhetorical audacity of these authors may make them seem to “deny” nature, or strive for something “more” than nature, but McDowell and Poirier allow us to hear a more complicated set of motives: a resistance not to nature per se but to certain shapes that second nature has taken over time – a resistance, in other words, to a certain sort of Bildung. McDowell is much less forthright in his commitment to pragmatism than Poirier,52 but his distinction between first and second nature is appropriate here because some version of it can be said to run throughout the history of pragmatism. Among the classical pragmatists it is perhaps most audible in Peirce, whose occasionally esoteric distinctions between “Firstness,”

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“Secondness,” and “Thirdness” are designed to distinguish first-nature relations between physical bodies and second-nature relations between concepts and community members. But even in James and Dewey, who typically stress the continuities of nature and culture, one repeatedly finds the suggestion that neither the physical universe nor our biological condition can in themselves tell us what to think and how to act. Thus, for instance, James’s famously provocative remark that “truth happens to an idea,” that something “is made true by events,” and thus Dewey’s insouciant belief that old standards (aristocratic moral ideals, belief in God) can be simply ignored.53 An emphasis on second nature – its varieties, its relative autonomy – has been even more pronounced among the philosophical pragmatists who are Poirier’s close contemporaries. Such an emphasis underlies Rorty’s controversial admiration for Foucault, Derrida, and other post-Hegelian figures, as well as his open skepticism toward Pinker, whom he deems a victim of “philosophy-envy,” the desperate attempt to ground human ends in something more seemingly solid than our social practices.54 But even less “postmodern” pragmatists have sought to identify the limits of first-nature explanations. Such an idea motivates Dennett’s repeated critique of post-Chomskyan theories of mind and meaning, and accounts as well for his more recent interest in “memes,” the non-genetic evolution of ideas, languages, cultures, and institutions. His book on religion, Breaking the Spell (2006), has been denounced as reductive, but such a judgment entirely overlooks one of Dennett’s most basic points, the claim that, as he puts it in his final pages, “in the complex world of cultural transmission, the patterns that are directly due to fixed features of human psychology will not look particularly large.” The human mind, that is, is not rigidly fixed, which means religions, for one, should be seen as quasiindependent linguistic and cultural phenomena – independent, that is, from our biological condition.55 In Brandom this kind of distinction becomes a methodological starting point, the distinction between what he calls “sentience” and “sapience”: the capacity, on the one hand, “to be aware in the sense of being awake,” the capacity for irritability or arousal in the face of new stimuli, the capacities we share with cats and cockroaches, and on the other hand the capacity for understanding and intelligence, the ability to attribute intentional states to something, to treat oneself as a subject of cognition and action.56 From this foundation Brandom builds up a stunningly meticulous account of language and logic, identifying them both – again in ways that rebuff the nativism of a Chomsky, Fodor, Pinker, or Dutton – as products of our densely woven social practices and “discursive commitments.” 5. The Varieties of Explanatory Experience As with my earlier sketch of pragmatist aesthetics, nothing in what I’ve just said is meant to suggest that all the figures mentioned here – Peirce, James, Dewey, Burke, Rorty, Dennett, Brandom, McDowell, Poirier, Shusterman – would agree

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with one another on every issue. Obviously they wouldn’t. My point is simply to suggest how pragmatism is everywhere marked by an awareness of Burke’s maxim: necessity may be the mother of invention, but our inventions, our “methodical habits” and “greater critical capacity,” give birth to further necessities, ones that extend in non-trivial ways beyond the initial necessities of first nature. Wherever they lay their particular emphases, all the figures noted here embrace minimal Darwinism while at the same time arguing that our “nature” comprises multiple layers or tiers, tiers that make humans both biological as well as normative beings. And with this claim we come to the most fundamental differences between the pragmatist and evolutionary-psychological accounts of creativity that I’ve been considering. In discussions of biology and art, pragmatists articulate a critical third position, one that suggests just why critics of evolutionary psychology get muddled when they insist that something called “culture” is more important than something called “nature.” Doing so is as uninformative as Dutton’s and Pinker’s own broad dichotomies between bad “relativists” and good “universalists.” The important philosophical question that pragmatists force us to ask is not whether there is a “human nature” that might somehow be betrayed, but rather, given the multiple tiers or levels that comprise our “nature,” what we believe should count as explanation for a given phenomenon and what should count as understanding it in a given circumstance. Dutton refers at one point in The Art Instinct to the distinction evolutionary psychologists make between “proximate causes” and “ultimate causes”: the proximate cause of my eating chocolate is hunger and a craving for sweets, but the ultimate cause is my genetically evolved nutritional need for sweet and fat (AI 88). This distinction makes perfect sense in certain contexts (discussions of human nutrition, say), but to state the obvious, neither of these “causes” have been very important in the long history of literary and aesthetic criticism. The reason, I would suggest, is not that literary critics and other humanists have been blinded by relativistic ideology or poisoned by social constructivism, let alone unwilling to accept the theory of natural selection. The reason is that proximate and ultimate causes, at least as evolutionary psychologists use these terms, are simply not the kinds of causes that matter most for humanistic study, for many of the same reasons that they are not what matter most in the ad hoc negotiations of our everyday lives. Biological instincts are hard to deny in biological creatures, but to what extent do they account for the kinds of things we want to know when we ask, say, why one’s friend forgot one’s birthday, or one’s neighbor behaved so generously, or one’s president failed to respond to a natural disaster? By extension, how does citing these instincts illuminate why particular authors depict, under a certain description, a certain kind of character doing certain kinds of things in a certain kind of social and historical situation? Why does a certain group of readers understand a certain text in certain ways? In most cases, pointing to biological instincts simply won’t seem like an explanation for

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very much – an explanation for why Jane Austen’s women choose the specific husbands they do, or why Wordsworth describes nature in such different terms from Defoe just a few decades earlier, or why Nick Carroway has such an ambivalent reaction to Jay Gatsby, or why Moby Dick was largely ignored by American readers in the mid-nineteenth century but celebrated over the last seventy-odd years. Or, to adopt examples that Robert Pippin has put to similar use, it will not seem to explain much about why the Germans voted for Hitler or the Yankees won the pennant.57 To explain and understand these types of things, gross first-nature phenomena like the urge to reproduce and Pleistocene sexuality may quickly seem, in Wittgenstein’s famous metaphor, wheels that turn without very much else moving, and referring to them might sound a bit like saying that gravity is the reason the Twin Towers fell. Surely the Yankees could never have won, the Nazis never have seized power, the Twin Towers never have fallen, if the physical make-up of Earth and its inhabitants hadn’t been much the way that it is. But a great many towers don’t fall, a great many baseball teams don’t win, and a great many political parties don’t come to power; so there must be much more to these stories, more levels of explanation to consider. To think otherwise is to forget that, as Putnam has put it, explanation is not transitive. Just because microparticles are part of the explanation for why an object is rigid doesn’t mean that these microparticles will be part of the explanation for everything that happens to the object, and just because a gymnast’s elaborate flights obey the laws of physics doesn’t mean that we won’t understand gymnastics without a solid foundation in physics.58 In exactly the same way, no novel would ever have been written, no painting ever painted, if our Pleistocene ancestors had developed differently, but understanding the novel or the painting will require a more local notion of “proximate” cause than the one employed by evolutionary psychologists, one referring less to cave-dwelling proto-humans than to, for starters, how an agent’s more immediate associates – families, cities, governments – behave on a day-to-day, year-to-year basis. To say how Wordsworth’s attitude toward nature differs from that of Defoe, reference to eighteenth-century British capitalism, industrialism, and imperialism will probably say more, will illuminate more relevant similarities and differences, than reference to how early humans may have viewed the African savanna a million and a half years ago. No less urgent in such explanations is a “cause” that often goes wholly unmentioned among evolutionary psychologists, namely final causes, in the traditional sense of ends or goals: the purposes an agent pursues, the deliberative intentions he or she avows from a first-person perspective. Referring to genes won’t be a credible defense when one friend accuses another of treating her callously, or when someone asks the president why he vetoed a bill, and for precisely the same reasons, it won’t seem like a relevant answer when someone asks why Wordsworth decided to challenge his era’s dominant conceptions of nature or why Jane Austen designs Elizabeth Bennett to prefer Mr. Darcy over Mr. Wickham. On the ground, in the stream of our lives, genetic dispositions

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don’t count as an agent’s reasons for doing something, justifications for doing something, unless he or she takes them to be a compelling reason for acting or speaking in one way rather than another, and such first-person perspectives need to be accommodated into our explanations in one way or another.59 In sum, what’s required for understanding a novel or film or painting is not one or two master concepts and a series of translation schemes to make our various explanations transitive, but fine-grained descriptions of particular agents in particular contexts, an account of what sorts of specific goods they pursue, what kinds of goods they refuse, what kinds of attitudes and emotions they seem to express, what sort of cultural practices form the background of their actions – all the varied shapes and colorings our second nature can take. Understanding the Germans of 1933 means knowing how particular politicians and citizens understood a certain range of past events, and understanding the Yankees means knowing how particular managers used their bullpens. Understanding Defoe, Wordsworth, Austen, Fitzgerald, or the various audiences of Moby Dick requires a meticulous and sensitive description of their times, their places, and what they took themselves to be doing. It is in this sense that Dewey believed – to return to a remark I’ve cited a couple times already – Darwin marked the major “intellectual revolt” of our age. Dewey didn’t mean by this what Pinker and Dutton seem to have in mind: that Darwin gives us the key to “human nature” or establishes human preferences and capacities once and for all. He meant instead that, after Darwin, we should forswear “inquiry after absolute origins and absolute finalities,” and “explore specific values and the specific conditions that generate them” (ID 13), the “particular set of changes that generate [an] object of study together with the consequences that flow from it” (ID 14). This requires, says Dewey, grasping not “the wholesale essence back of special changes” but “the question of how special changes serve and defeat concrete purposes,” not “some inclusive and first cause and some exhaustive final goal” but the “particular intelligences which things are even now shaping,” the “specific values of particular truth, social bonds and forms of beauty” at work in a particular context (ID 14–15). Like all the pragmatist remarks I’ve cited here, Dewey’s terms are shot through with both a naturalistic vocabulary, the vocabulary of first nature, as well as the second-nature vocabulary of intentions, purposes, values, intelligence, communal bonds, assessments, and all the other human inventions that engender human necessities. How well we grasp a given human phenomenon, how well we understand and describe a thought or utterance or action, how well we interpret a poem or painting, will depend on how sensitive we are to this immensely complicated confluence of causes. Indeed, it is striking here how Dewey’s description of Darwin’s influence sounds like the kind of thinking that has often been associated with literature, both with poems and stories themselves as well as most critical commentaries on them. A frequently unstated criterion we use to distinguish “literary” or “critical” texts from “theoretical” or “scientific” texts is the degree to which a

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given work is devoted to local, “concrete” accounts of actions and agents, of the “specific conditions” of an environment, of “the particular set of changes” and “consequences” involved in an event – be they the relatively unadorned accounts of a Norse epic or the more labyrinthine ones of The Golden Bowl. On the basis of such implicit criteria, Dewey questions what he calls the dual fallacies of “reduction” and “confusion of categories,” fallacies that most literary scholars and humanists would still probably find dubious: the urge, on the one hand, to reduce a work to its possible “causative generation,” as if such causes “‘explained’ the esthetic content of the work of art itself,” and the urge, on the other hand, to ignore the different problems and categories, the different “controlling conceptions of inquiry,” that characterize different fields (AE 315– 317). I say most literary scholars and humanists would still probably endorse Dewey’s questions because, unlike in the sciences, “reductive” is still largely a dirty word in humanistic study, and seldom at the “cutting edge” of any of its disciplines.60 The naturalism with a normative turn characteristic of pragmatism may, in other words, justify at least some version of a “two cultures” divide, insofar as pragmatism helps clarify why, as one commentator has said in a review of cognitive literary studies, true claims aren’t necessarily interesting claims.61 What’s “interesting” won’t necessarily be one particular “generative cause,” and accordingly no one set of critical categories should take final precedence over all others, let alone supercede them. Different causes, different categories, different aspects of first or second nature, will seem relevant at different times and places, depending on the purpose of our inquiry; many of these causes will involve reference not to our genetic pre-history but to the agent’s own first-person beliefs and desires; and the validity of our answers will depend in part on the questions we pose. There is no one description of a work any more than there is one map of Massachusetts. In a letter written to Richard Powers after reading Galatea 2.2, Dennett has cited the question with which I began – “Where the hell is the Two Cultures split when you need it?” – and said that the idea of the “third culture,” of scientists approaching traditional humanistic learning, is appealing to him, because when “the third culture is good, it is very very good.” But he immediately added: “when it is bad, it is horrid, which is why I like this line.”62 Dennett’s remark is perhaps too clever by half, for The Art Instinct, like The Blank Slate, is neither very very good nor horrid; the reasonable questions and occasional insights offered in these books appear on the same page as exaggerations and crass oversimplifications. Reading them, one isn’t convinced by their overall arguments, or perhaps even any of their particular claims, but is nevertheless led to recognize how much care is required in describing the relationship between our creative lives or histories and our existence as a certain kind of animal. What becomes clear, that is, is not that evolutionary theory should play no role whatsoever in our accounts of art and literature, but that we should think hard about just which aspects of evolutionary theory we want to

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bring to bear on these accounts. It would be a mistake to think biology has nothing at all to tell us about creativity: an evolutionary theory that sees humans inheriting their environments as much as their genomes may very well be compatible with a strong notion of second nature, and accordingly with a pragmatist understanding of aesthetics.63 Pinker and Dutton may not provide such a theory, but whatever their weakness and blindspots, they force us to make explicit, to both ourselves and others, just what we want from literary texts and aesthetic works, just what purposes they serve for us, just what purposes they don’t serve, what counts as knowledge in our so-called disciplines, and where our particular culture stands within the larger intellectual debate. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I thank Patrick Vincent for giving me the chance to first air some of these ideas, Bernie Rhie and Mo Lee for reading an early draft of the essay, and John Gibson for commenting on a near-completed draft.

NOTES 1. Richard Powers, Galatea 2.2 (New York: Picador, 1995), pp. 43, 44. 2. The Two Cultures: And a Second Look (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963). Henceforth cited parenthetically as TC. 3. Leavis’s caustic response to Snow was Two Cultures? The Significance of Lord Snow (New York: Pantheon, 1963). As Lionel Trilling observed, The Two Cultures revived a debate that had already been raging eighty years earlier between Arnold and Huxley; see Trilling, “The Leavis-Snow Controversy,” in Beyond Culture: Essays on Literature and Learning (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1965), esp. pp. 126–130. I mention the Cold War here because a good portion of Snow’s essay was devoted to comparing how the two cultures divide has played out in the West and in the USSR, and the effects it had had on recent politics. The spring of 2009 saw a spate of essays in the popular press marking the fiftieth anniversary of Snow’s book and attesting to the ongoing potency of his catchphrase. See, for example, see Peter Dizikes, “Our Two Cultures,” New York Times Book Review (March 19, 2009), 23; and Eliane Glasner, “Lost in the Maelstrom,” The New Humanist (April 2009), at http://newhumanist.org.uk/2005 (accessed November 30, 2009). 4. John Brockman, “Introduction: The Emerging Third Culture,” in Brockman, ed., The Third Culture (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), p. 17. 5. Jones’s remark can be found in Brockman, Third Culture, p. 24; Smolin’s remark can be found in the same volume at p. 31. 6. The idea of a “third culture” was proposed by Snow himself at the end of his essays; see Two Cultures, pp. 67–68. 7. The secondary literature of the third culture is large and rapidly expanding, but for a quick overview of it, see Jonathan Gottschall, Literature, Science, and A New Humanities (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Jonathan Gottschall and David Sloan Wilson, ed., The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2005); Joseph Carroll, Literary

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Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature, and Literature (New York: Routledge, 2004); Patrick Colm Hogan, Cognitive Science, Literature, and the Arts: A Guide for Humanists (New York: Routledge, 2003). For earlier materials, consult Alan Richardson, “Literature, Cognition, and the Brain,” at http://www2.bc.edu/~richarad/lcb/home.html (accessed November 30, 2009). 8. Dutton, The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2009), pp. 10–11. Henceforth cited parenthetically as AI. Pinker’s remark is the back-cover blurb. 9. See Dissanayake, What is Art For? (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1990) and Homo Aesetheticus: Where Art Comes From and Why (New York: Free Press, 1992). For examples of Pinker’s popular scholarship, see The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (New York: Viking, 2002) (henceforth cited parenthetically as BS); The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language (New York: William Morrow, 1994); “My Genome, My Self,” New York Times Magazine (January 7, 2009); “The Mystery of Consciousness,” Time (January 19, 2007): 58–70. 10. Rorty’s longstanding personal relationship with Hook was the result of Hook’s friendship with Rorty’s father, James. On their relationship, see Neil Gross, Richard Rorty: The Making of an American Philosopher (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 11. Dewey, The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy (Boston: Henry Holt, 1910), 1 (henceforth cited parenthetically as ID); Brandom, “When Philosophy Paints Its Blue on Gray: Irony and the Pragmatist Enlightenment,” boundary 2 29 (2002): 1–28. 12. See Hook, Out of Step: An Unquiet Life in the 20th Century (New York: Harper and Row, 1987). Near the end of his memoir, Hook goes out of his way to defuse the idea that he had undergone a fundamental intellectual and political change, despite his later years at the Hoover Institute. Contrasting himself with Ronald Reagan, who had awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1985, Hook writes: “I am unreconstructed believer in the welfare state and in a steeply progressive income tax, a secular humanist, and a firm supporter of freedom of choice with respect to abortion, voluntary euthanasia, and other domestic measures to which he is opposed” (598). These may not be the views of the young firebrand Marxist, but they are also not those of the “neocon” Hook is sometimes thought to have become in his later years. 13. Examples of pragmatist-oriented essays in Dutton’s journal include Megan M. Quinley, “Vengeful Vagueness in Charles Sanders Peirce and Henry James,” Philosophy and Literature 31 (October 2007): 362–377; E. P. Ragg, “Worlds or Words Apart? The Consequences of Pragmatism for Literary Studies: An Interview with Richard Rorty” Philosophy and Literature 26 (2002): 369–396. 14. One partial exception to this claim is E.O. Wilson’s allusions to pragmatism in Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (New York: Knopf, 1998), as when he says vaguely that, along with “positivism,” pragmatism rekindled the “dream of objective truth” at the turn of the nineteenth century (61). A still more partial exception here is Pinker’s sympathetic references to William James in The Blank Slate and elsewhere. But these references, too, are brief, and less about James’s pragmatism than about the antibehaviorist conception of mind that James largely shares with Pinker. On the analogies between James and Pinker, see my Worldly Acts and Sentient Things: The Persistence of Agency from Stein to DeLillo (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2008), pp. 57–67. 15. Poirier, Poetry and Pragmatism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 101. Henceforth cited as PP.

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16. One possibility I won’t be addressing here is that Dutton’s neglect of pragmatism simply reflects the book market’s demand for punchy, streamlined, accessible books. After all, like the work of Pinker and Dawkins and many other “third culture” figures, The Art Instinct is published by a commercial press, clearly intended for a “general audience,” and averse to an overloaded scholarly apparatus and minutely detailed analyses. But this explanation doesn’t seem enough, given that the book includes over ten pages of endnotes, a bibliography of comparable length, and is obviously keen to engage at some level with many of the most prominent arguments among art historians, literary theorists and critics, philosophers, psychologists, biologists, and anthropologists. A similar point would apply to the work of Pinker and Wilson. 17. Blank Slate, pp. 404. I say “pointing to” the remark rather than “citing” it because Pinker in fact mangles Woolf’s famous statement, rendering it as: “In or about December 1910, human nature changed.” I’ll avoid this problem here, but for some comments on the misquotation, see Louis Menand, “What Comes Naturally,” rev. of The Blank Slate, The New Yorker (November 22, 2002): 96, which sees it as symptomatic of larger problems in Pinker’s discussion. 18. Dutton is not the only Darwinian aesthetician to have questioned Pinker’s cheesecake analogy. For an alternative response, see Carroll’s “Pinker, Dickens, and the Functions of Literature,” in Literary Darwinism, pp. 63–68; Brian Boyd, “Evolutionary Theories of Art,” in The Literary Animal, ed. Gottschall and Wilson, pp. 153–157. 19. As Dutton puts it in this context: “In New Guinea, for example, traditional carvings were unsigned. This is hardly surprising in a nonliterate culture of small settlements where social interactions are largely face-to-face: everyone knows who the most esteemed and talented carvers are, and know their works without marks of authorship” (AI 56). 20. As Dutton notes, the notion of “mind-reading” has been especially important in the work of Lisa Zunshine. See her Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006). 21. Dutton is drawing particularly on Carroll’s Literary Darwinism. 22. Here we should note that the theory of sexual selection on which Dutton bases his discussion has been questioned within the scientific community. In her recent book The Genial Gene: Deconstructing Darwinian Selfishness (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), Joan Roughgarden has pointed to a number of phenomena that seem to counteract what she regards as the dubious, politically inflected accounts of (in Dawkins’s term) “the selfish gene.” In many parts of nature, she claims, we don’t see drab, cautious females attracted to highly ornamented, promiscuous males seeking to pass on their genes – a view that seems to naturalize selfishness, competitiveness, stereotypical sexual roles, rape, and war. Biologically speaking, what is sought in a mate is not merely sexual selection and reproduction, but what she calls “social selection,” a mate that can help raise an offspring to reproductive age and in a stable infrastructure. For a summary of Roughgarden’s views, see Prescilla Long’s review in American Scholar 78 (Spring 2009): 118–121. Roughgarden’s claims, however, changes little in the current context. After all, she is still giving some account of sexual preferences and sexual attraction, the need or wish to attract members of the same species, and were such claims to be verified, Dutton could adapt them very easily to his own thesis about our instinct for art. 23. Simon Blackburn, “Meet the Flintstones,” The New Republic (November 25, 2002): 29. 24. Trilling, “The Leavis-Snow Controversy,” p. 151.

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25. Pinker’s influence was one reason why Time magazine named him one of the hundred most influential people in the world in 2004; see http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/ about/media/2004_04_26_time.htm (accessed 30 November 2009). For a philosopher’s appreciative opinion of The Blank Slate, see Colin McGinn, “All in Our Heads,” rev. of The Blank Slate in The Washington Post (October 13, 2002): T03. For praise from psychologists, see Paul Bloom, “Back to Nature,” TRENDS in Cognitive Science 6 (December 2002): 538–539; David P. Barish, “Turning the Tables on the Tabula Rasa,” Human Nature Review 2 (2002): 444–448. By “college presidents” I am of course referring to Lawrence Summers and his controversial 2005 remarks about women and science, which Pinker subsequently defended in “Sex Ed,” The New Republic (February 14, 2005): 15–17. 26. Dennett, “From Typo to Thinko: When Evolution Graduated to Semantic Norms,” in Evolution and Culture, ed. Stephen C. Levinson and Pierre Jaisson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), p. 133. 27. Lebensform is of course a term heavily associated with Wittgenstein, and I use it here in order to indicate in a gestural way that he, too, can be understood as hovering around this discussion. The conjunctions and disjunctions between Wittgenstein and pragmatism have received much attention among philosophers and intellectual historians, but I’ve chosen to bracket off this issue here because Wittgenstein’s relationship to evolutionary psychology is an immensely complex topic and deserves a discussion of its own. Suffice it to say for now that Dutton’s references to Wittgenstein in The Art Instinct are almost as rare as his references to pragmatism, and uniformly caustic. See, e.g., Art Instinct, pp. 76, 162. 28. On Darwin and the Metaphysical Club, see Menand, The Metaphysical Club (New York: Farrar Straus, 2001), esp. pp. 120–128, 201–232. 29. For one recent discussion of James’s Darwinism, see Joan Richardson, A Natural History of Pragmatism: The Fact of Feeling from Jonathan Edwards to Gertrude Stein (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), chap. 4. 30. One place where Brandom openly discusses the Darwinian background of pragmatism is his “When Philosophy Paints Its Blue on Gray.” 31. Rorty, “Dewey Between Hegel and Darwin,” in Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers vol. 3 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 302; “Response to Barry Allen,” in Rorty and His Critics, ed. Robert B. Brandom (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), p. 238. 32. Dennett’s identification with pragmatism was made in his joint radio interview with Rorty during their interview on the WBUR radio program The Connection (27 July 2000). For a broad-ranging and important discussion that includes consideration of Dennett’s place in the pragmatist tradition, see Bjorn Ramberg, “Naturalizing Idealizations: Pragmatism and the Interpretivist Strategy,” Contemporary Pragmatism 1.2 (December 2004): 1–63. Dennett’s remark about “the single best idea” comes in a book for which Rorty not accidentally provides one of the back-cover blurbs, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), p. 21. For more on Dennett’s growing interest in Darwin, see his more recent books Freedom Evolves (New York: Penguin, 2003) and Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (New York: Penguin, 2006). With more space, one could also cite the Darwinian strains in the work of Wilfrid Sellars and W. V. Quine, two mid-century figures who had strong affinities to James and Dewey, and whose lasting influence on more recent pragmatists is well-known.

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33. Blurring distinctions between different sorts of “training” is of course a characteristic of Dewey’s writings on education. On “interpretation” and “experimentation,” see Dennett, Breaking the Spell, pp. 258–264. On Wordsworth, Galileo, and other “strong poets,” see Rorty’s Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989), chaps. 1 and 2. 34. For an early pragmatist account of art that sounds much like Dewey – indeed, that is explicitly indebted to Dewey’s Experience and Nature – see George Herbert Mead, “The Nature of Aesthetic Experience,” in Selected Writings, ed. Andrew J. Reck (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), pp. 294–305. For Dewey’s use of “experience,” a term that Rorty in particular has questioned, see chapter three of Dewey’s Art as Experience. It should be clear from my remark about popular songs and Degas that both Dutton and Dewey resist making categorical distinctions between “high” and “low” – though the final chapter of The Art Instinct, “Greatness in the Arts,” leads one to think that Dewey may be more consistent on this score than Dutton. 35. Burke, Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose (1935; repr., Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. 5. Henceforth cited parenthetically as PC. 36. Burke, “Literature as Equipment for Living,” in The Philosophy of Literary Form (1941; repr., Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), pp. 293–304. 37. Poirier, The Renewal of Literature: Emersonian Reflections (London: Faber and Faber, 1987), henceforth cited parenthetically as RL; Poetry and Pragmatism (see note 15). For a sense of Burke’s role in Poirier’s education, see chapter 4 of Poetry and Pragmatism, “Reading Pragmatically: The Example of Hum 6.” 38. De Man’s claim (from Blindness and Insight) is discussed by Poirier in Poetry and Pragmatism, pp. 141–142. Burke’s response to aestheticism is most powerfully apparent in his first book, Counter-Statement (1931; repr., Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968). For Dewey’s response to aestheticism, see in particular chapter 1 of Art as Experience. 39. Poirier, The Performing Self: Compositions and Decompositions in the Languages of Contemporary Life (1971; repr., Newark, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992), p. 90. Frost’s remark appeared originally in his 1960 Paris Review interview with Poirier. 40. Shusterman, Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art, 2nd edn (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), p. 263. Henceforth cited parenthetically as PA. 41. See Shusterman’s Body Consciousness: A Philosophy of Mindfulness and Somaesthetics (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008), chap. 6. 42. On the perceived dangers of somaesthetics, see in particular Shusterman’s discussion of the Frankfurt School critique of bodily practices in Pragmatist Aesthetics, pp. 273-274; for Shusterman’s take on “high” and “low” art, see his extended discussion of rap music in chapter 7 of the same book. My brief sketch here of Shusterman is not meant to ignore the very real questions that critics might have about his “disciplinary proposal.” Some readers, for instance, may wonder whether Shusterman fully recognizes what Dutton persuasively calls the “imaginative experience” typically thought to be crucial to works of art. In his discussions of somaesthetics, Shusterman often pays little attention to actual artifacts and intentional objects, things in the world that one perceives and judges. The only thing consistently comparable to such an intentional object in Shusterman’s program is one’s own body, as when he says, for instance, that somaesthetics involves “consciousness of breathing” and “clear attention” to the body

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(PA 269). It isn’t clear to me, however, that Shusterman would see this criticism as a decisive mark against him, and he acknowledges that the “threefold, double-jointed discipline” he envisions would stand astride many of the currently existing areas of study. If, he remarks at one point, somaesthetics doesn’t fit very well into our current disciplinary arrangements, “so much the worse for narrow definitions of aesthetics!” (PA 278). On this topic generally, see Pragmatist Aesthetics, pp. 276–280. 43. Wilson, Sociobiology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975); On Human Nature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978). In saying that sociobiology “gained widespread attention” in the 1970s, I mean to acknowledge that its roots (like pragmatism’s) go back further, in particular to the work of Robert Trivers and W. D. Hamilton. 44. Boyd, “Evolutionary Theories of Art,” p. 147. 45. Flück, “Pragmatism and Aesthetic Experience,” REAL: Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature. Volume 15: Pragmatism and Literary Studies, ed. Winfried Flück (Tübingen, Germany: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1998), pp. 227–242. 46. For examples of this distrust, see Part One of Shusterman’s Pragmatist Aesthetics, as well as Poirier’s Renewal of Literature and Poetry and Pragmatism. 47. “What Does Evolution Say About Why We Make Art?” American Scholar 78 (Spring 2009): 118, 122–125. 48. Other claims seem to plague Dutton’s arguments here, in particular those about intention. Most of The Art Instinct argues that people act in ways that will allow them to pass on their genes to their offspring – a claim which, if true, would make genes into agents more or less controlling the vessels in which they are housed (i.e., us). But when he discusses intention, Dutton suddenly shifts levels of explanation and credits individual human beings – me, you, Chekhov, Shakespeare – with being the relevant origin. I’ll be bracketing off this problem in what immediately follows, but a version of it will reappear in the final section of this essay. 49. Nehamas, “What Does Evolution Say About Why We Make Art?” p. 124. 50. McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), pp. 82–86. Henceforth cited parenthetically as MW. 51. My formulation here owes much to Terry Pinkard, “Was Pragmatism the Successor to Idealism?” in New Pragmatists, ed. Cheryl Misak (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 142–168. 52. While he is seldom identified strongly with pragmatism, McDowell has said that his “dualism-debunking and problem-dissolving” account of the mind “could be represented as a pragmatism” (MW 154–155), and many of his chief points of reference – Sellars, Quine, Davidson, Rorty, Brandom – are figures who are often strongly identified with pragmatism. More full-fledged pragmatists have accordingly reacted to McDowell’s recent work with a mixture of admiration and uncertainty. See, for instance, Rorty, “The Very Idea of Human Answerability to the World: John McDowell’s Version of Empiricism,” Truth and Progress, pp. 138–152; Brandom, “Non-Inferential Knowledge, Perceptual Experience, and Secondary Qualities: Placing McDowell’s Empiricism,” in Reading McDowell: On Mind and World, ed. Nicholas Smith (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 92–105; Richard M. Bernstein, “McDowell’s Domesticated Hegelianism,” in Reading McDowell, pp. 9–24; and the essays by Jeffrey Stout, David Bakhurst, and Danielle Macbeth in New Pragmatists, ed. Misak. 53. James, Writings 1902–1910 (New York: Library of America, 1988), pp. 573– 574. Among these earlier pragmatists one might also include Burke, who repeatedly distinguished between nonsymbolic motion and what he called “symbolic action.”

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54. Rorty, “Philosophy-Envy,” Daedalus 133.4 (Fall 2004): 18–24. 55. Dennett, Breaking the Spell, p. 385. For a denunciation of the book as reductive, see Leon Wieseltier, “The God Genome,” New York Times Book Review (19 February 2006): 11. For a concise expression of Dennett on memes, see Appendix A of Breaking the Spell, pp. 341–357. The most longstanding representative in Dennett’s work of the “post-Chomskyan” picture that I mention here has been Jerry Fodor; for one of Dennett’s extended responses to Fodor, see “A Cure for the Common Code?” in Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology (Montgomery, Verm.: Bradford Books, 1978), pp. 90–108. For an excellent discussion of Dennett’s views of cultural evolution, see Grant Gillett, “Dennett, Foucault, and the Selection of Memes,” Inquiry 42 (1999): 3–24. 56. Brandom, Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), p. 5. 57. Pippin, The Persistence of Subjectivity: On the Kantian Aftermath (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 204. Pippin’s remark – which has been crucial on my thinking here – is made in response to McDowell’s Mind and World, but the space of disagreement between them here is quite small compared to the disagreements they would share vis-à-vis Pinker and Dutton. 58. On the limits of transitivity, see Putnam, Words and Life, ed. James Conant (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), pp. 429–433. The claim that one cannot have a “theory of gymnastics” without a “sound foundation in physics” has been offered in all seriousness by Owen Jones, who uses the observation to underscore his belief that one cannot have an adequate understanding of the law without an adequate understanding of evolutionary psychology. See the conclusion of his article “Proprioception, Non-Law, and Biolegal History,” Florida Law Review 53 (2001): 872– 873. Jones’s claims have recently been discussed and dismantled, in ways that partially resemble my own discussion here, by Brian Leiter and Michael Weisberg, “Why Evolutionary Biology Is (So Far) Irrelevant to Legal Regulation,” Law and Philosophy (2009) at http://www.springerlink.com/content/9346hq6788710x50/?p=cefc5a754e174ed 6ab56612afa6a2548&pi=0 (accessed 30 November 2009). 59. Cf. Robert Pippin, “Natural and Normative,” Daedalus (Summer 2009): 35– 43. 60. The claim that reduction is the “cutting edge” of science is made by Wilson in Consilience, p. 54. In making this claim about reduction and the humanities, I clearly don’t mean to imply that reductionism is nowhere to be found in certain areas of literary and cultural studies, or that it is still more explicitly and zealously pursued in much contemporary philosophical research. 61. Jackson, “Issues and Problems in the Blending of Cognitive Science, Evolutionary Psychology, and Literary Study,” Poetics Today 23 (2002): 178. The phrase “naturalism with a normative turn” is the title of James R. O’Shea’s introduction to Sellars, Wilfrid Sellars: Naturalism With a Normative Turn (New York: Polity, 2007). 62. Dennett, “Astride the Two Cultures: A Letter to Richard Powers, Updated,” in Intersections: Essays on Richard Powers, ed. Stephen J. Burn and Peter Dempsey (Champaign, Ill.: Dalkey Archive Press, 2008), p. 154. 63. In The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), Michael Tomasello has claimed that organisms “inherit their environments as much as they inherit their genomes” (p. 78). Tomassello’s work constitutes one of the most sustained and compelling rejoinders to the nativist line of evolutionary psychology, and it is no coincidence that, in his frequent references to

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Wittgenstein and Mead, he regularly invokes the traditions that I have been examining here. Tomasello’s work is also important for Brian Boyd’s thoughtful review of Dutton’s The Art Instinct; see his “Art and Selection,” Philosophy and Literature 33 (2009): 204– 220.

Robert Chodat Associate Professor of English Department of English Boston University 236 Bay State Road Boston, MA 02215 United States

Contemporary Pragmatism Vol. 7, No. 2 (December 2010), 189–218

Editions Rodopi © 2010

Pragmatism’s Future: A Touch of Prophecy Joseph Margolis

I offer a brief for renewing pragmatism’s future in terms of the motto “Darwinizing Hegel and Hegelianizing Darwin” along lines responding to the work of the classic pragmatists (particularly Peirce, Dewey, and Mead), read against the salient tendencies of selected analytic and continental philosophy, the import of the interval spanning Kant and Hegel, and lessons drawn from post-Darwinian paleoanthropology regarding the theory of the human self.

1. Pragmatism’s recovery from its near-demise in the 1940s and 50s is nothing short of miraculous. A completely gratuitous reprieve, without warrant or explicit purpose – now exploited in a thousand insouciant ways world-wide, perhaps the most improbable philosophical recovery of its kind in recent academic memory since it has no manifesto of its own to proclaim that could account for its new-found attraction. In this regard, its recovery cannot compare with W. V. Quine’s ingeniously pared-down retrieval of the remnant forces of logical positivism’s failed vision, reconfigured transatlantically around the innovative spark of Quine’s own “Two Dogmas” paper and freed (by Quine’s wit) from the overly strenuous, now impossible ambitions of the Fregean, positivist, and unity of science visions that once joined hands to command analytic philosophy’s sprawling empire in the first half of the twentieth century. Quine extended analytic philosophy’s hegemony another fifty years, though not robustly enough to improve the viability of the programs of their most daring progenitors. They’ve lost their triumphal edge, possibly forever, and now betray the impoverished results of the narrow strategies of analysis they once demanded. Failing there, analytic philosophy has lost its original fluency and speculative breadth, which might have kept its practice in touch with the best of pragmatist and continental ventures. Its reputation still rests with its rigor; but rigor is doubtful wherever its best efforts are too slow to admit the failure of its reductionisms, supervenientisms, eliminativisms, axiomatizations, systems of causal closure, or the rest of its utopian projects.1 Also, Quine’s initiative arose to meet the willing responses of the “faithful” in support of his frontal attack on the canonical distinction (Rudolf Carnap’s) between the

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“analytic” and the “synthetic” so essential to the faltering claims of the positivists themselves. The pragmatists never had such a cause; yet their own cause, hardly much improved over the past sixty years, now seems remarkably secure. My guess is the new pragmatism will remain vigorous enough for a second inning; but if it cannot motivate its gift soon enough it will fade again into the archival oblivion that was ready to receive it at the end of its first life. I do, however, see something of the deeper meaning of reclaiming (now) the early promise of pragmatism’s classic phase. It’s not at all a regressive sort of enthusiasm. I don’t mean that there is or ever was a golden discovery somehow overlooked until the period spanning the 1970s and the first decade of the new century – that is, the start of pragmatism’s second life. Of course not. But the philosophical world has changed its priorities. Nearly every movement of distinction that once flourished in the last century (chiefly, in the first half of the century) has failed or lost the bloom of its original promise by now – or is viewed very differently now than in its prime – as a result of philosophy’s disenchantment with disenchanted philosophy. In that sense, pragmatism’s unearned recovery is the sign of a certain unspent resource (faute de mieux), an intuition of conceptual possibilities only hinted at, that the competing movements of its own prime could never build upon. Pragmatism’s recovery is due in good part to a dawning sense of the importance (still decisive in our age) of the philosophical revolution originally set in motion by the now indissoluble contributions of Kant and Hegel. It begins with the earliest reception, in America, of the Hegelian critique of Kant2 – in what, following the Civil War, marks the first flourishing of America’s newly liberated philosophical imagination, as it entered the Eurocentric world as the unanticipated expression of a newly minted people. Its recovery, now, depends on a new perception of the skewed work of the whole of twentieth century philosophy; possibly, then, on a sidewise estimate of its original promise, not yet fully discerned but dawning, that senses its native advantage over the more nearly disabling weaknesses (approaching irrelevance) of its most famous competitors: for instance, in terms of the inapt collapse of positivism and the near exhaustion of Husserl’s and Heidegger’s notably unstable apriorisms. What, from our present outlook, Hegel achieved includes at least the abandonment of all that remained regressive in Kant’s original defeat of the presumptions of cognitive privilege within the “pre-Kantian” world: hence, the a priori of the transcendental question turned aposteriorist: became, with its shifting interests, historied, provisional, constructed, diverse, impossible to confirm except as plausible and congruent in a practical way; hence, also, plural, open-ended, fragmentary, continually evolving, impossible to complete, useless to think of asymptotically in naive-realist terms. That is already more than an incipient pragmatism. Have a look, for instance, at C. I. Lewis’s “A Pragmatic Conception of the A Priori” and George Herbert Mead’s account of the emergence of the human self. You cannot fail to “anticipate” (so to say) Hegel’s

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probable interest in their new naturalism – if not his prescient approval.3 Pragmatism is Hegelian, then, and, of course, Kantian for that reason. It eschews the prospect of a closed system of categories for any descriptive, explanatory, or normatively practical discourse. It concedes (or celebrates) the insuperable informality of rational and responsible legitimation; the contingent and functional adequacies of human judgment; the vernünftig, entirely reflexive, constructivist sources of conviction, bootstrapped by its refusal to exclude any donneés of experience; hence, also, committed to the primacy of the merely human self and its humanly accessible world rather than to the invented fiction of a Transcendental Ego and its supposed practice.4 Hegel brings Kant back to the human world: so that the transcendental question cannot and need not be abandoned and can never again claim to justify any hierarchized order of cognitive competence. In championing all this, Hegel embeds the self in the internal Bildung of an enabling culture, itself historicized by the evolving work of its second-natured offspring. (This, I suggest, is the nerve of Hegel’s emendation of the Aristotelian thesis.) There you have a glimpse of one of the principal visions by which we still guide ourselves two hundred years beyond its first formulation – a fortiori, the nerve of the argument by which pragmatism’s evolving advantage (over analytic and continental philosophy) may be effectively advanced. It explains, in passing, for instance, the inordinate (however instructive) contemporary interest in John McDowell’s slack recovery of the relevance of Hegel’s conception of Bildung for late analytic philosophy: you may indeed find the object of that same interest matched (a little more suggestively at times, though still at a puzzling distance and not much detail) in Robert Brandom’s recent allusions to Hegel’s relevance for contemporary philosophy.5 This same interest in recovering Hegel answers to our sense of the unfinished project of pragmatism’s classic period – if you draw in Dewey’s Experience and Nature or the obvious affinities between Peirce’s and Dewey’s versions of fallibilism. But Dewey, opposing Peirce’s florid anticipation and eventual acceptance of parts of Hegel’s Idealist idiom, characteristically economizes by way of a more Darwinized reading of pragmatic success. Emphasizing the common conditions of animal and human intelligence and survival (the evolutionary continuum: the clever rhetoric of his “problematic situation”6), Dewey’s fallibilism acknowledges in one breath the difference between the human analogue of animal life and the “higher,” more complex requirements of a valid science. In Dewey’s hands, the phrasing assures us that we need not (and ought not) insist on any essential discontinuity between the resolution of our animal needs and the sui generis puzzles of scientific rigor. That is surely the point of the bridging function in Dewey’s deliberately informal advocacy of what he names “warranted assertibility” – in place of (Peirce’s infinitely pursued) truth.7 Peirce was much clearer than Dewey about the difference between the animal continuum of practical impasses and the uncertainties of science,

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between the doubts of existential life and the doubts of scientific conjecture; but Dewey was clearer about the improbability of ever reaching a unique convergence in open-ended inquiry. In different ways, each endorsed the infinity of our search of the uniformities of nature: Peirce elects the utopian option of a unique outcome; Dewey, the relaxed accommodation of whatever time may disclose. But neither is in error, since the endlessly unfinished purpose of inquiry is committed to a form of Hope, not any pretended grasp of the ultimate telos of history. Dewey is more literally pragmatic, since questions of truth or warranted assertibility are, for him, episodic rather than tied to conjectures about an infinite continuum; and Peirce is more ingenious, since he finds a regulative (pragmatic) use for the concept of infinite inquiry, despite the fact that infinite inquiry is, trivially, impossible to pursue in finite time. It is, in fact, in this way, that Peirce makes such a telling use of the indissolubility of realism and Idealism, without treating metaphysics in idealist terms. I take this to have been wrongly diagnosed by Hilary Putnam.8 My own intuition is persuaded that Dewey’s economy must still be tempered within the ampler terms of Peirce’s earliest papers (1877–78), especially “The Fixation of Belief” and “How to Make Our Ideas Clear,” which already signal the importance of the continuity between the animal and the human (a theme that may well precede Peirce’s eventual acceptance of the Darwinian thesis). I find the clue to Peirce’s subtlety and sense of the complexities of science (beyond the would-be “logic” of the resolution of animal “doubt” at the human level) in the verbal slippage Peirce permits himself (in “How to Make Our Ideas Clear”), moving from expressions such as, “to know what we think, to be masters of our meaning” (relative to the human continuation of the animal), down to these pointed claims – which use the same wording but change the weight of the possessive pronouns: I only desire to point out how impossible it is that we should have an idea in our minds which relates to anything but conceived sensible effects; and if we fancy that we have any other we deceive ourselves, and mistake a mere sensation accompanying the thought for a part of the thought itself .... Consider what effects, which might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.9 Here, Peirce makes provision for his initial “animal” reading of pragmatism, which (we cannot fail to grasp) is meant to mark only, or primarily) the initial animal condition on which the evolved conception of science (occupied with the puzzling search for truth and reality) begins to eclipse the explanatory resources of animal doubt itself (a fortiori, the Darwinian discovery). Thus, in “The Fixation of Belief,” Peirce already provides the following contrast, which Dewey somewhat conflates in his own economy:

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The irritation of doubt causes a struggle to attain a state of belief.... The irritation of doubt is the only immediate motive for the struggle to attain belief.... With the doubt, therefore, the struggle begins, and with the cessation of doubt it ends. Hence, the sole object of inquiry is the settlement of opinion. We may fancy that this is not enough for us, and what we seek, not merely an opinion, but a true opinion. But put this fancy to the test, and it proves groundless; for as soon as a firm belief is reached we are entirely satisfied, whether the belief be true or false. and The object of reasoning is to find out, from the consideration of what we already know, something else which we do not know. Consequently, reasoning is good if it be such as to give a true conclusion from true premises, and not otherwise.... It is certainly best for us that our beliefs should be such as may truly guide our actions so as to satisfy our desires; and this reflection will make us reject any belief which does not seem to have been so formed as to insure that result. But it will only do so by creating a doubt in the place of that belief.10 This is prettily turned but exceptionally spare: it shows the continuity and difference between the brute resolution of animal doubt and the transformed persistence of a very different kind of doubt within the concerns of scientific inquiry. It anticipates (and in effect refuses) Dewey’s simpler economy; anticipates (and in effect disallows, also in advance) William James’s wellknown (1898) rendering of Peirce’s conception of truth, twenty years after the publication of “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” – which misreads Peirce’s intention even as it introduces his pragmatism to the world; collects the nerve of Kant’s and Hegel’s critique of “pre-Kantian” philosophy; lays the ground for Peirce’s complex conception of fallibilism, which obliges us to come to terms with the continuum of finite and infinite inquiry (already broached in the “pragmatic maxim” of the second paper in the Popular Science Monthly series); and wisely avoids any confident analysis of the animal mind. All this entrenches – however obliquely – the incipient “Hegelan” cast of Peirce’s earliest papers, as well as their proto-Darwinian inclination. But what, finally, they yield (in the later papers) is the constant sense that precision in our conjectures about the nature of the world and our encounter with whatever may be found in it is forever hostage to the informalities of practical life – continuous with the animal and the protoplasmic – which then insuperably qualify the presumed rigor and systematicity of our grasp of the meaning of meaning, truth, and reality. In fact, it would not be unreasonable to read Peirce’s penchant for extravagant mythic renderings of his own philosophical searches as so many ways of entrenching his appreciation of the lesson – as with his agapasm, synechism, the evolution of the laws of nature, the treatment of inquiry itself as

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a continuum of living and overlapping infinitesimals, the unity of the finite and infinite. These are all part of Peirce’s cosmology, what he sometimes calls “guesses” (abductions of Hope, I think we may say).11 They are also very clever anticipations of a fresh reading of the pragmatist conception of science, which I shall come to shortly. I take these first ventures on Peirce’s part to signal, subliminally, what was to be the growing (never quite consummated) union of Hegelian and Darwinian themes among the pragmatists. In any event, the idea accords with the deep informality and absence of cognitive privilege of any kind in resolving the “doubts” of practical life and of the sciences that build upon them and inevitably eclipse their function; it accords with the flux of the experienced world and the inescapably ad hoc, fragmentary sufficiency of what we concede to be valid, though forever open to invented challenge; it answers the question regarding the general resources of realism by featuring the survival of the human world even where our grasp of the world clearly departs from animal intelligence and Cartesian certitude; and it trusts its inveterate optimism (abductive Hope, in Peirce’s conception – a higher sort of animal or psychological hope in Dewey’s) to the reflexive, sui generis powers of the historied cultures of the human world itself. (The puzzles of infinite inquiry must themselves be entirely settled within the boundaries of finite inquiry.) But most of what Peirce and Dewey provide in this regard falls noticeably short of the strongest possibilities of “Darwinizing Hegel” and “Hegelianizing Darwin”: that is, falls short of what now seems possible (and promising), given the radical notion of the artifactual self, the unique role of language, the differences between biological and cultural evolution, the analysis of history, and the completely altered expectations of a human world shorn of universalism, essentialism, substantive necessity, apodicticity, and any and all privileged sources of cognitive confidence beyond the passing adequacy of self-corrective practical guesses within a largely unknown and inexhaustible world. On my reading, this is the Hegel of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries – naturalized by the pragmatists, the best of the Marburg Kantians, the Marxists, the Nietzscheans, and the early Frankfurt-Critical school. Possibly then, it may also be Hegel’s best reading of Hegel. What beckons beyond all that is the attraction of the concept of the artifactual self and all that that may contribute to enhancing pragmatism’s new ascendency. Of course, we must bear in mind that the analysis of the self, of the enlanguaged and encultured human world, of the very idea of historied existence, is the most neglected – incomparably the most important – part of current and future philosophy: suppressed (thus far) by the saliency of the most reductive tendencies of analytic philosophy during the very interval in which pragmatism suddenly revived. It needs to be said that the inherent informality of human inquiry that pervades Peirce’s earliest papers and is favored even more insistently in Dewey’s treatment of science, has now begun to attract a growing number of knowledgeable inquiries into the philosophical foundations of the physical

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sciences: notably, in the work of Otto Neurath, Richard Feynman, Ian Hacking, Nancy Cartwright, and others, who see the fragmentary, somewhat opportunistic, informally overlapping, rather ad hoc, “interested” and pragmatic reliability of any of our truth-claims as a valid challenge to the very primacy of the idea of the changeless laws of nature and the canonical standing of the hypothetico-deductive model of explanation. Let me cite, without comment then, Feynman’s well-known preference for the “Babylonian” conception of science over the “Euclidean,” which affords a very good impression of the upstart attraction of (what I am calling) the developing pragmatist conception of science: In physics [Feynman says] we need the Babylonian method and not the Euclidean or Greek method ... [or at least not until] physics is complete and we know all the laws.... [Otherwise,] if all [our] various theorems are interconnected by reasoning [for instance, by alternative axiomatizations that yield mathematically strict equivalences at critical points but are “completely unequivalent (‘psychologically’) when you are trying to guess new laws”], there is no real way [and no need] to say “These are the most fundamental axioms.” The Babylonian method, then, proceeds along the following, seemingly blundering lines: I happen to know this, and I happen to know that, and maybe I know that; and I work everything out from there. Tomorrow I may forget that that is true, but remember that something else is true, so I can reconstruct it all again. I am never sure of where I am supposed to begin or where I am supposed to end. I just remember enough all the time so that as memory fades and some of the pieces fall out I can put the thing back together again every day.12 The argument favors commonsense successes that are relatively episodic and pretty well under local practical control; by contrast, theorizing tends to be global and takes conceptual liberties with what is relatively assured locally. I cannot imagine a general picture of science (favored as a form of rigor suited to the discipline given, as Aristotle says) that would be more congenial to a recuperated pragmatism. Admittedly, the thesis I have in mind about the artifactuality of the self is a quarrelsome one, possibly not entirely welcome, though it has its lesson. The end of the twentieth century witnessed the recycled failure (at a reduced level of ambition) of a great many of the most successful lines of inquiry of the first half of the century. The new wave of pragmatisms of our day, which are no longer merely parochial – perhaps then the whole of Western philosophy – depends upon that fact. We find ourselves obliged to reconsider what may have been lost

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or suppressed in analytic philosophy’s massive avoidance (through most of the twentieth century) of any commerce with Hegel’s thought, despite the plain fact that Hegel lays out the strongest, most ramified account of the possibility of a radical recovery of Kant’s great innovation, which, if allowed, would entail the rejection of all of Kant’s “pre-Kantian” assumptions. After Hegel, it no longer makes sense to think of Kant and Hegel separately, except in terms of the formation of one or another “Hegelianized” Kantianism. The second round of philosophical failings (from, say, World War II to the end of the century) signifies a serious loss of confidence, much confusion, above all a forced patience in the face of seeming stalemate and exhaustion, which, within the period of pragmatism’s recovery, I associate most memorably – though equivocally – with Richard Rorty’s terribly effective exposés and oddly relevant irrelevancies. Rorty was a philosophical talent of considerable daring, who was obviously tempted by Hegel’s courage, but who was clinically unwilling to advance any sanguine improvements addressed to the fatigued (perhaps already superseded) options of recent philosophy (which Rorty tirelessly examined along pragmatist and Hegelian lines) without instantly debunking them as impossible to validate. (Almost no philosophers of standing have followed Rorty in this.) In fact, Rorty construed his own dismissal of canonical philosophy as the true “postmodern” theme of pragmatism’s own revival.13 He meant this, at different moments, to be Hegelian, Heideggerian, Wittgensteinian, Sellarsian, Davidsonian, and Deweyian as well! 2. The shortest summary of the new turn I’ve been sketching: in effect, a prophecy of pragmatism’s future – perhaps the future of the whole of Eurocentric philosophy – calls, as I’ve already remarked, for “Darwinizing Hegel” and “Hegelianizing Darwin.” The manifesto was never explicitly embraced by the classic pragmatists, and its full implications are even now not entirely clear. (Its wording, however, was anticipated in one of Peirce’s book reviews in The Nation, but we cannot be sure what Peirce would have had us understand by that.) What I mean to signal on the Darwinian side is that, once the earliest postDarwinian speculations about Homo sapiens took form, pragmatism should have made the analysis of the concept of a person or self the absolutely decisive center of its own labor. If it had begun to think along these lines during the period in which classic pragmatism nearly expired (that is, in the 1940s and 50s), it would by now have had the benefit of not less than sixty years in which to explore its essential and most elementary possibilities – all the while the energies of its principal rivals were deflected by insistent inquiries that have proved to be occasions for recycling the spent proposals of the first half of the twentieth century. Imagine! Strange to say, this rather ordinary beginning – the analysis of the self – now promises to yield the most radical possible approach to the entire run of

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standard problems confronting any and all the current philosophical schools. Read along Darwinian lines, the least inquiry would have put in instant and deepest jeopardy a great many recalcitrant doctrines the pragmatists had hoped to topple by other means – and would have done by a single stroke – even if not, let it be said, without risking the standing of their own perspectives. It would, I believe, have brought philosophy as close as we could possibly imagine to the presuppositionless objective of Hegel’s original critique of Kant: the advantage of his minimal phenomenology. Pragmatism might have appeared then to have discovered the very nerve of one of the strongest possible versions of its evolving vision – in a way dialectically disclosed by the mounting exposé of analytic philosophy’s own decline. In truth, the two outcomes are hardly more than the heads and tails of the same philosophical toss. No large claim of the relevant kind could expect to escape the challenge of its own revision and the changing forms of its legitimation. Of course, that is also the essential point of reading Hegel as the best of the enlightened “Kantians” of his own age – though probably not of ours, persuaded as we are by post-Darwinian reflections on the meaning of the unique history of Homo sapiens. The Hegelian theme was always easier to flesh out than the Darwinian, but the Darwinian was easier to understand: the trouble has been (and still is) that the Darwinian theme (I include post-Darwinian developments) is, finally, more unsettling than the other. Nevertheless, it seems clear that the pragmatists are very well positioned to make good use of the unity of the two perspectives: there is almost nothing in recent Western philosophy that is seriously committed to the new possibility, and there is nothing of comparable interest that could be drawn from the scatter of other parts of contemporary thought. You have only to remind yourself that, already in mid- and late-eighteenth century Europe, Kant and Hume were completely baffled by the inability of their own philosophies to generate a reasonable account of what it was to be a human subject or agent; and that, early in the nineteenth century, Hegel had already made it clear that there was no way to understand the human subject if separated from the specifically cultural and historied world in which the self is gebildet. I won’t deny – the point is worth debating – that one may claim to find already in Hegel and Marx (Marx’s Grundrisse, for instance) evidence of a deeper speculation about the inherently artifactual nature of the human agent. (I’ve been tempted by the idea myself, but it needed a longer latency among the classical pragmatists – and, of course, ourselves.) It needs at least the notion of what I call “external” Bildung, that is, the effective evolutionary conditions (not primarily biochemical) that account for the originary presence (the artifactuality) of one or another stably enlanguaged and encultured society whose inherent paideutic powers may (then) be regularly enlisted (internally) in the inter-generational processes of (what I call) “internal” Bildung.14 That is the decisive consideration that remains inaccessible to figures like Herder and Hegel (and Aristotle) and that have been ignored by contemporary figures like Gadamer (and ourselves) and certainly by much of late-analytic philosophy. It needs a sense of the full

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transformation that post-Darwinian paleoanthropology makes possible. Hegel’s sense of Bildung remains committed to something like Aristotle’s notion of moral grooming – “internal” Bildung, as I’ve said. But I find no evidence in Hegel that Vernunft, for instance, is (is rightly taken to be) a precipitate, an artifactual instantiation of the original (hybrid) evolution of an enlanguaged culture. All that Hegel vouchsafes is that Vernunft and Geist are, ultimately, one and the same ontologically. But is Geist (in the relevant sense) an artifact of an evolutionary continuum that begins with the prelinguistic protocultures of hominid primates (the precursors of Homo sapiens or the precursor phases of modern Homo sapiens), themselves still incapable of producing a true language? The question hardly arises before the advent of genetic theory at the turn of the twentieth century. It requires a fresh distinction between biological and cultural evolution: hence, a hybrid form of evolution by means of which the processes of external Bildung prove viable. Read this way, the whole of Western philosophy may be deemed to have been marking time – albeit with a growing anticipation (and some dread) that the relative fixities of its most admired doctrines will have to be abandoned or radically altered. (Consider, for instance, the inevitable eclipse of Aristotle’s, Kant’s, and Hume’s moral doctrines.) This is indeed the nerve of the account I’m recommending. I suggest that something quite close to it has been on our lips at least since Dewey’s and George Mead’s floruit. The essential key lies with the presumptive fact that true language is a datable achievement, an artifactual transform of the native communicative skills of the continuum of a run of primate species (both hominid and prehominid), which, even prelinguistically, accommodate (by entirely cultural means) the reliable transmission of stable forms of proto-cultural learning capable of yielding progressively developed (still sub-linguistic) functions approximating more and more closely to true linguistic functions (reference and predication, say), possibly even among the monkeys.15 Grant all this and the decisive premise swims into view: the self or person (the human subject or agent) is a functional, hybrid transform of the biologically inherited cognitive talent of the primate members of Homo sapiens, the nominal agency that emerges, incipiently, with (and as the site of) the evolving mastery of one or another natural language, itself the individuated actualization of the gradually invented, collectively shared, species-centered ability to speak. Here, external Bildung makes internal Bildung possible; and internal Bildung makes the emergence of actual selves effective. Construed this way, the human self has no essential nature; is primarily a history, the site of a causally generated run of functional powers uniquely marked by their reflexive ability to report and share interior experience and to act by choice in ways informed by reflecting on that experience, on the experience of other similarly formed selves, and the accumulating lore of an enabling society. You cannot fail to glimpse the untapped power of this fresh conception. (I take it to be the promise of a new phase of pragmatism.) The human self is,

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effectively, a “natural artifact,” meaning by that that the biology of Homo sapiens sapiens has evolved in ways that facilitate the unique form of the endlessly repeated “ontogenetic” mastering of the “phylogenetic” cultural competence of the species.16 (The mixed phrasing may strike you as a little careless, but it is deliberately chosen, now a routine metaphor, and is meant to be entirely benign.) I draw a number of substantive lessons from this single theme, all pertinent of course to the prospective redirection of pragmatism’s classic vision. The principal gain rests with pragmatism’s dialectical advantage (its probable advantage) in competition with relevant analytic and continental inquiries. I shall shortly offer a sustained example of how the argument is likely to go, when pursued in accord with certain scientistic strategies of late analytic philosophy. But the whole of my brief is committed to the premise that, in claiming that the human self is a cultural artifact – a hybrid transform of the biological gifts of a notable species (our own) – I am claiming that the entire enculturing (human) world is, evolvingly, self-constructed (or self-constituting) insofar as its prelinguistic communicative powers gradually strengthen (that is, are societally remembered, developed, and reliably transmitted) in the direction of yielding a true language. In short, the emergence of the self is, effectively, nothing but the emerging communicative competence (and what it makes possible) as it becomes linguistically well-formed as speech. In this sense, the self and its matched (enlanguaged) world are socially self-constructed realities (forms of being) as a result of the unique evolution (the intertwined cofunctioning of biological and cultural processes – overwhelmingly weighted in favor of the accelerating pace and mounting hegemony of enlanguaged transformation). So the self and the encultured world are, literally, social constructions: as are machinery, technologies, languages, institutions, traditions, artworks and the like, not less real than mere physical things for that reason, but discernible as such only by those same hybrid agents (selves: ourselves) who are suitably transformed (enabled) to produce and discern what emerges in just such a world. We may say here that the (broadly) cognitive powers of selves and the (broadly) cognizable features of the encultured world are “penetrated” in the same transformative way by the historically evolving language and culture of one or another enabling society. (In this sense, language, culture, history, selves are publicly and objectively present in the world, not in any way confined to what is often said to be subjectively confined to the mind.) I’m speaking with some care here, because the formulation tendered will play an instructive role in examining the specimen quarrels I intend to introduce for the sake of isolating the most strategic (and disputed) features of the very space in which selves function. It’s a stunning fact that even sensory perception is linguistically “penetrated” (indissolubly, continually transformed) through the whole of a self’s career – hence, functions spontaneously (“naturally,” second-naturedly) in its newly mastered phenomenological mode – as a decisive factor in any

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adequate post-Darwinian account of what to regard as objective experience, thought, and judgment vis-à-vis the “natural world” – including the encultured world we construct or constitute and that, reciprocally, constructs us. Nevertheless, we are not obliged to hold (as Kant holds) that we thereby “constitute” or construct the natural world we claim to know. Not at all: we dismiss any such disastrous option and move on. But it remains entirely open to us to admit that, in speaking of the “independent” world, under the insurmountable conditions of linguistic and cultural penetration – I don’t mean a noumenal world of any kind – we find ourselves unable to define objectivity in naive-realist terms, except relative to our transient (conceptual) “pictures” of the world itself. We therefore escape representationalism and subjectivism in much the same way Hegel and the classic pragmatists do; hence, like them, we concede the continuing relevance of Kant’s transcendental question and his own struggle to surmount representationalism: a fortiori, the impossibility of disjoining realism and the displaced residual Idealism of our constructed pictures of the world.17 Thus far, at least, I see no important difference between (say) Peirce’s and Ernst Cassirer’s Hegelianized Kantianisms, except for differences in what they wish to save from Kant’s vision and differences in how they judge the relevance of the Darwinian theme. But I have no objection to admitting that a viable realism must take a constructivist form or that Idealism (in the post-Kantian sense) can easily escape subjectivism. My most compelling clue – it takes a moment’s reflection to grasp its force – rests with the remarkable fact that we actually hear (and grasp) speech directly, much as we hear sound. This, then, is the conceptual route I recommend by which to construe pragmatism as a late Hegelian variant of a distinctly naturalistic cast: a variant that bids fair to complete its promise and philosophical power by radically Darwinizing its Hegelian themes. I say that pragmatism had already made an excellent start during its classic phase when it demonstrated (at least implicitly) how to resolve the realism question – by featuring the continuum of human and animal life and the dependence of science on the informal adequacy of the provisional habits of practical life itself. Proceeding thus, within a fluxive context that was seen to draw closer and closer to Hegel’s vision, pragmatism joins the Hegelian and Darwinian themes by joining the aposteriorist reading of the transcendental question with the original continuum of the animal and the human.18 Nevertheless, in recovering the interlocking argument, we begin to see just how preliminary the pragmatists’actual efforts were in marking off the main lines of an acceptable theory of the human world. For example, to admit the artifactual constitution of the self – in the sense of dating its biologically enabling conditions: say, the placement of the larynx suitably for speech – we surely see that the objectivity of moral and cognitive norms cannot possibly be captured in any ordinary account of first- or second-order discovery: for those who regard selves as self-constituting artifacts, there can be no privileged

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essentialism suited to human practices (for instance, in the way of inherent facultative powers physically or biologically defined or legibly fixed, determinate, normatively binding universal interests). Although, to admit such limitations hardly deprives us of the ability to formulate “second-best” or reasonable (explicitly constructed, historically diverse, rationally constrained) norms of morality and science that enjoy a more modest (conditional) sort of objectivity.19 Certainly, to admit the artifactual nature of the self precludes any strictly cognitivist account of objective norms; but it need not preclude conditionally objective norms, conjectural revisions of our sittlich practices, in either domain – for example, the achievement of effective predictability with regard to as yet unobserved particular phenomena, even on grounds ultimately deemed mistaken or evidentiarily problematic: Mendeleev’s conjectures,20 say, predictions about the unseen planet Neptune, the building of the atomic bomb. It supports a notably robust novel intuition about objectivity accessible enough in concrete practice (an instance of Secondness, perhaps, in Peirce’s sense) but difficult to legitimate in canonical terms (as Peirce himself discovers in speculating about fallibilism and the “logic” of abduction). Still, this same informality and seeming lack of precision has, fairly recently, been promisingly converted into a new scruple in the philosophy of science – as with Feynman and Cartwright – that draws on Peirce’s original intuition (the famous one about the difference between a “cable” and a “chain” of reasoning21) that lends itself, along potentially radical lines, to the recuperation of the pragmatist cause.22 3. I come now to the specimen quarrels I’ve promised. For reasons of economy I draw them from a very recent publication by John Searle, Making the Social World (2010), which, broadly speaking, affords a skillful attempt – diametrically opposed to my own approach and open to considerable dispute – to map what is philosophically required in any adequate analysis of the same enlanguaged human world that I’ve been sketching. The confrontation with Searle’s analysis is a penny digest of a larger contest I envision between a recuperated pragmatism and an extremely spare attenuation of the most persistent scientistic convictions of late twentieth century analytic philosophy. The larger contest is increasingly centered on the analysis of the human world viewed as uniquely constituted and as the integrated space of the uniquely human form of life: hence, centered on the analysis of language, enlanguaged culture, history, the emergence of societies of selves or persons, and the human world’s dependence on, difference from, and functional interaction with, physical and biological nature. It’s a remarkable fact that all of this still remains the least explored specialty of contemporary Western philosophy, though it forms the natural setting for a fully fashioned pragmatism and for any Hegelian-inspired

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philosophy – as yet still largely inchoate and puzzlingly preliminary. The pragmatists have yet to grasp the full possibilities of their postHegelian/post-Darwinian turn, and the analysts have still to explain why their self-impoverishing confinement within a choice of conceptual resources loyal to the failed paradigms of scientism’s own history should not now be marked down as demonstrably inadequate to the task at hand. The turn to the analysis of the enlanguaged human world and the emergence of the self is bound to set effective conditions for assessing the adequacy of the philosophies of the near future. There can’t be much doubt that they will feature the primacy of the human agent’s role in science and inquiry, as in life and practical commitment, over the would-be canonical preference for the methodology of the physical sciences. But the self, as distinct from the mind, is still not much more than a surd in much modern philosophy. One has only to think of Kant and Hume. I’m convinced that we cannot understand the human construction or constitution of the encultured world, including what I’ve characterized as the emergence of the artifactual self, without an explanation of how language may have arisen (or, in Kantian terms, how language is itself “possible” – transcendentally but not in any apriorist sense). This is the neglected philosophical problem I associate with the novel notion of external Bildung, applied to the work of post-Darwinian paleoanthropology. On my reading, you remember, external Bildung accounts for the originary appearance of true language as the emergent outcome of a continuous series of progressive transformations of the forms of prelinguistic hominid communicative powers through the processes of cultural evolution, themselves applied to the enabling capacities that emerge in the last phases of the biological evolution of Homo sapiens sapiens (as in the placement of its laryngeal system, essential for speech, which seems not to have been sufficiently matched in the evolution of Neanderthal, now extinct.). On my view, external Bildung makes internal Bildung possible – internal Bildung having already become the preferred model (in philosophical circles) of how to explain the significance of the social rearing of the newborn members of the species – as with theorists as diverse as Aristotle, Herder, Hegel, Gadamer, and John McDowell. The trick is that internal Bildung appears not to presuppose external Bildung if we treat language, as John Searle does, as “a natural, biological phenomenon”: [L]anguage [Searle says, is] an extension of biologically basic, prelinguistic forms of intentionality, and thus meets our basic requirement of showing how the human reality is a natural outgrowth of more fundamental – physical, chemical, and biological – phenomena. Searle remarks that “language is often seen as the primary form of intentionality” and chides philosophers like Donald Davidson and Michael Dummett for holding that “Without language, there can be no thought at all” – a

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view he claims “is more than a philosophical error; it is [he says] bad biology.”23 But he nowhere explains how language can be rightly counted as an essentially biological phenomenon, narrowly construed (genetic, biochemical, epigenetic, say), apart from the unhelpful fact that it obviously arises among living organisms. I find what Searle says here to be not unreasonable if read with an eye to avoiding certain equivocations and privileged “facts” – but not otherwise. Thus, language, on my view, is indeed “an extension of biologically basic prelinguistic forms of communication,” but the extension requires (in an increasingly massive way) the effective processes of specifically cultural evolution (forms of social invention, for instance, socially directed learning and instruction, reliable ways of transmitting proto-linguistic and eventually mature linguistic skills from generation to generation, within the life of a stable society, but not genetically or biochemically produced, or produced in any similar way). The evolution of language takes a complex hybrid form, intertwining biologically and culturally distinct but hardly separate processes – since the “cultural” itself signifies a sui generis mode of transforming the “biological” in ways that yield an emergent world (the enlanguaged world), the distinctive properties of which cannot (as we now understand matters) be described or explained in terms of the familiar features of what Searle calls “physical, chemical, and biological phenomena.” He calls language “a natural outgrowth” of such phenomena. But I would rather emphasize that it is an “outgrowth” so original, unique to the species, so powerful in its import and effects, so entirely absent from the rest of the animal world (except incipiently, as among the bonobos, under conditions of human contact), that it would not be beneath debate to claim that the appearance of the self is a development that fully justifies our speaking of a fundamental “ontological” difference between selves and prelinguistic hominid primates – in precisely the sense in which the emergence of living creatures (though part of a chemical continuum with the inanimate world) is rightly taken to be ontologically different from the mode of being of inanimate things.24 I don’t believe Searle would concede the point; but the verbal quibble introduces deeper, more substantive sorts of challenge that classic philosophy never featured. I continue, therefore, with an extended examination of Searle’s analysis of the human world; I find that it exposes in the most compelling way (however unintentionally) the false leads of the scientistic options favored by the strongest efforts of analytic philosophy, and, at the same time, the seeming dialectical disadvantage of pragmatism’s conjoined Hegelian and Darwinian proclivities, which cannot be satisfactorily captured in Searle’s materialist terms and which, by and large, pragmatism has pretty well neglected to strengthen or improve further. Let me add, without explanation for the moment (I shall return to fill in what’s missing) two further preliminary comments on Searle’s remarks (as cited). For one thing, I’ve taken the liberty of replacing Searle’s formulation – viz., that language is an extension of “prelinguistic intentionality” – with the

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more neutral phrasing, language is an extension of “prelinguistic communication” (with whatever may prove to be relevant in the way of ontological differences). The reason is simply that “intentionality” is a much-contested notion, used in a heterodox and problematic way by Searle himself, and (thus construed) used in a way that cannot be freed from any assessment of Searle’s own way of viewing the “facts” about language. Secondly, when he chides Davidson and Dummett (whose views I’m not willing to defend), Searle means to emphasize that his prelinguistic hominids (including the early forms of Homo sapiens) are indeed capable of “thought” without the mastery of language. As he explains: By “hominid” I [Searle] mean to include prelinguistic humans. We are imagining a race of early humans possessing the biological forms of intentionality, both individual and collective, but lacking language. We imagine that they are capable of cooperative behavior and that they have the full range of perception, memory, belief, desire, prior intentions, and intentions-in-action. What [then, he asks] do they acquire when they acquire language?25 We must bear in mind that Searle never tells us whether or how the “thought” (or “perception”) of his prelinguistic hominids differs from that of enlanguaged humans. He does say that “the formal structures of intentional states and speech acts are surprisingly similar” (which begins to bridge the prelinguistic and the enlanguaged); he also says that “an animal that is consciously able to cope with the environment already has the category [though not the concept] of object, or thing, because it can discriminate the things that it encounters from each other.... It has the categories of space and time because it observes objects as located in space, and it experiences changes through time.”26 But here, surely, we must weigh Uexküll’s familiar warning against anthropomorphizing “animal” thought and perception: we cannot really understand the way in which “thought” and “perception” take form in animal life (except, of course, heuristically, from our own vantage); this may be just as true of the difference between the prelinguistic competence of Homo sapiens and ourselves as selves (which bears on Davidson’s and Dummett’s insistence).27 But the relationship between human infants and linguistically apt adults is hardly the same as that between human persons and their animal pets. Simply stated: languageless animals are not lesser selves; they’re not selves at all. Searle is at his weakest here. “My dog [Searle claims] can see a burglar, but he cannot see that there is a burglar there, because he lacks the appropriate concept. All the same, he does see that something is there.”28 I don’t believe Searle ever clarifies the sense in which his dog sees a burglar, or the would-be fact that he sees that “something is there” or that whatever he sees entails the same “categories” (as opposed to the same “concepts”) of “objects” that we employ: or, in fact, just how we distinguish

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between bare human “thought” and “perception” subtracted (so to say) from what we report, linguistically, as our thought and perception – or how we rightly distinguish between our thought and perception and that of Searle’s hominid primates (or, conceivably, his dog’s). I take human thought and perception to be “penetrated” and (thus) “transformed” by the mastery of language – so that what we suppose “remains” of biologized thought and perception apart from the “addition” of language must be a dependent conjecture of our own transformed powers. Think of the failings of sense datum theory, or the implications of our learning to hear meaningful speech as spontaneously as we hear sound. To what extent, I ask, are thought and perception altered and qualified by encultured learning (prelinguistic as well as linguistic)? The question seems to be permanently anthropomorphized. In accord with his answers to questions of this kind, Searle moves on to his theory of the creation of “human institutions”: in effect, to the whole of what he calls the human “social world,” the “enlanguaged world” (as I prefer to say), of a society of apt selves. (Actually, Searle makes no use at all of the concepts of “self” and “culture.”) He simply offers the extraordinary claim that “All institutional facts, and therefore all status functions, are created by speech acts of a type that in 1975 I baptized as ‘Declarations’.” The principle applies, for instance, to “making” a certain kind of printed paper a twenty-dollar bill that may rightly circulate as money (that is, applies to imposing such a “function” on the paper); but it also applies, as Searle says, “to the most fundamental institution of all: language,” except that language does not require a separate speech act (a separate “Declaration”) in order “to count” as language.29 I’m persuaded that Searle’s theory is demonstrably deficient in an essential and fatal way, and that it must (as a consequence) yield in the direction I’ve been favoring. A true language cannot possibly be deliberately constructed from prelinguistic sources, though it obviously must have evolved, over considerable time, from just such sources. The rest of my account of Searle’s views is meant to support this charge. (I may then inadvertently slight some of the best features of Searle’s theory where they do not bear directly on my counterargument). I shall have to confine my remarks to the briefest sketch. Let me, however, clinch as much as possible of the decisive finding that’s just surfaced, while we have it in view. My claim is that the transition from prelinguistic hominid communication to true language, though surely continuous, involves a deep change in the human capacity for thought, perception, belief and the like, so fundamental that it goes contrary to the known facts to speak (as Searle does) of his prelinguistic hominids possessing the “full range” of such capacities – despite their lacking language. In lacking language, they lack the “full range” of such capacities! The reason is that the very mastery of language entails the unique emergence of the self as the nominal agent of an entirely new set of mental powers. Failure to accommodate this fact amounts to a fatal petitio – or a regress, which I dub “Rousseau’s joke” (drawing on Rousseau’s Social Contract),

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though it’s not at all clear that Rousseau himself was clear about the joke’s being a joke: that is, drawing on the puzzle that worries about whether, in order to engage in a contract to begin to speak a language (for the first time) or to live by certain formulated political rules, we must already (on the argument’s own terms) have been party to effectuating a prior contract of precisely the same sort! If you ask, now, what are the new powers that we acquire?, I should say that they include the power to report in a public way, and thus to share, our newly formed reflexive awareness of our inner mental states; the linguistically altered (“penetrated”) modes of perception, feeling, and thought and the newly minted objects thereby introduced (as in the auditory accessibility of speech and music, that is, language-dependent objects); new forms of intentionality created and made accessible by language and language-dependent processes (the semiotic features of artworks and human actions, for instance); the capacity for second-order discriminations (applied, say, to concepts, relationships between language and the world); and so on. The world, then, is altered and enlarged by the acquisition of language and of what language makes possible. Searle senses the difficulty of extending his view of speech acts and Declarations to the origination of language itself: it’s the burden of Rousseau’s joke. There are, I would say, at least two prominent artifactual realities of the human world that cannot possibly be created by speech acts, by Declarations, or by any similar process. I concede Searle’s example of the creation of money as legal tender by a sort of pronouncement – a speech act, if you like, but even that’s too glib. Even so, language and selves cannot be produced by any such pronouncement; that would be magic. They are surely unique precipitates of the autonomous processes of cultural evolution running continuously from the prelinguistic to the linguistic. The complexity of these two achievements, not quite inventions but contrived, so different from one another but inseparably intertwined, cannot account for their own functional fluencies (a language that remains intact though continually changing over immense periods of time, clever selves that arise as transforms of the prelinguistic infant primates of the species with their own maturing mastery of language and the culture that that makes possible) – without admitting the mysterious fabric of the enlanguaged culture selves share (as we say) that sustains them as they acquire a mastery of their own society’s home language. This “fabric” (as I call it) is a uniquely unified ensemble – an explicative construct, let me say, abstracted from our actual practices, interpreted and marked as a collective possession of viable societies, gradually experienced as a palpable presence by experienced selves – of a sort that cannot be analyzed solely or primarily in terms of the independently aggregated acts of the individual members of any society. (The acts of agentive selves may be said to incarnate in individual ways the collective potentialities of a society’s distinctive ethos or Geist: what I’ve named the “fabric.”) Searle’s very different reading, confined essentially to the intentional mental states of individual agents already

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competent prelinguistically to produce a language and an encultured world in which certain pieces of paper can circulate as legal tender, produces only insuperable paradox. We say that we share a language, a culture, a tradition, the deepest institutions of our society. We share them aggregatively, cooperatively, because we are ourselves individual, individuatable selves; but we are also culturally formed and transformed, ensemble, by virtue of learning to share these complex things effectively. Hence, we share them aggregatively, because our own enlanguaged “second nature” incorporates what every society of selves shares collectively. We are imprinted (as we are transformed into selves) with the distinctive, publicly accessible aptitudes of our society, which we internalize and manifest as our own talents (in speaking, making love and war, transacting business). What I offer here, then, is not yet an argument, though it is the clue to an argument Searle’s way of proceeding cannot possibly match without producing instant paradox. I have supporting arguments to propose and will turn to them. But recall, please, that I’m primarily concerned to make an initial guess at pragmatism’s best future. I could not proceed without sketching some of the grand puzzles of the new inquiry that catches up pragmatism’s own interests and a sense of the way in which Hegelian and Darwinian themes may be joined. We must probe a little further into the most important of Searle’s distinctions. Begin then with these: “An institution is a system of institutional facts”; and (as we’ve seen) an institutional fact is “created by speech acts” of the kind Searle calls Declarations. Searle adds the following extraordinary claim: “there are five, and only five, possible types of speech acts, five types of illocutionary acts.” He names them straight out: Assertives, Directives, Commissives, Expressives, and Declarations. About the last of these, he says: “In a Declaration we make something the case by declaring it to be the case”; that is, we “make” institutional facts by Declaration.30 But as far as I can see, Searle never actually affords a clear statement of the sufficient conditions on which a Declaration is an effective Declaration. Now, I take Searle’s claims to be benign enough when rightly embedded in an adequate theory of the enabling powers they require, to be effective – which, in Searle’s hands, seems to begin and end with speech acts and intentionality. I’m convinced that that can’t possibly be enough. We need not take very seriously Searle’s claims that there are only five distinct kinds of speech acts. I see no reason why we cannot admit Avowals, for instance, as a sixth kind of speech act: first-person avowals have distinctive features that bear directly on the acknowledged emergence of selves. Prelinguistic hominids cannot have any Searlean-like “intentional states” akin to avowals. Avowals already entail reflexive powers that presuppose linguistic mastery. Of course, the very idea of speech acts (which play a pivotal role in Searle’s theory) implicates the presence of agents capable of certain reflexive roles. Hence, there must be an insuperable difference between the “thoughts” of selves and the “thoughts” of prelinguistic hominids. But if that is so, then it

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becomes suddenly unclear just what Searle could possibly have meant in urging (as reported) that “the formal structures of intentional states and speech acts are surprisingly similar.” They can’t be similar enough to account for the transition from prelinguistic communication to the mastery of language: the putative similarity cannot possibly advance Searle’s argument. Here, though I’m happy to acknowledge the force of George Mead’s account of the dialectic of the “I” and the “me” and his analysis of the role of the “generalized other,” I confess I don’t find Mead entirely clear about the relationship between the original ability to assume the role and the acquisition of language itself. On my view, the acquisition of a so-called natural language is the process by which the self is first formed and emerges: there is no prior play between the roles of the “I” and the “me”; that would be a step in Searle’s direction. The roles themselves are artifacts of the self’s formation. It becomes clear, then, that Searle’s final sort of speech act, Declarations, cannot quite belong to the same run of acts that the first four sorts of speech act do, because if we acknowledge the function of Declarations, we see that the other four kinds of speech act must, in a certain sense, already coopt the function of Declarations – though, normally, without requiring any explicit (Declarative) speech act: thus, Assertives must (on Searle’s view) “create [such] social and institutional [realities]” as “statements, descriptions, assertions”; Directives must create “orders, commands, requests”; and so on.31 There’s a reductio there. Can we, or must we, be able to make Declarations effective reflexively? Can a would-be Declaration make itself a Declaration? Can it make itself a linguistic utterance? Must it be able to do that? If yes, then Searle’s system becomes hopelessly defective, a victim of Rousseau’s joke; and if no, then the functional status of language itself (what Searle calls the conferred “status function” that “Status Function Declarations” confer, as “in creating and maintaining institutional facts”: money, for instance) becomes a complete mystery.32 There must be a further, as yet unmentioned, enabling condition that governs the very possibility of language – hence, governs speech acts and social institutions – that Searle has simply failed to supply. It can’t itself be captured by a speech act, because that would generate the regress noted. Furthermore, if we admit Declarations as speech acts, we can admit them only if they are coordinately denied the right to apply to originating language itself, or to creating the institution of creating institutions (or speech acts). Hence, then, speech act theory can’t be adequate to explaining the construction of Searle’s “social world” (or my “enlanguaged world”); and, as a consequence, it’s no longer clear how many kinds of speech acts there may be: after all, there will be an instant need for second-order speech acts at least (call them Explicatives) that specify the conditions under which alone these or these first-order institutions and speech acts effectively obtain! We are back to the dialectic of internal and external Bildung. Searle is careful enough to acknowledge that “prelinguistic thoughts lack representations” (that is, the representational function of language or speech

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acts, by which, for instance, Declarations “enable us to create a reality by representing that reality as existing”).33 Fine. But then, Searle also says: All human social institutions are brought into existence and continue in their existence by a single logico-linguistic operation that can be applied over and over again. [He means Declarations or what in the mere exercise of language preempts the need for explicit speech acts.] [L]anguage [he says] is constitutive of institutional reality, and consequently ... all human institutions are essentially linguistic.34 Here, Searle says something stronger and weaker than his claims about Declarations. I agree with at least part of what he says, but I don’t believe he’s earned the right to claim that part of the argument: as we have just seen, language cannot be created by Declarations, since that would generate Rousseau’s joke; that’s precisely what, on my view, the empirical facts regarding external Bildung and the transcendental function of those same facts supply – the missing assumption: what I take Hegel to have glimpsed but not to have analyzed in a way perspicuously suited to our own idiom – hence, to what a recuperated pragmatism might supply. 4. Let me bring the argument to a close with a final objection to Searle’s general strategy. I’ve been suggesting that a sufficient theory of the human world must admit what I’ve called the “fabric” of the human world itself, some actual public world populated with culturally artifactual things – selves and their minds, artworks, actions, technologies, machines, sentences, histories, traditions, institutions and the like, all hybrid transforms of whatever populates the physical and biological world, indissolubly emergent within the space of the latter but marked in innumerable ways by features that depend on the transformative power of language and the language-dependent non-linguistic cultural powers that language makes possible – “lingual” powers, as I name them (those, for instance, of the ballet, haute cuisine, and skiing, which, doubtless, have their prelinguistic counterparts as well). Searle believes he can, in principle, generate the entire human world from the resources of what he calls “intentionality,” which he ascribes to both his prelinguistic hominids (ourselves, deprived of language) and selves (ourselves, possessing language) – the latter (ourselves) being (on my view) radical transforms of the former. But what is intentionality in Searle’s sense? I’ve signaled its importance for Searle without explanation and I’ve delayed mentioning Searle’s actual characterization. But Searle’s entire argument depends on it: “Intentionality” [Searle says] is a fancy philosopher’s term for that capacity of the mind by which it is directed at, or about, objects and states of affairs in the world, typically independent of itself.

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Searle’s notion is loosely associated with Franz Brentano’s recovery of its medieval usage; adjusted by Searle, however, it appears to have abandoned part of its original scope, since it no longer features the interesting possibility that “intentional” objects (as of fear and belief) may include things that literally don’t exist (ghosts, for instance, which, of course, require linguistic resources). Apart from that, Searle is quite emphatic in insisting that “all human intentionality exists only in individual human brains” – “There isn’t any other place [he says] for intentionality to be except human brains” – a claim that raises an obvious puzzle about so-called “We-intentionality” (also called “collective intentionality”), which Searle reconciles with the constraint just mentioned. The matter is decisive, because Searle believes that “The capacity for collective intentionality” is indeed “the fundamental building block of all human social ontology and human society in general.”35 I find two important mistakes here: one, the notion that animal or prelinguistic hominid intentionality could account for the institution of language; the second, that intentionality in the enlanguaged sense “exists only in individual human brains.” Surely, Searle is mistaken about intentionality. Consider only that Michelangelo’s Pietà is, in a thoroughly familiar sense, intentionally “about” the Pietà involving Mary and her expired Son; yet the sculpture has no mind or mental states. Intentionality (in an enlanguaged world) ranges over a great deal more than mental states: it ranges over everything that is a cultural artifact to which we rightly attribute meaning or significance or signification (as expressive or representational or symbolic or geistlich: language, traditions, institutions, practices, products, and actions most particularly, all of which are actual and objective – not at all confined to the human mind or brain). I name this sort of intentionality, “Intentionality” (written with a capital “I”), according to which whatever is culturally significant or significative is Intentional.36 It’s part of my counterclaim to Searle’s account – congenial to my guess at pragmatism’s future – that every viable theory of the cultural world must admit its Intentional presence: otherwise, it will appear as a fiction or as an artifact confined within the human mind, which would surely generate an intolerable paradox. I take Searle’s notion of collective intentionality to be the linchpin of his entire theory. He says explicitly that “human beings, along with a lot of other social animals, have the capacity for collective intentionality.” Searle’s opposed to reducing “‘We intend’statements ... to ‘I intend’statements”: the reduction, he says, is not required by his theory and “the proposed reductions fail.”37 Fine. Nevertheless, his theory requires that his hominid primates be capable of sharing beliefs and purposes in common, capable of becoming aware that they do, and, as a consequence of that, capable of cooperating and agreeing to cooperate in various shared undertakings. In short, his primates possess the capacity for “collective intentionality” despite their lacking language – and in a way that permits them to create and master language itself. The latter capacity, Searle claims, makes it possible for them to acquire the capacity to make promises and

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pacts and to enter into conversation. So the problem is solved. Well, yes and no. Certainly, no one wishes to deny that prelinguistic Homo sapiens sapiens did indeed create and master natural language. That’s not the issue. The trouble is, Searle’s solution merely iterates the known fact that prelinguistic man somehow succeeded in creating language; or else it fails because it falls victim to Rousseau’s joke. The best that I can make of Searle’s argument, as an explanation of the “possibility” of language, is that it ignores the equivocation between the prelinguistic and the enlanguaged forms of “thought,” “belief,” “agreement,” “cooperation” and the like. Once it admits the stillproblematic nature of the claim that there must be a prelinguistic form of mental states that can stand as effective (intentional) equivalents of this or that pertinently enlanguaged variant, Searle’s solution will appear to generate a petitio. Here is the knockdown evidence: There is a ground-floor form of collective intentionality, [Searle claims,] one that exists prior to the exercise of language and which makes the use of language possible at all. (Think of engaging in a conversation or making a promise in a conversation.) Searle continues, You do not need a promise in order to have collective intentionality: indeed, the very conversation in which the promise is made, and is accepted or rejected, is already a form of collective intentionality. The conversation presupposes a Background capacity to engage in conversation, and the Background capacity depends on having a more fundamental prelinguistic form of collective intentionality.... You have to have a prelinguistic form of collective intentionality on which the linguistic forms are built, and you have to have the collective intentionality of the conversation in order to make the commitment [to a promise or a conversation].38 In a way, what Searle says may be read, equivocally, as reasonably correct: all the ingredients noted must indeed be present, somehow, in the process of what I’ve called external Bildung. Nevertheless, there remain insuperable defects in Searle’s solution – obscured by his wording. I shall mention only two essential weaknesses. First, as far as I can make out, Searle means to restrict what he calls “Background” (as opposed to what he calls “Network”) as entirely non-intentional. (“Network,” I should add, is thoroughly intentional.) Thus, Searle says: “Consciousness and intentionality are caused by and realized in neurobiology”; again, speaking of his intending to drive to his office, Searle says: “I take that ability for granted, and the ability does not consist in a set of intentional states”; and, again, he says: “We need [in our theory] a set of abilities, capacities, and so on for applying [our] intentional

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states. This set of abilities and capacities I will call the Background. The Background consists of all of those abilities, capacities, dispositions, ways of doing things, and general know-how that enable us to carry out our intentions and apply our intentional states generally.”39 But then, the transition from the prelinguistic to the linguistic fails to meet the threat of Rousseau’s joke, because the explanation finally depends on non-intentional factors. There must be a bridging condition, and the condition must be intentional in some as yet unexplained (non-questionbegging) way. (That is, it must be Intentional-with-acapital-“I.”) The second failing rests with Searle’s claim that “Collective mental phenomena of the sort we get in organized societies are themselves dependent on and derived from the mental phenomena of individuals.”40 We’ve already heard that all forms of intentionality are confined in the brain (are, or implicate, mental states). But that generates the puzzle (which Searle regards as benign) that collective intentionality (though not reducible to individual intentionality) is indeed confined to some form of aggregated individual instances of intentionality (with suitably added beliefs); and that, as far as I can see, does produce a version of Rousseau’s paradox. There must be a version of intentionality that is not confined to the mental; that takes a discernibly public form even in prelinguistic communication; that emerges with the proto-cultural (prelinguistic) forms of learning to improve our biological gifts for at least prelinguistic communication; and that contributes to the stable and reliable transmission of learned communicative skills (by culturally shared means) that, over time, could actually evolve, incipiently, along proto-linguistic lines (for instance, in the gradual improvement of prelinguistic referential and predicative functions without yet producing any actual grammar – which may conceivably begin to take form even among the monkeys). The sequence is perfectly straightforward, but you cannot get to it by way of the assumption that the intentionality of prelinguistic and linguistic communication is entirely derived from some merely aggregated forms of the intentionality of psychological states. Think, rather, of language or tradition as the abstracted, highly structured, public space we share (and produce) by acquiring an agentive mastery of our language and cultural practices that becomes objectively accessible to newborn members of our society who have had of course no part in its original formation or transformation but who may, in acquiring their own fluency, thereupon affect its evolving structure and causal processes in such a way, in turn, as to alter the way the offspring of later generations will have to achieve their mastery of the “same” language and culture. If you admit this much, you may as well make a similar proposal regarding prelinguistic communication. I think this actually begins to explicate the line of speculation that is so severely compressed in Dewey’s notion of the transformation of an “indeterminate situation” into a “problematic situation” and in Peirce’s extravagantly spare remarks about “protoplasmic” intelligence.41

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Peirce and Dewey offer very little here, but they are more responsive than Searle. I must add, however, that although Peirce, James, and Dewey are in a general way hospitable to the picture I’m presenting, it’s very difficult to draw a robust confirmation from any of them. The best I’m prepared to venture is that George Mead comes closest to providing a plausibly companionable statement of any sort and that, with Mead’s account of the conditions for the emergence of the self and the primacy of the social world in hand, it becomes not unreasonable to construe the views of the others congenially and with some supporting evidence. Because Mead’s paper, “Concerning Animal Perception” – among others of his papers – published as early as 1907, explicitly depends on Dewey’s extremely important piece, “The Reflex Arc Concept” (itself published in 1896) and helps us to read Dewey’s piece in the most perspicuous and pertinent way. The paper explains the complexity of the pragmatist account of perception and thought (chiefly Dewey’s version, it’s true) in such a way that we see at once how much is missing in Searle’s explanation – how improbable it would be to rely on Searle’s sketch of just how the resemblance between animal (and prelinguistic hominid) perception and thought and enlanguaged perception and thought might validate his picture of the invention of language (and its attendent culture) on the strength of the bridging power of (prelinguistic) collective intentionality. It’s simply not enough. Mead says in this regard, clearly reflecting Dewey’s ramified account of the interactive influence of eye and hand in perception and behavior – which greatly complicates the supposed transition: it is hard to believe that a consciousness of a “thing” can be segregated from [an animal’s] instinctive activities.... [W]e need only to recall what has been brought out by Dewey and [G. F.] Stout that perception involves a continued control of such an organ as that of vision by such an organ as that of the hand, and vice versa. We look because we handle, and we are able to handle because we look.42 Mead and Dewey anticipate Uexküll’s warning in a deep way. Given his trim remark, we are able to seize the sense in which Dewey would make much the same point Mead makes – and through Dewey, the sense in which James and Peirce could not be far from the same instruction. Nevertheless, James and Peirce emphasize distinctly opposed, though not entirely irreconcilable, views about the self, that move in very different directions. Both have interesting things to say: Peirce, surprisingly, even more that is relevant to the social construction of the self than James, despite the greater detail of James’s account of the self and the self’s mode of thought – in Principles of Psychology. James famously declares that “Every thought tends to be part of a personal consciousness.... The only states of consciousness that we naturally deal with are found in personal consciousness, minds, selves, concrete particular I’s and you’s. Each of these minds keeps its own thought to itself....

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Absolute insulation, irreducible pluralism, is the law.”43 Peirce takes an opposed view – in fact, he actually opposed James’s account in Principles: The recognition by one person of another’s personality [in effect, the content of the second’s mind] takes place [Peirce says] by means to some extent identical with the means by which he is conscious of his own personality.... At the same time, the opposition between the two persons is perceived, so that the externality of the second is recognized.44 Peirce is quite daring here, in a way that is particularly encouraging for a theory of the self’s artifactuality. The linkage is strengthened by Peirce’s view that the self is itself a sign (5.313). Peirce also holds that selves are “mere cells in a social organism” (1.647), which clearly anticipated Mead (and may indeed have influenced him) and, in any case, confirms a surprisingly apt convergence between Peirce and Dewey. (I take all this to catch up the most promising themes in Hegel and the post-Darwinian inquiries.) Even so, the larger record confirms the judgment that, on the whole, the classic pragmatists (even Mead, who is the most adventurous in the relevant regard) were quite slack in pursuing the analysis of the human world in terms of the self’s artifactuality – that is, in terms of Darwinizing Hegel and Hegelianizing Darwin. You see this very clearly in Mead’s very promising forays (not always easy to fathom), as in “The Social Self” (1913) and other papers collected in Mind, Self and Society and The Philosophy of the Act.45 The fact is, the pragmatists tended to explore these matters in a phenomenological spirit, which may have dampened the speculative work that needed to be pursued. (Up to a hundred years have slipped by.) Perhaps the prophecy is no more than a reminder of an unfinished venture. The point is that it’s still there for the taking. That is, if you admit a phenomenology of the prelinguistic hominid (the human infant, say) and of the sublinguistic animal world (whether among dogs or chimpanzees) – which is at least heuristically conceivable – then Mead may be questioned fairly closely on whether taking the role of the “generalized other” could actually obtain prelinguistically (so that the acquisition of language may perfect, but need not be held responsible for actually generating, the self). I find that more than improbable. Furthermore, to admit the verdict is to insist on the radical difference between, but inseparability of, biology and culture. There’s the clue to pragmatism’s future. NOTES 1. For an appraisal of samples of analytic philosophy in its “Quinean” phase, see my Unraveling of Scientism: American Philosophy at the End of the Twentieth Century (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003). 2. For a summary of the fortunes of the St. Louis Hegelians, see Elizabeth Flower

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and Murray G. Murphey, A History of Philosophy in America, vol. 2 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1977), chap. 8. After completing this essay, I received a copy of an important addition to the literature confirming the Hegelian sources of Dewey’s philosophy. I’d been anticipating its appearance, ever since James Good, one of its authors, was kind enough to provide me with a copy of the typescript of Dewey’s 1897 lecture on Hegel, on the occasion of a chance encounter at one of the American Philosophical Association’s Pacific Division meetings, in San Francisco. There’s been a great deal of resistance in the American academy to admitting the scope of the Hegelian influence, with respect to both Dewey and Peirce. The full import of the linkage has yet to be worked out. It was never worked out by the classic pragmatists themselves – and now cannot be ignored. The book in question, recently authored by John R. Shook and James A. Good, is titled John Dewey’s Philosophy of Spirit, with the 1897 Lecture on Hegel (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010). 3. C. I. Lewis, “A Pragmatic Conception of the A Priori,” Journal of Philosophy 20 (1923): 169–177; and George H. Mead, Mind, Self, and Society, ed. Charles W. Morris (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934). 4. See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), §§16–17. 5. See John McDowell, Mind and World, 2nd edn. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996); and Robert Brandom, Tales of the Mighty Dead: Historical Essays in the Metaphysics of Intensionality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). 6. See John Dewey, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (New York: Henry Holt, 1938). 7. Dewey, Logic, chap. 1. 8. See Hilary Putnam, The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), pp. 123–124. 9. Peirce, “How to Make our Ideas Clear” (1878), in The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, vol. 1, ed. Nathan Houser and Christian Kloesel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), p. 132. 10. Charles Sanders Peirce, “The Fixation of Belief” (1877), in The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, vol. 1, ed. Nathan Houser and Christian Kloesel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), pp. 111, 114 (I have rearranged the order of the passages cited.) 11. See Charles Sanders Peirce, “A Guess at the Riddle,” (1887–88), in The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, vol. 1, ed. Nathan Houser and Christian Kloesel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), pp. 245–279. 12. Richard Feynman, The Character of Physical Law (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1967), pp. 47–49. See also Otto Neurath, “The Unity of Science as Task,” in Philosophical Papers 1913–1946, ed. and trans. R. S. Cohen and M. Neurath (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1983); and Nancy Cartwright, The Dappled World: A Study of the Boundaries of Science (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 13. For a brief overview of this aspect of Rorty’s career, see my Reinventing Pragmatism: American Philosophy at the end of the Twentieth Century (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2002). 14. See Philip Kitcher, Vaulting Ambition (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985); and the candid concessions of a committed Darwinian, Richard Dawkins, in The Selfish Gene, rev. edn. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). I’ve sketched a preliminary account in support of the present thesis, in “Constructing a Person: A Clue to the New Unity of the Arts and Sciences,” European Journal of Pragmatism and American

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Philosophy 1 (2009): 70–91. 15. For a well-informed speculation along related lines, see Steven Mithen, The Prehistory of the Mind: A Search for the Origins of Art, Religion, and Science (London: Phoenix, 1996); and The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind, and Body (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). I find that those who speak chiefly of the prehistory of the mind tend (quite understandably) to enrich the concept of the biological (as Aristotle does), whereas those who speak of the origins of the self see very quickly the need for a firm distinction between the biological and the cultural. The decisive consideration seems to be the datable appearance of true language. 16. I borrow the phrase “natural artifact” from Marjorie Grene, “People and Other Animals,” in The Understanding of Nature: Essays in the Philosophy of Biology (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1974), but I use it with a distinctly different emphasis. Grene shares the expression with Helmuth Plessner, which captures as well Adolf Portmann’s helpful conjecture about the unique (and uniquely necessary) “social [that is, enculturing] gestation” of the human infant. Grene construes the artifactuality of persons chiefly in terms of the “naturalized” acquisition and extended use of cultural artifacts (including language); whereas I construe the original “emergence” of persons as itself an artifactual precipitate of the cultural evolution of language from prelinguistic sources. In this sense, both of us think of the self or person as hybrid and artifactual – but in distinctly different ways. 17. A good friend and a good philosopher, W. W., recently called my attention to the seemingly plain fact that constructivism is a form of subjectivism (or subjective idealism, as it is in Kant). But I’m persuaded that both Hegel and Peirce successfully support a version of objective constructivism that (a) confirms the indissoluble union of realism and Idealism; (b) eschews representationalism (in the sense Kant acknowledges in his famous letter to Marcus Herz); and (c) still allows for representations or transcendental pictures, without entailing representationalism or the subjectivist construction of the actual world. 18. See Lewis, “The Pragmatic A Priori” and his Mind and the World Order (New York: Scribners, 1929). 19. I have constructed a specimen morality of this second-best kind (constrained by prudential interests), in my Moral Philosophy after 9/11 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004). The parallel effort is more usual in contemporary philosophies of science. I take it, for instance, to be central to the account favored by Nancy Cartwright, in The Dappled World and, more allusively, in Richard Feynman’s account of the “Babylonian” model of science. 20. See Eric R. Scerri, The Periodic Table: Its Story and Its Significance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 21. See Charles Sanders Peirce, “Some Consequences of Four Incapacities” (1868), in The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, vol. 1., ed. Nathan Houser and Christian Kloesel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), pp. 28–55. 22. See, for instance, the interesting argument offered by William C. Wimsatt, ReEngineering Philosophy for Limited Beings: Piecewise Approximations to Reality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), pp. 46–52; also, Clark Glymour on “bootstrapping,” in Theory and Evidence (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980), cited by Wimsatt. 23. John R. Searle, Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 61. For a very spare sense of the remarkably widespread interest in models of the human world akin to (but not necessarily compatible

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with) Searle’s own theory, see Social Facts & Collective Intentionality, ed. Georg Meggle (Frankfurt am Main, Germany: Dr. Hänsel-Hohenhausen AG, 2002). For all the variety of approaches that center on what is now called “collective intentionality” – which is really a form of aggregated individual intentional states – I find it very improbable that any of these alternatives can escape what I identify, below, as Rousseau’s “joke.” Perhaps the most prominent theorists of this entire company, apart from Searle himself, include Margaret Gilbert and Raimo Tuomela. 24. See Sue Savage-Rumbaugh et al., Language Comprehension in Ape and Child (Monographs of the Society of Research in Child Development), Serial No. 233, vol. 58, Nos. 3–4 (1993), C. 7 and Appendix. On the emergence of the animate world, see the remarkable speculation offered by A. G. Cairns-Smith, Genetic Takeover and the Mineral Origins of Life (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1982). 25. Searle, Making the Social World, p. 65. 26. Searle, Making the Social World, p. 67. 27. See Jakob von Uexküll. Theoretical Biology, trans. D. L. MacKinnon (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1926). 28. Searle, Making the Social World, p. 70. 29. Searle, Making the Social World, pp. 10–11. On “status functions,” see p. 7. 30. Searle, Making the Social World, pp. 10–11, 69. 31. Searle, Making the Social World, p. 69. 32. Searle, Making the Social World, p. 19. 33. Searle, Making the Social World, p. 68. 34. Searle, Making the Social World, pp. 62–63. 35. Searle, Making the Social World, pp. 25, 43–44. See, also, on “collective intentionality,” p. 58, in the light of what Searle says about “prelinguistic intentionality” (cited below). 36. See my Cultural Space of the Arts and the Infelicities of Reductionism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), for a sustained account of Intentionality applied to the arts. 37. Searle, Making the Social World, pp. 43, 46. It’s quite extraordinary how tentative our best interpretations of nonhuman primate cognition are, particularly with regard to the recognition and use of “categories” and an understanding of causality and intentionality. See, for instance, the summary in Michael Tomasello and Josep Call, Primate Cognition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), Part 3. In a detailed text of more than 400 pages, Tomasello and Call finally arrive at the following extremely cautious conclusion: Although all primates understand the behavior of conspecifics as “animate” and “directed” and the behavior of physical objects as contingent on antecedent events, no nonhuman primate understands the behavior of conspecifics intentionally or the behavior of objects causally in humanlike ways. This is because the understanding of intentionality and causality requires an understanding of the dynamic relationships among two or more entities by means of an intermediary (intention or cause) that organizes a web of possible antecedent-consequent sequences into a meaningful set. Nonhuman primates only understand one-to-one antecedent-consequent sequences, although because of the complex spatial and social fields in which they operate, predictions of the behavior of animate beings and objects based on these understandings may be quite complex (p. 400).

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JOSEPH MARGOLIS About the capacities of human primates, they add: The evolution of human [primate] cognition is a complex story, and there is currently too little evidence for theories to be put forth with much conviction. Nevertheless, we believe that current evidence is most consistent with the view that the uniquely human adaptation for social cognition and culture was a relatively recent one.... It is likely that the initial social-cognitive adaptation for culture, for identifying with other persons and thus sharing intentional relations to the world with them, was a late-occurring one in human evolution, perhaps not constituting the unique cognitive skills of Homo sapiens sapiens (pp. 427–429).

I note the questionable intrusion of the term “person.” There is no account of the term’s extension in Primate Cognition. These findings apply to primates in the wild; primates raised in a human setting often show further cognitive development. Searle is familiar with Tomasello’s work but seems to be a good deal more sanguine than Tomasello is. I’m not convinced by either Searle or Tomasello, I should say. 38. Searle, Making the Social World, p. 50. 39. Searle, Making the Social World, pp. 25, 31; compare pp. 3–4. 40. Searle, Making the Social World, p. 4. 41. See Dewey, Logic, p. 104; and Peirce, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, 8 vols., ed. Charles Hartshorne, Paul Weiss, and Arthur C. Burks (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931–58), vol. 5, paragraphs 563, 583. 42. George Herbert Mead, “Concerning Animal Perception,” in Selected Writings, ed. Andrew J. Reck (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1964), p. 79. 43. William James, The Principles of Psychology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), pp. 220–221. 44. Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, vol. 6, paragraph 160. I’ve benefited here and in the rest of my remarks about Peirce’s theory from a reading of Vincent Colopietro, “Peirce’s Account of the Self: A Developmental Perspective,” in Peirce’s Approach to the Self: A Semiotic Perspective on Human Subjectivity (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989). 45. George Herbert Mead, Mind, Self and Society; and The Philosophy of the Act, ed. Charles W. Morris et al. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1938).

Joseph Margolis Laura H. Carnell Professor of Philosophy Department of Philosophy 724 Anderson Hall Temple University 1114 W. Berks Street Philadelphia PA 19122 United States

Contemporary Pragmatism Vol. 7, No. 2 (December 2010), 219–229

Editions Rodopi © 2010

Sen’s The Idea of Justice: Back to the (Pragmatic) Future Brian E. Butler

Sen argues that Rawls’ political theory suffers from the flaw of “institutional fundamentalism.” In response, he develops an alternate theory of justice that does not rely upon contractarian premises. I argue that Sen’s theory largely maps on to the insights of classic pragmatist thought. Further, the pragmatic tradition can help critique and supplement Sen’s project.

1. Sen’s Critique of Rawls’ Theory of Justice Amartya Sen’s The Idea of Justice constructs an extended critique of Rawls’ philosophy of justice. Sen acknowledges many aspects of Rawls’ theory as important, indeed essential, to a proper conception of justice. Sen describes himself as been privileged to have personally watched Rawls “transform contemporary political philosophy in a truly radical way” where “political philosophy took huge steps.”1 Further, Sen takes pains to “acknowledge the firm footing on which Rawls placed the whole subject of the theory of justice.”2 These statements, though, contrast sharply with his ultimate conclusion that Rawls’ approach involves “a formulaic and drastic simplification of a huge and multi-faceted task” which is “unfortunate” because “the relationship between social institutions and actual – as opposed to ideal – individual behavior cannot but be critically important for any theory of justice that is aimed at guiding social choice towards social justice.3 Sen places Rawls in a tradition described as “transcendental institutionalism” or “institutional fundamentalism.” This tradition is characterized as having two main features. First, “it concentrates its attention on what it identifies as perfect justice, rather than on relative comparisons of justice and injustice.” Second, it “concentrates primarily on getting the institutions right, and it is not directly focused on the actual societies that would ultimately emerge.”4 For Sen, transcendental institutionalism is the dominant tradition in contemporary theories of justice. Rawls, in turn, serves as the primary example of an institutional fundamentalist.

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The main idea in Rawls, of course is that justice is to be seen in terms of fairness. Fairness, in turn is, according to Sen, “a demand to avoid bias in our evaluations, taking note of the interests and concerns of others as well, and in particular the need to avoid being influenced by our respective vested interests, or by our personal priorities or eccentricities or prejudices.”5 More generally it is a simple demand for impartiality. To further specify the content of these ideas, Rawls constructs the now ubiquitous thought experiment of the “original position.” By imagining one as working out a theory of justice while being in the original position behind a veil of ignorance, Rawls believes that there will be identified two principles of justice and further claims them to be the “unanimous choice” that would be chosen by all. For Sen it is important to notice that this choice of principles is further thought to imply specific institutions and a decidedly political conception of justice. Sen finds much to agree with in the Rawlsian system even if it is formulaic. First, there is “the idea that fairness is central to justice.”6 Sen offers no critique of this in The Idea of Justice and at least implicitly accepts this as the proper starting point for a theory of justice. Even more important for Sen’s theory of justice is Rawls’ explanation of the concept of objectivity as public thought with judgment based upon reasons and evidence after discussion and due reflection. In fact, Sen’s theory of justice would not function without a broad acceptance of this concept of objectivity. In addition, as opposed to the tradition of rational choice theory, a theory seen as hopelessly attached to a ridiculously narrow picture of rationality (as means-end rationality attached to given preferences), Sen thinks that Rawls properly offers a broader picture of reasoning which includes both the capacity for a sense of justice and for a conception of the good. There is also a salutary focus upon procedural fairness, and an important attachment to the acknowledgment of equity and an informational attention upon the effects of principles and institutions upon the worst-off people. Finally, by focusing on what he labels ‘primary goods’, Rawls “gives indirect acknowledgement to the importance of human freedom in giving people real – as distinct from only formally recognized – opportunity.”7 But, just as importantly, Sen argues that there are multiple and serious problems with the Rawlsian approach. For instance, Sen sees Rawls as universally ignoring comparative questions. But ignoring comparative ideals of justice, it is argued, could blind a theorist to other possibilities, possibilities unknown to those constructing a theory of justice from within the original position. This opens up the Rawlsian system to Sen’s complaint that the conception of justice it can produce is too parochial. More concretely, “If behavior patterns vary between different societies ... how can Rawls use the same principles of justice ... to establish basic institutions in different societies?”8 This lack of concreteness and conceptual abstractness leads to Sen’s next claim, that by aiming for ‘just institutions’ and ignoring social realizations this inherent conceptual ascent renders actual and specific social injustice invisible. Indeed, instead of identifying “justice” in the abstract, and trying to imagine a

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priori just institutions, “we have to seek institutions that promote justice, rather than treating the institutions as themselves manifestations of justice, which would reflect a kind of institutionally fundamentalist view.”9 Rawls, according to this analysis, is an “institutional fundamentalist” too attached to institutional design, indeed to the design of a specific social institution, the political, to the detriment of all others. This fundamentalism, though, wrongly renders Rawl’s theory unable to account for or utilize the multiple resources available, and possibly necessary, for the alleviation of injustice. As an institutional fundamentalist, Rawls is one of many theorists that hope for one-dimensional “grand formula” solutions to social justice issues (such as those offered by advocates of socialism or the free-market). The big issue here is “the basic unreliability of not being constantly sensitive to what actually happens in the world, no matter how excellent the institutions are taken to be.”10 For one important example, Sen notes that Rawls’ system doesn’t notice the “conversion” problem for primary goods until after the major institutions are designed. In other words, Rawls creates a bundle of primary goods that are supposed to be guaranteed all citizens of his just constitutional regime, but relegates the urgent real-world problem that different goods are needed in different amounts by differently situated individuals to the position of a governmental policy afterthought. To help theorize the difference between the aim for just institutions and the aim for just social outcomes, Sen offers a distinction made in ancient Indian jurisprudence between niti and nyaya.11 Niti is best thought of as institutional propriety. Nyaya, to the contrary, is justice in a much more concrete and socially instantiated existence, on actual lives. Nyaya includes the issue, noted above, of whether actual behavior of people will match up to chosen “just” institutions. Rawls’ system, when mapped onto this distinction, is seen as improperly focusing upon niti. So, instead of focusing on “inanimate objects of convenience” (the primary goods offered by Rawls) Sen argues that we should use “direct indicators of the quality of life and of the well-being and freedoms.”12 For Sen this project will be best seen in terms of capabilities, a conception which he claims will not be as susceptible to allowing the confusion of means with ends. Combining the two above issues, Sen argues that the contractarian aspects of Rawls’ system entails that justice as fairness systematically ignores effects outside of borders and renders the theory unable to include the voices of those not directly privy to the original position. As Sen puts it, Rawls’ system not only does not create a barricade against local prejudice, but even more to the point, actually uses the veil of ignorance in a manner that shuts out “eyes of the rest of mankind.”13 A few problems seem particularly important in this respect. First, there is the matter of “imperfect obligations” – in particular, duties and identities not fully specifiable and, more specifically, not confined by the borders of a particular state. Second, there is the plain fact that actions of state often have significant influence out of state. Third, it may be better to develop a theory of justice that encourages a broader perspective than that offered from just those

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inside of and specific state. Finally, the contractarian tradition is “too confined to reasons of ‘extended prudence.’”14 If one thinks of a model contract as mutually beneficial arms-length consensual exploitation, then the big question might very well be why this narrow foundation, based as it is upon a slightly “extended prudence” or narrow self-interest, should be thought to suffice as a grounding for a properly nuanced conception of justice. Rawls seems to think that adopting this narrowly prudential perspective avoids more controversial stances towards reason and morality, but it is an open question as to whether or not this is correct. Further, Sen is skeptical about the Rawlsian claim of unique principles because “There are genuinely plural, and sometimes conflicting, general concerns that bear on our understanding of justice.”15 More directly, “At the heart of the particular problem of a unique impartial resolution of the perfectly just society is the possible sustainability of plural and competing reasons for justice, all of which have claims to impartiality and which nevertheless differ from – and rival – each other.”16 Finally, Sen offers a general critique against the whole project of developing a global answer to the question of justice. The claim is that developing such a theory is either redundant, because it would not help in identifying the specific injustices that need to be alleviated, or, even worse, useless, because the ideal would not help fill in the less than total ordering needed for real-world decision making. Sen’s ultimate verdict upon Rawls’ theory of justice, despite the acknowledgement of the “firm footing” it place the theory of justice on, amounts to the devastating conclusion that Rawls’ system distorts the project of the pursuit of justice more than it enhances it. Of course much of this conclusion is relevant as a critique of any theory that exemplifies institutional fundamentalism. 2. Sen’s Theory of Justice In The Idea of Justice Sen offers his own theory of justice as one that can retain the virtues and remedy the flaws of the Rawlsian system. According to Sen, the picture of objective reasoning relying upon public impartial and disinterested reason, the idea of justice as fairness, the priority of liberty and the recognition of procedural fairness are all virtues of Rawls’ theory. Some of these concepts will be slightly reconstructed (for example the ideas of objectivity and reason), some will be accepted without much comment and small qualifications (e.g., the priority of liberty and the characterization of justice as fairness) and others will be treated as out of bounds of Sen’s investigation (procedural fairness). The vices, though, are more numerous, and to solve them it often necessitates jettisoning Rawls’ thought as a whole. For instance, as opposed to the standard “transcendental institutionalism” framework that deflects attention from concrete injustice to ideal political institutions, Sen simply emphasizes the importance of noting and alleviating

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specific injustices. Indeed, Sen claims that what really motivates us is manifest injustice, not comparisons with the completely just, and further that justice is better thought of as relating to the way people’s lives are actually lived and not just the nature of institutions. Another salutary aspect of beginning with a theory of justice that first notices specific injustices, rather than aims directly at a universalized ideal of justice, is that it becomes possible and necessary to “investigate realization-based comparisons.”17 So, the theory becomes comparative rather than transcendental and therefore looks to actual realizations in specific societies rather than “universally” just institutions and rules. In addition, Sen’s theory of justice does not rely upon the contractarian tradition. The contractarian view does seem necessarily attached to an insider version of justice, in that the parties are conceived of as privy to a contract, and as such the social contract tradition has at least initial difficulty in being made effective at noticing effects and ideas outside of state borders. This type of exclusion, seemingly necessitated by the social contract tradition and exacerbated by the unique way Rawls utilizes the tradition, makes it more difficult to include third part effects, or third party ideas (the effects upon or ideas of those not included in the contracting parties). But, of course, group actions such as the choice of foundational political institutions, implicates more than just the contracting parties. In addition, outside perspectives could be helpful, and may even be necessary in order to counteract parochial beliefs of the contracting parties. Sen’s alternative construction of justice rests upon an adoption of Adam Smith’s broader “impartial spectator” stance. Smith argues that in order to construct the position of the impartial spectator we should look at our own “sentiments and motives” from a certain distance, “by endeavoring to view them with the eyes of other people, or as other people are likely to view them.” For Sen, Smith’s impartial spectator is comparative not “merely” transcendental, looks to “social realizations” and not just to institutions and rules, allows incompleteness in social assessment but can still provide guidance, and takes notice of voices beyond contracting parties.18 Importantly, because of its inclusion of “eyes of other people” the Smithian spectator can be much more cognizant of global issues and perspectives. This ability is described by Sen as “open impartiality” as opposed to the “closed impartiality” encouraged by the idea of contracting. As stated above, the picture of objectivity and impartiality that Sen attaches to Smith’s stance is largely imported from Rawls. In thinking about issues in justice one should be “as objective” as we reasonably can be. For instance from Rawls, Sen accepts the idea that objectivity needs a public framework of thought where conclusions are to be reached on the basis of reasons and evidence through a process of open discussion and due reflection. Sen states that given this conception of objectivity as public reason, “by and large, all of us are capable of being reasonable through being open-minded about welcoming information and through reflecting on arguments coming from different quarters, along with undertaking deliberations and debates on how the

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underlying issues should be seen.”19 But, once again, using Smith’s “impartial spectator model” as opposed to the Rawsian original position model allows a much broader inclusion of perspectives and reasons and therefore avoids the potential of “local parochialism.” Further, not only are the ideas of objectivity and impartiality liberated from the contract model, but so also is the idea of obligation, which Sen instead sees arising directly from capability. Sen references here the example of the Buddha, who found that human moral responsibilities in relationship to animals simply because of our greater power to help (or hurt) them, and not because of any type of reciprocity of interests. Simply put, obligation is based upon “the argument that if someone has the power to make a difference that he or she can see will reduce injustice in the world, then there is a strong and reasoned argument for doing just that.”20 So even more simply put: if there is capability then there are obligations. This is opposed to the perceived need to generate obligations from a hypothetical meta-contract. What really is argued here, it seems, is that by not accepting the implicit assumption that motivates the social contract tradition, which is that an obligation-free human existence is the default and obligations must be generated through some procedural or social device, then obligations can be thought of as inherent in relationships from the beginning. From this, Sen argues that this ability to infer obligations from ability shows the capabilities approach’s superiority to other proposed theories.21 Another important aspect of Sen’s theory is his explanation of democracy. Sen redefines democracy as “government by discussion” and “public reasoning” instead of as a set of specific institutions. That democracy is best seen as government by discussion not just public ballot is argued for the following manner. First, Sen claims that “the central issues in a broader understanding of democracy are political participation, dialogue and public interaction.”22 Once allowed their central place, these factors are seen to be essential in order to properly evaluate whether balloting, or any other formal or institutional arrangement, is really democratic as opposed to only formally so. This is an important and significant conclusion that accords well with the fact that formally democratic balloting procedures can result in plainly undemocratic results due to contextual conditions. Sen argues that if these claims are accepted, then democracy is not a peculiarly Western phenomenon, or for that matter is democracy such a rare form of government. Instead what is Western, and possibly quite parochial, is the assumption that a particular institutional structure of specifiable type is foundationally necessary in order for a government, or any other social process, to qualify as a democracy. Once again, the tradition of institutional fundamentalism is critiqued in favor of a more direct investigation into the substantive and constitutive factors that are to test how democratic any formal procedure actually is. This shift in the strategy of conceptualizing democracy brings with it a great extension of democratic possibilities. So, for example, Sen can claim that, “if democracy is seen in terms of public reasoning, then the practice of global

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democracy need not be put in indefinite cold storage. Voices that can make a difference come from several sources, including global institutions as well as less formal communications and exchanges.”23 The above claims both point toward how Sen will undercut the tendencies for theories of justice to look for one-dimensional grand formula solutions to the issue of justice. This is because much of the transcendental institutionalism framework as well as the contractarian qualities of Rawls’ system can be attributed to the generic aim for a one-dimensional grand formula solution to the issue of justice. But, according to Sen, such an aim cannot help but ignore the complex and plural issues involved. To support this conclusion, Sen looks to another influential and popular grand formula solution to justice and social organization. Sen’s other major example is welfare economics. Welfare economics, as Sen characterizes it, is the area in economics that specializes in appraising the “goodness” of policies and affairs. Further, welfare economics most often equates a thin conception of happiness with goodness as sole guide for normative choice. In addition, because of a disciplinary agreement that interpersonal comparisons of utility are impossible, market based solutions are preferred where choices are publicly “revealed” thereby avoiding this difficulty (in turn incurring many other theoretical difficulties that Sen has mercilessly exposed in other writings). In response, Sen argues that we should see “welfarism” in economics as a very narrow and “special approach to social ethics.”24 One attached, importantly, just as much as the Rawlsian system to the hope for a one-dimensional grand formula solution (as well as to the contractarian tradition). Seen in this light, the main question to be asked is not how to work with revealed preferences, but why everything but happiness is treated as insignificant. Happiness, as narrowly defined in welfare economics, seems much too restricted to fulfill the claim to be the only value worthy of note for a theory of justice. In place of welfare economics and philosophical analysis, Sen offers social choice theory and the capabilities approach. Social choice theory analyzes collective decision making. It attempts to derive or aggregate collective decisions from the articulated opinions or values of the individual members of a community. As an academic discipline it places heavy emphasis upon mathematical modeling and might even be seen as attempting to create a mathematics of choice procedure. This is certainly true of the works of the most famous of social choice theorists, Kenneth Arrow. It is also true of much of Sen’s writings in the field. Sen argues that though social choice theory is formalistic, it is still more of practical relevance for justice than “philosophical analysis” because it is concerned with comparative analysis and rankings from “a social point of view.”25 The social choice framework from “a social point of view” includes a focus on the comparative, recognition of the inescapable plurality of competing principles, the permissibility of partial resolutions, and a diversity of interpretations and inputs. Importantly, the impossibility results as offered by Arrow and Sen, thought to be one of the great achievements of public

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choice theory, “are partly designed to be contributions to a public discussion on how these problems can be addresses and which variations have to be contemplated and scrutinized.”26 As can be seen by this list, public choice theory is seen as a better alternative to “mainstream” philosophical analysis and/or welfare economics because of its capacity for encouraging and handling a broader perspective, more complexity, incompleteness and plural values. The capabilities approach is the other tool Sen advocates. The argument rests upon the plausible and important insight that “we have reason to be interested not only in the various things we succeed in doing, but also in the freedoms that we actually have to choose between different kinds of lives.”27 In other words, it is important for a theory of human life to include choices as well as accomplishments. This is true at the very least because a large part of the meaning of accomplishments comes from the other options available. If capabilities instead of just completed accomplishments are aimed at human lives are seen more inclusively. Further, the capabilities approach notices the importance of “person’s own judgments and priorities,” in that it aims at encouragement of agency.28 Further, instead of focusing on “inanimate objects of convenience” (Rawls’ primary goods) with the capabilities approach we use “direct indicators of the quality of life and of the well-being and freedoms” and therefore don’t confuse means with ends.29 Instead of a generic bundle of multipurpose goods, “individual advantage is judged in the capability approach by a person’s capability to do things he or she has reason to value.”30 A further critique offered aims at the conception of reason as “extended prudence.” Sen points out that because such a conception of human reason is thinner it therefore seems too narrow and exclusionary to serve as the proper foundation for a comprehensive theory of justice. Sen offers as a more desirable option a more pluralistic concept of reason founded first upon the idea of unreason; “Unreason is mostly not the practice of doing without reasoning altogether, but relying on very primitive and very defective reasoning.”31 This, as with many of his other strategic moves within The Idea of Justice, utilizes a deflationary and modest conception of reason, one based upon the limiting of conditions of unreason, to start with specifics instead of broad generalities about “Reason.” Simply put, it is rational to choose “what we have reason to choose.”32 Further, Sen allows for a space of reasons instead of “reason” - that is what is accepted is the possibility of plural grounding and a multiplicity of reasons. Not only this, but reason has dynamic qualities when used in the realm of value, such as when constructing a theory of justice. This is because, “the valuations and weights to be used may reasonably be influenced by our own continued scrutiny and by the reach of public discussion.”33 3. From Sen to a Pragmatic Theory of Justice Much of the above should sound quite familiar to anyone working within the pragmatic tradition. While the early pragmatists did not have the privilege of

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reading Rawls, they did have tools to critique such a system. Many of the tools and attitudes are quite similar to those Sen offers in The Idea of Justice. For example, there is the wariness towards formulaic solutions, especially those that are attached to a single value or strategy. Sen notes the general plurality of issues discussed under the umbrella of the concept of justice, and pragmatists, of course, have always noted plurality in the same realm. Further, Sen’s critique offers a nice conceptual analysis of the tendency for theorists like Rawls towards institutional fundamentalism, the assumption that the aim is to intellectually create an ideal one and for all institutional solution to the issue of justice. From this critique Sen constructs a more empirical and diverse conception of both the solutions and the problems of justice. Along these lines it is a traditional critique of the pragmatic tradition that its practitioners have been not been focused as much as they ought to institutional arrangements. Of course from within the tradition, and within Sen’s The Idea of Justice, the emphasis upon flexibility and context, and the de-emphasis upon ideal institutional solutions, becomes a virtue. Here Sen’s theory shows a clear affinity to pragmatism and its emphasis upon the centrality of results. Like pragmatism, Sen’s theory also highlights the importance of the experiential context and the need for broad comparative analysis. The contrast between bottom-up approaches and the top down approach of the transcendental institutionalist is made beautifully clear in Sen’s analysis. Further, just as Sen argues that the capabilities approach doesn’t need to turn to a social contract ideal in order to generate or ground social obligations, neither have many in the pragmatist tradition thought such constructions necessary. For instance, William James argues that the more plausible starting point is that initial obligation towards the fulfillment of the demands of all creatures is the default, with the only excuse for not fulfilling them fully being the fact that conflicting demands also bring obligations and harmonizing and constructive solutions are required.34 This shift of the source of original obligations eliminates the need for the social contract construct, and therefore with it all the inherited contractual problems of how to include third party effects, broader conceptions of reasons, imperfect obligations, etc. Of course, Sen’s critique of the social contract tradition’s fixation upon a narrow picture of reasoning combines nicely with the pragmatist’s emphasis of the broad variety of types of reasoning, logic and inquiry. For example, the concept offered in The Idea of Justice of “unreason” shows that Sen has much the same difficulty with the concept of “reason” as a univocal value as does Dewey. Sen is, admittedly, more comfortable with traditional ideas of reason and objectivity than Dewey. And here is were the pragmatic tradition can further the project of The Idea of Justice. By further escaping from the Rawls’ infused picture of objectivity to a Dewey-like picture of engaged and experimental social inquirers, Sen’s project could be more active, and less set in spectator models of rationality. As Dewey noted, it might be much better to see democratic government based upon a discourse model than that based upon that of a spectator. This would, of course,

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fit better with a model of democracy as based upon political participation, dialogue and public interaction. Of course, such a move might render questionable not just the reliance upon Smith’s impartial spectator model but also some of Sen’s and Arrow’s formalist assumptions used to construct the “impossibility theorems” of public choice theory. So, for instance, a more active picture of reason and democracy, and a more social picture of the individual might find that the aggregating of given individual preferences assumed within social choice theory is as much a type of institutional fundamentalism as the topdown methods utilized by Rawls. In any case, most of Sen’s critique argues for claims that pragmatists have been making for years. For example that there are plural and often conflicting values that the pursuit of justice must recognize. Or, further, that construction of a perfect version of justice, or of an image of a “well-ordered” society, doesn’t translate effectively into alleviating specific injustices in the world here and now. Or that democracy is less properly characterized as a set of specific institutions than as a government founded upon public reasoning. And, once again, observation of actual events in the world combined with substantive yet particularistic aims is substituted for institutional fundamentalism. Maybe most important in the case of The Idea of Justice, though, is Sen’s implicit critique of another example of institutional fundamentalism that might be thought of as impeding a broader and more constructive practice and theory of justice. Of course this is the continuing conflation of political philosophy with “Rawls Studies.” Maybe it takes a person with the academic prestige of Sen to bring about general notice of all the flaws and problematic assumptions that have dominated the discussion of justice in political philosophy since the first publication of A Theory of Justice in 1971. Maybe it takes a person from another academic discipline to ignore the philosophical party line drawn by the Rawlsian project. Sen’s critique shows how important a broader view of the domain of philosophy and philosophical reasoning is to an engaged philosophy of social justice. Sen’s book is a welcome critique of Rawls, and an important overview of the tools Sen has developed over a very fertile career. Further, it stands as an unintentional but very clear call back to the pragmatic future of social and political theory. As opposed to other philosophical traditions, pragmatic thought should and often welcome tools from other disciplines. The irony here is that part of the brilliance of Rawls’ A Theory of Justice was its wide-ranging appropriation of vocabulary from economics, game theory, etc. Perhaps returning to more pragmatic methods of inquiry via Sen’s critique of Rawls will open up the option to re-read Rawls in a more pragmatic, pluralistic and openended manner. Of course to do this entails avoiding the style of analysis exemplified by many of Rawls’ followers, as well as much of the later writings of Rawls.

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NOTES 1. Amartya Sen, The Idea of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), p. 52. Hereafter Sen’s book is cited as IOJ. 2. IOJ, p. 53. 3. IOJ, p. 69. 4. IOJ, pp. 5–6. 5. IOJ, p. 54. 6. IOJ, p. 62. 7. IOJ, p. 64. 8. IOJ, p. 78. 9. IOJ, pp. 82, 67. 10. IOJ, p. 85. 11. IOJ, p. 20. 12. IOJ, p. 225. 13. IOJ, p. 126. 14. IOJ, p. 138. 15. IOJ, p. 57. 16. IOJ, p. 12. 17. IOJ, p. 8. 18. IOJ, p. 70. 19. IOJ, p. 43. 20. IOJ, p. 271. 21. IOJ, p. 271. 22. IOJ, p. 326. 23. IOJ, p. 408. 24. IOJ, p. 281. 25. IOJ, p. 95. 26. IOJ, p. 110. 27. IOJ, p. 18. 28. IOJ, p. 288. 29. IOJ, p. 225. 30. IOJ, p. 231. 31. IOJ, p. xviii. 32. IOJ, p. 180. 33. IOJ, p. 242. 34. William James, The Will to Believe (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1899) p. 200–205.

Brian E. Butler Associate Professor of Philosophy Philosophy Department University of North Carolina at Asheville 215 New Hall, CPO #2830 One University Heights Asheville, NC 28804-8520 United States

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Editions Rodopi © 2010

Book Reviews Jay Schulkin. Cognitive Adaptation: A Pragmatist Perspective. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Pp. 198. Cloth ISBN: 0-521-51791-1.

Much of the recent interest in pragmatism has been focused on social, political, cultural, and moral issues. The insights that Peirce, James, Mead, and Dewey have for us today regarding such questions are of obvious value. However, there has not been a remotely parallel interest in the classical pragmatists when it comes to the impressive amount of new research in the mind and life sciences. Indeed within recent philosophical writings on cognitive neurobiology, one can count on one hand the number of pragmatist philosophers who are taking seriously and exploring what the classical pragmatists may have to contribute. Jay Schulkin is a welcome contributor to these discussions. He comes to them, however, as a neuroscientist, not a philosopher on the sidelines or in the armchair. In Cognitive Adaptation, Schulkin not only continues his career long interest in both philosophy and science but achieves something all too rare: a humanistic work that blends our best scientific knowledge about mind and life with a poetic sensibility not found among many of today’s philosophers or scientists for that matter. Schulkin’s central project is to show that science and the humanities – theire two cultures or their respective conceptual objects, nature and culture – are continuous with one another. Through his vast background in psychobiology, cognitive and behavioral neuroscience, and classical pragmatism, Schulkin moves with ease from scientist to philosopher to poet and back. The key distinction he makes for this project is that between agency and animacy. Agency speaks to Schulkin’s roots in the humanities. Culture, if it is concerned with anything, is concerned with the recognition that people have beliefs, desires, intentions – and above all a rich experiential life. Animacy speaks to Schulkin’s roots in the sciences. It serves to emphasize that we humans are not just personal agents but natural animals as well. This distinction does significant philosophical work for Schulkin, particularly as he ties it both to evolution and the major insights of the classical pragmatists. Throughout the book, Schulkin fluently draws on the resources of the classical pragmatists, especially their emphasis on the nature of inquiry as selfcorrective. The introduction of the book provides a nice survey to Schulkin’s position. He starts by noting that we humans are social creatures who seek to

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share as well as exploit one another’s experiences – often to create new, more meaningful ones. This social transaction is, for Schulkin, both a cognitive adaptation and an evolutionary achievement. In the terms of agency and animacy, Schulkin casts the achievement as one “of distinguishing animate from inanimate objects and then recognizing the beliefs and desires of others and their personal histories” (2). The transition from animacy to agency, Schulkin argues, occurs when nervous systems evolve not only to detect motion – an enabling condition for animacy – but to interpret that motion as well – the mark of agency. Schulkin then ties this evolutionary story to contemporary neuroscientific research on autism. The autistic person is one who does not share in the neural hardwiring necessary for looking for both animacy and agency. Schulkin concludes this introduction with a valuable discussion of the nature of inquiry in relation to doubt and the precariousness of the world. In light of his discussion of autism, Schulkin, whether he realizes it or not, presents an interesting project for further inquiry: the nature of inquiry in autistic persons. Chapter one, “Cognitive Adaptation, Objects, and Inquiry,” continues the undermining of Cartesianism by pragmatism introduced in the introduction. The animal nature of humans is employed in this endeavor by Schulkin to demonstrate the origins of categorical schemes in biology and not as something strictly impressed upon the developing child by the external culture. Rather the basic categories of mind – notably the distinctions between animate/inanimate and between agency/animacy – are understood as developing innately within a child yet nurtured by the cultural interactions a child has with other humans. Schulkin’s recognition of this continuity between nature and culture in the behavioral and cognitive development of children serves as a platform for his recognition of another cognitive adaptation and evolutionary achievement: language and the symbolic meaning it endows on the interactions of human organisms with each other and their environments. Schulkin notes, rightly, that “language changes everything in the diverse cognitive systems that are at work” (25). The linguistic empowerment of symbolic meaning and manipulation is an evolutionary game changer. Schulkin argues that “human understanding lies in the ability to secure stability and security in representing events” (33–34) – an ability that requires language not only as it improves upon the cognitive adaptation of distinguishing between animate and inanimate things but as it modifies the ability to take the intentional stance making possible the personal and cultural histories used to explain why some things move. In the second chapter, “The Human Situation: Uncertainty and Adaptation,” Schulkin explores the human context of inquiry. Beginning with the biological, Schulkin introduces recent neuroscientific findings that illustrate that the brain not only evolved to solve problems but has a direct correlation in size and structure to the level of sociability. The greater size of the neocortex goes hand-in-hand with richer and larger social interactions. This level of cognitive and social complexity underlies, in part, human inquiry as the subtleties of human social interaction provide both opportunities for greater

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precariousness – the more people one must account for, the greater the difficulty in understanding and predicting what people will do next – and for greater stability – social bonds enlarge the individual’s ability to accomplish practical tasks. Perhaps the most intriguing part of this chapter is Schulkin’s discussion of the neurobiological basis of inquiry. As pragmatists well know, inquiry begins with doubt, the breakdown of expectations based on one’s beliefs. Schulkin weaves into this cornerstone of pragmatism recent research on the neurochemistry of motivation, struggle, and uncertainty. The central – but not the only – neuromodulator for discussion is dopamine as it plays significant roles in numerous parts of the brain, all of which are involved in one way or another with cognitive and motor skills. In other words, Schulkin’s central distinction between agency and animacy reaches into the neurochemical depths of the cranium. For Schulkin, the liveliness of nature is never taken for granted. Unlike some scientists today whose materialism or mechanism leave nature inert and/or dead, Schulkin writes provocatively, if not convincingly, that “Nature is alive and booming with activity and expression” (59). This romantic spirit carries through his discussions of the intentional stance and teleology, where habits are cleverly depicted as “pressure valves” (62–63) and even echoes a famous remark of Thomas Jefferson in a brief but apt meditation on the relationship between fortune and labor (the more of the latter brings more of the former). Chapter three, “Time and Memory: Historical Sensibilities,” begins with Schulkin’s claim that “historical sensibility should be expressed in every discipline… [such that it] reflects the cultures in which we live… [in order] to provide a prophylactic against abuse towards others and an existential sense of how we got here and to be humbled by a sense of self-corrective inquiry” (69). Schulkin begins as he has in the previous chapters by looking at the relevant science before moving directly to humans and culture. He provides a thorough and captivating discussion of bodily clocks, from circadian rhythms to the roles of cortisol and the amygdala in memory. The cognitive adaptation and evolutionary achievement highlighted in this chapter is the uniquely human ability “to think about time, in terms of both personal and historical events” (82). With regard to human memory, a key feature is our modifying our environments in order to recall with greater efficiency and fidelity. This externalization of memory takes various forms, from making a mark on a piece of paper or an electronic device to the rich personal and cultural narratives we tell each other in order to cope with our environments, whether it is to aid in adjusting to a new environment or in instructing how best to behave within a familiar one. When these personal and cultural narratives advance beyond memory and into history, Schulkin sees this transition as the convergence of nature with culture. Historical narrative not only becomes a self-corrective inquiry itself but part of our larger efforts at inquiry in general. Amidst this discussion of memory turning to history, nature to culture, arises the weakest part of Schulkin’s book. To be clear, this weakness is relative

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only to the rest of his claims and should not be taken as anything fatal. Rather, my problem is that I wish he would have said more about how he sees evolution working culturally. In biological matters, Schulkin is very much a Darwinian (his pragmatic pluralism allows for a brief discussion but ultimately agnostic conclusion on the debate between gradualism and punctuated equilibrium, see pp. 41–42). However, when it comes to cultural evolution, Schulkin suggests Lamarckian evolution as an alternative to Darwinism (90, 92). He gives only a few examples of social learning and social striving for ideals but no substantial argument for why Lamarck is superior to Darwin. Given the earlier discussion on externalizing memory by modifying one’s environment, more could have been said on the role of ecological niche construction and the role of the Baldwin effect in cultural transmission and evolution – both of which are recognized as generally Darwinian. The disappointment lies in the fact that Schulkin has drawn on so many other resources on other issues in his argument that the relative lack of discussion on an issue as hotly debated as cultural evolution comes as a surprise. I hope Schulkin’s future work will explore this debate in further detail as he is sure to make a worthwhile contribution. Schulkin’s fourth chapter, “Educational Sensibilities,” is perhaps my favorite of the whole book. Unlike the previous chapters, Schulkin does not first prevent the science from which he draws out his humanist position. Instead he begins by advocating his experimentalist pedagogy which he then elaborates by weaving in recent research on mirror neurons, neurogenesis and neural plasticity. This chapter is both culmination and transition of the previous chapters to the final chapter and conclusion. The earlier discussions of selfcorrective inquiry, of memory and history, and the agency/animacy distinction are employed quite well in Schulkin’s pedagogy. The educational adventure he describes cultivates a historical sense of the chosen discipline, as well as tight social bonds, particularly through an apprenticeship with one’s mentor. The cultivation of both the historical and the personal sensibilities are endemic with empathy and an appreciation of inquiry as inescapably interdisciplinary. A central metaphor throughout this chapter is the link Schulkin sees between neurogenesis and lifelong learning. He writes that “Neurogenesis is a symbolic expression of the long-term regrowth and rejuvenation essential to our species, to our personal lives. Regrowth and regeneration is at the heart of long-term learning. A life like ours, tied to animacy, and agency and replete in selfexpression, requires this neuronal generation” (119). This expression ties itself to the cognitive adaptation and evolutionary achievement displayed by the experimentalist: wisdom, which Schulkin understands to be “tied to an appreciation and an understanding of experiences other than one’s own” (122). “An Instinct for Spiritual Quests: Quiet Religion” is the final chapter of the book. Having just painted a picture of what it is for a social-linguistic organism to inquire, communicate, empathize, and cultivate oneself and others, Schulkin is in a position to address the most difficult of questions for the naturalist: a sense of overall purpose to life from which one derives meaning in

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one’s everyday affairs. To do this, Schulkin introduces what he calls pious naturalism that serves as the basis for what he calls quiet religion. The religious sensibility that quiet religion cultivates is thoroughly naturalistic and humanistic. Schulkin argues that “We are deeply part of nature, and this experience involves a strong sense of human dignity” (134). The aim of quiet religion is similar to that found in both theistic and atheistic beliefs: “a sense of quiet, attentive peace as the desired end of a quest permeated by disciplined discovery” (131). Schulkin attributes three underlying traits to any spiritual quest: “(1) heightened vigilance and some discomfort or unrest about human existence, (2) a search to come to terms with this fact, and (3) the much-appreciated moments of peace and quietude needed for human well-being” (124). Given the recent and significant interest paid to religion by many scientists and philosophers, Schulkin’s willingness to recognize religious traditions as cultural artifacts that have developed out of human experience is valuable for he takes religious traditions as resources for – not necessary blights on – the progress of civilization. His quiet religion embraces the science behind religious experiences and techniques such as meditation while tying religious experiences to his pragmatic sense of inquiry as both appetitive and consummatory (141). Schulkin concludes his highly informative and enjoyable book with a return to where he began. Instead of seeing the two cultures of the sciences and the humanities as opposed to one another, he asserts their continuity and permeability as they both share in a quest for truth – but not an absolute, infallible truth attained by a mythological faculty of Reason divorced from the body and all experience. Rather it is a fragil truth in need of vigilant nurturing in light of the recognition of ourselves as natural and cultural creatures, as products of a living and dynamic nature, which has endowed us with unique abilities based on our symbolic capacities within and beyond our craniums and skins. This cultivation develops through a disciplined self-corrective and on-going inquiry into ourselves and our world. Such is the vision of classical pragmatism – a vision Schulkin as a scientist-poet not only embraces but employs with a grace rare among scientifically-inclined writers today. Tibor Solymosi Southern Illinois University, Carbondale

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Transactionss has been the premier peer-reviewed journal specializing in the history of American philosophy since its founding in 1965. Although it is named for the founder of American pragmatism, American philosophers of all schools and periods, from the colonial to the recent past, are extensively discussed. The journal regularly includes essays, and every significant book published in the field is discussed in a review essay. A subscription includes membership in the Charles S. Peirce Society. PUBLISHED SEMIANNUALLY eISSN 1558-9578 pISSN 0009-1774 Available in electronic, combined electronic & print, and print formats

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