Amphiboly: een frase die vatbaar is voor meer dan één interpretatie. (..) Kant: Seek the path between dogmatism and skepticism. (..) 1984 Uni of Nebraska, conference 'The Foundations of Critical Pluralism' essay also in honour of Richard McKeon (who recently died) (..) If we cling to one critical method as being true, we are dogmatists. If we grant that some or all are equally true, we are skeptics. (..) Nelson Goodman: pluralism as the tradition 'that began when Kant exchanged the structure of the world for the structure of the mind, continued when C. I. Lewis exchanged the structure of the mind for the structure of concepts, and that now proceeds to exchange the structure of concepts for the structure of the several symbol systems of the sciences, philosophy, the arts, perception, and everyday discourse. The movement is from unique truth and a world fixed and found to a diversity of right and even conflicting versions or worlds in the making.' (..) those who were proposed as the primary sources of pluralism at the 1984 conference - Aristotle, Leibniz, William James, Stephen Pepper, Richard McKeon, Goodman, Kenneth Burke, and Wayne Booth - especially the "Chicago Group" and Pepper. (..) Pluralism face the 'problem of demarcation' - to which feeld belong the question - science, metaphysics, epistemology, ...? (..) Wittgensteinian "language game" as an unaccountably neglected model for coherent pluralist theory and analysis (..) claims to encourage multiplicity while in fact championing the opposite (..): whatever we know embodies a general category identical with and exhausting the known's reality - that is - there are no individuals, only universals. (..) When we assemble varied particulars, do we also thereby assert that they correspond to categories already present before our research, in the world? (..) Pepper's 'World Hypotheses', a key text among contemporary pluralists (..) we will discover that major pluralists are not at all pluralistic. Their assumption was already critically examined by Kant: it is to regard thought processes as if they were entities apart from thought, and consequently to reify logical procedures into substances and methods into doctrines. They talk like Protagoras, but act like Hegel (see CPR, pp. 276-96). (..) I treat the function of pluralism as a tendentious social ideology. Here, concealed formal monistic assumptions have their complement in advocacy of a single political practice. (..) I will argue that its major creative period is already behind us; that it restates intellectual currents much discussed from roughly 1940 to 1960; and that its roots are deep in the history of American political commonplaces. (..) I adopt the willfully barbarous collocation, "Judeo-Kantian-Marxian-cognitivism" (..) Pluralism will then advocate the compatibility of all perspectives (from whatever premises and toward whatever ends) studying a common object that can produce sufficient evidence for their validity. (..) McKeon: "from the point of view of the rhetorical" tradition whose "fundamental assumptions are that knowledge is advanced best by the free opposition of arguments, that a common truth may be given a variety of statements from different perspectives, and that there is an element of truth in all philosophic positions." (..) McKeon: Dialogue is statement and counterstatement, based on ordinary ways of life and ordinary uses of language, with no possible appeal to a reality beyond opposed opinions except through [further] opinions about reality. Truth is perceived in perspective, and perspectives can be compared, but there is no overarching inclusive perspective ... Method is the art of seizing and interpreting the opinions of others and of constructing and defending one's own. Virtue is method translated into intelligent self-interest and respect for others. (..) Pluralism as individualism with a contractarian spirit (..) Pepper: formism, mechanism, contextualism and organicism, coöperating in a single enterprise. (..) must we grant only one view, or admit that all claims have equal validity? (..) I fail to understand what is wrong with (a) multiplicity of voices, each demanding assent, without any resolution possible among them other than private choice, or (b) claims of exclusive correctness. Yet, for less tolerant pluralists, both "relativism" and "monism" are bitter expletives. It seems the pluralist endeavor wants a paradox, It wants not a totally free critical market, rather, pluralism needs a controlled market: diversity will be admitted, but only as disciplined by criteria of proof which, in effect, restore very traditional conceptions of author, text, and reader. (..) I suggest three general varieties of pluralism may be identified historically and functionally: (a) the ontological, (b) the epistemic-methodological, and (c) the volitional types or procedures." (..) Ontological pluralism asserts that (1) multiple worlds exist, which may (or not) intersect; or, (2) one reality exists, containing an irreducible multiplicity of constituents. In either view, it follows that (3) there are at least two "worlds" or "constituents," and there may be an infinite number. (examples: Buddhist Sarvastivadins, Anaxagoras, Empedocles, Goodman) (..) William James: 'The experiences which we have been studying ... plainly show the universe to be a more many-sided affair than any sect ... allows for. What, in the end, are all our verifications but experiences that agree with more or less isolated systems of ideas (conceptual systems) that our minds have framed? But why ... need we assume that only one such system of ideas can be true? The obvious outcome of our total experience is that the world can be handled according to many systems of ideas, and is so handled by different men ... And why ... may not the world be so complex as to consist of many interpenetrating spheres of reality, which we can thus approach in alternation by using different conceptions and assuming different attitudes... ?' (..) James' multiplication of possible truths and methods prepared for McKeon's assertion that the modes of philosophic inquiry do not provide a fixed list of the ... perennial problems of philosophy, but rather a structure for the formation of hypotheses concerning a common question viewed from the orientation of different modes of inquiry.... Too little attention has been paid to the fact that common problems have been treated in different ways or to the possibility that the accord of philosophies is not to be found in a common ideology or a common language but in a common enterprise to which different philosophies make supplementary contributions. (..) I find The Sources of Value Pepper's richest book, but pluralists focus instead upon the systematizing promises of World Hypotheses. (..) Since categorizing principles and their justification are both assumed in McKeon's study and dominate his final exposition, they become more prominent than the facts themselves, functioning as mental universals with independent existence, patterned - like Aristotle's cosmos and logic - in advance. (..) It is a byword of the Kantian tradition that speculative idealism (Leibniz, Hegel, Pepper) and radical empiricism (Aristotle, Locke, James, McKeon) turn out, in practice, to be the same. (..) The third pluralism is "volitional," and here emerge the ethical paradoxes which are the subject of my last section. This claims that we confront multiple definitions of "the good," incompatible with one another, each of which solicits our consent and action on its behalf. (..) Although we think in multiples, we are obliged to act in singulars, in specific choices. While the ontological and epistemic-methodological approaches tried to unite the Many, the role of volitional pluralism is to bring us back without illusion to the necessity and consequences of doing. But how is it possible to remain a pluralist if singulars must always supervene upon the intellectual exercise of variety? If we accept multiples as long as no action is called for (either in criticism or in ethico-politics) but become monists the moment we must perform in the arena of other minds and actors, then is not pluralism a self-contradiction? (..) Pluralism was made thinkable by, among others, George Herbert Mead, with his "objectivity of perspectives" created by organisms toward reality: perspectives are multiple (among individuals) and equally "true," for they are the unique fiats upon which life and behavior rest. It follows that the "acts" (Mead's pivotal term) which individuals undertake have the potential for clashing with each other. (..) I consider pluralism to be largely a variant upon (or subset of) pragmatism. (..) I take the first generation to include John Dewey, Mead, James Hayden Tufts, and the others of the Chicago pragmatists; a second has Pepper at Berkeley and Lewis at Harvard and, in Hyde Park, R. S. Crane and McKeon; the last is Booth himself and his students. (..) Are the Many part of a One? In the pluralist recasting, this ancient question means whether individual "acts" and "perspectives," "interests," and consequent "selective systems" can nonetheless establish a social unity. This is the obstacle which pluralist ethico-politics has never been able to get past without violating its own premises. Even more than skepticism, the archenemy of pluralism is "monism" or - less tactfully - "totalitarianism." (..) How individualistic and contractual premises thus eventuate in a sanctioned authoritarianism is not the least paradox of pluralist ethico-politics, nor of twentieth-century America. A tradition that started by extolling the invisible hand (through free market exchange and intellectual inclusiveness) thus ends by lauding the visible fist. The history of twentieth-century pluralism moves from opposition to prevailing theories and conditions (with the Chicago pragmatists), to consolidation and eminence (with McKeon, Burke, Crane, Lewis), to defense and even repression (the late Pepper and Booth). (..) I am interested in how power compromises "dialogue" among seemingly free individuals, and in how pluralism assumes the exercise of power which it does not openly acknowledge. (..) Historical example: The Babylonian Talmud contains a dialogue within the tradition (Mishnah, Gemara, Rashi, Posaphot, Midrashim, Elijah of Vilna). The 'dialogue' over the Talmun in 1240 between the rabbis and their Christian antagonists met high standards of intellectual frankness and honesty. Nevertheless all copies of the Talmud in France were subsequently ordered to be burned. (..) I suggest that pluralism cannot explain the moral preferability of the dialogue set upon the Talmud page to the erudite and sophisticated (but evil) one in 1240. (..) All discourse assumes social relationships rather than having the potential to stand beyond them. Booth's approach thus conceals power - both the authority which it demands for itself as a theory, and the power of the world in which texts and criticism reside. (..) The dogmatic basis of liberalism, suggested Merleau-Ponty, lies in its taking away the freedom to choose against liberalism. In theory, no critical voice has the right to suppress others, and yet not only does suppression in fact happen but pluralism admits its possibility and even desirability under specific circumstances. (..) A different explanation of how social relationships (to which the encounter among literary critics is analogous) in truth exist is necessary. Such a paradigm occurs in economic naturalism, in feminist and Third World authors, and among the more imaginative deconstructionists: it regards social groups and not individuals as fundamental; it sees these groups already locked in relations of power before the utterances of single persons occur; and it assumes a frank stance toward that power. (..) If the heterogeneity of thought and Being avoids hypostatizing methods into substances, it also seeks rule-governed operations so generally regulative that, from them, all various apparent orders (including the socio-political) may be deduced (cf Kant: grammar behind language). (..) The measure of any philosophy is the kind of human beings it produces. |