To parody John RawIs, to ask Why Pluralism Now? is to raise a question that is political, not metaphysical. (..) Philosophical pluralism is unavoidable today because practical pluralism, the problem of how to live in a world of plural ultimate values, is unavoidable. (..) David Hume's essay "Of Parties in General". Parties based on real interest and on affection and personal loyalty are "easily explained." But explanation is more complicated with "parties from [abstract, speculative] principle". (..) With Christianity difference of faith becomes contrariety of belief > extremism, spirit of persecutions. Hume hints that parties from principle emerge from a Christianity at war with itself: "hence naturally arose keenness in dispute, when the Christian religion came to be split into new divisions and herestes," (62-63). (..) Hume's pluralism is an imitation, or adaptation, of pre-Christian toleration, but with modern skepticism added. (..) Modern skepticism differs from its ancient model by being a reaction against novel claims to certainty made by science and its Cartesian formulation. (..) In 'The Prince' Machiavelli discovers the irreducible plurality of ethical values. (..) Machiavelli argues, it is a mistake to try to control factions; one should instead insure that their effects promote the public good. (..) It is my claim that pluralism proper emerges when people see corresponding benefits in parties from principle. (..) So two key ingredients were present long before the emergence of pluralism itself. (..) The puzzling way in which our principles both are and are not a matter of choice sets the problem for contemporary pluralism, and makes relativism and external tolerance as inadequate a solution as dogmatism and solipsism. Plurality without pluralism makes for incoherence and arbitrary choice. (..) Questions of identity and choice frame this dimension of the problem of pluralism, of us and them. (..) In his brief article on pluralism for Baldwin's Dictionary, John Dewey notes that the term popularized by James's Will to Believe occurs first in Kant's Anthropology, where pluralism is used as an alternative to egoism. (..) Pluralism as opposed to egoism becomes the contemporary problem of the one and the many when connected, as I will now show, to the problem of the possible and the actual. (..) Two ideas to be rejected: The first is the idea that since there are various possible ways of thinking, all these are possible for me. (..) The other understanding of ultimate plurality thinks that these forms are fixed, by history, nature or the unconscious. (..) Once I realize that my thought is only one among many possible thoughts, how does that affect my thinking? (..) There is a desire for uniqueness and individuality at the root of today's pluralism. We both want the scope of Us to expand until it is universal, and we want to maintain the borders between Us and Them. (..) Contemporary practical and theoretical problems of pluralism erase the distinction of reasons and causes. People resist having their values reduced to preferences. (..) A relativism-based tolerance that might have been workable in the past can no longer satisfy the conditions of contemporary pluralism (..) the hope that enlightenment will erase differences by dissolving their irrational sources in nationalism and superstition is just as unsatisfactory. (..) Pluralism requires a commitment to taking other people's most fundamental and most diverse reasons simultaneously as other and as reasons. That new form of pluralism requires a new kind of justice. Systematic pluralism aims at a community, not a peace treaty. (..) Systematic pluralism differs from mere tolerance, relativism or plural monisms by refusing to treat the inside and the outside by different rules. (..) Kenneth Burke's pentad, Richard McKeon's philosophical semantics, Stephen Pepper's world hypotheses, and Hayden White's tropological metahistory, each of which erects a structure in which all possible thinkers find their place. The construction of such second-order structures is historically without precedent. (..) Wittgenstein offers a pluralism that is not architectural or systematic, and the same could be said of Dewey - just as Hume's framework of agreement... (..) he requirement that pluralism treat different reasons as both different and reasons makes pluralism exclude certain forms of explanation (e.g. attributing behavior to national character). |