Putnam and Cavell on the Ethics of Democracy

Political Theory

Volumn 25, Issue 2, 1997, Pages 193-214

  Shusterman, Richard ^a  

^a TEMPLE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 84992862968     PISSN: 00905917     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0090591797025002002     Document Type: Article

References (33)

1. The texts of Putnam and Cavell that I use here will be cited with the following abbreviations: Hilary Putnam, The Many Faces of Realism (LaSalle: Open Court, 1987)
2. MFR; Realism With a Human Face, ed. James Conant (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990)
3. RHF; Renewing Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), RP;
4. and Words and Life, ed. James Conant (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), WL;
5. Stanley Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary: Unes of Skepticism and Romanticism (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1988)
6. QO; Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1990), CH;
7. A Pitch of Philosophy: Autobiographical Exercises (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), AP;
8. and Philosophical Passages: Wittgenstein, Emerson, Austin, Derrida (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), PP.
9. The quotations here are from QO, pp. 10, 12;
10. RP, p. 200;
11. MFR, p. 50.
12. Putnam's account of this demand and “the absolute conception of the world” is based on the work of Bernard Williams, which he criticizes in “Bernard Williams and the Absolute Conception of the World,” RP, pp. 80–107.
13. See John Dewey, The Public and its Problems (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988) LW 2:319;
14. and Ethics (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989) LW 7:347, hereafter abbreviated as E.
15. Other works of Dewey, all in the standard Southern Illinois University (SIU) editions, will be cited with the following abbreviations: Art as Experience (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987), AE (LW 10);
16. Experience and Nature (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1981), EN (LW 1);
17. Liberalism and Social Action (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987), LSA (LW 11). Other references to Dewey's writings will simply use the volume numbers in the official edition of his collected works—early, middle, and late (EW, MW, LW) published by Southern Illinois University Press.
18. In other writings, Putnam also links James's will to believe with existentialism and notes James's own allusion to Kierkegaard, “the Danish thinker,” when advocating the individual's right to believe in cases “that cannot… be decided on intellectual grounds,” “the right of the existentialist to believe ahead of the evidence.” The difference Putnam draws here between pragmatism and existentialism is that only the former can see one's leap of faith as fallible and “subject to revision.” “William James' Ideas,” RHF, pp. 227, 229.
19. See Michel Foucault, “What is Enlightenment,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Vintage, 1984).
20. I discuss Rorty's creative misprisions of Deweyan democratic theory and ethics of self-realization in Richard Shusterman, “Pragmatism and Liberalism Between Dewey and Rorty,” Political Theory 22 (1994): 391–413
21. and much more extensively, Practicing Philosophy: Pragmatism and the Philosophical Life (New York: Routledge, 1997), chaps. 2, 4.
22. See also the critique in Richard Bernstein, The New Constellation (Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 1991), 230–92
23. part of which was originally published as “One Step Forward, Two Steps Backward: Rorty on Liberal Democracy and Philosophy,” Political Theory 15 (1987).
24. Cavell would regard such a view as a form of moralism morally inferior to perfectionism, “the form of moralism that fixates on the presence of ideals in one's culture and promotes them to distract one from the presence of otherwise intolerable injustice.” The other form of moralism “is the enforcement of morality, or a moral code, by immoral means.” “It is,” Cavell Adds, “to John Dewey's eternal credit to have combated, unrelentingly, both forms of moralism” (CH, p. 13).
25. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), 325.
26. Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. William H. Gilman et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960–82), vol. 15, p. 462.
27. Dewey in contrast suggests a historicist outlook for understanding and assessing theories of the good life. Although he criticizes Epicureanism for concentrating on the individual rather than the social, he recognizes that self-absorption may be the best option when social conditions are too unfavorable for a social realization of self. See his Ethics, 202.
28. See Pierre Hadot, “Spiritual Exercises,” in his Philosophy as a Way of Life, ed. Arnold Davidson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 81–125. Davidson himself suggests the connection between this idea and Cavell's view of philosophical writing, 40 n. 91.
29. Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge: MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 233–4.
30. Friedrich Nietzsche, “Schopenhauer as Educator,” in Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge 1983), 187.
31. Henry Thoreau, Waiden, in The Portable Thoreau, ed. Carl Bode (New York: Viking, 1969), 270; henceforth abbreviated W.
32. I take all these issues up in my recent book, Practicing Philosophy, which contains a chapter on somatic experience. For a comparative analysis of some of today's more popular and promising somatic techniques of emancipatory self-realization (e.g., Alexander Technique, Feldenkrais Method, and Bioenergetics), see Richard Shusterman, “Die Sorge um den Körper in der heutigen Kultur,” in Philosophische Ansichten der Kultur der Moderne, ed. A. Kuhlmann (Frankfurt Fischer, 1994), 241–77.
33. Clarification of the vague and somewhat contested notion of the philosophical life can be found in my book Practicing Philosophy, which has profited greatly from Pierre Hadot's seminal study of this notion in ancient philosophy. See Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, ed. Davidson. My understanding of the philosophical life has also been improved by discussions with Arnold Davidson, James Miller, Alexander Nehamas, and James Conant.