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PREFACE
- University of Pennsylvania Press
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PREFACE Writing, for me, has always been an adventure of discovery. This book itself is a stage in a personal and intellectual odyssey-one which has opened new horizons of questioning. In Praxis and Action (1971), where I explored the meaning and centrality of the concepts of praxis and action in Marxism, Existentialism, Pragmatism, and Analytic Philosophy, I wrote in the introduction: At first, it was the common negative stance of contemporary philosophers that most forcefully struck me. Most contemporary philosophers have been in revolt against the Cartesian framework. Descartes is frequently called the father of modern philosophy. If we are to judge by philosophy during the past hundred years, this title can best be understood in a Freudian sense. It is a common characteristic of many contemporary philosophers that they have sought to overthrow and dethrone the father. 1 When writing Praxis and Action, I was aware that there is significant common ground in the diverse attacks on the Cartesian foundations of modern philosophy, the "spectator theory of knowledge," and in the new emphasis on the centrality of human agency and activity, but I did not at the time realize how much convergence and substantive agreement was to be discovered in the proposed alternatives to the Cartesian legacy. It was easier to isolate a common enemy than to discern a shared objective. X Preface This concern was primary when I sought to make sense of the critiques and disputes about the social and political disciplines that were erupting during the 1960s and 1970s. In The Restructuring of Social and Political Theory (1976), I argued that a new sensibility and universe of discourse was in the process of emerging, one which sought to integrate dialectically the empirical, interpretive, and critical dimensions of a theoretical orientation that is directed toward practical activity. It was also becoming clear to me that the restructuring of social and political theory had much broader and deeper consequences. For it raised fundamental issues about the character and prospects of human rationality. I wrote at the time, "When individuals sense that they are living through a period of crisis, when foundations seem to be cracking and orthodoxies breaking up, then a public space is created in which basic questions about the human condition can be raised anew."2 Only when I was in the final stages of completing The Restructuring of Social and Political Theory did I fully and dramatically realize that the themes I had been pursuing in both of these books, as well as in my earlier studies of the pragmatic thinkers, were gravitating toward the complex network of problems concerning the character, dimensions, and texture of human rationality and irrationality . All the pathways of my thinking kept drawing me ineluctably to the question of rationality. I felt the need and urgency to work through the "rationality debates" that were becoming so central in a great diversity of cultural contexts, to sort out what were the underlying issues, to see how they might be related to each other, and to confront the specter of relativism that always seemed to be hovering in the background of these discussions. As I began to work through these tangled debates in the philosophy of the natural and social sciences, in the confrontation between hermeneutics and critical theory, and in contemporary reflections on practical rationality, political judgment, and praxis, I kept having an uncanny sense of deja vu. Let me illustrate what I mean with reference to three very different and apparently unrelated texts: Paul Feyerabend's Against Method; Hans-Georg Gadamer's Truth and Method; and Sheldon Wolin's essay "Political Theory as a Vocation." Whether we focus on the disciplinary matrices that characterize their investigations, their intellectual temperaments and styles, the traditions that inform their writings, or the specific issues they address, one's initial impression is that of radical differences. Feyerabend sharply criticizes prevailing orthodoxies in the philosophy of the natural sciences and attacks what he takes to be the myth of a deter- [18.208.172.3] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 12:55 GMT) Xl Preface minate scientific method with fixed rational criteria. Gadamer focuses on the "happening" of understanding, especially as it pertains to tradition and the interpretation of works of art, literary texts, and history. Wolin's theme is the critique of contemporary political science and a defense of the vocation of the political theorist. But when one compares these three works, despite the manifest and real differences , fundamental latent similarities leap to...