Pragmatism

CONCRETE ANALYSIS OF THE CONCRETE SITUATION
Stop having idealist discussions and go read more lenin you dumbasses

No

This. Pic related.

well good luck getting anything done. The dustbin of history is that way >>>

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Well, if your idea of revolution is reading books as if they were instruction manuals, then you don't know what a dialectic analysis is.
I am referring to the theme in OP - CONCRETE ANALYSIS OF THE CONCRETE SITUATION. This is 2017 not fucking 1917's Russia and whoever can't see that is retarded.
Having said that, the idealism vs materialism debate was solved thousands of years ago- to ignore that is to be an inefficient piece of shit. Now, you can go and do exactly that -no-one is preventing you.

lol

Sorry, I didn't know this was reddit.

I was just laughing at your ignorance. Good to know you prioritize action over thought though, LARPer. Reminds me of some crazy Italians I read once.

You're right. Socdems applied pragmatism and achieved socal democracy. Revolutionaries bogged themselves down with useless theorizing and what a surprise: Liberal arts universities are swimming with Marxists yet we have no revolution in sight. Hmm….

It would be one thing if they were honest about it, the problem is they weren't in most pragmatist writing. James would insist to his dying breath pragmatism could prove god, free will, deontological ethics (pragmatism initially came out of Kantian philosophy through Pierce) and a foundation for philosophy beyond the Cartesian trap. The actual arguments don't bear any of this out thought, which was my point.

Bertrand Russel was an idiot, but he hit the nail on the head with pragmatism, that it's the ultimate American philosophy with money metaphors and talks of "juices and food" everywhere. It's philosophy with a consumerist keep-shopping backdrop over a nihilistic center, only they consistently denied the nihilism.

Oh, I don't know if we want the best results. Maybe it's better to let a few million people die as long as we know we did The Right Thing (according to common sense and public opinion). Maybe it's better to die having followed arbitrary and clearly incorrect guidelines laid down by a bunch of idiots rather than living in the knowledge that we actually used our fucking brains.

Pragmatism as a tradition is vaguely defined with different pragmatist philosophers seeming to contradict each other about what it is. It comes from a paper CS Peirce wrote that basically said that there can be two seemingly conflicting ideas or beliefs, but if the choice between them makes absolutely no practical difference, then the two ideas or beliefs are essentially the same. From this, William James made a whole philosophical system about truth, saying that what is true is what is useful. Not all pragmatists would agree with William James. If you want to characterize the whole thing as a tradition, I'd say it's anything that follows from Peirce's identification of truth with how an idea is used or what it leads to.

Pragmatism is not necessarily relevant to moral philosophy because you don't have to think of morals as being true in the same way as other ideas. When applied to moral philosophy, it tends to mean elevating human experience over everything else, but all the specifics past this are an open question.

I'm a pragmatist, and my best argument for it is that how truth is used in life is ultimately to inform other people. That is, philosophers write books to be read by people. Finding "absolute metaphysical truths" is worthless if it doesn't somehow help people with something.

Except as Zizek shows people who think they're unideological and further free from idealism tend to commit the most heinous acts. Realpolitik gave us the biggest atrocities around the globe in the recent past. Plato was an idealist and his ideas of government were scary in some aspects but I'd rather live under philosopher kings with good intentions than Machiavellian Medici's who think they're doing what nature just intends them to do to survive. Dreams and goals are a necessary part of political reality and when we divorce ourselves from those we get a void of excuses and violence that justifies the status quo.

The problem is that this at best works as a good personal philosophy for attaining further knowledge/happiness. I'm not against that on a personal level. The problem is the whole point of philosophy at least traditionally is to move past the needs for potentially illogical personal narratives and find a coherent structure beyond the vagueness and searching of every day human thought. A lot of these aims failed as we found out in the early parts of the last century a lot of our knowledge really is just baseless, but I think most people would still rather attempt for a third-person standard of knowledge even if it will always fail rather than give up and learn to love the limits of human thought. I'm an avowed late-Wittgensteinian I'm aware in some way this is a lost cause, but lost causes are the best causes especially in philosophy.

And arguably fucked people over even more. It does nothing to removed the entrenched Porkies from their power. If anything, it only reinforces it, a fucking bandaid covering up a gunshot wound.

That was unexpected. I'm really a late-Wittgensteinian first and a pragmatist second, and it's because I think absolute standards of knowledge are a lost cause that I'm a pragmatist.

I see no reason why pragmatism can't go beyond personal philosophy. Standards of knowledge, that is systems of knowledge, have been very useful throughout history and they're definitely worthwhile to make. I would just rather people not take them to be absolute but dependent on the people's own uses for the knowledge. In society, thanks to the basic similarity among people, what's useful for one is probably useful for another, so I don't think pragmatic philosophy would tend to be just personal. (Class and societal role differences make an exception to this basic similarity in use and goals.)

In any case, what does it mean for systems of knowledge to fail? If they work for any period of time at all, I'd say they have some worth, even if they fail in the end. I think the best we can do is create systems as we think we need them, and throw them away when material conditions or general goals in life change enough for them to outlive their uses.

solidarity-us.org/node/1818

Well that always been the funniest thing about pragmatism to me, what if ignoring it is a defined philosophical idea is the most "pragmatic" course of action that will the most "cash value?"

Historical pragmatists in their writing often assumed good intentions on the part of the individual pragmatist would split the difference and save their philosophy. Philosophical propositions that assume the rationality and the inherent moral rationality of actors before they have proved such things have always been amusing to me though. It's like when Aristotle went about proving Virtue Ethics, but everything he tried to prove was virtuous was the inhuman excesses of his own culture. Or with lolberts particularly Hoppean's believing rational dialogue itself proves their ethical rationality apriori. If that is the case, whence came first the dialogue or ethics? A lot of philosophy is spent tautologically presupposing what you're trying to prove in the first place, historically if the philosopher had "good intentions" the academic community let them get away with this slight of hand but I don't think that will work anymore. People want proofs of everything and in the absence of proof they want you to continue to search for it. Even if as I indicated in my previous post, there might be nothing behind the metaphorical curtain. Which is why I think pragmatism is deeply unsatisfying as a philosophical position. It can leave you in a state where the most pragmatic course of life is the one that takes you away from the search for truth. I get the further irony that the search for truth presupposes truth.

What if the most pragmatic thing is to be an unadulterated hedonist, who cares not for the truth unless it can help them survive yet another day longer in their "pragmatic" delusions? I can imagine all kinds of bizarre horror scenarios where the most pragmatic thing to do is the worst thing imaginable.

I'm not saying social democracy is a good end goal. I'm just saying they achieved their end goal to an extent because they applied pragmatism.

I would argue that literally any political act requires you to muh privilege some ideas over others; meaning, you have to accept that some ideology is more "true" than others. So if you want to do anything productive, you have to assume that your way of thinking is closer to the truth than other people's; your way of thinking is more immune from ideology.

Zizek, as well as Derrida, Foucault, and others only identify ideology. They never construct any political program in its place, because they know they can beat up their own constructive ideas if they wanted to.

So why not take some fucking risks and be a pragmatist? Last time I checked, the polar ice caps are melting and there's not enough time to erode away at everything we think we know as capitalism kills us.

ITT: Everyone confusing "pragmatism" in the colloquial sense with the pragmatist school of philosophy

Read the last sentence of what I wrote in the paragraph that you quoted

I agree with your general point "Something needs to be done rather than nothing." The problem is people associate being pragmatic and realistic with upholding the status quo and unknowingly reiterating ideas and things that defend it. Ask the average person on the street what being idealistic means in their own words and they will say something reflects what they think is liberalism/general vague leftism and being realistic is being a penny pinching conservative. They believe that because their standards are setup by the limits of the current paradigm of material conditions.

Maybe that's a norm we ought to try and change? I tell my liberal normie friends all the time that trying to reform an unreformable system is the true utopianism. I'm pretty sure Zizek talks about this btw.

There are a ton of anarchists/Marxists out there, but the're all cooped up in liberal arts faculties learning that all political movements lead to tyranny so we might as logic away everything we know about the world and how to change it. If these academics followed the pragmatic maxim and only developed theories as a means to an end, we'd have global revolution in a 2017.

The basic principle of pragmatism is to ask "what difference does it make?" I'd say philosophical pragmatism is not opposed to idealism so much as to dogmatism. An idea's truth is not what's important. What difference it makes to believe it is what's important. After all, we don't ever make judgments about what is true by some infallible enlightenment. (Forget about math for this one, it's a long story.)

If you think those bizarre horror scenarios are bad, then that's a pragmatic reason to oppose the idea that leads to them. That idea is not pragmatism necessarily, but thinking that it's for some reason a good thing to be an unadulterated hedonist who cares for truth only if it can help you survive another day longer.

If you think dreams and goals will make a good difference, then that's a pragmatic reason to have them. Maybe some pragmatist philosophers could argue against dreams and goals, but they wouldn't represent all of pragmatist philosophy. I'd say that it's a good idea to be willing to reconsider dreams and goals if they seem to not be working for us, not to not have them at all.

It's just a way to deny you have an ideology.

If I have to choose between a just way where a huge portion of people die of hunger and diseases. And an unjust way where everyone in earth live a respected livable life. I will go to the unjust one every time.

That is the hope, the problem is Ideology is strange and hard to counter. It might paradoxically be that they're right to think that is what the truth is ideologically.Maybe the limits of the current system make liberalism (reformism) a dream and conservative accelerationism the best course.

Obviously we want to state the alternative system we want in lieu of those two terrible options, but if that was easy to do it would have been done in the past 150+ years.

I pretty much agree with both points in a common sense way. I guess I could get even more picky with philosophical details and shit, but I'll give up the goose.