{"id":512,"date":"2009-02-18T22:42:49","date_gmt":"2009-02-19T02:42:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.therowboat.com\/?p=512"},"modified":"2009-02-19T09:05:14","modified_gmt":"2009-02-19T13:05:14","slug":"searching-for-truth-force-in-pragmatism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/2009\/02\/searching-for-truth-force-in-pragmatism\/","title":{"rendered":"Searching for Truth-Force in Pragmatism"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club<\/em> was a happy discovery for $1.50 at the otherwise frustrating Salvation Army at Bedford and North 7th in Brooklyn. As my bedtime reading for the last few weeks, for better or worse, it has been more thought-provoking than sleep-inducing. It tells the early story of pragmatism as a distinctly American philosophy, built out of the remains of the Civil War and, perhaps, ended by the self-certainty of the Cold War. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., William James, Charles Peirce, and John Dewey are the characters. For me, well-fed on his Varieties<\/em> and a book of his essays I once pilfered from my father, James is the star.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, my head has of course been rapt in theories of nonviolence, inevitably summarized in Gandhi’s notion of satyagraha<\/em>\u2014truth-force\u2014as well as in American adaptations. The overlap between this classic pragmatism and satyagraha<\/em> are considerable. And indeed, both played central roles in the making of 20th century American progressive politics, in progressivism and the civil rights movement, respectively. Both, furthermore, play a part in the politics promised by the Obama administration. Think, for instance, of Obama’s well-acknowledged debt to the nonviolent legacy of civil rights<\/a> and his pragmatist penchant for constructing public truths out of performance.<\/p>\n

The connection between these systems breaks down\u2014and for roughly this reason a friend recently described pragmatism to me as “demonic.” Menand puts the problem this way:<\/p>\n

Pragmatism explains everything about ideas except why a person would be willing to die for one. (p. 375)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In the brand new book Acts of Conscience: Christian Nonviolence and Modern American Democracy<\/em>, Joseph Kip Kosek adds:<\/p>\n

The radical Christian pacifists found the pragmatist view incomplete, despite their alliances with Dewey and other pragmatists on specific issues. They held that the method of weighing relative moral goods and reserving absolute commitment provided a shaky foundation during crises, namely crises of violence. (p. 9)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There is, at the heart of the pragmatist philosophical program, a fatal flaw of nihilism. In the end, it offers nothing to which we can hitch our lives. But can truth-force save pragmatism? Should we bother trying?<\/p>\n

To begin, I’ve been assembling a list of common patches of ground shared by pragmatism and nonviolence.<\/p>\n