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Handbook on Pragmatism, Ed. Michael Festl (Stuttgart: Metzler)

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Handbook on Pragmatism, Ed. Michael Festl (Stuttgart: Metzler) 1 Handbook on Pragmatism, ed. Michael Festl (Stuttgart: Metzler). KANT Sami Pihlström University of Helsinki, Finland E-mail: [email protected] Introduction It may be argued that it is, to a significant extent, the “Kantian” nature of pragmatism, as well as the ability of pragmatism to critically reinterpret, transform, and further develop some key Kantian ideas, that makes pragmatism a highly relevant philosophical approach today – in, e.g., metaphysical and epistemological discussions of realism and idealism, ethics and axiology, the philosophy of religion, and many other fields. This entry articulates some central aspects in which pragmatism, early and late, can be regarded as a Kantian philosophy, focusing on the nature of metaphysics, the relation between fact and value, and religion. The charge (by some pragmatists) that pragmatism is essentially anti-Kantian is also briefly examined. Clearly, the towering figure of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) cannot be neglected in serious pragmatism scholarship. William James (1898, 138-139) saw philosophical progress as going “round” Kant instead of going “through” him. Undeniably, pragmatists have defended non- or even anti-Kantian views regarding various philosophical problems: contrary to Kant’s universalism and apriorism, pragmatism tends to emphasize the contingent practice-embeddedness of knowledge, morality, and value. However, pragmatism – even James’s – also shares crucial assumptions with Kant’s critical philosophy, to the extent that Murray Murphey (1966) aptly called the classical Cambridge pragmatists “Kant’s children”. Recent scholarship has extensively covered the Kantian background of pragmatism and the affinities between pragmatism and transcendental philosophical methodology (see several essays in Gava and Stern 2016; cf. Pihlström 2006, 2010, 2013, 2015). In this entry, one cannot do justice to the richness of the question concerning the pragmatists’ relation to Kant – either historically or systematically. One may, however, shed light on this topic by exploring this relation through the threefold structure of Kant’s critical philosophy. Kant summarized his three Critiques in terms of three questions: (1) What can I know? (2) What ought I to do? (3) What may I hope? These questions open up Kant’s critical philosophy with respect to (1) epistemology and metaphysics (i.e., the core areas of “theoretical philosophy”), (2) ethics (i.e., “practical philosophy”), and (3) philosophy of religion. Both classical pragmatists – especially Peirce, James, and Dewey – and 20th century neopragmatists – e.g., Hilary Putnam and Richard Rorty – have significantly contributed to all these fields of philosophy. While this entry focuses on these areas, pragmatist reinterpretations of Kant (and vice versa) have also been presented in other fields, including aesthetics (see McMahon 2014). As is well known, Kant transformed and transcended various philosophical controversies and dichotomies of his times, critically synthesizing, e.g., rationalism and empiricism, realism and idealism, determinism and freedom, as well as nature and morality. Similarly, pragmatism has often been defended as a critical middle ground option. For James (1907), pragmatism mediates between extreme positions, in particular the conflicting temperaments of the “tough-minded” and the “tender-minded”. Even the conflict between pragmatism and Kant’s apriorism can be mediated, as in C.I. Lewis’s (1923) theory of the pragmatic a priori. It is in this reconciliatory yet critical spirit that one may also undertake the task of finding common ground between Kant and the pragmatists. 2 Epistemology and metaphysics Analogously to Kant’s combination of empirical realism and transcendental idealism, virtually all the classical pragmatists attempted to walk the middle path between realism and idealism (or what is now often called constructivism) in epistemology and metaphysics. One cannot reach any speculative metaphysical truths about the world as it is in itself. The objects of experience and inquiry are not “ready-made” but are structured through conceptualization and inquiry. Neopragmatists like Putnam have made this point by attacking metaphysical realism and aiming at “internal” or “pragmatic” realism instead. A deep, essentially Kantian tension between realism and idealism (constructivism) thus seems to characterize the pragmatist tradition. The view that reality is a pragmatic “construction” faces a dilemma, however: it may seem to be either exciting but obviously false (if causally, empirically, or factually interpreted), or true but trivial and unexciting (if it merely amounts to the thesis that human beings construct the concepts used for categorizing reality). This problem is considerably enriched and nuanced when articulated in a Kantian way, distinguishing between the transcendental and the empirical levels – though this distinction itself must eventually be softened (“naturalized”) according to pragmatist Kantians. Many philosophers – not only pragmatists – have argued that the existence and/or identity of things (entities, facts) is in a way or another relative to, or dependent on, the human mind, linguistic frameworks, conceptual schemes, practices, language-games, forms of life, paradigms, points of view, or something similar. Among influential advocates of key variations of this “dependence thesis” are, in addition to Kant himself (for whom the empirical world is constituted by the transcendental faculties of the mind, i.e., the pure forms of intuition and the pure concepts or categories of the understanding), pragmatists like James (whatever we may call a “thing” depends on our purposes and selective interests), Dewey (the objects of inquiry are constructed in and through inquiry), Putnam (there is no “ready-made world” but only scheme-internal objects), and Rorty (our “vocabularies” constitute the ways the world is). (See James 1907, Dewey 1929, Putnam 1981, Rorty 1991.) In their distinctive ways, these and many other philosophers have suggested that there is no absolute world an sich that could be conceptualized or cognized; if there even is such a world, as Kant held, it is a mere limit of human thought and experience, a problematic Grenzbegriff (cf. Kant 1781/1787, B306-309). What there is for us is a world continuously structured relative to schemes of categorization and inquiry, which are analogous to the Kantian categories. Pragmatists, however, generally follow Kant in embracing something like empirical realism within a broader pragmatist position comparable to Kantian transcendental idealism. Pragmatism does not simply opt for antirealism or radical constructivism and relativism but seeks a pragmatic realism compatible with naturalism. Instead of understanding metaphysics as an inquiry into Being qua Being, pragmatists may understand it as an essentially Kantian inquiry into the fundamental – pace Kant, not universal but historically changing and reinterpretable – features of the human world, as it emerges in and through purposive practices (including the practices of inquiry itself). Pragmatists thus join, implicitly, Kantians like Henry Allison (2004) in insisting (with Kant) that one cannot know, or perhaps even form a coherent conception of, the world as it is in itself, independently of the conditions of cognition and representation. Metaphysics as pursued by metaphysical realists, assuming what Putnam calls the “God’s-Eye View” on the absolute structure of the world, is impossible, according to both pragmatists and Kantians. However, this approach does not renounce the possibility of an ontological inquiry into the structure of the (human) world, as there is room for a critical conception of metaphysics reconceived as an examination of the basic features of a humanly categorized reality, of the practice-embedded conditions necessary for us to be able to experience an objective, structured world. Pragmatism, when developed as an inquiry into the structure of the “human world”, may be seen as a naturalized form of Kantian transcendental philosophy. Pragmatism reinterprets and further develops 3 Kantian ideas by formulating a perspectival approach to ontology and inquiry generally, highly critical of metaphysical realism (and antirealism), yet affirming the seriousness of rational inquiry into the ways the world must be taken to be from within human practices. Such an ontologically serious Kantian pragmatism cannot be reduced to a merely methodological perspective or constraint; it is a method of inquiring into the way(s) the world (for us) is. The pragmatic method, developed by Peirce and James in their different ways (see Peirce 1992-98, vol. 1; James 1907, ch. 2), seeks to determine the core of metaphysical disputes and theories by examining their objects’ conceivable practical effects. According to pragmatist metaphysics, objects – and ontological categories generally – emerge from human categorizing practices, just as they are in traditional Kantian transcendental philosophy constitutively based upon the necessary conditions of possible experience. Accordingly, it is primarily in the context of the realism debate – the on-going dispute concerning objectivity, truth, and reality – that pragmatism and the Kantian transcendental approach are natural companions, critically integrating a moderate form of realism with a full acknowledgment of the human constructive contribution in shaping the world into what it is for rational concept-users and inquirers. Ethics and value Pragmatists
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