Gary Gutting. Pragmatic Liberalism and the Critique of
Modernity. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. 193 +
xii pp.
Modernity and its
supposed end has been the subject of many books published in the last decade,
most of which argue about the necessity to overcome rationalism and empiricism,
but don't quite show how to accomplish the task. Gary Gutting book's major
merit is to present a concrete proposal to overcome the crisis of modern
reason, which does not ask for a complete break with tradition, but rather
looks for a synthesis of the proposals of some of the major thinkers of the
last third of the 20th century. Gutting builds up his pragmatic
liberalism in dialogue with the ideas of Richard Rorty, Alasdair MacIntyre, and
Charles Taylor. The reader may ask how is it possible to bring to an
understanding such dissimilar authors, though it is worth noticing that Gutting
criticizes the authors just mentioned, and only takes from them what is
suitable for his own position.
Very briefly, his
proposal consists in saving the best of Liberal tradition and on that basis to
redefine the role of philosophy. According to Gutting, there are two types of
Enlightenment: the "philosophical Enlightenment," and the
"Enlightenment of the philosophes" or "humanistic
Enlightenment." The first one served as a basis for the proposals of Locke
or Kant, and is the one that is in crisis. The "humanistic
Enlightenment," on the contrary, always showed aversion to the
foundationalist project of the philosophers, and satisfied itself with
postulating values—mainly, the value of the autonomy of reason. For Gutting, it
was this humanistic Enlightenment that built up the matrix for political
liberalism, whose main merit consists in providing the scheme in which everyone
engages in a fruitful dialogue. In this sense, Gary Gutting's proposal is fully
liberal in a classic sense: "It is quite convinced that we should live in
accord with the democratic liberalism that has built and informed the North
Atlantic nation-states of the twentieth century, that is, lead a life of
individual self-creation amid a social atmosphere of equality, justice, and
toleration." (p. 186)
What is
"pragmatic" in Gutting's proposal is found in his
anti-foundationalism, and in his vision of the role of philosophy in the time
to come. With respect to the first, Gutting writes that pragmatic liberalism
"sees as wrongheaded any effort to ground this ethical view in fundamental
truths about human nature and its place in the cosmic scheme, and it rejects
any suggestion that the lack of such a grounding would or should weaken our
ethical commitment to our ideals." (Ibid.) As for the role of
philosophy in our culture, Gutting's vision is similar to that of Wittgenstein
(or, at least, to interpreters of Wittgenstein, like Cavell, Putnam and James
Conant), and it seems strange that Gutting mentions Wittgenstein only once, and
for a theme not related to this one. In any case, Gutting's proposal is highly
original and very appealing. For him, the present division of philosophy into
Analytic Philosophy and Continental Philosophy is very misleading. The task of
philosophers should be taken into account from the point of view of the
creation and analysis of our fundamental concepts. According to this, there are
people "specialized" in vision, in what Hilary Putnam would call the
task of "presenting images of the human situation in the world." On
this side we would think of philosophers like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Derrida,
and, in part, Hegel and Heidegger. But these proposals and moral images soon
are subjected to rigorous scrutiny. This has been the task of Analytic
philosophy, which Gutting considers as "the effort to attain maximum
clarity regarding the content and basis of our intuitions." (p. 184). But
there are also philosophers that see things from a reconstructive
archeological—or genealogical—point of view, such as Foucault, Rorty,
MacIntyre, Taylor, Derrida and Heidegger. Looking at things this way,
"[p]hilosophy does, then, have a distinct subject matter (the development
and explication of fundamental concepts) and a distinctive set of techniques
(conceptual analysis, historical critique, and creative redescription). Given
our inability to establish one account as the final truth, there is no warrant
for placing philosophers at the head of our intellectual table. But our
pragmatic liberal metaphilosophy shows why they have a distinctive and
essential voice in the conversation." (p. 193) It is a pity that Gutting
makes no reference at all to John Dewey's ideas, which are so close to his
view.
Universidad Francisco
Marroquín