Abstract
Summarizing his argument in the Conclusion, Schulenberg underscores that his study wants to develop a new perspective on the much-debated renaissance of pragmatism. For the past three decades, as he makes clear, Marxism has played no role regarding this renaissance. As he has shown in his book, a discussion of the relation between these two philosophies of praxis can help one fully to appreciate the implications of the modern antifoundationalist story of progress, or the process from finding to making. Furthermore, this discussion forces us to rethink, or retheorize, those concepts we thought we would not need anymore, namely, truth, form (and the link between truth and form), and totality. However, Schulenberg not only summarizes his argument in the Conclusion but also offers brief discussions of Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx, Henri Lefebvre’s Critique of Everyday Life, and Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala’s Hermeneutic Communism.
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Notes
- 1.
Like Dewey and Rorty, Habermas uses metaphysics as a term denoting versions of philosophical idealism that go back to Plato. This is also the understanding of metaphysics that I have used in the present study. Habermas writes: “In a rough simplification that neglects the Aristotelian line, I am using metaphysical to designate the thinking of a philosophical idealism that goes back to Plato and extends by way of Plotinus and Neo-Platonism, Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, Cusanus and Pico de Mirandola, Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz, up to Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel” (1992: 29).
- 2.
At the beginning of “Themes in Postmetaphysical Thinking,” Habermas summarizes the aspects of metaphysical thinking that he will discuss: “I want to take up the theme of unity within the philosophy of origins, the equation of being with thought, and the redemptive significance of the contemplative life; in short, identity thinking, the doctrine of Ideas, and the strong concept of theory” (1992: 29).
- 3.
Concerning the Platonic doctrine of ideas and the appearance-reality distinction, Adorno’s contention is that one “might define metaphysics as the product of a breach between essences—the gods secularized as ideas—and the phenomenal world, a breach which is inevitable as soon as the gods become concepts and being becomes a relation to existing things; at the same time, however, these two moments cannot be naively related together or formulated concurrently. I believe this way of stating the matter may better define the locus of metaphysics in the history of philosophy, and thus define the essence of metaphysics as well (for I believe the essential is always historical), than would be possible in the relatively superficial lectures one might give on the themes of metaphysics” (2001: 19).
- 4.
In this context it is crucial to see that in the second volume of Philosophische Terminologie, Adorno repeats his insistence that one ought to hold on to metaphysics. He maintains that metaphysics realizes the moment of nonregulated thought (“des nicht reglementierten Gedankens”) and that it also motivates us, pace Wittgenstein, to go further than simply stating what the case is: “Gegen die Heteronomie, gegen das unserem eigenen lebendigen Denken Entfremdete, also sowohl gegen Theologie wie auch die Wissenschaft von den Tatsachen realisiert die Metaphysik das Moment, ich will mich wieder vorsichtig ausdrücken, des freien, des nicht gegängelten, des nicht reglementierten Gedankens. Deshalb ist an ihr festzuhalten. Sie verkörpert, könnte man sagen, das Moment, das in der Sprache der Philosophie allgemein das Moment der Spekulation heißt und in dem wir motiviert über das hinausgehen, was der Fall ist, weil das, womit wir konfrontiert werden, es von uns so verlangt” (1974: 168).
- 5.
For Jameson’s critique of Specters of Marx, see his “Marx’s Purloined Letter,” Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx, ed. Michael Sprinker (New York: Verso, 1999), 26–67.
- 6.
In this context, see also Zabala’s comments on the relationship between pragmatism and hermeneutics: “[B]oth movements arose not merely in revolt against all authoritarian theories of truth but were also impelled by the intention to improve the way in which men understand one another. / Postmetaphysical thought fundamentally aims at an ontology of weakening that reduces the weight of the objective structures and the violence of dogmatism. The task of the philosopher today seems to be a reversal of the Platonic program: the philosopher now summons humans back to their historicity rather than to what is eternal. Philosophy appears dedicated more to the progressive edification of humanity than to the development of knowledge” (2005: 9). On the question of how a contemporary post-Marxism might look like, see Costas Douzinas and Slavoj Zizek, ed., The Idea of Communism (New York: Verso, 2010); and Göran Therborn, From Marxism to Post-Marxism? (New York: Verso, 2008).
- 7.
In this chapter, Dewey points out: “As against this common identification of reality with what is sure, regular and finished, experience in unsophisticated forms gives evidence of a different world and points to a different metaphysics. We live in a world which is an impressive and irresistible mixture of sufficiencies, tight completenesses, order, recurrences which make possible prediction and control, and singularities, ambiguities, uncertain possibilities, processes going on to consequences as yet indeterminate” (1958: 47).
- 8.
In spite of my critique of Lefebvre’s version of Marxism, one has to note that his Critique of Everyday Life is of particular value to those who regard Marxism as a form of humanism. It should have become clear that this understanding of Marxism also plays a crucial role for the theoretical framework developed in this study. Expanding on the meaning of a humanist world and how it is threatened by an alien reality (or the process of alienation), Lefebvre writes: “Only man and his activity exist. And yet everything happens as though men had to deal with external powers which oppress them from outside and drag them along. Human reality—what men themselves have made—eludes not only their will but also their consciousness. They do not know that they are alone, and that the ‘world’ is their work. (Here we are using the word ‘world’ to signify the coherent, organized, humanized world, not pure, brute nature)” (2014: 187). For an interesting discussion of Lefebvre, see John Roberts, Philosophizing the Everyday: Revolutionary Praxis and the Fate of Cultural Theory (London: Pluto, 2006).
- 9.
This also implies, of course, what I have stated throughout this book: pragmatism is a humanism, and so is Marxism. In this context, see the thought-provoking essays in David Alderson and Robert Spencer, ed., For Humanism: Explorations in Theory and Politics (London: Pluto, 2017).
- 10.
In “The Continuity Between the Enlightenment and ‘Postmodernism,’” Rorty avers that “the Enlightenment philosophers were on the right track, but did not go far enough. We hope to do to Nature, Reason and Truth what the eighteenth century did to God” (2001: 19). As far as the notion of maturity is concerned, he emphasizes that “there is no such thing as full intellectual maturity. There is, to be sure, intellectual growth, but there is no natural terminus to the process of intellectual advance. Stories of intellectual advance will make possible further, surprising, intellectual advances, without end” (2001: 25).
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Schulenberg, U. (2019). Conclusion. In: Marxism, Pragmatism, and Postmetaphysics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11560-9_10
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