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

Narrativity, Modernity, and Tragedy How Pragmatism Educates HumanityABSTRACT I argue that the modernist nonion of a humane self (or subject) cannot easily be post-modernistically rejected because the need to view an individual life as a unified communicative with a beginning and an end ( oddment) is a condition for petition 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, much(prenominal) as linear narration in literature, but also premodern ones much(prenominal) as tragedy, ought to be interpreted seriously in reflecting on these questions. The customs 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 charge both the plurality of such interpretive frameworks-premodern, modern, postmodern and the need to pronounce 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 alike old-fashioned to be taken seriously any longer. There is no privileged Gods-Eye-View available for telling big, important stories about these notions. The cultural hegemony of cognizance and systematic philosophy, in particular, is over.Nevertheless, as still some postmodern thinkers themselves persist on insisting, we still 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 sa ys we can forgets who she or he is. From 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 purget 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, somewhat paradoxically, death essential be postulated as the imaginary end point, the final event, of the story of my life. If at that place 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.