Nietzsche and the Pragmatists
RORTY, RICHARD
Perspectives NIETZSCHE AND THE PRAGMATISTS By Richard Rorty Philosophers in the United States have, in the last few decades, developed a new account of the place of Nietzsche in the...
...That is, of course, an utterly un-Nietzschean vision...
...to the expansion of social justice and freedom can be seen as an alternative attempt to overcome and supplant what Nietzsche called "Socratic man...
...The pragmatists' shift in emphasis from individual greatness...
...This is not a capacity a human being can exercise on his own, independent of the society in which he lives, but that develops as the complexity of the behavior of one's fellow citizens increases...
...The biggest difference between Nietzsche and the American pragmatiste, I think, is that Nietzsche, like Heidegger, saw his own philosophical adventure of self-overcoming as linked to the history of the West, as having world-historical importance...
...is not an end in itself...
...In place of "life" (or "power" in Nietzsche's later works) Dewey substituted the notion of "growth," by which he meant something like the capacity for ever richer and fuller experience...
...For the pragmatists, there is no connection between worth of democracy and the Socratic-Platonic precept that human perfection was a matter of cognition...
...Socrates was, in Nietzsche's eyes, the figure who saddled our civilization with the idea that the point of being human is to know...
...We see the differences between Nietzsche's most eminent disciple, Heidegger, and James' successor, John Dewey, in the same way...
...to supplant Truth as our goal...
...Rather, it was the Emersonian and Whitmanesque vision of a democratic, egalitarian civilization...
...For Dewey, then, looking at science through the optic of art means looking at science as a means of creating a society that would itself be a work of art...
...Perspectives NIETZSCHE AND THE PRAGMATISTS By Richard Rorty Philosophers in the United States have, in the last few decades, developed a new account of the place of Nietzsche in the intellectual history of the West...
...The only ambition they had for pragmatism was that it be of some use in the construction of such a society...
...Heidegger and Dewey are at one in their attitude toward the Western philosophical tradition, but utterly different in their sense of the possibilities open to a post-Socratic culture...
...Nietzsche and the pragmatists, by contrast, held that knowledge ??”the formation of reliable beliefs...
...We can no longer believe that some larger power is on the side of those who pursue knowledge...
...The only such ambition they had was for their country, which they saw as the likeliest place for a social-democratic, egalitarian, romantically hopeful society to emerge...
...Yet that need not lead to pessimism, or to a sense of tragedy, or to an abandonment of Christian, utilitarian and democratic notions...
...His vision of such a society was an egalitarian and pluralist one, in which mutual tolerance would be combined with an endlessly proliferating variety of styles of life and thought...
...But for the pragmatists there was no "optic" exactly corresponding to what Nietzsche called "life...
...James and Dewey, by contrast, were free of world-historical ambition, either for themselves or for philosophy...
...The quest is no longer for knowledge of a nonhuman reality, but for something that, if it ever comes to exist, will be an entirely human creation...
...The only thing James and Dewey thought we have to give up when we renounce this idea is what Nietzsche called metaphysische Trost...
...We have come to think of Nietzsche as the most eminent disciple of Emerson, and as the European version of the pragmatism of another of Emerson's disciples, William James...
...We see the differences between Nietzsche and James as the differences between two philosophers who agreed that "the age of Socratic man is over," but who disagreed about what should succeed that age...
...Beliefs are, as Peirce said, "habits of action," and the formation and correction of beliefs is simply a way of getting what we want...
...an account that often strikes our French and German colleagues as pointlessly paradoxical...
...Nietzsche's "Overman," Heidegger's "Poets and Thinkers...
...For the pragmatists, what we see when we "look at science through the optic of art, and at art through that of life" (the words are Nietzsche's) is human culture aiming at nothing greater or nobler than happiness...
...It allows human freedom ??”taken not in a metaphysical sense, but in the concrete political sense of the ability of human beings to live together without oppressing one another...
...James and Dewey shared neither Nietzsche's distrust of Christianity nor his distrust of democracy as "Christianity naturalized...
...As a good American, and as someone who thinks of himself as a pragmatist, I am of course inclined to see pragmatism as having duplicated all the best of Nietzsche while avoiding all the bad...
...Their alternative to Socratism was not a return to a pre-Socratic, tragic sense of life...
...Nietzsche thought of Socratism as linked to democracy...
Vol. 80 • May 1997 • No. 9
