In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

[ 69 ] 4 ] Pragmatism and Gay Science: Comparing Dewey and Nietzsche Barry Allen It is seldom appreciated that all the first critics of the “Correspondence Theory of Truth,” especially Friedrich Nietzsche, William James, and John Dewey, were Darwinists. In epistemology, postmodernism begins as post-Darwinism, which explains similarities in the arguments of these otherwise different thinkers. Darwin did not elaborate on the epistemological implications of evolution and may not have thought them through. He was reluctant to appear radical in philosophy even when he was.1 His theory had enough trouble without a reputation for innovation in the philosophy of science. He left epistemology to the experts, and Nietzsche, shortly followed by James and Dewey, was the first to take him up. All the thinkers one might today call “postmodern” concur on one point, albeit a negative one: the metaphysical idea of truth as a correspondence or mimesis is hopeless. Like the idea of God, it can no longer be taken seriously. This thought belongs to Nietzsche’s legacy. The simplest, least controversial, most helpful sense of the elusive term “postmodern” is to describe philosophers who take Nietzsche seriously. The beginning of the postmodern critique of “correspondence” is Nietzsche ’s essay of 1873, “On Truth and Lying in a Nonmoral Sense,” unpublished in his lifetime.2 He developed his arguments in The Gay Science (1882), Beyond Good and Evil (1886), and the magnificent closing sections of On the Genealogy of Morals (1888). By 1906, James was on the same path, thinking about the pragmatic meaning of “truth.” There seems to be no influence. James heard of Nietzsche and apparently read something, but not much, and probably never studied Nietzsche’s arguments concerning truth. Dewey may have read more but still didn’t perceive the similarity between Nietzsche’s rather outlandish writings and what the pragmatists were saying about “truth.” Plato first formulated Western philosophy’s idea of truth, working with hints from Parmenides. Aristotle reduced it to a formula: “to say of what is that it is, is true”; and the idea passed without criticism into even the most )DLUILHOG&KLQGG $0 70 Barry Allen “critical” modern philosophy.3 More striking even than the metaphysical extravagance of the idea is how the philosophers, never reluctant to quarrel, found so little to quarrel with, so little to doubt about it. The most interesting and important of the new questions Nietzsche raised about truth concern not its epistemological unavailability or metaphysical impossibility. They concern its value, truth’s claim to a place among the highest values, especially if you are a philosopher. Mulling over this history, he says, “it . . . looks to us as if the problem has never been raised until now.” He had a keen sense of being on his own in this question: “Let us thus define our own task—the value of truth must for once be experimentally called into question.” He was also convinced that the questions were not going away.4 Hence the dramatic closing words of On the Genealogy of Morals: “All great things bring about their own destruction through an act of self-overcoming. . . . In this way Christianity as a dogma was destroyed by its morality; in the same way Christianity as morality must perish too: we stand on the threshold of this event. After Christian truthfulness has drawn one inference after another, it must end by drawing its most striking inference, its inference against itself; this will happen . . . when it poses the question ‘what is the meaning of all will to truth?’ And here again I touch on my problem, on our problem, my unknown friends (for as yet I know of no friend): What meaning would our whole being possess if it were not this, that in us the will to truth becomes conscious of itself as a problem?”5 Nietzsche has lots of friends now. They are the postmoderns. Is Dewey a friend? Is pragmatism a gay science? Unknown Friends Nietzsche raised doubts of two sorts against classical truth, metaphysical and moral. Metaphysically, the envisioned correspondence is impossible and absurd. No medium is innocent; perception and cognition are adaptations, not transcendental faculties. According to the classical theory, truth is an adequation or congruence, some very precise objective sameness between what is (fact or being) and what is said. But no two things are the same unless we more or less willfully overlook their differences. In speaking, or even thinking of speaking, we form a designation—a word or concept; but even the most...

Share