Praxis and Action by Bernstein Richard J.;

Author:Bernstein, Richard J.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.

PART THREE

ACTION, CONDUCT, AND INQUIRY

PEIRCE AND DEWEY

IN MY DISCUSSIONS of Marx, Kierkegaard, and Sartre, I began by first exploring relevant aspects of Hegel's thought which set the “problematic” for their own investigations of human action. In the case of Marx, this approach enabled me to clarify the dialectical context of his theory of praxis. Marx himself had engaged in a close study and critique of Hegel. Even more important than Marx's explicit critique, we could see how deeply he was influenced by a Hegelian orientation and how his successive analyses of praxis, labor, and production represent attempts to overcome what he took to be radical deficiencies in Hegel's understanding of the world. With Kierkegaard and Sartre, I have noted that it would be artificial and misleading to suggest that they first studied Hegel and then set out to develop an alternative point of view. Both were sensitive to the insights, claims, and the power of Hegelianism, but both felt that something had gone desperately wrong with the System. By sketching what it was in Hegel that they were reacting against, we could better understand their distinctive understanding of human existence and action. When we examine the pragmatists, the connection with Hegel is much less obvious (with the striking exception of Dewey), but no less important and revealing.

Although Peirce came to recognize basic affinities with his version of pragmatism and Hegelianism, it cannot be said that Peirce was ever a serious student of Hegel. He deplored some of the developments in logic that were carried out by those who considered themselves Hegelians. It was Kant and the medieval philosophers that were the chief source of Peirce's philosophic stimulation. There is, however, a parallel to Hegel insofar as Peirce started developing his own intellectual point of view by reflecting upon and criticizing what he took to be inadequacies in Kant, especially in Kant's understanding of logic. But late in his career when Peirce adopted the term “pragmaticism”—a name “ugly enough to keep it from kidnappers” (5.414)1 in order to distinguish his doctrine from other versions of pragmatism, he wrote, “The truth is that pragmaticism is closely allied to Hegelian absolute idealism, from which, however it is sundered by its vigorous denial that the third category (which Hegel degrades to a mere stage of thinking) suffices to make the world, or is even so much as self-sufficient. Had Hegel, instead of regarding the first two stages with his smile of contempt, held on to them as independent or distinct elements of the triune Reality, pragmaticists might have looked upon him as the great vindicator of their truth” (5.436).

James had a deep aversion, and even a hostility toward “German” philosophy—especially Hegel and what he took to be the pernicious influence of Hegel on American and English forms of absolute idealism. The picture of Hegel that emerges from A Pluralistic Universe is clearly a caricature; Hegelianism represented intellectualism, obscurity (in the name of profoundity), loss of contact with the tangled reality of life itself, and commitment to a “block universe monism.

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