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Ron C. de Weijze's picture

No foundation for pragmatistm?

I think that living in the age of binary decisions closely relates and indeed enhances, pragmatism or empirical non-foundationalism. After the episode that nothing went anymore, anything goes again, which illustrates our revolutionary epoch of the internet, multiculturalism and the redistribution of happiness and sadness in-the-making. Life is becoming a graphic fractal of nature, an orchid indeed, where stories are pulled into stories ad infinitum. Bergson called this the 'fabulating fuction', the ability of human kind to transform his own history and wisdom into stories, such as the Bible. The White Heat of the Big Bang is cooling down and in the process, of evolution, matter is created and clutting together to form life. All life-forms are but 'footprints in the sand' and can readily change. All experience is, let there be one universal, differentiation, immediacy, actuality, continuousness, change, equity, newness and simplicity (ref the binary - rcdw). We need to learn to see all the 'qualia' of this experience, as Rorty coined them. I admired his Philosophy and the Mirror Image of Nature a lot and was struck by his apparent questioning of the foundations of all those theories of all those who inspired my teachers to make me believe what they taught me: their correctness and of their followers/favorite pupils. A blessing in disguise it must have been, to never find myself one of those. My distrust of society in general and teachers in particular had lead me to choose social psychology, to study that basic unrighteousness of society. I guess I am at the age now that Rorty was when he had found enough answers to write his Mirror Image, so the reflection must now be even stronger. Indeed we need to wipe it clean from time to time, as he writes, to remember some of that wisdom of his, shaky or not, coming from ALL those studied stories, nonetheless empirical and foundational, at least for pragmatists.

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