re: kosik reception

Rorty, dialectics, pragmatism's limits

"Today pragmatism arguably represents the greatest challenge to Marxist-Humanist thought in the U. S. Fredric Jameson once pointed out the Anglo-American tradition's profound hostility to dialectic. And what falls under the term postmodernism owes more to James and Dewey than to Heidegger's question of being. Richard Rorty is an important figure in this respect, because he has done the most to refurbish the pragmatist tradition and because he nevertheless shares a certain affinity to Marxist-Humanism.

Rorty vigorously attacks the idea of an intellectual vanguard. He writes that pragmatism is humanism applied to epistemology--truth is not SUB SPECIE AETERNITATIS but is what is useful to human beings. Furthermore, he comes from the same radical milieu as Raya Dunayevskaya, which shows itself obliquely in statements such as "still, the image of Lenin, that captured the hearts of our grandparents..." Like Lenin, Rorty insists that theory subordinate itself to practice, that it concern itself first and foremost with the concrete. And it is with his understanding of concreteness that we can begin to flesh out the differences between his pragmatism and dialectical thought.

[...]

From a dialectical perspective, Rorty indulges in his own form of abstraction. The world is an interrelated whole, and the attempt to grasp particular issues outside of this context will only mystify their inter-relational character. Rorty's pragmatism would be seen as a philosophy of the pseudoconcrete by the Czech philosopher Karel Kosik. In his work DIALECTICS OF THE CONCRETE, Kosik describes the pseudoconcrete as a world of fixed objects existing in apparent autonomy or indifference from one another. This autonomy conceals relationships that effect the particulars not just at their margins, so to speak, but in their very essence."


also interesting: whole paper quite rich

"As Ricoeur says (1988), the discourse-work-writing triad constitutes the tripod which bears the project of a world, the world opened by the text, however the world of the text goes far beyond the author’s world. The world of the text opens to the reader’s world, creating multiple possibilities. From this perspective, the term I used – appropriation – appears inadequate and restrictive, since it offers the idea of appropriating a single "true" sense. Regarding this "true sense" there is yet another point that I would like to discuss, which is the relationship between intellectuals and ideology. The theoretical framework which provided support for my scientific intentionality, was Critical Educational Theory (CET), whose inspiration comes from the idea, now rather heavily criticised, that the world of truth is deformed, obscured by mystifications which can be attributed to the effect of power interests and mechanisms, and it is up to the revolutionary (the word revolutionary is taken in the sense rendered explicit by Karel Kosik in The Dialectics of Concrete: of a change in human-social reality, performed by man himself who produced it) intellectuals to take the critical-reflective actions required to remove the ideological rubble covering up the truth, in order to allow true reality to appear, and that conditions should be created to overcome domination and inequalities, allowing people greater control over their lives. In the formulation of Paulo Freire, this critical operation of the intellect is expressed in the metaphor of removal of the veils that hide true reality. The process of conscientization of the oppressed would occur precisely in this approach of an essential truth which is to underlie the mystified facts and phenomena in the daily experience of domination. Unveiled, domination could be overcome and reality transformed."