Abstract
The relationship between Marxism and pragmatism was discussed in the 1970s and 1980s. Since then, this important discussion has been neglected. In the Introduction, Schulenberg explains that his study seeks to reactivate this discussion. His book intends to achieve three things. First, it endeavors to highlight the productive tension between, on the one hand, a representationalist and teleological universalism that still needs the appearance-reality distinction and, on the other, a historicist nominalism that is antirepresentationalist and antifoundationalist. Second, it shows that a discussion of the relation between Marxism and pragmatism is of contemporary significance since it can help one to fully grasp the implications of the notion of a postmetaphysical or poeticized culture. Finally, it is argued that Marxism’s combination of theory, form, a hermeneutics of depth, and the idea (or practice) of a coherent dramatic narrative clearly opposes this philosophy of praxis to pragmatism’s version of cultural criticism and its notion of horizontal critique. Elucidating the significance of the modern process from finding to making, Schulenberg’s interdisciplinary study brings together intellectual history, philosophy, and literary studies.
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Notes
- 1.
For stimulating readings of Flaubert’s L’Éducation sentimentale, see Jonathan Culler, Flaubert: The Uses of Uncertainty (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1974), 79–97, 148–152; William Paulson, Sentimental Education: The Complexity of Disenchantment (New York: Twayne, 1992); and Patrick Coleman, “Introduction,” Gustave Flaubert, Sentimental Education, trans. Helen Constantine (New York: Oxford UP, 2016), vii–xxix.
- 2.
For a discussion of the renaissance of pragmatism, see Morris Dickstein, ed., The Revival of Pragmatism: New Essays on Social Thought, Law, and Culture (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1998); and Mike Sandbothe, ed., Die Renaissance des Pragmatismus: Aktuelle Verflechtungen zwischen analytischer und kontinentaler Philosophie (Weilerswist: Velbrück, 2000). In addition, see John R. Shook and Joseph Margolis, ed., A Companion to Pragmatism (Malden, MA and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009). Regarding the work of the New Pragmatists, see Cheryl Misak, ed., New Pragmatists (New York: Oxford UP, 2007); and Alan Malachowski, The New Pragmatists (Durham: Acumen, 2010).
- 3.
Only a very few authors have discussed the relationship between Marxism and pragmatism. From a Marxist perspective, George Novack did this in Pragmatism versus Marxism: An Appraisal of John Dewey’s Philosophy (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1975). For the significance of Sidney Hook in this context, see Christopher Phelps, Young Sidney Hook: Marxist & Pragmatist (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2005 [1997]). In addition, see Brian Lloyd, Left Out: Pragmatism, Exceptionalism, and the Poverty of American Marxism, 1890–1922 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1997). An interesting discussion of Lloyd’s book can be found in the chapter “Marrying Marxism” in Robert Westbrook’s Democratic Hope: Pragmatism and the Politics of Truth (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2005), 114–136. For a detailed discussion of Cornel West’s theoretical development from Marxism and black liberation theology to pragmatism and beyond, see the chapter “Love and Resistance: Cornel West’s Prophetic Pragmatism as Oppositional Cultural Criticism,” in Ulf Schulenberg, Lovers and Knowers: Moments of the American Cultural Left (Heidelberg: Winter, 2007), 187–221.
- 4.
For an appreciation of the complexity of the idea of a postmetaphysical culture, the following two books by Jürgen Habermas are important (also as far as the continued relevance of religion is concerned): Nachmetaphysisches Denken: Philosophische Aufsätze (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988); Nachmetaphysisches Denken II: Aufsätze und Repliken (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2012), see especially “Religion und nachmetaphysisches Denken: Eine Replik,” 120–182. In addition, see Lorenzo C. Simpson, The Unfinished Project: Toward a Postmetaphysical Humanism (New York: Routledge, 2001).
- 5.
For a discussion of the contemporary significance of Marxism, see, for instance, Antonio Callari, Stephen Cullenberg, and Carole Biewener, ed., Marxism in the Postmodern Age: Confronting the New World Order (New York: Guilford Press, 1995); Bernd Magnus and Stephen Cullenberg, ed., Whither Marxism?: Global Crises in International Perspective (New York: Routledge, 1995); Terrell Carver, The Postmodern Marx (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State UP, 1998); David McLellan, ed., Marxism After Marx, fourth edition (New York: Palgrave, 2007); and Jacques Bidet and Stathis Kouvelakis, ed., Critical Companion to Contemporary Marxism (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2009). In this context, one also has to mention the discussion of Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx (New York: Routledge, 1994); see Michael Sprinker, ed., Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx (New York: Verso, 1999). In addition, see Fredric Jameson, An American Utopia: Dual Power and the Universal Army, ed. Slavoj Zizek (New York: Verso, 2016).
- 6.
Hilary Putnam suggested in some of his essays that the combination of fallibilism and antiskepticism was the most important characteristic of pragmatism. See, for instance, “Pragmatism and Moral Objectivity,” Words and Life, ed. James Conant (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1994), 151–181.
- 7.
As far as Nietzsche’s critique of metaphysics is concerned, the first part of Human, All Too Human (1878), “Of First and Last Things,” is also very important. He writes: “It is true, there could be a metaphysical world; the absolute possibility of it is hardly to be disputed. We behold all things through the human head and cannot cut off this head; while the question nonetheless remains what of the world would still be there if one had cut it off. […] For one could assert nothing at all of the metaphysical world except that it was being-other, an inaccessible, incomprehensible being-other; it would be a thing with negative qualities.—Even if the existence of such a world were never so well demonstrated, it is certain that knowledge of it would be the most useless of all knowledge […]” (1996: 15–16). In this context, Richard Schacht comments on the Nietzschean “enhancement of human life” as follows: “Nietzsche had long yearned—and continued to yearn throughout his productive life—for a higher humanity with a worth great enough to warrant the affirmation of life even in the absence of any transcendently supplied meaning. He now had come to the hard realization that the only possible way to that higher humanity required an uncompromising examination of everything human and all-too-human that at once stands in our way and is our point of departure, and a sober stocktaking of what there is to work with in undertaking what he was later to call the enhancement of human life” (1996: ix). For a brief discussion of the relation between Nietzsche and pragmatism, see Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, fourth edition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1974), 87–89. For Rorty’s critique of the idea of the human subject’s answerability to the world, see his essay, “The Very Idea of Human Answerability to the World: John McDowell’s Version of Empiricism,” Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Vol. 3 (New York: Cambridge UP, 1998), 138–152.
- 8.
In Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics (Melbourne: re.press, 2009), Graham Harman clearly counts this French sociologist and philosopher among the metaphysicians. That Latour is somewhat reluctant to agree with this reading becomes clear in Bruno Latour, Graham Harman, and Peter Erdélyi, The Prince and the Wolf: Latour and Harman at the LSE (Winchester: Zero Books, 2011). It would be interesting to discuss the relation between ANT and object-oriented ontology (as a version of speculative realism) in the context of the idea of a new materialism. See, for instance, Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, ed., New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2010); and Estelle Barrett and Barbara Bolt, ed., Carnal Knowledge: Towards a “New Materialism” through the Arts (New York: Tauris, 2013).
- 9.
A discussion of the relationship between Marxism and pragmatism is of course not the only desideratum as far as the renaissance of pragmatism is concerned. An important gap has recently been closed by Sean Bowsden, Simone Bignall, and Paul Patton, ed., Deleuze and Pragmatism (New York: Routledge, 2015), see especially Paul Patton, “Redescriptive Philosophy: Deleuze and Rorty,” 145–162, and Barry Allen, “The Rorty-Deleuze Pas de Deux,” 163–179. This volume might also stimulate one to reread Deconstruction and Pragmatism, ed. Chantal Mouffe (New York: Routledge, 1996).
- 10.
It would be interesting to analyze Berlin’s still thought-provoking discussion of Romanticism, which is central to his work as an intellectual historian, together with his early book on Marx: Karl Marx, ed. Henry Hardy, fifth edition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2013 [1939]).
- 11.
In this context, see Richard Rorty, “Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism,” A Companion to Pragmatism, ed. Shook and Margolis, 257–266.
- 12.
In this context, consider the fact that Hook, in From Hegel to Marx, seems to count Marx among those thinkers who prepared the establishment of a postmetaphysical culture: “In Marx’s eyes, the whole theoretical tradition of Western European philosophy with its apotheosis of Reason, its conception that thought has an underived and independent history, its identification of theoretical activity with divine activity, and when divinity was no longer fashionable, with the ‘highest’ type of human activity—all this represented a religious pattern of behaviour” (1994: 279–280). See also Cornel West, The Ethical Dimensions of Marxist Thought (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1991), and my discussion of this book at the beginning of Chap. 2.
- 13.
For two utterly opposing views on the significance of theory, see Judith Butler, John Guillory, and Kendall Thomas, ed., What’s Left of Theory? New Work on the Politics of Literary Theory (New York: Routledge, 2000); and Daphne Patai and Will H. Corral, ed., Theory’s Empire: An Anthology of Dissent (New York: Columbia UP, 2005). In addition, see Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Zizek, Contingency, Hegemony, and Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left (New York: Verso, 2000).
- 14.
In this context, one should also remember the influence of Nelson Goodman on Rorty’s thought. An important passage in Goodman’s Ways of Worldmaking reads as follows: “Furthermore, if worlds are as much made as found, so also knowing is as much remaking as reporting. All the processes of worldmaking I have discussed enter into knowing. Perceiving motion, we have seen, often consists in producing it. Discovering laws involves drafting them. Recognizing patterns is very much a matter of inventing and imposing them. Comprehension and creation go on together” (1978: 22).
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Schulenberg, U. (2019). Introduction. In: Marxism, Pragmatism, and Postmetaphysics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11560-9_1
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