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NEWS & LETTERS, JULY 2003
Philosophic Dialogue
Rorty, dialectics, pragmatism's limits
by Eric King Editor's note: This Philosophic Dialogue was delivered
as part of News and Letters Committees' recent series of classes on
"Negativity and Freedom: Philosophic Alternatives to Capitalism, War and
Terror." Today pragmatism arguably represents the greatest
challenge to Marxist-Humanist thought in the U. S. Fredric Jameson once pointed
out the Anglo-American tradition's profound hostility to dialectic. And what
falls under the term postmodernism owes more to James and Dewey than to
Heidegger's question of being. Richard Rorty is an important figure in this
respect, because he has done the most to refurbish the pragmatist tradition and
because he nevertheless shares a certain affinity to Marxist-Humanism. Rorty vigorously attacks the idea of an intellectual
vanguard. He writes that pragmatism is humanism applied to epistemology--truth
is not SUB SPECIE AETERNITATIS but is what is useful to human beings.
Furthermore, he comes from the same radical milieu as Raya Dunayevskaya, which
shows itself obliquely in statements such as "still, the image of Lenin,
that captured the hearts of our grandparents..." Like Lenin, Rorty insists
that theory subordinate itself to practice, that it concern itself first and
foremost with the concrete. And it is with his understanding of concreteness
that we can begin to flesh out the differences between his pragmatism and
dialectical thought. RORTY'S PSEUDO-CONCRETENESS For Rorty, concreteness is a matter of local issues as
opposed to abstract theory. "I hope that we have reached a time where we
can finally get rid of the conviction that...there just must be large
theoretical ways of finding out how to end injustice, as opposed to small,
experimental ways."(1) He thinks we should talk about greed rather than
bourgeois ideology; starvation wages and lay-offs rather than the
commodification of labor; per-pupil expenditures and differential access to
education rather than the division of labor into classes. But does it really make sense to talk about education disparities without also raising the issue of class? From a dialectical perspective, Rorty indulges in his own form of abstraction. The world is an interrelated whole, and the attempt to grasp particular issues outside of this context will only mystify their inter-relational character. Rorty's pragmatism would be seen as a philosophy of the pseudoconcrete by the Czech philosopher Karel Kosik. In his work DIALECTICS OF THE CONCRETE, Kosik describes the pseudoconcrete as a world of fixed objects existing in apparent autonomy or indifference from one another. This autonomy conceals relationships that effect the particulars not just at their margins, so to speak, but in their very essence. If reality were only the sum of facts, of further irreducible elements, then it would follow that concreteness is the sum of all facts; YET the accumulation of all facts would not yet amount to the cognition of reality, and neither would all accumulated facts amount to a totality. Facts are the cognition of reality only provided they are comprehended as parts of a dialectical whole, not as immutable further irreducible atoms which, agglomerated, compose reality. The concrete totality is not equal to all the facts. Dialectical thought's embrace of totality would
scandalize Rorty--even though the liberal capitalism he espouses is as
totalizing a doctrine as the socialism he rejects. But dialectical totality
simply recognizes that the things of this world do not exist in isolation from
one another. It is emphatically not the summation of all facts, or a formal
unity external to the content. THREE FORMS OF TOTALITY Kosik distinguishes between three forms of totality: 1) the atomist-rationalist view; 2) an organic notion for which the whole is greater than the parts; and 3) a dialectical understanding of the term.(2) Totality in the first two perspectives is a transcendent and otherworldly concept. In important ways, it returns to the problem of the "in-itself." The impossibility of knowing a thing in its essence becomes the impossibility of knowing the world apart from scattered particulars. But we should resist the dualism of particular vs. totality. Andrew Seth Pringle Pattison, the 19th-century Scottish idealist, writes that the "thing" is a complete synthesis of qualities; and that the noumenon is thus a fuller knowledge as yet unreached by us. But it is not an unattainable reality, and to exalt this useful distinction of thought into a barrier which thought is unable to surmount is simply to fall down and worship our abstractions.(3) Likewise, totality cannot be seen as what is beyond the scope of finite reason. I would argue that another name for totality is the process of history. History is infinite, but not because it goes on forever. Hegel describes this as "the perpetual repetition of one and the same content, one and the same tedious alteration." Rather, it is the moment of self-creation that produces this infinity. Far from being constrained to what it has been, humanity has the possibility of transforming its conditions and creating what Dunayevskaya calls a "revolution in permanence." Pragmatism verges on a dogmatism of the present as a result of its rejection of dialectics. Rorty sees the world as broken up into discrete, local
issues. His politics reflect this perspective: "The best we can hope for is
more of the same experimental, hit-or-miss, two-steps-forward-and-one-step-back
reforms that have been taking place in the industrialized democracies since the
French Revolution."(4) If only the Right were as humble as Rorty insists
the Left become. It was said of President Eisenhower that his philosophy was his
smile; but conservatives soon abandoned his genial conformism and remade the
world to suit their convictions. Seattle 1999 and the anti-war movement
attracted mass audiences to left-wing politics. But without delving deeper into
philosophical questions, this movement will be stillborn. As an organization, News and Letters Committees is
crucial to addressing this challenge. But it is not always careful to project
the philosophy of Marxist-Humanism as a revolutionary force; and thus falls into
the same mistakes facing pragmatism. Recent issues of NEWS & LETTERS have
seen a discussion in the "Readers' Views" section between a reader
frustrated with the lack of a program and respondents who see this as another
form of vanguardism. PRACTICE AND THE IDEA In her May 20, 1953 letter on Hegel's Absolutes, Dunayevskaya writes that "practice itself is implicitly the idea." She isn't referring to just any kind of practice, but revolutionary PRAXIS, which isn't supplied by the masses and then reflected in the pages of NEWS & LETTERS. This would set up a new system of external mediations, placing the organization outside of revolutionary activity and in the role of passive bystander. If the idea of freedom has content, the philosophy of Marxist-Humanism cannot leave programs or organizational work to the masses. For this reason, Dunayevskaya's 1987 "Presentation on the Dialectics of Organization and Philosophy" states that though the committee-form and the party-to-lead are opposites, they are not absolute opposites: "At the point when the theoretic form reaches philosophy, the challenge demands that we synthesize not only the new relations of theory to practice, and all the forces of revolution, but philosophy's 'suffering, patience, and labor of the negative,' i.e. experiencing absolute negativity."(5) Rorty is most persuasive when he points out the
difficulty of envisioning a non-capitalist society. Given the failure of
previous attempts, he writes, "this would have to be a society based
neither on the investment of private capital nor on public ownership of the
means of production."(6) Rorty's third alternative is precisely what
Dunayevskaya means when she raises the question of what happens after a
revolution. It cannot be vanguardist, then, to raise the issue. What is
necessary is that it be seen as revolutionary praxis, and develop concretely
from the struggles and subjectivities of the present. 1. "Intellectuals at the End of Socialism," by
Richard Rorty, YALE REVIEW, Vol. 80, Nos. 1-2, April 1992, p. 4. 2. Karel Kosik, DIALECTICS OF THE CONCRETE, pp. 18-19. 3. Andrew Seth Pringle Pattison, THE DEVELOPMENT FROM
KANT TO HEGEL, pp. 46-47. 4. "Intellectuals at the End of Socialism," p.
16. 5. THE POWER OF NEGATIVITY: SELECTED WRITINGS ON THE
DIALECTIC IN HEGEL AND MARX, by Raya Dunayevskaya, pp. 18-19. 6. "Intellectuals at the End of Socialism," p. 4. |
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