Pragmatism and Spirituality: New Horizons of Theory and Practice and the Calling of Planetary Realizations

Abstract

Pragmatism has been an important philosophical and sociocultural movement in the United States of America which has influenced our views of self, language, social reality and human condition and has opened up new avenues of creativity of freedom, action and imagination. The last century has seen its spreading global influence. American pragmatism cultivated by pioneering savants such as Charles Sanders Peirce, William James and John Dewey influenced the post-war continental philosophy of seekers such as Karl-Otto Apel and Jurgen Habermas from Germany. This influence has not been one-way. In the works of Apel and Habermas, we see a mutual dialogue between American pragmatism and streams in continental philosophy—namely Kant, leading to what is now called Kantian pragmatism, which in its own way was an effort to simultaneously engage with the pragmatics of both communication and action, practice and transcendence. But this dialogue needs to be broadened, becoming part of what can be called planetary conversations, where we move from our locations of visions, practices and philosophical traditions and dialogue across different traditions of thinking and practices of the world. This chapter carries out such a task.

This first builds on a presentation on “Sri Aurobindo and Spiritual Pragmatism” presented at the international seminar on “Re-reading Sri Aurobindo,” organized by Department of English in 2010. I thank Professor S. Muraleedharan and Professor Makarand Paranjape for their kind invitation and interest. This then has been presented in several workshops in India, Europe and the USA as part of our dialogues from Asian Forum for Social Theory. A related version of this essay has come out as “Spiritual Pragmatism and the Transformation of the Posthuman” in Critical Posthumanism, ed. Makarand Paranjape and Debashish Banejree (Springer, 2016).