Making Sense and Changing Lives: Directions in Contemporary Pragmatism

I

Because pragmatism has been famously defined as a forward-looking philosophy, there is an understandably irresistible urge to pose the questions of where it is currently going and where it should be directed to go further in the twenty-first century. What new issues call for or reward the most careful philosophical attention? Which of pragmatism's historical figures and which of their theories should prove most useful for our current problems and inquiries? Which traditions and philosophers outside the pragmatist fold could provide particularly helpful conceptual resources and rewarding dialogue for today's pragmatist problematics? What new ways of thinking are needed? Indeed, one might ask a more radical question. As a forward-looking philosophy, to what extent and in what way does pragmatism even need to take its own specific past and that of other philosophical traditions seriously? To what extent is this history a benefit or a burden? And if we cannot escape such history, how should it be deployed?

This paper considers these questions by a comparative examination of two very worthy new books: Robert Innis's Pragmatism and the Forms of Sense: Language, Perception, Technics (2002) and John Stuhr's Pragmatism, Postmodernism, and the Future of Philosophy (2003).¹ Besides their other merits, these books exemplify the rich plurality of contemporary pragmatism because they are strikingly different in several important ways and can be wonderfully helpful in critically complementing each other. After highlighting some of the key methodological, stylistic, and thematic contrasts between their approaches (while also noting some crucially shared ground), I shall suggest how my work in somaesthetics can contribute to their respective projects and provide a useful bridge between them.

In Pragmatism and the Forms of Sense, Innis provides a careful, detailed study of crucial and very general semiotic structures that generate our sense-making activities in perception, in language, and in the use of tools. His study, as he puts it, is devoted to "exploring and attempting to justify, pivotal forms of sense about the forms of sense" (14). Innis argues that we human beings, as active, sentient, form-giving organisms, make sense through interrelated structures of perception, language, and tools (or "technics") that are firmly rooted in and shaped by our fundamental embodiment in the world. This condition of embodiment, he holds, is a permanent feature of our being-in-the world, even if the precise modes or styles of embodiment can vary historically through changing circumstances and technologies.

In studying "the 'interplay' between perception, language, and technics and the proper conceptual tools for understanding their complex relations" (11), Innis draws heavily on the concepts, insights, and arguments of Charles Sanders Peirce and John Dewey, but he is equally concerned with resurrecting and utilizing the ideas of past European thinkers. Innis distinctively does not concentrate on the most recent and trendy exemplars of European thought, but instead focuses his attention on older figures like Ernst Cassirer and Michael Polanyi, who rarely surface in contemporary pragmatist discussions, and also on theorists such as Karl Bühler, Phillipp Wegener, and Giovanni Vailati, who have been almost totally forgotten by American philosophers. Innis explicitly recognizes and thematizes this philosophical methodology as "historical retrieval with systematic and theoretic intent" (12). A fine exemplar of creative philosophical reconstruction and synthesis, his book is also a monument of magnificent erudition that should impress any reader by its range and depth of scholarship. Innis is a systematic philosopher who is interested in determining or explaining very general features of our experienced world (such as semiotic embodiment and the intentionality of consciousness) that are often claimed to be invariant, "permanent" (10), or "universal" (2). In his account of human existence as semiotic and tool-using, Innis enlists notions of spiritual power and transcendence that guide our efforts of interpreting and of tool-making and use; he does so by affirming with Dewey and Cassirer a basic, spontaneous drive of "making sense" that takes us somehow beyond what is imminently given or physically present. As Innis's program aims at systematic analysis and synthesis of basic structures or frames of meaning, so his tone...