On Making Another "Trip": Democracy, Homeness, and the Decision
Abstract: I provide here a long-form and experimental essay on the philosophical foundations of conversion, taken in a pragmatist key. Inspired by the writing of John Dewey and Alfred North Whitehead, I argue that democracy is an existential response to the problem of deontology, and in particular of the individual agent’s responsibility to act-as-“decision.”
“Philosophy is actually homesickness—the urge to be everywhere at home.”[1]
“Ach! unsre Taten selbst, so gut al unsre Leiden,
Sie hemmen unsres Lebens Gang.”[2]
I. Introduction
Roudy Hildreth offers a good summation of the pragmatist notion of the “problem”: “It is only when we trip on a crack,” Hildreth begins, “that the sidewalk becomes apparent.”[3] Behind this notion rests the entirety of the pragmatic relationship between doubt, inquiry and belief. For Hildreth, as for Charles Pierce, William James and John Dewey, the structure of philosophical “problems” is derived from a purely practical material. If the object in question bears no relation to the way we may actually act, if the “problem” on the table fails to relate to the consequences of our realized situation, then it isn’t a “problem” at all. Problems arise from the particularities and consistencies of our encounters with one another and the world; as the product of innumerable interactions with and within an environment, problems confront us imminently as an inability to get along comfortably or effectively in the world.
The fundamental formula for the continuity of experience and problems is drawn primarily from Pierce, whose insight into the relation between action and belief would set the stage for latter pragmatists to appropriate and perfect. For Pierce, “Our beliefs guide our desires and shape our actions.”[4] Insofar as our beliefs enable our actions to get along, we develop “habits of mind”; these habits, in turn, “determine us, from given premises, to draw one inference rather than another.”[5] Unfamiliar experiences—and it is important to stress the experiential basis of Pierce’s theory[6]—trigger the irritation of habits, manifesting in doubt. Pierce measures doubt as “an uneasy and dissatisfied state from which we struggle to free ourselves and pass into the state of belief,” and further defines “belief” as “a calm and satisfactory state which we do not wish to avoid, or to change to a belief in anything else.”[7] Doubt and belief are rooted in feelings, senses and dispositions; when one doubts, one is subject to anxiety and agitation. Since one cannot operate under such confusions and distresses, one seeks to relieve oneself of doubt and regain belief.[8] Pierce terms the manner by which doubt transforms into belief “inquiry,” and opts for a specifically scientific mode.[9]
I agree fundamentally with the general model Pierce introduces, but seek here to correct certain flaws in the conclusions of his argument—namely, the election of scientific inquiry as the dominant form our inquiry should generally assume, and his associated claim—which would dominate much of Dewey’s work—on the social character of inquiry. What I hope to recapture from Pierce, as well as from Dewey, is a missing sense of the individual, which is equally flawed in James’ thought, if only by gross exaggeration.[10] What does it mean, pragmatically, to “make a problem,” and what is the relevance of problem-making to individuality?
The following is an investigation into the philosophical justification for making another “trip.” In other words, I am interested in defining the terms that make an individual’s intervention into the world viz. causing doubt in the beliefs of other individuals a) meaningful, and b) legitimate. I propose that it is in this interaction that a unique aesthetic event emerges, one that promotes a vision of freedom predicated on the making of novelty. Much of pragmatism’s focus, especially in the discourses of pierce and Dewey, promulgates the “social character” of problem solving, and in the process inadvertently promotes a limited space for the individual to identify a meaningful role in the economy of problem solving.[11] It is this motivational deficit on behalf of individual interventions within given environments that I seek to address.[12] Another way to look at this question would be to ask: what is the relation between an individual and a public? In short, why and how should an individual care about problems in this world?
The inspiration for this project is drawn from the same reservations that launched pragmatism’s growth in the early 20th century, mainly in terms of Dewey’s “reconstruction”—namely, the conviction that the practices of our contemporary civilization have outrun our capacity to understand or control them, and that our conceptual and practical confusions will remain lest an adequate philosophy is developed for our particular modernism.[13] Put otherwise, and in a particularly Jeffersonian light, the problem that concerns me is: why is the world so outside the control of the living? My intention is to carve out one more iterative stage of philosophical reconstruction, itself permanently incomplete, in an effort to provide not merely the grounds for a new theory, but for a new attitude toward theory.[14] In so doing, I shall investigate how to preserve a pragmatic individualism without falling into three pitfalls: 1) re-expressing the Cartesian subject/object binary; 2) failing to provide adequate and convincing theoretical room for individual interventions; and 3) producing mere solipsism.
II. The “Problem” Stated
In May of 1799, the young Kleist wrote to his sister, Ulrike von Kleist, concerning anxieties over the nature of his contemporary era. Confronting what he perceived to be a modern crisis of determinism, Kleist’s passionate assault on the complacency of his age spewed a positive commitment to purpose and planning: “No free person, no thinking person,” Kleist began, “stays where chance happens to thrust him; or if he does he does so for a reason, out of choice, because it is better there. He feels that a man may rise above fate; indeed, that, viewed aright, it is actually possible to direct one’s fate.”[15] For Kleist, this “viewing aright” consisted primarily in the capacity of an individual to “draw up a plan for his own life,” and, in achieving this, determine for himself a “fixed purpose.”[16]
It was not two years later, however, that Kleist amended his philosophical doctrine. Having now become disillusioned with the purpose-driven principle of planning he had originally envisioned, Kleist opted for a decentered individualism ultimately cursed by its own blindness:
Truly, considering that we need a lifetime to learn how we ought to live, that even in death we still have no idea what heaven wants with us, if nobody knows the purpose of his existence nor what he is intended for, if human reason is not adequate to comprehend us, our souls, our lives, the things around us, if even after thousands of years we are still doubtful whether there is any such thing as right—can God ask of such creatures that they be responsible?[17]
Kleist’s rejection of the category of “responsibility” is here drawn against a canvas of radical contingency. The unknowability of the future means: that which is good now may be evil tomorrow; there are no categorical truths. Kleist concludes: “The things of the world are connected and intertwined in a myriad ways, every act is the mother of a million more and often the worst begets the best—tell me who on this earth has ever done anything evil? Anything to be counted evil in all eternity?”[18] Kleist’s earlier thesis of planning had now been inverted: planning comes to nothing, if only because the cascading multiplicity of “every act” transforms each intervention into the cause of “a million or more” unforeseen ripples. The extension of these ripples have the capacity to undo and corrode even the “best laid schemes”—and, of course, even if by some flick of luck contingency complies with your plan now, it all fades in the long run, anyway.
Kleist’s transition from a positive conception of individual intervention to a more defeatist notion of contingency rehearses the classical apprehensions that dwell at the core of western metaphysics. It would not be until over a century later, however, that Alfred North Whitehead would distill these apprehensions down to a more concise and rudimentary concern. Drawing from the hymn of 19th century composer Henry Lyte, Whitehead, operating within a logicist tradition distinct from Kleist’s romanticism, argued that “the complete problem of metaphysics” was formulated in the phrase “Abide with me/Fast falls the eventide.”[19] For Whitehead, Lyte’s lyrical poem exhibited the fundamental binary that split the human desire to find permanence in a universe of flux: the possibility of being in the midst of becoming, an island of permanence in the archipelago of oblivion. From this principle Whitehead draws the entirety of his speculative philosophy; though different in form and substance than Kleist’s, the concerns that ground Whitehead’s own intervention point to a similar category of recurrent problems.
I will label this category the “problems of the individual.” Kleist’s insistence on being more than a “play thing of chance” ultimately gave way to an overwhelming sense of chance’s mockery; the question “how does one act?” receded to reveal the broader and more vital concern: “can action ever be made humanly meaningful?” What, if anything, has the capacity to “abide” throughout the cacophonies of change that determine the endgame of this universe?
For Whitehead, the problem is further complicated by the contradictory position the living find themselves in: “The world is thus faced by the paradox,” Whitehead writes, “that, at least in its higher actualities, it craves for novelty and yet is haunted by terror at the loss of the past, with its familiarities and its loved ones. It seeks escape from time in its character of ‘perpetually perishing’….Each new epoch enters upon its career by waging unreeling war upon the aesthetic gods of its immediate predecessor.”[20] It is in this way that the task of “abiding” is set alongside the persistent “seeking of escape”: somewhere in between, man finds himself possessed by “the insistent craving that zest for existence be refreshed by the ever-present, unfading importance of our immediate actions, which perish and yet live evermore.”[21] Alongside the “craving” to produce something of enduring purpose, to produce novelty, is both the “terror” of losing the past and the projected fear of fading in the future. I will argue that these sentiments may only be felt individually: craving, terror and fear link a consciousness to the reality of its perishing, and, to the extent that no feeling has ever been felt collectively, the singular embodiment of their experience is both the starting and end point of intervention.
The “problems of the individual” are, in this sense, not “problems” at all, but constitute rather the capacity of problems to exist in the first place. If we take “problems” to be immediate hindrances to our “getting along in the world,” then what is it to speak of the “problems of the individual” in such broad and existential terms? And further, why make the “individual” the basis of this class of experiences?
We start with the individual not as a given entity, but as the only type of experience that is intrinsically knowable.[22] In referring to the “problems of the individual,” we refer to a certain class of experiences that, in their interrelated totality, constitute the grounds of consciousness; and consciousness is itself a self-made experiment in getting along in this universe. At some unremarkable point in the course of all things, a group of hydrocarbons bound together and birthed the first etches of curiosity. From this minor and utterly forgettable moment, the phenomenon of “man” was nominated as a new type of experiencing; to the extent that this type of experiencing was the only type of experience to be aware of its own typology as experience, the concept of the “individual” was forged not out of accident, but necessity. In fact, consciousness can only be considered in terms of the category of “necessity”—that is, a proper treatment of consciousness would see it arriving not merely by accident, but an accident that met a latent need.[23] That need we might deem temporality.
The “perpetual perishing” that in turn necessarily accompanies temporality is, from the perspective of consciousness (that is, from the perspective of knowable experience), both what informs and determines the shape experience is to take.[24] Consciousness is the attempt at perishing’s own undoing. To this extent, the “problems of the individual” endure so long as a type of experience finds itself in the world: so long as there is existence, so long as there is death, and so long as there is a knowable experience that flickers between.
I have referred elsewhere to the essential contradiction between these terms, when elected into a knowable discourse, as the basis of myth. Or, better, it is myth that emerges as a necessary response to the knowability of contradiction—myths abridge aporias.[25] Myth is what the experience of knowability forges for itself in order to get along. Whitehead’s appropriation of Lyte, and Kleist’s attempt to manufacture a doctrine of planning are but two iterations of this phenomenon: they emerge as a product of knowable experience that in turn seeks to master and explain experience writ large. To the extent that the category of “the problems of the individual” is self-populated, the means of therapy are equally self-forged. The question that emerges from the vesica piscis of Whitehead and Kleist’s concerns is: what means of melioration can experience manufacture in response to experience’s problems?
The answer must necessarily come by way of the myth, as it is the myth that enables experience to “get along” in the face of persistent contradictions. What is at stake is not meaning, nor purpose (though these two germinate in the soil of knowable experience): it is, rather, homeness. Homeness is itself not a knowable state, but an experiential mode of being that enables the knowable; it is not happiness, nor even the broader feeling of satisfaction. It is principally a “being-there without residual,” whose counterposition is determined less in terms of sadness and unfulfillment so much as alienation and strangeness. Homeness is an attitude knowable experience fashions for itself: it is where feeling and thinking run fully in tandem. It is the experience of experience that discloses its own self-made lineage. Homeness emerges along the contours of the myth: with the proper myth, I feel at home.
The question of melioration is therefore really a question of what myths experience must build for itself to feel at home in the universe. The permanent character of contingency means: the contradiction will always remain, and insofar as it remains as an aspect of knowable experience, experience makes for itself the capacity to “get along” viz. the manufacturing of the myth. The primary condition of knowable experience is this capacity to fashion; man’s status as homo faber delineates not only the tactile and material domination of the physical world, but the production first and foremost of the myth—of itself, of consciousness, and so forth.[26]
The contingency that determines the existence of the myth further determines its alterability. The myth is false, if only because the totality of any vision is itself one perspective among an infinite multiplicity.[27] The myth simultaneously operates as the adjudicator of truth and the apotheosis of the lie: it is falsity made serviceable—the lie made real, animated, employed. The first lie ever born was manufactured in the service of truth, and every lie evangelizes this truth-service. Homeness, to this end, is faith in the right kind of falsity, electing “truth” as the right kind-of lie.[28]
The ultimate form implied by the myth, once it has emerged from all possible logical iterations, is this: that the only illusion is that there is any illusion at all.[29] Why is it the great proneness of the type of knowable experience we call ‘man” to crave so much in terms of meaning and purpose, and yet to self-produce so much toward the exhaustion and limitation of their realization? How can we move forward knowing that a move forward requires, in essence, a lie?
Can one ever not lie? To the extent that the closure between knowable experience and experience generally will remain deterred, the pragmatism of the myth will endure: knowable experience must lie to itself, but some lies are more truthful than others.
Before analyzing the truth of a myth, the contrary phenomenon need first be addressed. Why does man choose so many impoverished myths—and cling to them even in the midst of fire and destruction? Kleist’s emphasis on the unknowability of future doubts, matched by Whitehead’s elaboration of “fast falls the eventide,” points, in part, to a conceivable answer: the resilience[30] of the “problem of the individual” means only that knowable experience is knowable only of its own experience. The particularity of knowable experience, e.g. the local neuron of an infinite grid, is manifest in the decision. The decision is that which causes novelty[31]; the “I” is the disclosure of the decision as and through knowable experience.[32] The decision is oriented to an unknowable future in that it produces that future spontaneously, while it is only through the decision, itself a result of myth, that knowable experience amends itself; the decision implies that experience could have otherwise been different. The myth is animated by faith, and faith directs action: That we are “only in this once,” that life is something of a “one way street,” only means: man approaches contingency with his back to it. The resilience of failed myths, e.g. the consistent tendency of knowable experience to estrange itself, is haunted precisely by this local and unavoidable dimension of knowable experience to decide facing backwards, or: the most enduring problem is the problem of the decision.[33]
Problematicity surrounds knowable experience in its entirety. The extension of knowable experience through the decision is coextensive with the permanence of problematicity. This is not to say that as there is man, there are problems, but rather man is himself the first and foremost problem—e.g. man himself is the source of his doubt.[34] The thorn of doubt is set to indicate that man has not lied to himself well.[35]
So long as the myth of the “I” remains, and remain it will, the decision is subject to the possibility of triumph or suffering. Suffering is: anxiety, confusion, disorientation—anger, conflict, war.[36] Suffering is doubt, and doubt is estrangement. How, then, does knowable experience turn itself around? In other words, how does the “I” find “fixed purpose” in the flux? Pierce would argue it is through inquiry, and Dewey through experiment, but what is an experiment without a control, and what is inquiry without an immediate problem? Do we move forward, confident that our findings will relieve us of our mistakes and “plop us back at the beginning,” so to speak, only this time with correct data? The nature of the decision is determined through its capacity to make: make experience, both in its physical and mythic properties.[37] This making cannot be unmade, but only made anew: an experiment in living is different than an experiment in physics. The expectations of the former alter along the trajectory of its deployment, are unknown and opaque, vacillate, crescendo and fade; whereas it is only against fixed expectations that the latter may be said to exist at all.[38]
This is not to say that scientific experimentation does not alter itself or harbor an instrumental relation between means and ends, but rather when the testing is done one may recalibrate, set the measurements aright, calculate from a parallax view, and hit the “run” button again.[39] The unknowability that accompanies the making-character of the decision forbids this level of mastery; scientific inquiry is the consequence of the decision, and holds its relation to the extent that it offers mastery, or an extension of knowable experience.[40] As one manufactured tool among many, scientific inquiry fails to satisfy conditions relevant to an application to “the problems of the individual.” Scientific inquiry is associated with a different category of problems all together, and proves invalid in determining the form the decision is to take viz. the decision’s own knowability. What form should the decision thus take to 1) make itself an amenable myth, and 2) through the deployment of that myth, make for itself homeness in the world?
III. The “Decision,” “Truth” and “Homeness”
For Whitehead, as for James, “No actual entity, then no reason.”[41] If this is to say that the knowability of chimeras may never participate in claims to certainty, then certainly this is the case; if this is to say that the actual is co-determinate with the “real,” then this is certainly false.[42] Experience is exhausted thoroughly by the actual, but the actual is only manifest prismatically in the experiential: we might say that experience is a valence or side of the actual. What is actual far exceeds what is experiential, whereas what is “real” is the groundedness of this relation at any given unfolding.[43] The actual constitutes all potential arrivable worlds; and, insofar as they have yet to arrive, their character has yet to fully be determined. This is not to say that there is some distant, waiting modality that, when it arrives, the laws of physics will be temporarily suspended and all we hiccup into a Picasso-esque style frame (of course, there is nothing to necessarily prevent this anomaly, either). Rather, the actual is what constitutes all arrivable worlds within the purview of imagination, which is the manner by which the decision adjudicates novelty. The determination of the content of actuality is the responsibility of imagination. Imagining is a kind-of experience whereby the real is reconceived in relation to a yet disclosed future; it is where they “kiss” in the reality that spells out the decision. It is through experience that the real is made the actual, and vice-versa. Imagination is an intervention into an environment: it is the experience of turning that environment into a knowable experience.
Creativity is the decision producing a new unfolding through imagination: it is the realization of novelty, and pertains exclusively to knowable experience. To this end, the exercise of decision in the service of creativity is called: freedom. It is in this way that we can say that “freedom” is a certain type of experience, a certain class of relations between the actual and the real. Freedom is the making the actual into the real, it is the realization of the myth of the decision. Freedom is thus measured as a category of novelty, as the capacity to produce a certain type-of novelty.
For the decision to be a decision at all, it must fashion novelty. Habit is the stultification and entropy of the decision; there is no decision where there is habit.[44] To the extent that traditional pragmatic theory has valued the role of habit in that habit “offloads” problematic concerns and produces rhythm and harmony where there is otherwise discord and confusion, it has also overlooked the cost that habit introduces. Habit robs knowable experience of freedom. Insofar as knowable experience lacks freedom, the capacity to produce the novel myth deteriorates: homeness is nullified. The habit thus holds unique relation to contingency: on the one hand, the habit enables smoothness; on the other hand, the smoothness it enables deadens and numbs the intrinsic creativity of the decision.
The problem with adumbrating a notion of freedom contrary to the role of habit is the necessity to simultaneously outline a corresponding attitude capable of accepting novelty as its primary directive. Knowable experience must forge a particular disposition in relation to itself that accepts the permanent openness of the decision.[45] The nature of this attitude consists in an acceptance of “truth” as a necessary lie, e.g. the recognition of the myth, and further in the participation of the decision opened therein. What the decision unconceals are four things: 1) the decision as decision—that is, the capacity of experience to alter itself; 2) the permanent incompleteness of the decision; 3) the animating myth that is (re)born within the decision’s inaugurated novelty; and 4) the attitude knowable experience takes up in relation to its openness.
The decision’s relation to myth means that, through decision-making, the need for this attitude may be fulfilled through the further elaboration of myth: first and foremost in the making of the myth of truth.[46] To the question, “Does the decision select a myth?” The decision must have foremost faith in the myth of faith.[47] To this end, the myth selects the decision; there is no decision prior to the myth. But it is equally incorrect to describe the decision as purely a reproduction of the myth: to be a decision, novelty must be made. But never is novelty made ex nihilo: the decision partakes in the manufacturing of a self-history while within that very history.[48] “History,” here taken, is history of the decision’s realized myth-making.
The recognition of the history of the “myth of truth” is not a rejection of truth, but its rightful humanization. What, then, is truth?[49] Truth is a relation between the decision and experience: truth delineates the relation between grounds and consequences.[50] The traditional view of truth as validity (the establishment of theoretically secure grounds, which imply a commitment to a Cartesian subject and a subsequent correspondence theory of truth) and truth as consequence (the recognition of the essentially manufactured and synthetic character of truth[51]) are both no doubt “true,” in the sense that the decision may create experiences unique and reducible to their claims.[52] They are myths that link actuality to reality resiliently. Resilience, properly indexed, is an experiential rather than analytic category[53]: it is the “being there again”[54] that summarizes the continuity of experience writ large, manifest as temporality. Resilience is felt as more than a getting along, but as the potentiality of permanence: “there will be something that will experience again” is the ultimate claim of resilience. Resilience frames the relation between the decision and myth, to the extent that the equation “myth + resilience = truth” holds for the decision’s grounds, while the consequences are determined solely by the subsequent alterations in knowable experience.[55] To this end, the persistence of truth is what makes feasible the knowable experience of homeness: homeness is the attitude the decision takes up in relation to truth.[56] To the question: “What truth must we make?” the decision’s immediate answer—which it repeats indefinitely as long as it answers—is first the category of the “true.” The affirmation of truth, so conceived, sits behind every intervention knowable experience makes into experience, however grand and triumphant or trivial and innocuous.[57]
The manufacturing of the category of the true quickly gives way to a deeper set of concerns: “What truth may we make with the truth we have made?”[58] This is the evangelical status of the myth, and, insofar as there is myth, knowable experience remakes its environment to conform to this evangelism via decision-making.[59] To the extent that homeness emerges with the decision’s iteration of the proper myth, the decision’s creative intervention into an environment introduces novelty that produces homeness. But how, then, to conceive of homeness as both an attitude toward truth and a product of novelty?
The relation between novelty and truth is mediated by the aesthetic.[60] The aesthetic is a form of knowable experience that is co-determinate with the possibility of freedom—that is, the possibility of knowable experience birthing for itself an indeterminate experience. Taken technically, an “aesthetic experience” is a redundant title; the aesthetic is experience self-elected into novelty.[61] The decision is what confronts and manufactures aesthetic experience: aesthetic experience turns habit into decision, it is the making of knowable experience where there was just experience, the production of a self-reflexivity.[62] The intervention of the decision, aesthetically taken, is not change to a particular “this” or “that” in knowable experience, but rather the incitement and invitation of another decision.[63] The aesthetic is the making actual of the decision, it is that which makes another “trip.” What the aesthetic experience actually inaugurates is: the decision, burdened by a newly acquired self-criticism. The aesthetic experience creates a problem.
The decision that produces “decision” intervenes on behalf of the myth while simultaneously disclosing myth-making as the consequence of the decision; it is in this way that “myth” writ large is stabilized in actuality but the question of its manifestation is opened up in reality. This is only to say: the decision, through its production of novelty in the evangelical service of the myth, attempts to remake experience to conform to a particularity that betrays the particularity of any and all decisions.
While it is the decision that inaugurates the aesthetic, it is the aesthetic that 1) converts experience into knowable experience, and 2) invites the decision where there was only habit, stasis, void.[64] While the aesthetic permits the decision’s intervention qua decision writ large, it also writes the decision into the permanency of temporality. The aesthetic means: there is no final decision, but only the potentiality of further iterations. This limitation is intrinsic to the decision itself, and is drawn from the well of “problems of the individual.”
The decision makes a home for itself to the extent that it can produce aesthetic experience. But the homeness of a decision may necessarily signal the estrangement of further knowable experience; this is the basic architecture of pluralism. The fundamental algebra of this “pluralist fact” is: for the decision to make aesthetic experience, e.g. for there to be the making of freedom, it requires force.[65] Force is the realization of the principle of freedom, e.g. it is when freedom in the actual is made real. Force is the fuel of creativity: As the aesthetic is the actualization of the decision, force is its realization. Behind every free decision—and truly only those decisions which are free are decisions at all—is the possibility to move from the actual to the real; force is the making real this possibility. But, insofar as there is the decision, so too are their contrary and competing decisions: force, as the realization of the myth, must navigate between producing homeness and producing alienation within knowable experience.[66] This is to say: how does the decision adjudicate for the nature of force? Force is instrumental to the myth; the nature of realization accords with the decision of its deployment. To this end, force is the process of realizing the intrinsic evangelism of the myth through the decision.[67]
But not all evangelisms are as truthful as others, and the measurement of resilience here comes to the fore. The decision that purports finality, the decision that closes the possibility of decision, achieves not homeness, but frustration, resistance, violence. This is not evangelicalism, but imperialism.[68] The imperial myth obfuscates homeness in its closure of the decision: it misuses and abuses force,[69] producing self-defeating non-resilience, the untruthful myth, the myth that “makes” nothing beyond doubt.[70] The rejection of the imperial myth does not mean the rejection of utopia, but rather the experiential failure of a certain kind-of decision-making. The aesthetic privileges the evangelical, and is occluded by the imperial: the essence of the imperial is conflict.[71] The reduction of conflict is the utopia of the myth (and the myth of utopia), and utopia is: homeness in perpetuity, e.g. it is the systematization of an attitude.[72]
Only evangelical myths may be deemed “truthful,” but beyond their rejection of imperialism their contents are subject to be instrumentalized by the creativity inherent in decision-making. The decision creates problems by altering faiths (e.g. by altering knowable experience) and it achieves this by intervening into an environment imaginatively and creatively. In this light, the nature of aesthetic experience is porous: no formula may deny or limit decision-making, save for the categorical unresilience of imperialism.[73] Knowable experience, aware of itself through the decision, manufactures the aesthetic differently with each iteration. The novel character of the aesthetic is absolute, but bound to the local character of the decision in that it realizes the novel 1) from a limited perspective, 2) in a novel manner. (Just how the decision might come to alter experience, and thereby alter knowable experience and the promotion of future decisions, I have explored elsewhere).[74] While homeness is a resilient category of experience, its manifestation viz. the aesthetic is never prefigured. The dominance of the evangelical myth is thus determined solely, contextually, and irreducibly by the question: “how does this decision amend knowable experience?” Or, otherwise put: “How resiliently does it link human needs to human ends?” To the extent that some evangelical myths meet this criteria more fully and comprehensively than others, are made real through the force of the decision, and produce aesthetic experience—well, eppur si muove, “the fairies dance, and Christ is nailed to the cross.”[75]
IV. Democracy and The Decision
I have tried to sketch above an outline for a pragmatic philosophy amended to respond to the growing neoliberal tendencies of early 21st century. While I have sketched out those concerns more fully elsewhere, the object of this attempt was to provide the philosophical grounds upon which to develop a systematic governmental model.[76] What I here mean by “grounds” is drawn in light of the definition of truth enumerated above: the truthfulness of this pragmatism has yet to be lived, and therefore has yet to prove its resiliency. But it would be wrong to characterize the process of proving its resiliency as an experiment, or even that of inquiry. The relation between the myth and the decision is here something quite different, something more mercurial and volatile: like the shimmering of light on water. There is a sterility to Pierce’s inquiry and Dewey’s experimentation; even with Dewey’s inclusion of imagination and intelligence, the role of the individual is diminished in light of a grotesque sociality.[77] Of course, nothing gets done without others—and very little can even be thought of, either. So it goes with any serious treatment of language and bricolage, let alone anything to do with action. But this is just a triviality: all there is in this world are individuals, entities walking through doorframes, saying a thing or two to one another, and exiting as quickly as they had come. The only publics ever formed were through one little group of atoms convincing another: “things could be different.” It starts and ends in the decision, and while sociality may be the vehicle and backcloth of individualism, nothing has ever been accomplished by a “people,” but rather through the persons that make up the contingent whole. Publics are made by the successful deployment of individual interventions persuading other individuals; while the form and content of the public is left open, its origins in “the problems of the individual” and its relation to the decision cannot be erased.
My hope has been to provide something of an early sketch of what the space of that individual intervention might look like, drawn in the color of pragmatism. What I intended to accomplish, too, was a response to Kleist and Whitehead’s earlier concerns—namely, how to find meaning in a pluralistic universe. The answer I have tried to provide is: you don’t. You make it. But some products are better made than others, and what I have tried to leverage as a philosophy is really a user’s-guide to building a home in a world dictated by the contingent and pluralistic.
I agree wholeheartedly with Dewey’s insistence on the relevance of democracy as the political model most responsive to pragmatism and the growth of the individual, if only for different reasons.[78] Democracy is the political threshold of the decision: it is the context where the decision is made most imminent and real, and hence, too, the context most representative of aesthetic experience. In this way, democracy is an orientation toward contingency. Above anything else, it is a type of experiencing made real by the myth. The positive feedback loop between democracy, the decision and homeness only suggests that the resilience of this interrelation responds to a latent human need, which is ultimately the need of the free individual in a perishing universe.
Denis Diderot, on attending a Paris salon in 1767, encountered a sketch of the artist Hubert Robert. The subject matter of Robert’s portfolio were ruins, and of the works presented it was the ghostly etching Ruins of the Baths of Diocletian that most caught Diderot’s eye. Diderot would later recall the episode in a reflection in his notebook: “The ideas ruins evoke in me are grand. Everything comes to nothing, everything perishes, everything passes, only the world remains, only time endures. How old is the world! I walk between two eternities.”[79] Diderot’s elegiac remarks are at once beautiful and terrifying: they whisper with all the romance of Kleist’s “fixed purpose,” arriving at its endgame, and elect Whitehead’s metaphysical concerns into poetic laments. The only question one is left to ask concerns the manner by which “walking between two eternities” becomes a salient human project. Democracy is one such way of walking, and insofar as we tread its path, we trace out the truth of myth made amenable to the realization of human homeness.
[1] Novalis, “General Draft (45),” p. 135
[2] Johann von Goethe, Faust, 632-633. Trans.: “Our deeds, no less than our sufferings, cramp the course of our waking days.”
[3] R. W. Hildreth, “Reconstructing Dewey on Power,” p. 789
[4] Charles Pierce, The Fixation of Belief, p. 114
[5] Charles Pierce, The Fixation of Belief, p. 112; Pierce continues: “The habit is good or otherwise, according as it produces true conclusions from true premises or not; and an inference is regarded as valid or not, without reference to the truth or falsity of its conclusion specially, but according as the habit which determines it is such as to produce true conclusions in general or not.”
[6] Charles Pierce, The Fixation of Belief, p. 111; praising Lavoisier’s method, Pierce notes that “his way was to carry his mind into his laboratory, and to make of his alembics and cucurbits instruments of thought, giving a new conception of reasoning, as something which was to be done with one’s eyes open, by manipulating real things instead of words and fancies.”
[7] Charles Pierce, The Fixation of Belief, p. 114
[8] Charles Pierce, The Fixation of Belief, p. 114: “The irritation of doubt causes a struggle to attain a state of belief. I shall term this struggle inquiry.”
[9] Charles Pierce, The Fixation of Belief, p. 120: “To satisfy our doubts…it is necessary that a method should be found by which our beliefs may be caused by nothing human, but by some external permanency—by something upon which our thinking has no effect….Such is the method of science.” It is also important to stress the social character of Pierce’s scientific inquiry.
[10] See William James, “Great Men and the Environment.” I take James’ conception as far too cavalier: the process of successful intervention may itself be made, but I think by different means.
[11] This is certainly less so with James, though he brings his own host of problems viz. the individual.
[12] See John Patrick Diggins, “Pragmatism and its limits,” p. 213: “For all his organic metaphors about ‘growth,’ Dewey rarely dealt with the question of human motivation.”
[13] For Dewey, reconstruction means taking the findings of scientific inquiry—and especially Darwinian evolution—seriously. As Dewey notes, “Today Reconstruction of Philosophy is a more suitable title than Reconstruction in Philosophy. For the intervening events have sharply defined, have brought to a head, the basic postulate of the text: namely, that the distinctive office, problems and subjectmatter of philosophy grow out of stresses and strains in the community life in which a given form of philosophy arises, and that, accordingly, its specific problems vary with the changes in human life that are always going on and that at times constitute a crisis and a turning point in human history.” (John Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy, p. iii)
[14] The primary “enemy” in this theoretical project is the growth of neoliberalism. Please see my “Politics of the Myth” paper.
[15] Heinrich von Kleist, “Letter to Ulrike von Kleist, May 1799,” p. 418
[16] See also: “A person not in a position to draw up a plan for his own life is one not come of age, he may be a child under the guardianship of his parents or a grown man under the guardianship of fate. The first thing a man will do who has his independence is draw up such a plan.” (Heinrich von Kleist, “Letter to Ulrike von Kleist, May 1799,” p. 418)
[17] Heinrich von Kleist, “Letter to Wilhelmine von Zenge, 15 August 1801,” p. 422
[18] Heinrich von Kleist, “Letter to Wilhelmine von Zenge, 15 August 1801,” p. 422
[19] See Alfred Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. 209
[20] Alfred Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. 340
[21] Alfred Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. 351
[22] The way I use “Individual” here is from the perspective of experience: that is, closer to the cardinal value “one” rather than a traditional conception of individuality. On this front, James and Parmenides share more an intellectual affinity than they would admit: both are primarily concerned with the singular character of being. The emphasis is merely placed differently. That is, both are concerned with essential individual of things: for James, this individuality is reducible to the unique perspective on an environment: complete in itself, but unmoored from other individual moments. For Parmenides, this individualism is merely elected into a categorical truth: the experience of this universe as a whole is individual. To this end, the split between monism and pluralism is less a split and more a dinner-table disagreement: they share the same pantheistic appreciation for singularity, but emphasize different contours. The Cartesian binary is just one permutation of this general pantheism. They are all a part of the same picture: what, then, can disenthrall us from this picture?
[23] The problem of whether truth is made or found is analogous to the problem: “if a tree falls in a forest, and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” That is, it is an irreducibly human problem arising from—and responding to—human perspectives. Or, without the frame “man,” there isn’t a problem whatsoever: truth is silent through the void. To the extent that the “fact” of man is a truth lived out daily, ‘truth’ itself enters our conceptual categories as a longing, an anxiety, a passion—in a word, a need. To think of truth outside of the human condition is to think through a ghost of a universe that was never born—it rests undisturbed, and matters not.
[24] Imagine here a cascading wall of sand: “intervention” doesn’t stop the flow, but is akin to reaching one’s hand into the stream such that the sand falls sideways here, at an angle there, ultimately turning patterns throughout the air.
[25] See my paper “The Politics of the Myth,” p. 9
[26] The production of the myth means: Man’s daily creation is the manufacturing of purpose, meaning, and the perpetually perishing link that binds the two.
[27] For James, this in turn indicates that there is always some irreducible, heterogeneous, external element that frames our faiths and contributes to the selection and adoption of philosophies—there is a subjectivist aspect to all thought, as no philosophy is purely rational, and there is no “perspective from nowhere.” This is the principle of the “some”: “Radical empiricism and pluralism stand out for the legitimacy of the notion of some: each part of the world is in some ways connected, in some other ways not connected with its other parts…” (William James, A Pluralistic Universe, p. 79) It is important to note that, for Whitehead, as for Pierce, it is the reduction of this subjectivist element, the erasure of the “selection” viz. the “some,” that constitutes philosophy: “Philosophy is the self-correction by consciousness of its own initial excess of subjectivity….The task of philosophy is to recover the totality obscured by the selection.” (Alfred Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. 15) And further: “The chief danger to philosophy is narrowness in the selection of evidence. This narrowness arises from the idiosyncrasies and timidities of particular authors, of particular social groups, of particular schools of thought, of particular epochs in the history of civilization.” (Alfred Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. 337)
[28] It begs to be argued—and here is subject for further reflection—whether we can fully answer the question: “How can we leverage the existence/necessity of the lie against and genuine and resilient cultivation of belonging/homeness?” In other words, can one ever truly be at home in a lie? In some sense I want to say: no, but it is by lying that we remove ourselves from proximity to the lie. Two problems arise here: first, what lies contribute the most to homeness? And second, can homeness exist alongside the felt/known lie? See Nietzsche, Gay Science #124. The question here is how to make an agent that can sail along the void with laughter. Just like James’ pluralist, who requires something of a “tough hide,” reconciling the myth as the grounds of homeness with a corresponding attitude is an open question.
[29] See Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense,” p. 84: “What ten is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions…” I believe Nietzsche is right in his ultimate assessment of the nonmoral lie. The grindstone that the pragmatists offer is the question: “If me must lie, then what lies help us get along best?
[30] I use the term “resilience” here as Philip Pettit defines it in relation to contingent worlds. For Pettit, “A way things are in the actual world will be contingent in the graduated sense to the extent to which they are not found elsewhere, non-contingent to the extent to which they are found at other locations: found, that is, in other possible worlds. The less frequent their location in non-actual worlds, the more contingent they are; the more frequent, the less contingent. The limit of contingency will be realization in the actual world but nowhere else; the limit of non-contingency will be realization in every possible world—i.e., necessity. And there will be any number of in-between grades. The word I use for the property of figuring in the actual world and being relatively common across other possible worlds is ‘resilience.’” (Philip Pettit, “Resilience as the Explanadum of Social Theory,” p. 80)
[31] Whitehead’s notion of novelty is far looser and metaphysically broad; for Whitehead, novelty may only be understood in relation to creativity. For Whitehead, “‘Creativity’ is the universal of universals characterizing ultimate matter of fact. It is that ultimate principle by which the many, which are the universe disjunctively, become the one actual occasion, which is the universe conjunctively. It lies in the nature of things that the many enter into complex unity. ‘Creativity’ is the principle of novelty….The ultimate metaphysical principle is the advance from disjunction to conjunction, creating a novel entity other than the entities given in disjunction The novel entity is at once the togetherness of the ‘many’ which it finds, and also it is one among the disjunctive ‘many’ which it leaves…” (Alfred Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. 21)
[32] I do not want to say that the decision is “Social,” in the way that either Pierce or Dewey see it, but rather that it is experiential. What I have in mind is something like Hannah Arendt’s notion of “action” and “disclosure.” For Arendt, “In acting and speaking, men show who they are, reveal actively their unique personal identities and thus make their appearance in the human world.” (Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 179) To this end, “The fact that man is capable of action means that the unexpected can be expected from him, that he is able to perform what is infinitely improbable.” (Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 178)
[33] The problem of the decision’s locality is an adaptation of the pluralist principle: it is a problem of the infinitely limited perspective in an infinitely unlimited universe.
[34] Colin Koopman suggests that the limits of the pragmatic model are in part reducible to its insistence on providing a “general explanation of the origin of all our problems”: “we do not need a general explanation that shows us some common origin of all our problems when we would be better served by a diverse set of specific explanations of specific problems….Rather than a unifying explanatory origin, what we really need are diverse accounts of the emergence and descent of our diverse sets of problems.” (Colin Koopman, Pragmatism as Transition, p. 207) This is obviously to miss the fundamental nature of the problem, and insofar as he misses this, Koopman’s genealogical pragmatism is insightful, but ultimately useless.
[35] And, truly, only a god could ever lie well.
[36] Both conflict with others and the traditional Socratic notion of “civil war of the self.”
[37] The notion of the decision is derived from Whitehead: “The element of ‘givenness’ in things implies some activity procuring limitation. The word ‘decision’ does not here imply conscious judgment, through in some decisions consciousness will be a factor. The word is used in its root sense of a ‘cutting off.’” (Alfred Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. 43) My objective here is to radically individualize the decision, and in so doing to humanize it: the decision belongs purely to the realm of knowable experience.
[38] See, for instance, Thomas Kuhn’s take on expectation and experiment in his monumental The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
[39] The problem of experiment is made full in James’ notion of how a man “votes” for the best possible universe: “But which particular universe this is he cannot know for certain in advance; he only knows that if he makes a bad mistake the cries of the wounded will soon inform him of the fact.” (William James, “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life,” p. 626) Who could possibly be satisfied with the possibility of such destruction, all in the name of a little experimentation?
[40] Hannah Arendt, “Understanding in Politics,” p. 311: “Understanding precedes and succeeds knowledge….True understanding always returns to the judgments and prejudices which preceded and guided the strictly scientific inquiry. The sciences can only illuminate, but neither prove nor disprove, the uncritical preliminary understanding from which they start.”
[41] Alfred Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. 19
[42] See Ruth Putnam on James: “Given James’ radical empiricism, the view that anything is real is experienced and vice versa, values are real if and only if they are experienced.” (Ruth Putnam, “The Moral Impulse,” p. 69)
[43] An “unfolding” is the self-produced mythic narrative of the “subject-object” distinction, felt as Locke’s “perpetual perishing.”
[44] James adds far too much stress on the value of habit: “A tendency to act only becomes effectively ingrained in us in proportion to the uninterrupted frequency with which the actions actually occur, and the brain ‘grows’ to their use. When a resolve or a fine glow of feeling is allowed to evaporate without bearing practical fruit it is worse than a chance lost; it works so as positively to hinder future resolutions an demotions from taking the normal path of discharge.” (William James, “Habit,” p. 19
[45] I have in mind here something akin to Arendt’s notion of political action: “Each event in human history reveals an unexpected landscape of human deeds, sufferings, and new possibilities which together transcend the sum total of all willed intentions and the significance of all origins.” (Hannah Arendt, “Understanding in Politics,” p. 320) And further: “political action, like all action, is essentially always the beginning of something new; as such, it is, in terms of political science, the very essence of human freedom.” (Hannah Arendt, “Understanding in Politics,” pp. 320-321)
[46] Note the “must” in Ruth Putnam’s argument: “I have argued we must believe that we are, indeed, choosing, that our choices make a difference, and that there are standards by which we judge and are judged, standards that are themselves of human making and subject to human critique.” (Ruth Putnam, “The Moral Impulse,” p. 66) And further she argues: “to make sense of our moral lives we need to believe that there are other people with whom we share a common world and that our actions can make a difference to what that world will become.” (Ruth Putnam, “The Moral Impulse,” p. 68) It is this “musting” and “need” that I refer to as the myth of truth.
[47] See William James, “Private Diary Entry: April 30, 1870,” p. 7: “My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.”
[48] My sympathy is here derived from James’ concerns with the erasure of history by monism: As absolute…the world repels our sympathy because it has no history. As such, the absolute neither acts nor suffers, nor loves nor hates; it has no needs, desires, or aspirations, no failures or successes, friends or enemies, victories or defeats. All such things pertain to the world qua relative, in which our finite experiences lie, and whose vicissitudes alone have power to arouse our interests. (William James, A Pluralistic Universe, p. 48)
[49] Dewey’s conception of truth is too broad and ambivalent to be humanly serviceable. David Hildebrand offers a good summary: “Dewey defined it [truth] mainly as a way of coaxing interlocutors to pay some sympathetic attention to his theory of inquiry. ‘Like knowledge itself,’ Dewey writes, ‘truth is an experienced relation of things, and it has no meaning outside of such relations.” (David Hildebrand, “Dewey’s Pragmatism,” p. 69) John Patrick Diggins also offers an insight on the open nature of Dewey’s “truth”: “The philosopher Dewey advised that we cannot know anything until we experience it and then we do not really know for sure because events are contingent and experience unrepeatable in a world of change and transition.” (John Patrick Diggins, “Pragmatism and Its Limits,” p. 217)
[50] I here want to chasten James’ robust conception of truth, drawn from Pragmatism:
[51] See William James, Pragmatism’s Conception of Truth, p. 430: “The truth of an idea is not a stagnant property inherent in it. truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events. Its verity is in fact an event a process: the process namely of its verifying itself, its veri-fication. Its validity is the process of its valid-ation.”
[52] The definition of resilience I here propose to use fundamentally connects with James proposition: “ideas (which themselves are but parts of our experience) become true just in so far as they help us to get into satisfactory relation with other parts of our experience…” (William James, Pragmatism, p. 512) And further: “The true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief, and good, too, for definite, assignable reasons.” (William James, Pragmatism, p. 520)
[53] Hilary Putnum offers a good summation of what this mode of experience looked like for James, and of which I want to theoretically draw: “The advantage of pragmatism over traditional ‘foundationalist’ epistemology, in James’ view, is that the way in which pragmatist philosophers answer skeptical doubts is the way in which doubts are answered in practice, by appealing to tests that in fact work in our lives.” (Hilary Putnam, “Pragmatism and Realism,” p. 47) And for Dewey, “In order to be able to attribute a meaning to concepts, one must be able to apply them to existence. Now it is by means of action that this application is made possible. And the modification of existence which results from this application constitutes the true meaning of concepts.” (John Dewey, “The Development of American Pragmatism,” p. 43)
[54] See Alfred Whitehead, The Concept of Nature, pp. 143-144.
[55] Of course, James and Pierce differ in important ways on the problem of truth. Principally, Pierce thought truth was applicable only as a measurement of scientific validity/inquiry, while James opted for a far more expansive and broader definition enumerated in Pragmatism: “There can be no difference anywhere that doesn’t make a difference elsewhere—no difference in abstract truth that doesn’t express itself in a difference in concrete fact and in conduct consequent upon that fact, imposed on somebody, somehow, somewhere, and somewhen. The whole function of philosophy ought to be to find out what definite difference it will make to you and me, at definite instants of our life, if this world-formula or that world-formula be the true one.” (Williams James, “Pragmatism,” p. 508) And further: “As a rule we disbelieve all fact and theories for which we have no use.” (William James, The Will To Believe, p. 722)
[56] The definition of resilience I here propose to use in relation to homeness fundamentally connects with James’ proposition: “ideas (which themselves are but parts of our experience) become true just in so far as they help us to get into satisfactory relation with other parts of our experience…” (William James, Pragmatism, p. 512) And further: “The true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief, and good, too, for definite, assignable reasons.” (William James, Pragmatism, p. 520)
[57] To this end, every intervention evangelizes a mythology. Evangelism is different than imperialism, however, in the manner by which force is instrumentalized. See Dewey on force.
[58] I derive this from Pierce, “The Fixation of Belief,” p. 111: “The object of reasoning is to find out, from the consideration of what we already know, something else which we do not know. Consequently, reasoning is good if it be such as to give a true conclusion from true premises, and not otherwise.”
[59] See William James, “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life,” p. 625: “There is but one unconditional commandment, which is that we should seek incessantly, with fear and trembling, so to vote and to act as to bring about the very largest total universe of good which we can see.” I would agree, but would add: we achieve this within the purview of the myth. See further Alfred Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. 11: “every proposition refers to a universe exhibiting some general systematic metaphysical character.”
[60] I derive my conception of the aesthetic from Dewey, but attempt to make it more serviceable in terms of conversion. For Dewey, “Art is the living and concrete proof that man is capable of restoring consciously, and thus on the plan of meaning, the union of sense, need, impulse and action characteristic of the live creature….Wherever conditions are such as to prevent the act of production from being an experience in which the whole creature is alive and in which he possesses his living through enjoyment, the product will lack something of being esthetic.” (John Dewey, Art as Experience, pp. 26-27) See further: “The moral function of art itself is to remove prejudice, do away with the scales that keep the eye from seeing, tear away the veils due to wont and custom, perfect the power to perceive.” (John Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 338)
[61] The aesthetic experience is synonymous with the phenomenon of conversion. The aesthetic engages attitudes and dispositions: it is a reworking of the commitments—beliefs, for James—that sustain our truths.
[62] Compare to Dewey’s idea of criticism, for instance. As Robert Westbrook has noted, for Dewey, “Critical appraisal produced gods different from those of initial immediate value, goods funded with the meaning supplied by inquiry into their antecedents and consequences….The function of criticism was to subject immediate values to this sort of inquiry and replace them with reflective values.” (Robert Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy, p. 370)
[63] It is the incitement of our “passional nature,” to borrow from James: “Our passional nature not only lawfully may, but must, decide an option between propositions, whenever it is a genuine option that cannot by its nature be decided on intellectual grounds…” (William James, “The Will to Believe,” p. 723
[64] In other words, the decision viz. aesthetic experience opens up the problem of conversion. I am less concerned with exploring how to convert to this or that end, and more in the architecture of the phenomenon—though the former question is vital, and requires further thought.
[65] I have in mind here something akin to Dewey’s definition of force. For Dewey, it is “force all the way down,” so to speak; Hildreth argues that, “Knowledge, for Dewey, is a function of experimental inquiry. We cannot gain knowledge without reconstructing problematic situations and without, most importantly, taking action to test hypotheses.” (R. W. Hildreth, “Reconstructing Dewey on Power,” p. 789) It is by way of force that social inquiry is performed and problems solved.
[66] Homeness, in this manner, is haunted by what James would call the fact of radical empiricism: ““radical empiricism allows that the absolute sum-total of things may never be actually experienced or realized, in that shape at all, and that a disseminated, distributed, or incompletely unified appearance is the only form that reality may yet have achieved.” (William James, A Pluralistic Universe, p. 44)
[67] I disagree fundamentally with James and Dewey on the role of the individual in the environment. James Albrecht Summarizes Dewey’s concept of individual interventions: “This model of experience implies both that individuality provides an element of novelty that is indispensable in the reform of environmental circumstances, and that individuality flourishes only when environmental conditions supply the necessary opportunities.” (James Albrecht, Reconstructing Individualism, p. 185) I want to rather argue for the ability of an individual to move beyond “opportunity,” and rather turn to the more Machiavellian problem of what it would look like to make opportunities, to invite them.
[68] This obviously needs much more work, but I want to somehow link this notion to the macro-treatment of James’ anti-imperialism in Alex Livingston’s manuscript.
[69] See John Dewey, “Force and Coercion,” p. 251: “there is always a possibility that what passes as a legitimate use of force may be so wasteful as to be really a use of violence; and per contra that measures condemned as resource to mere violence may, under the given circumstances, represent an intelligent utilization of energy.”
[70] The great imperial myth is: monism. What I have in mind here, and what needs to be greatly expanded, is the appropriation of the Hegelian Master-Slave dialectic as 1) purged of its position within the Hegelian framework, and 2) thought of in terms of homeness and doubt.
[71] Again, compare to Dewey’s notion. As Melvin Rogers has noted, “For him [Dewey], conflict is between some portion of an agent’s values, or between the agent’s values and those of the other members of the situation of concern, or between some values expressed by a more generalized community. The immediate identification of conflict—that is, the recognition that these two values cannot be actualized concurrently—means that the agent…must engage in the process of reflection to find a resolution.” (Melvin Rogers, The Undiscovered Dewey, p. 164) I rather see conflict as the opposite of resilience, as a form of doubt.
[72] Another important voice on the nature of the conflict I am trying to induce is Richard Rorty, who summarizes concerns felt by theorists such as William Connolly and Danielle Allen: “the principle source of conflict between human communities is the belief that I have no reason to justify my beliefs to you, and none in finding out what alternative beliefs you may have, because you are, for example, an infidel, a foreigner, a woman, a child, a slave, a pervert, or an untouchable.” (Richard Rorty, “Universality and Truth,” p. 15)
[73] I would argue separately—and this needs to be elaborated—that the insistence for James and Dewey to move beyond “grounds” and toward “consequences” is itself unfounded, as the ultimate “grounds” upon which pragmatism rests are the grounds of “workability.”
[74] See my paper on Wittgenstein, “Changing Frames.”
[75] Alfred Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. 338. What I mean by this is: to the extent that some myths “win out better” than others, and those myths abide by the criteria of evangelicalism I have enumerated, then the tools of persuasion made by the individual to convert others are perfectly legitimate. As human beings, who, in ultimate, can reject the most persuasive argument? Persuasion is here considered a subspecies of novelty, much like James Albrecht treats the making of Deweyan public opinion: “forging a public opinion that could provide the basis for a recovered community requires new symbols to communicate the shared public interest, so that it may become operative intellectually and emotionally as a shaping motive in the activities of individuals in their local communities.” (James Albrecht, Reconstructing Individualism, p. 256)
[76] Please see my “Politics of the Myth” Paper.
[77] See John Patrick Diggins, “Pragmatism and Its Limits,” p. 212: “The problem of community has always been the problem of individual autonomy and diversity. But since Dewey denies dualism, he sees little distinction between the community and the individual.”
[78] Rather than seeing democracy as an enterprise in collective experimentation, for instance, I contend that democracy is the realization of a certain mythology in my “Politics of the Myth” paper.
[79] Denis Dideot, “Salon of 1767,” pp. 198-199