The Resources of Rationality: A Response to the Postmodern Challenge
by Calvin O. Schrag (Indiana U. Press, 1992)
Reading Notes--Adam Kissel
Introduction
Kant - critiques reason, segments science/morality/art
Hegel - tries to reunify them, first with ideas about community; later by investing in the rational subject
Habermas - goes back to the early Hegel, to unify in terms of pragmatics
Lyotard - disagrees with Habermas, and says that dissensus, not consensus, is the real end of discourse
Rorty - tries to find a middle path between Habermas and Lyotard: community without metanarrative
The "End of Philosophy" people = Rorty, Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard (esp. his The Postmodern Condition)
The "Transformation of Philosophy" people:
'Systematic Proposals' = Davidson, Dummett, Putnam, Apel, Habermas
'Hermeneutics, Rhetoric, Narrative' = Gadamer, Ricoeur, MacIntyre, Blumenberg, Taylor
Rorty - takes up philosophy before Kant segmented the spheres; can move past Hegel's/Habermas' preoccupation with Kant. In this sense Rorty gets past the foundationalism that worries about the spheres and how they come to be together or apart. Rorty "enjoins us to live with plurality, change, difference, and incommensurable discourse" (6).
Schrag will engage the postmodern idea by keeping in mind the idea that rationality is a transversal praxis.
Ch. 1: The Challenge of Postmodernism
Nietzsche and Heidegger - often referenced as "architects of postmodernism" (15).
Gadamer - takes a right-wing branch of Heidegger: tradition, universal hermeneutics
Derrida - takes a left-wing branch of Heidegger: deconstruction
Husserl - critiques positivism/scientism and reminds us to "return to the lifeworld" in which reason is primarily a means. But then postmodernists ambiguously despise many parts of reason.
Deleuze on Proust: remembrance = repetition with difference ["deepening," per Booth], as opposed to Plato's theory of recollection (e.g. in Meno).
Deleuze: creates "a politics of desire." Foucault: creates "a politics of power" (35). For Foucault power and knowledge reinforce each other. "We have noted the emergence of certain ethical imperatives in Foucault's 'care for the self' project, indicating that genealogy may have normative resources wherewith to critique the constellations of power that slide into domination and oppression. Contrary to some interpreters, the vocabulary of critique, emancipation, and creative self-formation may not be all that foreign to Foucault's thought" (39).
Many postmodernists are too quick to jump to certain kinds of conclusions, but: "Dissensus, incommensurability, irretrievable conflicts of interpretations, and hermeneutical nihilism . . . are not necessary consequences of plurality and multiplicity." (33)
MacIntyre - notes that challenges to the tradition cannot exist without the tradition--one cannot completely deny tradition without acknowledging not only its power in some way but also its value to some extent for communication.
Ch. 2: Rationality as Praxial Critique
Descartes - rational method: clear and distinct ideas as criteria for judgment
Cavell - takes a more rhetorical stance, letting criteria be more shaded
Lyotard - stresses the shaded part of criteria; says that criteria are always and only local; criteria cannot judge themselves
Schrag's solution: "rationality as praxial critique," i.e., eliding the gap between theory and practice. Rationality as local (antifoundational) but solid:
It is not without a measure of irony that the deconstructionist frame of mind, in its subversion of all contents of meaning and reference, makes purchases on the very logocentric belief system that it purposrts to undermine. It presupposes that claims of reason, performances of meaning and reference, and a standpoint for critique can be secured only on the basis of logocentric and foundationalist premises. But there is no necessity that ties rational and critical discourse to such premises. Indeed, there are philosophical discourses in the tradition that make do without logocentric foundations. The sweeping indictment of the tradition as logocentric and foundationalist is based on a conveniently selected canon. There are resources for rational critique and assessment other than those of a logocentric sort. (59)
In other words: we must recognize that we have pre-existing judgments (see also p. 64 n. 28: cf. Vorhabe - "fore-having," Heidegger; Gadamer on prejudices; Dewey on habit; Newman on antecedents), and yet do the best we can to have reason and criteria and system anyway--without putting too much emphasis on these abstractions over against the real phenomena of life. Cf. Gk. κρινω [krino]. Criteria need at least be sufficient. At the same time critique can turn back against the pre-existing judgments and reshape them (cf. Ricoeur on distanciation).
Ch. 3: The Consequences of Interpretation
The hermeneutics of suspicion tend to present their own grand narratives, so these should be suspected too.
There is no good reason why a hermeneut should be frightened by nostalgia. The highly contagious postmodernist phobia about nostalgia needs to be cured rather than facilely accepted as an argument against any project of recollection or recovery. The remembrance of things past can be pruned of its essentialist sedimentations, and one can come to recognize the display of intentionality and the disclosive power of nostalgic reminiscence. (73)
Truth, because of our limited perspective, to us seems incurably partial and plural:
From radical hermeneutics we learn that [for humans] there is no truth at the bottom of being, no final, bedrock, correct interpretation [because of the limits of understanding and of expression] that supplies the Letztebegrunding. The search for such is misguided . . . On the other hand, the hurried and facile claim of relativism that every interpretation is as good as every other is equally misguided. As no finite mind is privy to an absolute, strictly univocal, and timeless interpretive truth, so no finite mind can achieve a vision of all interpretations, which is required for the judgment that all interpretive claims are relative. In the end, the fashionable re-treading of the absolutism versus relativism debate leads to a conceptual wearisomeness and eventually surfaces as a . . . red herring. The disputants in the debate unwittingly assume that the abstract logocentric theory of truth is a genuine philosophical donnée, either to be accepted or rejected, only to find that no significant redemptions can be secured from purchases on such an abstract philosophical problematic. (75)
Schrag's answer, again: a transversal rationality that navigates among the interpretations without presupposing a logocentric basis for judgment.
Saussure - language-oriented analysis: looks mainly at signs; this approach is unnecessarily limiting for hermeneutics
Derrida and Ricoeur - respond to Saussure and bring the subject back into play. Derrida, "grammatology"; Ricoeur, "semantics of discourse."
Ch. 4: Narrative and the Claims of Reason
Narrative for some has become narratology, in which narrative becomes the new totalizing logos. But a moderate position takes logos as the gathering of multiple narratives for practical purposes. Language and texts are always tied to experience, which is in many ways pluralistic. Lyotard chooses "narrative knowledge" over "scientific knowledge" because narrative knowledge makes use of scientific knowledge, but scientific knowledge stands apart; the criteria used by narrative knowledge are unlike scientific criteria (98-99).
Narrative refers to (cf. the later Husserl and successors) lifeworld; cf. phenomenology; cf. American pragmatism (James etc.).
Ch. 5: Reason and Rhetoric
R "binds discourse with action" (116). Schrag notes the speckled history of rhetoric in relation to philosophy. But Schrag notes that reason "is transversal to the discourse of the two disciplines" (like what Aristotle shows), p. 119.
R in relation to pm: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, Gadamer, Ricoeur, Lyotard.
Gadamer - rhetoric and hermeneutics together. [cf. Augustine, Newman]
Communicative rhetoric fights off challenges of incommensurability to be a binding topos.
Rhetoric and knowledge and power (power has its many good parts), p. 127. Even the agonistic postmodernists are forced to agree that "we" are disagreeing with each other, 129.
Rhetoric/community/we-ness/dialogue/communication: "There are no undivided, solidified, hermetically sealed chunks of either commensurable or incommensurable discourse, of either consensus or dissensus" [though I disagree strongly] (135). Schrag faults Habermas for "the effort to privilege consensus as the proper end of discourse" (135), but I think Habermas here is correct.
R deals with "provisional" reasoning, so it fits very well with pm thinking.
Ch. 6: Transversal Rationality
--some interesting stuff about doxa.