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American Philosophy
Narrativity, Modernity, and Tragedy:How Pragmatism Educates Humanity
Sami PihlströmUniversity of Helsinkisami.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 "God's-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 one's own death is hardly even conceivable from within one's life.
On the other hand, somewhat paradoxically, death must be postulated as the imaginary end point, the final event, of the story of my life. If there were no death (i.e., the annihilation of my self) to be expected, I could not even realize that I am leading a specific, spatio-temporally restricted human life. The fact that death is awaiting for me, even if I cannot fully understand what it is all about, enables me to think about my life as a coherent whole with a beginning and an end. Only with respect to such a life can the question of "meaning" or "significance" arise.
It seems, then, that no postmodernist talk about the disappearance of the subject, connected with the distrust felt toward grand narratives, can force us to give up this meta-level fact about our life. We might perhaps even say, echoing Kant, that the inescapability of death is a necessary "transcendental condition" of a meaningful (or, for that matter, meaningless) life. Human life as we know it is intelligible only under the circumstances in which death inevitably puts an end to it. Without death, our lives would be something entirely different, something about which we can have no clear conception whatsoever—not from the point of view of our present human condition, at least.
Death, then, plays a decisive role in the modern human being's understanding of her or his life as a unified narrative. Let us explore the essentially modern notion of narrativity in some more detail. It is a central element of the modern outlook, of our typically modern conception of personal identity, to employ this notion in making sense of our lives. The modern person, often without noticing it, conceives of her or his life as a "story", and this narrativist attitude to life has been conceptualized in various ways in the history of modern thought (cf. Taylor 1989). To see one's life as a linear progression from a starting point, through various phases (corresponding to adventures in a novel), up to its final page, death, is to be a modern person. To go postmodern is to break this chain of narration, as in self-conscious fiction, in which the story itself somehow "knows", and shows that it knows, that it is only a fictional story. The postmodern person could, or such a person thinks that she or he could, understand that the subjective life she or he leads is not really the life of a single, unified subject. Then, apparently, such a "subject" would not be a person in any normal sense of the term.
I am not simply suggesting that we should not at all attempt to go postmodern in this sense. The "antihumanist" French (as well as American) thinkers have had many insightful things to say about the ways in which the modern subject is constituted in terms of the social and political structures (e.g., power relations) which make life-narratives possible in the first place—instead of being the fully autonomous center of its life we are (modernistically) inclined to think it is. Furthermore, interesting post-structuralist developments of these investigations have been pursued. Some are still emerging. Yet, from the point of view of an individual human being living in her or his natural and cultural environment, there can be no total disappearance of the subject any more than there can be a total disappearance of all acting characters in a literary narrative. Narratives are about actions—usually about human actions in some problematic circumstances. There simply is no way for us humans to remove this fact of humanity. To do so would require that we turn into beings quite different from what we in fact are. As long as our life is intelligible to us, we will presumably be unable to fail to see ourselves as characters in a narrative, acting in the midst of the problems our environment throws against our face. Even the postmodernist writers themselves, whose work I am unable to comment upon here in any detail, must view themselves as subjects engaging in the intentional action of writing postmodernist prose.
It is, in fact, somewhat ironical that postmodernist philosophers and sociologists of science—for example, Joseph Rouse (1996) in his recent book—strongly emphasize the need to take seriously the narrative aspect of science, thus employing an inherently modernist notion in apologizing for postmodernism. "Modernist" philosophers of science need not necessarily oppose the idea that science, like any other human practice, is partly