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son and will. In pragmatism there are no ideals beyond experience and one
need only attend to, not the abstract imperatives of justice or what is good
and excellent, but simply the empirical data of science and society's con–
ventions. The historian Gertrude Himmelfarb protests that the new
scholarship leads to the "abyss," where everything is power and domina–
tion without any basis of ethics founded either on inner moral sentiments
or on external objective standards.
Where does pragmatism propose to find a basis for truth and morali–
ty? Seeing all life as contingent and truth as relative to circumstance,
morality would be determined by the practical and functional, by what
works successfully, or, as John Dewey put it, when faced with a "prob–
lematic situation," try whatever "will do" and if it does the job, it will do.
The difficulty with this resolution, as pragmatism's philosopher-critics
have pointed out, is that behavior can function successfully and still be eth–
ically repugnant. Today in China female infanticide has succeeded in
controlling population growth, and thus it has met the pragmatic criterion
of having achieved its intended consequences. How could it possibly be
defended morally?
Once, pragmatism promised to revitalize American liberalism, and sev–
eral of its early exponents were among the country's outstanding essayists
and journalists. But some, like Randolph Bourne, immediately sensed its
inadequacies in the first world war, pointing out the embarrassment of a
philosophy that somehow assumed it could control what it also regarded
as inevitable, a philosophy "which has no place for the inexorable [and yet]
should have adjusted itself so easily to the inexorab[ility] of war." Others,
like Walter Lippmann, accused Dewey of turning philosophy itself upside
down. Traditionally, Lippmann wrote in
The New Republic
in 1915, our
philosophy drew "sanction from God, or nature or evolution. The theory
was that our philosophies determined us; we conformed to them. Now
comes Professor Dewey to argue that we ought to make our philosophies
for our own needs and purposes."
To the contemporary philosopher Richard Rorty, such a critique
would merely be asking pragmatism to return to the very situation from
which it had set out to liberate philosophy, a return to metaphysical foun–
dations, first principles, absolutes, and other ideas that antedate experience
and thus are in no position to control it. After the publication of Rorty's
seminal text,
Philosophy and the Mirror
if
Nature
(1979), which brilliantly
demonstrated that Dewey and William James presaged European post–
structuralists in realizing that truth could no longer be based on coherence
to a scheme or correspondence to the real, pragmatism began to flourish
on the American campus. Before long Mrican-American scholars and
