Geuss on Rorty: Pragmatism and (as?) Americanism

I'm a sucker for academic memoirs and scholarly recollections that give peeks into the lives and friendships of scholars, particularly when they inhabit rather places like Princeton (an idyllic little island that might as well be a million miles from Trenton).  But even those without a soft spot for this genre will find Raymond Geuss's personal recollections of Rorty at Princeton a delightful read: a witty, entertaining, and critically respectful take on Rorty, both the man and his pragmatism.  It includes some spirited disagreement about Gadamer, the history of philosophy, and the prospects of pragmatism. 

I have long thought that pragmatism is under-appreciated in philosophical circles, as well as in circles concerned with "postmodernism" and theology.  Indeed, I've been trying to get a leading voice to write a book for the Church and Postmodern Culture series that would articulate a 'postmodern pragmatist' take on the church's mission (Jeff Stout turned me down!).  However, though I have a deep appreciation for pragmatism, and a sense that it has something important to contribute to the conversation, I've always had a nagging worry that it is not only a distinctly American product, it might be a distinctly Americanist project.  (I've hinted, for instance, about such concerns with respect to the closing section of Stout's Democracy and Tradition--though I need to take the time to articulate this in a more scholarly context.) 

So I was doubly intrigued when, in the middle of his recollections, Geuss makes this incisive observation:

Achieving Our Country, though, represented a step too far for me. The very idea that the United States was “special” has always seemed to me patently absurd, and the idea that in its present, any of its past, or any of its likely future configurations it was in any way exemplary, a form of gross narcissistic self-deception which was not transformed into something laudable by virtue of being embedded in a highly sophisticated theory which purported to show that ethnocentrism was in a philosophically deep sense unavoidable. I remain very grateful to my Catholic upbringing and education for giving me relative immunity to nationalism. In the 1950s, the nuns who taught me from age five to twelve were virtually all Irish or Irish-American with sentimental attachment to certain elements of Celtic folklore, but they made sure to inculcate into us that the only serious human society was the Church which was an explicitly international organization. The mass, in the international language, Latin, was the same everywhere; the religious orders were international. This absence of national limitation was something very much to be cherished. “Catholica” in the phrase “[credo in] unam, sanctam, catholicam, et apostolicam ecclesiam” should, we were told, be written with a lower-case, not an upper-case, initial because it was not in the first instance part of the proper name of the church, but an adjective meaning “universal,” and this universality was one of the most important “marks of the true Church.” The Head of the Church, to be sure, and Vicar of Christ on earth, was in fact (at that time) always an Italian, but that was for contingent and insignificant reasons. The reason most commonly cited by these nuns was that, as Bishop of Rome, the Pope had to live in the “Eternal City,” but only an Italian could stand to live in Rome: it was hot, noisy, and overcrowded, and the people there ate spaghetti for dinner everyday rather than proper food, i.e., potatoes, so it would be too great a sacrifice to expect someone who had not grown up in Italy to tolerate life there. I clearly remember being unconvinced by this argument, thinking it set inappropriately low standards of self-sacrifice for the higher clergy; a genuinely saintly character should be able to put up even with pasta for lunch and dinner every day.

For Geuss, this Catholic universality was just a sort of antidote to nationalism; that is, it inoculated him to nationalism without commiting him to a distinctly Catholic transnationalism.  But it still raises a tension that those who do confess "one holy, catholic, apostolic church" need to take seriously.

Comments

[joel hunter]

Ask Tim Renick to do it (Ga State).