Transcendence Down: Pragmatism’s Eastern Strains and Poststructuralism

• In Event: Transcendence and Education

Abstract

Taking over the task of the third paper from the side of poststructuralism, and centering on the idea of “transcendence down,” the final paper of our panel discusses the relationship between pragmatism (especially Dewey’s), transcendentalism (unsatisfactory name for Emerson, Thoreau, and Cavell), and poststructuralism (which has different strands, mostly French). It explores the ways in which the combination of proximities and tensions between these philosophies open new possibilities of thought. I will attempt to do this by opening the boundaries of American philosophy in terms of pragmatism’s “Eastern” strains, of its controversial and complicated relationship with European poststructuralism – Europe here as considered to be east of America, and the word, “strain,” to have its double connotation of “tension” and “element.” Pragmatism can benefit from a fruitful mode of cross-cultural dialogue with poststructuralism (cf. Mouffe 1996). In my view there is a significant difference both between pragmatism and poststructuralism and within American thought – that is, between Emerson and Thoreau (and Cavell), on the one hand, and Deweyan pragmatism, on the other. The differences have something in common, in my view, such that what separates Emerson and Thoreau (and Cavell) from Deweyan pragmatism has some connection with what separates poststructuralism (in some of its aspects, at least) from Deweyan pragmatism. Connections here are partly traceable through the take-up of Emerson's ideas in Nietzsche, which feeds in some way or other into poststructuralism. But I do not think it is just this. I find a sense of rivenness in Emerson, a kind of incessant troubling of thought, that I do not see so much in Dewey, and I will explain ways in which this has parallels with poststructuralism. This, however, does not mean that that Dewey is never troubled (cf. Kestenbaum 2013).
I will try to draw educational implications out of the idea of “transcendence down.” It moves us out of a moralistic mode of thinking in which we might think of going “beyond the self” as a kind of project to be achieved – set it up as a goal, as it were, with the consequence that the self is substantialized once again. Rather to think “beyond the self” is a way of thinking that involves a kind of transcendence of self: the receptive-responsive mode of language itself exemplifies such a process of thinking – one that exceeds the conventional dichotomy between autonomy and care. From the perspective of otherness, towards which our responsibility is never satisfied, it points us to the notion of incommensurability, in which any mode of comparison or juxtaposition is destabilized.

Author

• Paul Standish, Institute of Education - University of London