Pragmatist Cultural Naturalism: Dewey and Rorty

Abstract

In this essay I discuss the relationship between naturalism and culture by drawing on the aesthetic notions of two leading pragmatists, John Dewey and Richard Rorty. Rorty’s view of the cultural significance of metaphor, which is based on Donald Davidson’s theory of metaphor, centers on the distinction between a naturalistic and an idealistic view of the cognitive value of metaphor. I then discuss the development from idealism to naturalism in Dewey’s view of the imagination and the parallels that may be drawn between Dewey’s and Rorty’s views, particularly regarding the latter’s critique of idealism and its failure to provide a credible philosophical understanding of culture. In the final section I outline a naturalistic view of the emergence of culture based on Dewey’s notions of rhythm and rite as presented in his classic work Art as Experience.

Notes

1. For a recent example, see Richard Shusterman, “Pragmatism and Cultural Politics: From Rortian Textualism to Somaesthetics,” New Literary History 41.1 (Winter 2010): 69-94.

2. Robert Brandom, “Vocabularies of Pragmatism: Synthesizig Naturalism and Historicism,” in Rorty and His Critics, ed. Robert Brandom (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 160.

3. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 15.

4. Donald Davidson, “What Metaphors Mean,” in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 262.

5. Richard Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 124; hereafter cited in the text.

6. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 16.

7. Mary Hesse, “The Cognitive Claims of Metaphors,” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 2.1 (1988): 1–16. Rorty refers to an earlier version of this article under the same title, which appeared in Metaphor and Religion, Theolinguistics 2, ed. J. P. van Noppen (Brussels, 1984), 27–45.

8. Thomas M. Alexander, John Dewey’s Theory of Art, Experience, and Nature: The Horizons of Feeling (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1987), 43; hereafter cited in the text.

9. Noël Carroll, “Art and Human Nature,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Criticism 62.2 (Spring 2004): 96.

10. John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Perigee Books, 1980), 27–28; hereafter cited in the text.

11. For a systematic, critical study of Rorty’s reading of Dewey, see David Hildenbrand, Beyond Realism and Antirealism: John Dewey and the Neopragmatists (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2003).

12. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope (London: Penguin, 1999), xxiii.

13. Richard Rorty, Philosophy as Cultural Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 107.

14. Rorty, Philosophy as Cultural Politics, 94–95.

15. Rorty, Philosophy as Cultural Politics, 115.

16. Hesse, “The Cognitive Claims of Metaphor,” 11–12.

17. Rorty, Philosophy as Cultural Politics, 96.

18. Rorty, Philosophy as Cultural Politics, 94.