Noting the conceptual stalemate, confusion, and inertia of much of current Western philosophy, Margolis advances a new line of inquiry. He considers a fresh conception of the human agent as a hybrid artifact of enlanguaged culture, the decline of all forms of cognitive privilege, the pragmatist sense of the practical adequacy of philosophical solutions, and the possibilities for a recuperative convergence of the best resources of Western philosophy's most viable movements.
Noting the conceptual stalemate, confusion, and inertia of much of current Western philosophy, Margolis advances a new line of inquiry. He considers a fresh conception of the human agent as a hybrid artifact of enlanguaged culture, the decline of all forms of cognitive privilege, the pragmatist sense of the practical adequacy of philosophical solutions, and the possibilities for a recuperative convergence of the best resources of Western philosophy's most viable movements.
Pragmatism Ascendent: A Yard of Narrative, a Touch of Prophecy
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Pragmatism Ascendent: A Yard of Narrative, a Touch of Prophecy
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Overview
Noting the conceptual stalemate, confusion, and inertia of much of current Western philosophy, Margolis advances a new line of inquiry. He considers a fresh conception of the human agent as a hybrid artifact of enlanguaged culture, the decline of all forms of cognitive privilege, the pragmatist sense of the practical adequacy of philosophical solutions, and the possibilities for a recuperative convergence of the best resources of Western philosophy's most viable movements.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780804782289 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Stanford University Press |
| Publication date: | 10/17/2012 |
| Pages: | 200 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 9.20(h) x 0.50(d) |
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Pragmatism Ascendent
A Yard of Narrative, A Touch of ProphecyBy Joseph Margolis
Stanford University Press
Copyright © 2012 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior UniversityAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-8227-2
Chapter One
The Point of Hegel's Dissatisfaction with Kant
HERE, WITHOUT PREAMBLE, is a version of the central paradox of modern philosophy—in effect, the paradox of the whole of Western philosophy, ancient as well as modern: to know the world, to have knowledge of "what there is," implicates at some level of understanding "knowing" what it is to "know," knowing what knowledge is; so that, justified in the way we view the second distinction, we rightly take ourselves to be able to justify our claims with regard to the first. And yet, we cannot say that we ever achieve a greater precision moving from our first-order intuitions to a critical analysis of our second-order concepts: the grammatical difference (so to say) in the levels of discourse seemingly invoked here obscures the slack identity of the cognitive sources accessed at the two levels.
Even in these first sentences, the term "level(s)" is already fatally equivocal: we cannot assign (in any discernibly principled way) the putatively superior cognitive power accessed at the metalogical level to exclude any matched first-order discourse involving truth-claims about the actual world. There is no second-order science of science (or of knowledge) that can claim a higher source of objectivity, though there are indeed second-order questions and second-order answers. (If we required such a hierarchy, we'd be caught in an infinite regress.) There you have the pons of transcendentalism and rationalism alike.
I take the dictum to be common ground between Hegel and the pragmatists, the touchstone of resistance to the deepest convictions of "Cartesian" thinking contested by both—not only in René Descartes but, perhaps more fundamentally, in Kant as well. Furthermore—and this is especially compelling "transcendentally" or in accord with whatever strategy might replace Kant's way of explaining the "possibility" of human knowledge—that finding is not a necessary or universal truth; it's hardly more than a faute de mieux concession that may, so far as we have managed to secure the second-order query as an option, suggest an alternative way of answering Kant's original question—that is, relative to our supposed knowledge and ignorance. Otherwise, we should never be able to escape Kant's transcendentalism, which, by determining (as it claims to do) the conditions of "possibility" of our understanding the world constrained within the space of our own experience, does indeed also claim to yield universally necessary conditions (though always and only from the vantage of the inquiring subject), which then constrain the "rational possibility" of reality or the entire cognizable world being intelligible at all. I take this to be the deepest puzzle of Kant's "Copernican" revolution (see, for instance, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, Bxvi).
Here, now, a decisive paradox struggles toward clarity. The new option arises because Kant is committed to his transcendentalism even where he views the transcendental question as qualified (however it may be) by the inherent limitations of the human form of reason!1 Hegel, of course, rejects Kant's transcendentalism: hence, he calls into mortal question Kant's right to draw from his "Critical" inquiry any of the resources of "canonical" (rationalist) accounts of reason thought to yield genuinely universal or necessary enabling powers of, or limitations on, cognition sans phrase. There's a reductio there—or an insuperable mystery. The viability of the transcendental question (apart from the fortunes of transcendentalism) makes no sense unless we also concede that the viability of empirical realism cannot be separated from "idealism" (the "Idealism" already implicated in the transcendental question itself ): that consideration already signals the importance of deciding whether the human version of "reason" reflexively affects what we affirm to be possible regarding "what there is" in the whole of reality independent of human cognition. (There's a puzzle there that I must come back to regarding the relationship between realism and Idealism. Let me say for the moment that I take "realism" and "Idealism" to be inseparable within any "constructivist" form of realism—it being the case that there is no other viable form of realism. I take that to be both Hegel's and Peirce's view.)
Wherever knowledge is tethered to perception and experience—"presuppositionlessly," without privilege (as Hegel supposes, in the Phenomenology)—strict universality and necessity are either false objectives in the human world, impossible to confirm, or no more than presumptive targets that will have to change with evolving experience. The essential paradox (in Kant), then, is this: that although Kant abandons canonical rationalism's epistemological and metaphysical presumptions (restricting his own reflexive analysis to what is "possible" for humankind alone), he manages to recover the universalism of the rationalists "by other means," by reclaiming it (illicitly) in the work of human reason itself. There you have one way of formulating the essential premise that Kant's transcendentalism cannot possibly supply, that Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Hegel (and, in effect, Peirce and Ernst Cassirer) confirm from entirely different vantages.
Let me intrude here, without preamble as I say, a devilishly clever challenge addressed by Stephen Houlgate to Robert Pippin's Kantian-inclined reading of Hegel's "logic," that is, regarding the analysis of the intertwined first- and second-order questions (already broached) that fixes the inseparability of epistemological and metaphysical questions post-Kant (and post-Hegel), which, nevertheless, Houlgate manages to treat as separable. Houlgate charges that "in Pippin's view, [Hegel's logic] sets out 'all that "being" could intelligibly be,' but it does not set out 'all that "being" could intelligibly be.'" Houlgate is right, of course; but that's because the would-be separable (second) question is entirely idle, impossible to distinguish (pragmatically) from the first.
Put in the most unguarded way, the best reading of Hegel's undertaking (perhaps not always textually perspicuous or interpretively reliable) commits us to the following constraints: (1) that Hegel adheres to a Kantian vision of a "critical metaphysics" (qualified by our theory of specifi- cally human powers and limitations) rather than a "canonical" (rationalist) metaphysics such as Kant himself rejects; (2) that Hegel unconditionally abandons transcendentalism (all a priori assurances of necessity and universality); (3) that, in confining inquiry within the bounds of experience, the distinction between the analysis of intelligible being and being tout court proves to be completely empty (as both Hegel and the pragmatists would insist); and (4) that, under the constraints of evolving and historied experience, claims of necessity and universality are, wherever pressed, never more than faute de mieux contingencies. In short, Kant's defeat lies not with the demonstration that his claim is false—which would require (at least in arguing to a stalemate) a cognitive power equal to the one Kant himself affirms a priori—but, rather, with an argument weaker in cognitive presumption, yet adequate to the task, to the effect that neither Kant nor we know of any argument by which to confirm the transcendentalist power Kant claims. Indeed, we are not even clear that we possess a reliable criterion by the use of which we can distinguish, in Kant's sense, between transcendental and nontranscendental claims. (There's a difficulty there more serious than that of mere error—regarding Euclid or Isaac Newton, say.)
Perhaps, then, I may as well add: if Hegel exceeds these constraints, so much the worse for him; also, nothing on this score is likely to restore any form of Kantian transcendentalism—which always defeats itself, in the sense just noted. (I admire Hegel's daring, but his concessions in the Phenomenology already make it impossible to validate any recovery of Kantian apriorism by historied means.)
Thinking ahead to the use I mean to make of this penny survey of Hegel's continuation of the Kantian project, I daresay that Peirce's fallibilism, the continuum of finite and infinite inquiry, and the inseparability of realism and Idealism (in the spirit of acknowledging the transcendental question) define the sense in which pragmatism—initially Peirce's, but read conformably, Dewey's simpler account as well—cannot fail to be construed as an ingenious and especially promising spare variant of Hegel's own undertaking, now naturalized, shorn of Hegel's extravagances, and qualified by Darwinian and post-Darwinian considerations. Construed this way, contemporary philosophy has never (in my opinion) bettered the promise of the pragmatist retelling of the Hegelian correction of Kant's grand innovation. (This is not, of course, to ignore Peirce's extravagances!)
If, as Kant implies in the second preface to the Critique of Pure Reason, we cannot do better than offer the work of our strongest and most reliable sciences (shorn of apriorist assurances) as the least quarrelsome specimens of what to count as knowledge, we cannot draw then on any such contingent posit for (any) necessary or necessarily adequate conditions of what it is to "know": proceeding thus, we would make any would-be a priori presumption about what knowledge "is," fatally hostage, incurably subject a posteriori, to the contingencies of evolving experience.
Knowledge appears, then, to be a contingent construction fitted as plausibly as possible to our would-be sciences and ordinary practice. There is no ready sense in which what knowledge is is a matter of empirical or transcendental discovery. I take this to be the most strategic—though perhaps not the most important—Hegelian theme that, retrospectively applied, could possibly effect the most congenial "correction" of, say, the whole of twentieth-century and the new century's analytic philosophies, both Anglo-American and continental European, in the spirit (finally) of abandoning all the vestigial sources of foundational and privileged conceptions of knowledge that the joined (hardly, joint) work of Kant and Hegel unquestionably demands.
Hegel saw in this the insuperable weakness of Kant's analysis of knowledge: he saw unblinkingly that whatever features of our actual sciences might seem to require synthetic a priori truths, in order to secure the bare conceptual "possibility" of their particular cognitive success, might also (for all we know) be no more than an "accident" of the contingencies of clever thought wrongly taken to be the enabling posit of the necessary and essential conditions we require! The Kantian program fails, Hegel supposed, at least because it cannot demonstrate in a principled way the difference between genuinely synthetic a priori truths in the body of confirmed science and opportunistic, even arbitrary or mistaken, empirical conjectures that a later advance in the sciences might easily eliminate.
Accordingly, "knowledge" appears to be an unavoidably contingent and informal construction fitted as well as possible to the evolving work of the sciences themselves. But if that is true, then Kant's entire undertaking could never escape a decisive reductio—nor could Descartes's or Gottfried Leibniz's or our own (if we elect to follow these or similarly exhausted exemplars)—without yet denying or disallowing the immense importance and fruitfulness of Kant's original invention. It's just that, beginning in Kant's way, there can't be a science of knowledge tout court, and Kant can't have discovered the a priori conditions of any such science.
Hegel embraces this deep contingency, the sheer historicity of the search—and so must we. It's the constant theme of the Phenomenology, which, improving on Kant, implicates at one stroke the multiple blunder of Kant's first Critique: namely, (1) Kant's failing to acknowledge the unprivileged presence of whatever appears as "actual" in our perception and experience of the world; (2) his failing to match at the very start of his undertaking the subjective and objective sides of whatever we report as the content of experience; and, as a result, (3) the insuperable contingency of our reflexive, continually reconstituted constructions of what to regard as provisionally actual. (This is, of course, a Hegelian phrasing.)
It's for such reasons as these that Kant (according to Hegel) could never escape the incoherence of his completely subjectivist account of empirical realism. But it's also the reason that Hegel's own rhetorical identification of (say) the necessary and the contingent, the infinite and the finite, the essential and the accidental, the absolute and the actual—that is, the entire play of what he presents as the dialectical logic of thought and being—is either a complex ideology sublimely contrived or a new version of Kantian blindness writ large. It must be the first, since the first is Hegel's way of escaping the second—in which case it makes a splendid contribution to all the viable movements of contemporary philosophy. But, in the same sense in which Hegel corrects and replaces Kant, history manifests an appetite for even more diverse forms of resolution than Hegel's own rhetoric might seem to favor: for instance, along the lines of historical discontinuities, plural perspectives, fragmentary narratives, and incompatible interpretations. (Consider Nietzsche and Foucault.) The upshot is that we cannot count on validating any constant cognitive principles or assured practices mediating between our fluxive selves and our fluxive world. Which is to say: Hegel and the pragmatists make common cause. In any case, we glimpse here the master contest of the modern era down to our own day—affecting "analytic" and "continental" philosophy in equal measures.
This, then, is my charge; or, rather, its principal part. But it confronts Kant and the post-Kantian tradition eccentrically.
* * *
The first Critique, you realize, rests on Kant's grave concern that Newton's splendid achievement requires a cognitively validated commitment to "absolute space" and "absolute time," which could never be justified on empirical grounds alone (say, in accord with empiricist assumptions); the entire Critique thereby acquires (Kant would have us believe) its transcendental right to determine what is needed for a complete account of the necessary conditions of the empirical knowledge embedded in Newton's physics. Kant's purpose here was to come to Newton's rescue; so that the Critique presumes to investigate the possibility of hitherto unnoticed necessary structures in the understanding (of a cognizing subject) answering to the requirements of Newton's science and thereby justifying Newton's much-disputed provisions—by means of conceptual resources not otherwise accessible.
Kant's transcendental critique is meant, therefore, to be a science in its own right. But then, the cleverness of Kant's abandoning the "rational metaphysics" of thinkers such as Leibniz and Christian Wolff is, as Hegel plainly believed, hardly a perspicuous spelling of his own question and the answer he provides. As we might now say: couldn't a normal change in physics obviate the seeming need for anything as presumptuous as Kant's transcendental strategy?
If you grasp the point of the suggestion, you see at once how Kant's transcendentalism shores up his subjectivism; hence, then, how the defeat of his transcendentalism leaves his subjectivism completely undefended. The appeal to the empirical work of the sciences confirms, therefore, the presuppositionlessly "objective" cast of phenomenological reportage. (Thinking ahead to the purpose of my entire argument, this is the nerve of the Hegelianized reading of Peirce's phenomenology, however it may be that Peirce came to see himself and Hegel at first as opponents and then, gradually, in good part—many claim—under Josiah Royce's instruction, as distinctly convergent.)
How could Kant's maneuver fail to be ad hoc and question begging, given that it relies, transcendentally, on the strength of this or that potentially excessive claim in Newton, in inferring the validity of its own Critical effort to recover the synthetic a priori conditions on which just such claims (in Newton), assumed to be true, are shown to be "possible"? Hegel took Kant to have been fatally deflected by the "inessential" (purely "accidental") question of how, relative to his knowledge of physics, Kant might concoct a plausible account of the enabling "subjective" (not, however, psychological) conditions matching what Newton's physics (or Euclid's geometry) might "require." Whatever is "essential" ("internal") to knowledge or reality, Hegel supposed, could never be fathomed in this way: it could never escape being historically blind. Kant's a priori "necessities" obscure Kant's reading of the facts.
The deep (Hegelian) lesson I draw from this review (dependent, of course, on a reading of Fichte) is perfectly straightforward: philosophical arguments cast in terms of abstract concepts primarily, arguments not thoroughly and defensibly grounded in the concrete phenomena of the experienced world (and not demonstrably apriorist), are both implicitly privileged and utterly vulnerable to historicized changes in the drift of science itself. I take this to be the effective center of "all" subsequent valid philosophical work—whether analytic or continental—that marks the true beginning of "modern" modern philosophy: for instance, in the profound doubts (voiced by figures as different as Søren Kierkegaard and Foucault) embedded in our noticing that Hegel's Geist never seems to lose its sense of the continuity and unity of interpretive thought, an abiding consistency of perspective, a relatively totalized conceptual inclusion of experience that no mortal historian could possibly confirm, an absence of any experienced discontinuity of time or history, or the diversity or fragmentary nature of any particular person's sense of the actual play of individual and aggregated experience. (We cannot accord Hegel greater cognitive powers than those he rejects in Kant.)
Seen thus, it hardly matters whether Hegel was himself mistaken in thinking he knew what would be necessary and adequate in coming to know the true nature of knowledge: the charge against Kant would still stand. This hints at the relationship between Kant's transcendental and Hegel's dialectical logics vis-à-vis the relevant analysis of "necessity." But it's also reasonable to read Hegel as championing a careful sort of historied constructivism that Kant never seriously explored. In any event, it's the most interesting of the viable options Hegel can offer the modern world.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Pragmatism Ascendent by Joseph Margolis Copyright © 2012 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of Stanford University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Preface ix
Prologue 1
1 The Point of Hegel's Dissatisfaction with Kant 7
2 Rethinking Peirce's Fallibilism 51
3 Pragmatism's Future: A Touch of Prophecy 111
Notes 157
Index 183