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American Philosophy
Narrativity, Modernity, and Tragedy:
How Pragmatism Educates Humanity
Sami Pihlström
University of Helsinki
sami.pihlstrom@helsinki.fi
ABSTRACT:
I argue that the modernist notion of a human self (or subject) cannot easily be post-modernistically rejected because the need to view an individual life as a unified ‘narrative’ with a beginning and an end (death) is a condition for asking humanly important questions about its meaningfulness (or meaninglessness). Such questions are central to philosophical anthropology. However, not only modern ways of making sense of life, such as linear narration in literature, but also premodern ones such as tragedy, ought to be taken seriously in reflecting on these questions. The tradition of pragmatism has tolerated this plurality of the frameworks in terms of which we can interpret or ‘structure’ the world and our lives as parts of it. It is argued that pragmatism is potentially able to accommodate both the plurality of such interpretive frameworks—premodern, modern, postmodern—and the need to evaluate those frameworks normatively. We cannot allow any premodern source of human meaningfulness whatsoever (say, astrology) to be taken seriously. Avoiding relativism is, then, a most important challenge for the pragmatist.
1. The idea that "grand metanarratives" are dead is usually regarded as the key to the cultural phenomenon known as postmodernism. We have been taught to think that the Enlightenment notions of reason, rationality, knowledge, truth, objectivity, and self have become too old-fashioned to be taken seriously any longer. There is no privileged "Gods-Eye-View" available for telling big, important stories about these notions. The cultural hegemony of science and systematic philosophy, in particular, is over.
Nevertheless, as even some postmodern thinkers themselves keep on insisting, we still have to be committed to the grand narrative of our individual life.
(1)
We cannot really dispense with the modernist notion of self, and the one who says we can forgets who she or he is. From the point of view of our
own
life, no postmodern death of the subject can take place. On the contrary, my death transcends my life; it is not an experienceable event of my life—as Wittgenstein also famously pointed out at
Tractatus
6.4311. Most (perhaps all) of us feel that ones own death is hardly even conceivable from within ones life.
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