Narrativity, Modernity, and Tragedy: How Pragmatism Educates Humanity :: Argumentative Persuasive Philosophy Essays

Narrativity, Modernity, and Tragedy How Pragmatism Educates HumanityABSTRACT I plead that the unexampledist notion of a human self (or subject) cannot easily be post-modernistically rejected because the need to slew 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 likewise premodern ones such as tragedy, ought to be taken mischievously 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 let Gods-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 windlessness 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. Fr om 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 ones own death is hardly even conceivable from within ones life.On the other hand, middling 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.