MARK LILLA
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for better or worse, developing outside of continental influences and
continental categories . Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, J iirgen
Habermas, Hans-George Gadamer- these continental philosophers
whose work impinges on all the questions American philosophy is
now examining, and who have become so influential in American lit–
erary and social studies, are not central to this new American philo–
sophical tendency.
All in all, this is probably a good thing. For what these
American writers bring to the postmodern philosophic enterprise is
their cultural pragmatism - but a pragmatism shorn of its faith in
exact scientific method, and self-conscious about language, logic,
and its limits. Rorty is the only one of the three to call himself a
pragmatist, though students of Dewey would probably deny him that
appellation if they could . When Rorty writes critically of pragmatic
"method" and continental "depth" he is, I think, speaking for Good–
man and Putnam as well ; these two paths have already been re–
jected . The question remains whether a third, nonrelativistic path
remains .
To judge by their most recent work, it can be said that neither
Goodman, Putnam, nor Rorty knows for sure.
It
seems to me that
they are all on roughly the right track, but none pushes his argument
quite far enough. Even if we no longer believe that objective meth–
ods can provide sure foundations in morals, art, architecture , liter–
ary criticism, science, or even philosophy, something tells us there
has to be something firmer than just "rightness," "rationality for us,"
or hermeneutic "conversation." Goodman, Putnam, and Rorty vaguely
suggest that truth and meaning are always connected with something
previously "given ," a certain social tradition, but they do not make
much philosophically from this fact.
What these writers do not yet seem to have realized is that by
deconstructing the analytic philosopher's program of securing "time–
less" foundations for human knowledge, they have implicitly raised
the question of how human knowledge
relates to time.
Perhaps I
should say "reraised," since the genesis of knowledge has been a
question for philosophy since the
Republic,
though since Hegel it has
not been considered a very interesting epistemological issue . But the
genetic path - the inquiry into human knowledge as
Bildung,
as the
product of human societies rooted in time-may be the only non–
nihilistic path available to these American philosophers .
Oddly enough , they do not seem to have studied the counter-
