Voices and Selves: Beyond the Modern-Postmodern Divide

Abstract

arthur o. lovejoy famously referred to thirteen pragmatisms. If he were called on to enumerate postmodernisms, no doubt he would increase this number tenfold.1 Fortunately I need not follow his lead for the task at hand, namely, to discuss whether the pragmatic tradition can narrow the divide between modernism and postmodernism on the topic of cosmopolitanism. To do so I will focus on specific sets of ideas that have been associated with these terms. So, for example, modernists have been viewed as defenders of some form of universality, ethical or conceptual, and of a responsible, self-actuating, authentic subject. Postmodernists look toward particularity and alterity, and stress that notions of a unitary subject are misguided, as are ideas of authenticity, implying as they do a univocal identity. Postmodernists often claim that modernists are overt or covert essentialists in their understanding of the self. Of course these generalizations are open to contestation and exceptions, but we must start somewhere. An added complexity is that it is not even clear that there is a modern/postmodernist divide. The case has been made innumerable times that postmodernism— or I should say postmodernisms—are merely a host of assorted trajectories within modernity. I will not engage this question here; instead, as noted, I will address ideas that have been associated with these traditions. My approach is pragmatic. It is in sympathy with Rorty’s invocation of Dewey at the beginning of his article “Cosmopolitanism without Emancipation: A Response to Jean-Francois Lyotard”: