"An Indonesian tourist was visiting his old friend who worked in Vienna and took him to the Währinger Ostfriedhof. Walking in the graveyard, he heard the Third Symphony playing backward. When it was over, the Second Symphony started playing backward, and then the First. However, he couldn't listen well to Schiller's An die Freude or Ode to Joy.'What’s going on?' he asked his friend.'O don't worry, it's common, it’s Beethoven,' replied his friend, 'he’s recomposing his symphony.'”"When it comes to many matters of fact, old-fashioned absolutism still usually trumps newfangled relativism," said Jasmine as she watched the red carpet followed by Charpentier's Marche en rondeau symphony."When it comes to values, however, says Julian Baggini, relativism has more genuine devotees. Throwing up our hands is an understandable response if we believe that moral judgements involve facts about the rightness and wrongness of actions. Facts are established by appeal to evidence and observation. No facts are inconvenient for the truth. The way to truth is not to look for an impossible neutral view that takes us outside any given network of beliefs. Power doesn’t speak the truth; truth must speak to power. Baggini added that to become smarter, we must understand the ways we are dumb. For a better morality, we need better knowledge, it needs to be understood holistically.On 1908, A. O. Lovejoy was taking William James’s 1898 essay on ‘Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results’ as marking the inauguration of pragmatism as a completed doctrine.The terms pragmatism, pragmatic, and pragmatist are commonly used to denote a commitment to success in practical affairs, to ‘getting things done’. According to Robert B. Talisse and Scott F. Aikin, pragmatists are driven not by principle, but by the desire to achieve their ends. Hence pragmatists have little interest in abstraction, idealization, nitpicking argument, or theory of any sort; they have no time for these because they are fixed on practical tasks. A pragmatist is hence a bargainer, a negotiator, a doer, rather than a seeker of truth, a wonderer, or a thinker. We might say, then, that pragmatism is the opposite of philosophy.Is pragmatism a philosophical theory? Not exactly. It is difficult to point to a single philosophical claim to which all pragmatists subscribe. It is also, not bound to any particular cultural or historical milieu. Pragmatism in the sense which concerns us is the name for something distinctively philosophical, say Talisse and Aikin. Is pragmatism a school of philosophy orga- nized around a single doctrine in the way that we might say that, for example, Stoicism is a school? Not quite. Although there are doctrinal similarities and channels of influence among all pragmatist philosophers, the differences among them make it difficult to see them as constituting a school.Philosophers who embrace the term pragmatism, disagree over central and substantive philosophical matters. They also disagree about what pragmatism is. Some say that pragma- tism is a thesis about meaning, reference, communication, or language itself. Others claim that pragmatism is an epistemological proposal, an account of knowledge, belief, justification, inquiry, or truth. Some hold it is a metaphysical perspective, a view about reality, nature, what there is, what we should say there is, or what we should say about what natural science says there is. Still others deny that prag- matism is a philosophical account of anything in particular. Among these philosophers, some say pragmatism is a method of doing philosophy. Others claim it is a stance one might take toward traditional philosophical problems. According to some, pragmatism is an attitude one takes toward philosophy itself. Some have held that pragmatism is a kind of intellectual therapy, an antidote to the human compulsion to obsess over the traditional questions of philosophy. In light of all of this, Talisse and Aikin agree with Richard Rorty, who observed that pragmatism is ‘a vague, ambiguous, and overworked word’.Knowing is a connection between a knower and a truth. The question of truth is implicated in the question of the nature of knowledge. Pursuing a clear view of truth is not merely instrumental to our pursuit of an account of knowledge. Truth is itself intrinsically interesting and worth getting clear about. Our beliefs are things we take to be true. Truth is a success term. That is, when we have true beliefs, we have gotten things right, and when we have false ones, we have missed the mark. A further regulative thought about truths is that they not only should not contradict each other, but they also should hang together in a coherent fashion. Truth, as a good, is not intelligible unless it is integrated in our lives.Pragmatism are species of empiricism—the view that all knowledge has its source in experience; additionally, all pragmatisms endorse some style of naturalism—the view that the world investigated by empirical science is the only world there is. Pragmatism is also concerned with action. Pragmatists are concerned with making action more successful. The word 'pragmatic' has existed in English since the 1500s, a word borrowed from French and ultimately derived from Greek via Latin. The Greek word pragma, meaning business, deed, or act, is a noun derived from the verb prassein, to do.Charles Peirce, an American polymath, was the first one who identified pragmatism. Pragmatism began in the United States in the 1870s. Its origins are often attributed to philosophers Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey. The later, views that pragmatism entails ‘democracy is a way of life’. What kind of ‘way of life’ is democracy?Deweyan democracy through the following characterization: Deweyan democracy is substantive insofar as it rejects any attempt to separate politics and ethics. Dewey held that the democratic political order is essentially a moral order, and, further, democratic participation is an essential constituent of a ‘truly human way of living’. Dewey rejects the idea that participation consists simply in voting and petitioning in service of one’s preferences. Thus, Dewey held that democratic participation is essentially communicative, it consists in the willingness of citizens to engage in activity by which they may ‘convince and be convinced by reason’ and come to realize ‘values prized in common’. Dewey thought that such communicative processes unlike other forms of perfectionism, which hold that the project of forming citizens’ dispositions is a task only for the state, Dewey’s perfectionism is, like his conception of democracy, deep; that is, on the Deweyan view, the perfectionist project is a task for all modes of human association. Dewey held that ‘The struggle for democracy has to be maintained on as many fronts as culture has aspects: political, economic, international, educational, scientific and artistic, and religious’. He saw the task of democracy to be that of ‘making our own politics, industry, education, our culture generally, a servant and an evolving manifestation of democratic ideals’. For Dewey, then, all social associations should be aimed at the realization of his distinctive vision of human flourishing. For Dewey, then, all social associations should be aimed at the realization of his distinctive vision of human flourishing. This aspiration is found throughout Dewey’s corpus; in his writings on politics, education, psychology, religion, culture, and art, we are told that growth is the ultimate and proper end.So, do we know what it is for humans to flourish? Given the state of our moral knowledge, no one yet knows which conception of human flourishing is correct. Talisse and Aikin suggest that a state which imposes on its citizens a false or defective conception of human flourishing inflicts serious moral harm on them. The project of instituting ‘democracy as a way of life’ by designing all institutions of human association so that they promote growth is at best premature.Pragmatism views language and thought as tools for prediction, problem-solving, and action, rather than describing, representing, or mirroring reality. Pragmatists contend that most philosophical topics—such as the nature of knowledge, language, concepts, meaning, belief, and science—are all best viewed in terms of their practical uses and successes. Pragmatism sees no fundamental difference between practical and theoretical reason, nor any ontological difference between facts and values. Pragmatist ethics is broadly humanist because it sees no ultimate test of morality beyond what matters for us as humans.Democracy as we know it is an inspiring but perpetually troubled endeavor, a difficult, ongoing struggle with no clear outcome in sight, says John Medearis. When Anthony Trollope was writing Phineas Finn—British politics novel of the 1860s, including voting reform, secret ballot, rotten boroughs, and Irish tenant-right, as well as Finn's romances with women of fortune, which would secure his financial future—a great deal of democratic trouble centered on radical heirs to Chartism who challenged the political domination of landed and high bourgeois classes. These efforts were threatening enough to prod both Liberals and Conservatives to compete doggedly for working-class support.If the democratic ambition is collective, egalitarian management of the institutions and forces that shape our lives, each of these situations includes an element of the opposite, a spiraling loss of such control or an inability to exert it. It would be wrong to say that democratizing forces are absent. Movements, politicians, and ordinary people have tried to regain some democratic restraint on finance, and the public fitfully set limits on military behemoths. Still, democracy seems at best an ongoing struggle with phenomena like these, not a victory over them. Yet neither dismay, nor resignation, nor retrenchment in the face of these democratic troubles is warranted. The democratic path, according to this view, simply is continuous oppositional exertion, without any expectation of transcendent victory.A political vision like this one, stressing the continual struggle to recapture runaway social forces, wherever we find them—one emphasizing opposition, conflict, and tension—may strike some people, like Trollope’s character Jane Bunce, as a promise that democracy will never offer more than 'dry bread and cross words.' In Phineas Finn, Bunce’s husband, a copying journeyman, trade unionist, and reformer, survives on jail food for a week after being arrested during protests outside Parliament for the secret ballot. This experience, too, is the very stuff of democratic struggle.Democratic action, says Medearis, responds perennially to apparently untamable wars, sclerotic bureaucracies, racial caste systems, and runaway markets. It persists uneasily alongside these refractory institutions and forces, which resist and make democracy precarious. These sorts of social structures and forces as alienated. They deeply overshadow ordinary people’s capacities to act, while they provide a means for some people to oppress others. At the same time, crucially, these forces and institutions are not external ones, confronting the mass of people from outside, but the by-product of the same people’s varied collective activities. They are, in a certain social science vernacular, reproduced by these activities. Because democratic action continually struggles to maintain egalitarian control over the social world that our shared activities constantly reproduce—because alienated institutions and forces are a persistent, constantly renewed challenge—democracy is perennially oppositional.The word ‘opposition’ is used daily to account for a variety of developments; but its many meanings have not been systematically related to the differences among the political systems of the world, says Jean Blondel. Meanwhile, many country analyses examine the nature of political opposition in each particular case. Opposition is a ‘dependent’ concept. This means that the character of the opposition is tied to the character of the government. The notion of opposition is thus, so to speak, parasitic on ideas of government, of rule, of authority: indeed, the existence of a state is a necessary condition for the existence of opposition and it could indeed be added that a distinction should be made between strong and weak states, between states that can and states that cannot fully implement their decisions. One might therefore seem entitled to draw the conclusion that the only way to discover the true character of opposition is by examining first government, rule, authority, or state.Political opposition varies markedly in strength and character, not just between but among authoritarian and liberal regimes. In authoritarian polities, the government can be brutal or mildly repressive and, in the latter case, allow some groups and even parties to express a degree of (limited) dissent, only to clamp down if this opposition goes beyond what is regarded as ‘acceptable’ bounds. Varying degrees of repression may thus result in much of the real opposition being forced underground and the tolerated opposition being mainly represented by rather weak groups. In liberal politics, on the other hand, institutions and social cleavages have a profound effect on the character of opposition: at one extreme, opposition can reflect the existence of communal groups, parties being mere ‘epiphenomena’; at the other extreme, where there are no or almost no communal divisions, and social cleavages are cross-cutting or weak, parties are likely to be strong and some of the most important groups at least will tend to operate closely with the parties.The strength of opposition depends on its cohesiveness. In authoritarian regimes, cohesiveness is likely to be low, at least except for short periods, since, when the opposition is cohesive, the regime is in imminent danger of collapse. As the opposition is not likely to be cohesive, the building of opposition (its ‘repositioning’) is likely to pose vast problems of institution-building if and when the political system moves away from authoritarianism. In liberal politics, political opposition is likely to be cohesive where there is one decision center only and where institutions rather than social cleavages dominate the political system. Not surprisingly, opposition is given full recognition in situations of this type and it is indeed regarded as having a status almost equal to that of the government which it is able to challenge and indeed to replace.We will continue our discussion in the next episode, bi 'idhnillah."
Citations & References:
- Robert B. Talisse & Scott F. Aikin, Pragmatism: A Guide for the Perplexed, 2008, Continuum International
- John Medearis, Why Democracy is Oppositional, 2015, Harvard University Press
- Jean Blondel, Political Opposition in the Contemporary World, Government and Opposition Journal, 1997, Vol. 3, Iss. 4, John Wiley and Sons
