When Philosophy Paints Its Blue on Gray: Irony and the Pragmatist Enlightenment

1. A Second Enlightenment

Classical American pragmatism can be viewed as a minor, parochial philosophical movement that was theoretically derivative and practically and politically inconsequential. From this point of view—roughly that of Bertrand Russell and Martin Heidegger (Mandarins speaking for two quite different philosophical cultures)—it is an American echo, in the last part of the nineteenth century, of the British utilitarianism of the first part. What is echoed is a crass shopkeeper's sensibility that sees everything through the reductive lenses of comparative profit and loss. Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill had sought a secular basis for moral, political, and social theory in the bluff bourgeois bookkeeping habits of the competitive egoist, for whom the form of a reason for action is an answer to the question "What's in it for me?" William James and John Dewey then show up as adopting this conception of practical reason and extending it to the theoretical sphere of epistemology, semantics, and the philosophy of mind. Rationality in general appears as instrumental intelligence: a generalized capacity for getting what one wants. From this point of view, the truth is what works; knowledge is a species of the useful; mind and language are tools. The instinctive materialism and anti-intellectualism of uncultivated common sense is given refined expression in the form of a philosophical theory.

The utilitarian project of founding morality on instrumental reason is notoriously subject to serious objections, both in principle and in practice. But it is rightfully seen as the progenitor of contemporary rational choice theory, which required only the development of the powerful mathematical tools of modern decision theory and game theory to emerge (for better or worse) as a dominant conceptual framework in the social sciences. Nothing comparable can be said about the subsequent influence of the pragmatists' extension of instrumentalism to the theoretical realm. In American philosophy, the heyday of Dewey quickly gave way to the heyday of Rudolf Carnap, and the analytic philosophy to which Carnap's logical empiricism gave birth supplanted and largely swept away its predecessor. Although pragmatism has some prominent contemporary heirs and advocates—most notably, perhaps, Richard Rorty and Hilary Putnam—there are not many contemporary American philosophers working on the central topics of truth, meaning, and knowledge who would cite pragmatism as a central influence in their thinking.

But classical American pragmatism can also be seen differently, as a movement of world historical significance—as the announcement, commencement, and first formulation of the fighting faith of a second enlightenment. For the pragmatists, like their Enlightenment predecessors, reason is the sovereign force in human life. And for the later philosophes, as for the earlier, reason in that capacity is to be understood on the model provided by the forms of understanding distinctive of the natural sciences. But the sciences of the late nineteenth century, from which the pragmatists took their cue, were very different from those that animated the first enlightenment. The philosophical picture that emerged of the rational creatures who pursue and develop that sort of understanding of their surroundings was accordingly also different.

Understanding and explanation are coordinate concepts. Explanation is a kind of saying: making claims that render something intelligible. It is a way of engendering understanding by essentially discursive means. There are, of course, different literary approaches to the problem of achieving this end, different strategies for doing so. But there are also different operative conceptions of what counts as doing it—that is, of what one needs to do to have done it. It is a change of the latter sort (bringing in its train, of course, a change of the former sort) that the pragmatists pursue. For the original Enlightenment, explaining a phenomenon (occurrence, state of affairs, process) is showing why what actually happened had to happen that way, why what is actual is (conditionally) necessary. By contrast, for the new pragmatist enlightenment, it...