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 University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-8228-9

Contents

Preface..............................................................ixPrologue.............................................................11 The Point of Hegel's Dissatisfaction with Kant.....................72 Rethinking Peirce's Fallibilism....................................513 Pragmatism's Future: A Touch of Prophecy...........................111Notes................................................................157Index................................................................183

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...