Richard Rorty - Achieving Our Country (1998)

Här är några av mina excerpter från Richard Rortys Achieving Our Country (1998) som någon mer kanske kan ha nytta av. Det rör framförallt den amerikanska vänsterns utveckling, och har egentligen inte full bäring på den svenska situationen, men innehåller ändå en del lärdomar och resonemang som kan vara tillämpliga även i våra försök att återuppfinna socialdemokratin.

Utan att han själv beskriver det så, tror jag Rorty också är tidigt ute med att problematisera det som Dr. Palmås kallar 68-tänk. Även små förbättringar räknas, etc.

s. 3: "National pride is to countries what self-respect is to individuals: a necessary condition for self-improvement. Too much national pride can produce bellicosity and imperialism, just as excessive self-respect can produce arrogance. But just as too little self-respect makes it difficult for a person to display moral courage, so insufficient national pride makes energetic and effective debate about national policy unlikely."

s. 3: "Those who hope to persuade a nation to exert itself need to remind the country of what it can take pride in as well as what it should be ashamed of. They must tell inspiring stories about episodes and figures in the nation's past - episodes and figures to which the country should remain true."

s. 9: "For James, disgust with American hipocrisy and self-deception was pointless unless accompanied by an effort to give America reason to be proud of itself in the future. The kind of proto-Heideggerian cultural pessimism which Adams cultivated seemed, to James, decadent and cowardly. "Democracy", James wrote", "is a kind of religion, and we are bound not to admit its failure.""

s. 15: "Dewey and Whitman wanted Americans to continue to think of themselves as exceptional, but both wanted to drop any reference to divine favor or wrath."

s. 20: "But there is another form of Hegelian historicism which survives Popper's criticisms intact. In this form, historicism is simply the temporalization of what Plato, and even Kant, try to eternalize. It is the temporalization of ultimate significance, and of awe."

s. 29: "democracy is the only form of moral and social faith which does not 'rest upon the idea that experience must be subjected at some point or other to some form of external control: to some "authority" alleged to exist outside of the processes of experience'"

s. 32: "To say that certain acts do make [national pride] impossible is to abandon the secular, antiauthoritarian vocabulary of shared social hope in favor of the vocabulary which Whitman and Dewey abhorred: a vocabulary built around the notion of sin."

s. 33: "But now suppose that on has in fact done one of the things one could not have imagined doing, and finds that one is still alive. At that point, one's choices are suicied, a life of bottomless self-disgust, and an attempt to live so as never to do such a thing again." s. 34: (citerat av Andrew Delbanco) "evil was the failure of imagination to reach beyond itself, the human failure to open oneself to a spirit that both chastises the enduring comfort of reciprocal love."

s. 91: "let me cite a passage from Dewey's Reconstruction in Philosophy in which he expresses his exasperation with the sort of sterile debate now going on under the rubric of 'individualism versus communitarianism.' Dewey thought that all discussions which took this dichotomy seriously 'suffer from a common defect. They are all commited to the logic of general notions under which specific situations are to be brought. What we want is light upon this or that group of individuals, this or that concrete human being, this or that special institution or social arrangement. For such a logic of inquiry, the traditionally accepted logic substitutes discussion of the meaning of concepts and their dialectical relationship with one another.' Dewey was right to be exasperated by sociolpolitical theory conducted at this level of abstraction. He was wrong when he went on to say that ascending to this level is typically a rightist maneuver, one which supplies 'the apparatus for intellectual justifications of the established order.' For such ascents are now more common on the Left than on the Right."

s. 94: "In its Foucauldian usage, the term 'power' denotes an agency which has left an indelible stain on every word in our language and on every institution in our society. It is always already there, and cannot be spotted coming or going. One might spot a corporate bagman arriving at a congressman's office, and perhaps block his entrance. But one cannot block off power in the Foucauldian sense. Power is as much inside one as outside one. It is nearer than hands and feet. As Edmundson says: one cannot 'confront power; one can only encounter its temporary and generally unwitting agents... [it] has capacities of motion and transformation that make it a preternatural force.' Only indeterminable individual and social self-analysis, and perhaps not even that, can help us escape form the infinitely fine meshed of its invisible web. The ubiquity of Foucauldian power is reminiscent of the ubiquity of Satan, and thus of the ubiquity of original sin - that diabolical stain on every human soul. I argued in my first lecture that the repudiation of the concept of sin was at the heart of Dewey and Whitman's civic religion. I also claimed that the American Left, in its horror at the Vietnam War, reinvented sin. It reinvented the old religious idea that some stains are ineradicable. I now wish to say that, in committing itself to what it calls 'theory,' this left has gotten something which is entirely too much like religion. For the cultural Left has come to believe that we must place our country within a theoretical frame of reference, situate it within a cast quasicosmological perspective."

s. 98: "The current leftist habit of taking the long view and looking beyond nationhood to a global polity is as useless as was faith in Marx's philosophy of history, for which it has become a substitute."

s. 100: "This left wants to preserve otherness rather than ignore it."

s. 101: "But you cannot urge national political renewal on the basis of descriptions of fact. You have to describe the country in terms of what you passionately hope it will become, as well as in terms of what you know it to be now. You have to be loyal to a dream country rather than to the one to which you wake up every morning. [...] But the country of one's dream must be a country one can imagine being constructed, over the course of time, by human hands."

s. 114: "By 'campaiging,' I mean something finite, something that can be recognized to have succeeded or to have, so far, failed. Movements, by contrast, neither succeed nor fail. They are too big and too amorphous to do anything that simple. They share in what Kierkegaard called 'the passion of the infinite.' They are exemplified by Christianity and Marxism, the sort of movements which enable novelists like Dostoevsky to do what Howe admiringly called 'feeling thought'."

s. 115: "This kind of politics [movements] assumes that things will be changed utterly, that a terrible new beauty will be born."

s. 121: "What would or past look like if we decided that (in the words that Bruno Latour takes as the title of his brilliant book) 'we have never been modern' - that history is an endless network of changing relationships, without any of the great climactic ruptures or peripeties, and that terms like 'traditional society,' 'modern society,' and 'postmodern society' are more trouble than they are worth."

s. 122: "... we might lose dramatic intensity. But we might help immunize ourselves against the passion of the infinite. If we dropped references to movements, we could settle for telling a story about how the human beings in the neighborhood of the North Atlantic made their futures different from their pasts at a constantly acceleating pace. We could still, like Hegel and Acton, tell this story as a story of increasing freedom. But we could drop, along with any sense of inevitable progress, any sense of immanent teleology."