Pragmatism, Perfectionism, and Feminism :: Feminist Feminism Pragmatism Essays

Pragmatism, Perfectionism, and FeminismABSTRACT I consider the re peck of reality by three leading neopragmatists Richard Rorty, Richard Bernstein, and Cornel West. I argue that their vision of realism lacks a teleology, though a teleology is suggested by Bernsteins description of a pragmatic ethos. I appeal to Stanley Cavells notion of moral perfectionism to suggest a potpourri of teleology that is available to pragmatism. Finally, I hold the weakness of pragmatism done without teleology considerably exemplified in the sub between Rorty and Nancy Frazer at Rortys 1990 Tanner Lecture. Rortys paper, Pragmatism and Feminism, was meant to fracture feminists some pragmatic strategies for improving their position. Frazers strong response finds Rortys suggestions only marginally helpful. I interpret her criticism of Rortys suggestions to be that they lack something like a teleology. To me, this suggests that pragmatism can learn from feminism. Pragmatism is revolutionary both in the sense of being a philosophy that is critical, destabilizing, and progressive, as well as in the sense of being a philosophy that, in the bend philosophical tides, has come back. Pragmatism was eclipsed in the first half of the twentieth century by analytic philosophy, in its various forms, but in the last decade or so pragmatism has returned in encompassing force, and with an explicitly philosophical agenda. In this paper I will testify this new wave of philosophical pragmatism, sometimes referred to as neopragmatism, as it appears in the works of three of its leading proponents, Richard Rorty, Cornel West, and Richard Bernstein and specifically, how it compares to, contrasts with, and contributes to feminism, as illustrated in the exchange between Rorty and Nancy Fraser that occurred as part of Rortys 1990 Tanner Lecture. A difficulty that arises in talking about pragmatism, new or old, is that pragmatism comes in so many forms. For Rorty, the most influential of the neopragmati sts, pragmatism is primarily anti-philosophical. He defines its region in terms of negations it is anti-representational, anti-universalist, and anti-foundational. One of Rortys descriptions of what pragmatists do is, pragmatists keep trying to find ways of making antiphilosophical points in nonphilosophical language. (1) For Cornel West, pragmatism represents a liberal of return to philosophy, a return, that is, from a false to a genuine philosophy. It is a return to a philosophy that, at last, addresses the loci of our real needs. In his impressive, The American Evasion of Philosophy A Genealogy of Pragmatism, West describes the return to pragmatism as follows