Title: Pragmatism as Naturalized Hegelianism: Overcoming Transcendental Philosophy?
Abstract: FROM ITS INCEPTION PRAGMATISM HAS DISPLAYED an ambivalent relation to Hegelianism. John Dewey conceived his experimentalism as a more modest alternative to Hegel's system of absolute idealism, which he deemed too grand for present tastes.(1) At the same time, pragmatists from James and Dewey to Quine and Rorty have all assimilated important Hegelian motifs. These include most importantly a deep suspicion of modern representationalist epistemology, in both its rationalist and empiricist versions; a conception of intelligence as a form of practice, best conceived in terms of making, doing, and acting; and a commitment to a nonreductionist, holistic appreciation of our beliefs about the world (one which induces a general distrust of dualistic thinking). To this list Rorty adds an appreciation of Hegel's conception of the philosophical enterprise as Nachdenken, as a kind of edifying recollective summary. Rorty has also provided what is perhaps the most concise formula for expressing at once pragmatism's debt to and criticism of Hegel: pragmatism is a form of Hegelianism.(2) In this paper I wish to examine what it means to naturalize Hegel and whether this really is such a good thing to do. Naturalism can mean many different things, but I am interested primarily in naturalism as a theoretical critique of philosophy. For Rorty naturalizing is synonymous with a process he calls detranscendentalization. My question can thus be rephrased: If pragmatism is naturalized Hegelianism and if naturalism is a critique of philosophy, then in what specifically does the detranscendentalization of Hegel consist? I will argue that Rorty does not provide a satisfactory answer to this question. Since few if any of the charges Rorty levels against Hegel withstand careful scrutiny, and indeed seem to have been articulated in one form or another by Hegel himself, we are left to wonder not only what nonnaturalized Hegelianism really is but how it stacks up against contemporary pragmatism. Pursuing these issues can show us, I think, that Rorty is mistaken in his claim that holism takes the curse off of naturalism.(3) I will argue to the contrary that Hegel's holistic idealism exemplifies a form of philosophical theory superior to naturalism insofar as it saves the phenomena more comprehensively than the reductive explanatory strategies of naturalism. To this end I want to examine how Rorty sets up Kant as the paradigmatic philosopher and then uses his critique of Kant to advocate a wholesale rejection of the project. My claim is that because Rorty's understanding of is filtered almost entirely through a reading of Kant, his understanding of Hegel (as well as others within the tradition, including Husserl, Heidegger, and Derrida) is for the most part reductive and off target. The point is not merely that in Hegel himself we find many of the same objections to representationalist epistemology that Rorty supposes originate with linguistic philosophy, though this is true and deserves careful scrutiny. Equally important is that fact that through his construction of a straw man called transcendental philosophy Rorty suppresses a philosophical voice distinct not just from contemporary Anglo-American but from the empiricist and rationalist traditions of modern in general. That Rorty is unable to distinguish this voice from the chorus of modern is in part due to the fact that this voice's lexicon derives largely from Descartes and Hume rather than from Plato and Aristotle, with whom it perhaps shares more in common. Ultimately, however, this inability has to do with the very proximity of Rorty's own thought to the epistemological tradition whose founding arguments and guiding metaphors he has so trenchantly criticized. II Rorty has claimed that Hegelianism consists principally in having a historical sense. …
Publication Year: 1992
Publication Date: 1992-12-01
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 6
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