Some Pragmatic Preferences for Educational Transcendence

• In Event: Transcendence and Education

Abstract

Pragmatism is a philosophical family and as in any family there are disagreements. What follows is one version of pragmatic transcendence expressed as the preferences of a family member.
Charles Sanders Peirce admired Kant, but preferred Kant’s “pragmatisch,” which applies practical reasoning to experience based art and science to Kant’s “praktisch,” which supposedly relies on a priori laws based entirely on pure reasoning, so he named his new philosophy “pragmatism” (CP 5: 412). For pragmatists like myself, educational transcendence is an artistic achievement immanent to the affairs of a naturalistic universe achieved through creative action. It is not something transcendental a priori as with Kant or neo-Kantians such as Immanuel Levinas or Jacques Derrida, nor anything transcendent a priori as with Plato and the Platonists.
Pragmatism is largely post-metaphysical. I prefer versions inspired by Darwinian emergent naturalism (see Dewey, 1909/1977). There are no substances (ousia) in Darwinism only continuously evolving events. We may do for all essences (eidos) what Darwin did for species. Likewise, there are no ultimate foundations (arche) only relatively stable albeit evolving events. There is no telos to evolution much less any perfect telos (entelecheia). In Emerson’s terms, around any circle another circle may be drawn. Ninety-nine percent of all species that have ever existed are now extinct. Individually and collectively, that is our destiny. However, we may learn to delight in living, growing, and creating.
Darwinian post-metaphysical pragmatism is intrinsically post-structural. That is why in Of Grammatology, Derrida (1967/1974) proclaims: “Peirce goes very far in the direction of what I have called the de-construction of the transcendental signified” (OG: 49). Peirce went all the way. Pragmatism provides what Derrida cannot, an empirical post-structuralism capable of accounting for the success of the sciences.
Two metaphysical concepts survive Darwinism. First, it appears we live in a pluralistic universe wherein everything that exists has external relations (see James (1909/1977). New transactions, such as multi-cultural encounters, occasion opportunities for poetic creation. Second, we cannot account for change without the concepts of actuality (energeia) and potentiality (dynamis). I follow Dewey in believing each of us is born with unique potential, although we need others different from ourselves to actualize it. We should emphasizes the developmental formation of an individual’s unique potential through participation in the social practices and institutions of a pluralistic democratic culture. He seeks to educate an endlessly actualizing individual that makes unique contributions through critical-creative reconstruction of norms, beliefs, and values.
Dewey and Mead reject atomistic individualism. Like Wittgenstein, Dewey rejects the possibility of a private language. Hence, linguistic educational transcendence is always social. I prefer social self-creation to the selfish self-creation of Nietzsche, Foucault, and Rorty
With Walt Whitman, I envision educational transcendence as poetic, spiritual democracy in a pluralistic community wherein we need divers others to creatively actualize our unique potential. Spiritual transcendence results from having an intimate relation with others wherein our creative actions matter in the course of events. Every trope is an act of transcendence a realization of the possible in the actual.

Author

• Jim Garrison, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University