Pragmatism and Social Philosophy

Exploring a Stream of Ideas from America to Europe

Michael G. Festl, Michael G. Festl

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000293920
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Pragmatism in Philosophy

This book explores the role that American pragmatism played in the development of social philosophy in 20th-century Europe.

The essays in the first part of the book show how the ideas of Peirce, James, and Dewey influenced the traditions of European philosophy, especially existentialism and the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, that emerged in the 20th century. The second part of the volume deals with current challenges in social philosophy. The essays here demonstrate how discussions of two core issues in social philosophy—the conception of social conflict and the public—can be enriched with pragmatist resources. In featuring both historical and conceptual perspectives, these essays provide a full picture of pragmatism's role in the development of Continental social philosophy.

Pragmatism and Social Philosophy will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working on American philosophy, social philosophy, and Continental philosophy.

1
Pragmatism’s Social Philosophy

New Tiles and New Currents

Michael G. Festl

A number of gaps have recently been filled in the mosaic depicting the history of pragmatism. This is especially true for the reception outside the United States. We now know of a fruitful reception of pragmatism in the Hispanic world (Pappas, 2011). We know that there have been “Cambridge Pragmatists”, Cambridge, England, notabene (Misak, 2016). Despite the mantra-like repeated ascription of pragmatism as the quintessentially American philosophy, such studies lay bare that pragmatism is anything but purely (Northern) American. It is not the gestalt American exceptionalism (if that ever existed) has assumed on the field of mind. Pragmatism is, and has been from the beginning, an international philosophy that happened to emerge in America and was then developed by engaging with a bustling and sprawling modernization, visible, most of all, in cities like Chicago and New York but also in, say, London, Paris, and Tokyo. Not only has pragmatism been conceived with tools forged outside the US, as its founders highlighted; from its very beginning, pragmatism has also been received with appreciation outside the US. This flies in the face of a reading of pragmatism’s reception which assumes that, especially in Europe, pragmatism had only been pulled to pieces, an assumption strengthening the hypotheses of pragmatism as America’s philosophical Sonderweg (separate path).

Nevertheless, plenty is yet to be done to get a fuller mosaic of pragmatism’s significance. This anthology attaches new tiles by focusing on pragmatism’s past and present contributions to social philosophy in Europe, especially France and Germany but also Poland, which, due to pragmatism’s studies on Polish immigrants in Chicago, has been an important reference almost from the beginning. A normative discipline inquiring how society ought to organize itself, social philosophy connects to ethics and political philosophy. Yet, opposed to traditional conceptions of especially ethics, it does not assume the existence of immutable values for organizing society, values in need of discovery and application. Rather, social philosophy holds that questions of value are connected to and should be (tentatively) decided in exchange with social facts, relations, habits, and institutions. Hence, it stays in touch with the social sciences, investigating the normative implications of the latter’s findings. Understood this way, the discipline is a product of sociology’s detachment from philosophy in the late 19th century; the German philosopher/sociologist Georg Simmel (1858–1918) was the first to use the term Sozialphilosophie in analytic fashion. Social philosophy is philosophy’s effort to stay connected to sociology despite the latter’s emancipation into an autonomous discipline. So, if philosophy is an octopus whose flexible limbs wriggle through the house of science, social philosophy is the limb that embraces sociology.

In the mosaic of pragmatism’s significance, the part on social philosophy is rather empty. Most tiles have been attached and are constantly reattached in the part on pragmatism’s epistemology, especially on truth. At the same time, pragmatism is congenial to social philosophy’s merging of parts of philosophy with parts of sociology. Arguing for a seamless connection between normative and empirical claims, pragmatism lends credibility to this merger. This explains the appreciative reception of pragmatism by Europe’s social philosophers, amply demonstrated in this anthology. No hostility to pragmatism comparable to European hostility in epistemology or metaphysics is visible in social philosophy. To the contrary, the emergence of social philosophy in Europe was profoundly influenced by pragmatist ideas. It goes too far to speak of the birth of social philosophy from the spirit of pragmatism but not much too far either. How much too far exactly is, I believe, a fruitful question for further research.

The anthology hosts nine chapters on pragmatism’s role in the forging of social philosophy, divided into three parts. The first part revolves around pragmatism’s reception in European philosophy from around the turn of the 20th century to the 1920s, the time social philosophy emerged. It runs the gamut of assessments, from hostile to friendly. James Campbell inquires the causes of the hostility with which pragmatism, especially in William James’s version, was met by European thinkers. To that end, he focuses on the critique of pragmatism by Paul Carus, a German philosopher who migrated to the US and was essential for the time’s world-wide reception of pragmatism (chapter 2). Dennis Sölch takes a look at Germany’s earliest reception of Ralph Waldo Emerson as a founding father of American pragmatism, laying bare affinities between pragmatism and European philosophy. Friedrich Nietzsche, a central reference point for social philosophers, notably Theodor W. Adorno, figures as Emerson’s central German reader in Sölch’s account (chapter 3). Moritz Gansen deals with French philosopher Jean Wahl’s appreciation and dissemination of William James and other pragmatists. Today almost forgotten, Wahl is instrumental in the relationship between pragmatism and social philosophy since he shaped the former’s reception by some of France’s most influential social philosophers (chapter 4).

The second part investigates pragmatism’s reception in European sociology. Claude Gautier and Emmanuel Renault draw an exciting, U-shaped curve of the value of pragmatism in French sociology: heavy trading at the turn of the 20th century until about 1920; lack of demand between the 1920s and the 1970s; and recovery in the 1980s, leading to two major research projects on pragmatism still underway (chapter 5). Simone Bernardi della Rosa uncovers affinities between Charles S. Peirce’s theory of habit and Pierre Bourdieu’s account of habitus. He shows how the notion of habit is crucial for undermining dichotomies and realizing the pragmatic maxim that only our actions, not our confessions, are a true guide to our values (chapter 6). Agnieszka Hensoldt focuses on the Polish sociologist Florian Znaniecki. She not only illuminates Znaniecki’s direct affiliations with pragmatism, especially The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, coauthored with W.I. Thomas, but also takes a look at the late Znaniecki’s shaping of sociology in Poland (chapter 7).

The third part is devoted to pragmatism’s relation to the foremost school of social philosophy today: the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. Kenneth W. Stikkers investigates pragmatism’s role in the emergence of social constructivism in Europe through the work of Max Scheler and Wilhelm Jerusalem. Thereby, Stikkers sheds light on the early Frankfurt School’s reception of pragmatism, which was formed by Scheler’s encounter with James’s work (chapter 8). Arvi Särkelä tracks the major events in the Frankfurt School’s reception of pragmatism from the 1920s to today. He explains that the Frankfurt School’s continuous interest in pragmatism, from Horkheimer, Marcuse, and Adorno to Apel and Habermas to Honneth and Jaeggi, has been sparked by commonalities between the two schools, especially the ambition for social transformation (chapter 9). Such commonalities are also important to Cedric Braun’s contribution. Braun focuses on John Dewey’s German Philosophy and Politics and its argument that Immanuel Kant’s dualistic philosophy opened the gates to German militarism. He shows how Axel Honneth defends Dewey’s account from the perspective of the Frankfurt School against German advocates of Kant, tapping a novel source for researching the relationship between pragmatism and the Frankfurt School (chapter 10).

After concentrating on the period from the 1890s to the 1930s, the anthology jumps to pragmatism’s present impact on social philosophy in Europe. The gap that thereby emerges testifies to pragmatism’s decline by the middle of the 20th century. While recent research has demonstrated that it is simplistic to speak of a general eclipse of pragmatism, this anthology reveals that, concerning social philosophy, things do become dark for pragmatism in those decades. However, it is beyond the reach of this anthology to inquire the reasons. In any case, the situation is different today. Pragmatism is up and running in European discussions of social philosophy. So, in addition to attaching new tiles to the mosaic of pragmatism’s history, this anthology stirs the flowing current of ideas from west to east, from America to Europe. Before James’s philosophy was recognized in Europe, the only strong philosophical current connecting Europe and America went the other way around, east to west. Supporting James’s wish that the philosophical current from west to east (which he got going more or less single-handedly) will not run dry (James, 1985, p. 2), the fourth and fifth parts depict pragmatism’s potentials for social philosophy in Europe. Thereby, the anthology suggests that two of pragmatism’s concepts are especially relevant today: conflict and the public.

Part four is devoted to pragmatism’s contribution to the concept of conflict. Shannon Sullivan assesses appraisals of the outbreak of World War I stated by Dewey, James, and W.E.B. Du Bois. She argues that only Du Bois’s, with its emphasis on white supremacy, accounts for what went wrong. On this basis, Sullivan shows why Du Bois’s work is important in dealing with conflicts in Europe today, for example over migration from Africa (chapter 11). Lotta Mayer demonstrates that the pragmatist approach to crisis is unique because it is process oriented and dynamic. Thereby, she reveals a major cause of pragmatism’s relevance to social philosophy’s notion of conflict. Mayer develops the work of Herbert Blumer to provide an action-centered account of the players in conflicts, including wars (chapter 12). Núria Sara Miras Boronat highlights the commonalities between pragmatism and feminism. Criticizing both for neglecting classical women pragmatists, she shows that regaining this heritage, especially Jane Addams and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, is fertile for a theory of power, domination, and oppression (chapter 13). These three contributions demonstrate that fully exploiting pragmatist resources implies looking beyond conventional pragmatists (Peirce, James, and Dewey) to thinkers such as Du Bois (Sullivan), Blumer (Mayer), Addams, and Gilman (Miras Boronat).

Focusing on pragmatism’s notion of the public, part five almost naturally centers around Dewey. Henrik Rydenfelt relies on Dewey to deal with the challenges that communication technologies and pluralism pose for political participation today. He releases pragmatism’s notion of the public from the embrace of deliberative democracy developed by German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, arguing that the strength of Dewey’s account is freed only if used as experimental inquiry into social issues (chapter 14). Matteo Santarelli and Justo Serrano Zamora invoke Dewey’s theory of emotions to rethink the role of affections in the creation of social demands and political identities. Underlining the power of pragmatism’s philosophy of the public, they criticize Italy’s national movement and its banner “Italians First!” (chapter 15). Christopher Gohl turns to Dewey’s economic thought as part of Dewey’s theory of the public and compares it to ordo-liberalism, the account that relates capitalism and democracy in Germany and increasingly also in the EU. Searching for mutual inspiration, Gohl inquires commonalities and differences between Dewey and ordo-liberalism, which its German defenders also label Soziale Marktwirtschaft (social market economy) (chapter 16). These three papers make a case for putting Dewey center stage in European social philosophy.

The match between these chapters has been tested in a conference by the John Dewey Center Switzerland in St. Gallen in June 2019. Federica Gregoratto and I organized this conference, sponsored by the Research Fund of the University of St. Gallen, the Philosophical Society of Eastern Switzerland, and the Swiss Academy for the Humanities and the Social Sciences. Generous support was provided by Dieter Thomä, chair of philosophy at the University of St. Gallen. I also thank Barbara Jungclaus and Thomas Telios for making the event work. My colleague Cedric Braun provided crucial help in editing this anthology. Special thanks to Federica Gregoratto for her invaluable ideas and tips and her guidance of this project.

References

• James, W. (1985). The Varieties of Religious Experience. Penguin Books.
• Misak, C. (2016). Cambridge Pragmatism: From Peirce and James to Ramsey and Wittgenstein. Oxford University Press.
• Pappas, G. F. (Ed.). (2011). Pragmatism in the Americas. Fordham University Press.

Part A
Pragmatism and the Birth of Social Philosophy

I
Pragmatism and European Philosophy

2
Paul Carus and Pragmatism

A European Philosopher in America

James Campbell

Paul Carus was born into an educated religious family in Ilsenburg am Harz, in present-day Sachsen-Anhalt, Germany, on 18 July 1852. He died in LaSalle, Illinois, on 11 February 1919. He studied at the universities in Greifswald, Strasbourg, and Tübingen, receiving his doctorate in classical philology from Tübingen in 1876. After he served in the Prussian military and taught briefly in a gymnasium and in the military academy in Dresden, his disillusionment with the autocracy of the Prussian state and its state church caused him to abandon his plans to follow his father into the ministry. He wanted the freedom to follow the light of reason and the guidance of science. He departed for Belgium, England, and eventually the United States, where he began teaching German in Boston and pursued writing and editorial work. His little volume Monism and Meliorism (1885) caught the attention of Edward Carl Hegeler. Hegeler was a successful mining engineer born in Bremen and educated at the Bergakademie in Freiberg in Sachsen, a cofounder of the Matthiessen and Hegeler Zinc Works and the founder of the Open Court Publishing Company in 1887. Carus ran the publishing house from late 1887 to 1919, editing both The Open Court and The Monist.¹ From this lofty perch, Carus was able to develop and disseminate his own philosophical perspective in dozens of books and hundreds of articles. One of the central foci of Carus’s later work was his rejection of pragmatism, and his hostility to it was so strong that he gathered up a series of his antipragmatic writings from 1909 through 1911 into the volume Truth on Trial (1911a).

Carus was thus an early European opponent of pragmatism living in America and writing at a time critical for its interpretation on both sides of the Atlantic. He maintained at the Third World Congress of Philosophy in Heidelberg in 1908 that “pragmatism does indeed come from A...