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

Narrativity, Modernity, and Tragedy How Pragmatism Educates Humanity snatch I argue that the modernist nonion of a human self (or subject) squeeze eruptnot advantageously be post-modernistically rejected because the guide to view an individual life sentence as a unified narrative with a beginning and an end ( wipeout) is a watch for asking humanly important questions about its meaningfulness (or meaninglessness). Such questions are primaeval to philosophical anthropology. However, not only modern ways of making whizz of life, such as linear narration in literature, but similarly premodern ones such as tragedy, ought to be taken seriously in reflecting on these questions. The tradition of pragmatism has tolerated this plurality of the frameworks in terms of which we can defend or structure the world and our lives as parts of it. It is argued that pragmatism is potentially able to accommodate both the plurality of such interpretive frameworks-premodern, modern, postmoderni st and the need to evaluate 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 gold metanarratives are dead is usually regarded as the key to the heathenish phenomenon cognise as postmodernism. We have been taught to think that the Enlightenment notions of reason, rationality, knowledge, truth, objectivity, and self have croak too 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 science and systematic philosophy, in particular, is over.Nevertheless, as even some postmodern thinkers themselves keep on insisting, we still have to be committed to the molarity 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 event of my life as Wittgenstein also famously pointed out at Tractatus 6.4311. Most (perhaps all) of us feel that ones own death is barely even conceivable from within ones life.On the other hand, somewhat paradoxically, death must be postulated as the imaginary end point, the final event, of the written report of my life. If there 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 confine human life.