Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: The pragmatics of romantic idealism
- 1 Romanticising pragmatism: dialogue and critical method
- 2 Pragmatising romanticism: radical empiricism from Reid to Rorty
- 3 This living Keats: truth, deixis, and correspondence
- 4 An unremitting interchange: Shelley, elenchus, and the education of error
- 5 The embodiment of reason: Coleridge on language, logic, and ethics
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN ROMANTICISM
1 - Romanticising pragmatism: dialogue and critical method
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 July 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: The pragmatics of romantic idealism
- 1 Romanticising pragmatism: dialogue and critical method
- 2 Pragmatising romanticism: radical empiricism from Reid to Rorty
- 3 This living Keats: truth, deixis, and correspondence
- 4 An unremitting interchange: Shelley, elenchus, and the education of error
- 5 The embodiment of reason: Coleridge on language, logic, and ethics
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN ROMANTICISM
Summary
Rorty's call for ‘a rhetoric that romanticizes the pursuit of intersubjective, unforced agreement’ (my emphasis) reflects his view that pragmatism extends some of the key ideas of romanticism. This in turn raises the question: which ideas? Kathleen Wheeler characterises the antirationalistic strain of thought linking romanticism, pragmatism, and deconstruction as a thoroughgoing rejection of dualism in all its guises. Rorty himself is more cautious, picking his way between the possibilities of redescription implicit in what he identifies as ‘the romantic notion of man as self-creative’, and the equally romantic but (for him) less laudable aspiration that the vocabulary for that redescription be final, grounded in the noncontingent foundations of a ‘transcendental constitution’. Consequently, Rorty argues, although Coleridge, Shelley, and Wordsworth may have taught William James and John Dewey that truth is a human creation, the pragmatists had to find out for themselves that creation is not the act of an individual (or universal) consciousness, but is embedded within social interaction and communication. Habermas's argument, in turn, cuts between Wheeler's inclusiveness and Rorty's caution. His articulation of a romantic counterdiscourse of communicative rationality unsettles the assumption that romantic writers have no way of expressing the idea of self-creation without hypostasising it as an ideal. In subsequent chapters, I trace a distinctly British and empirical form of this counterdiscourse through the work of Keats, Shelley, and Coleridge.
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- Information
- The Truth about RomanticismPragmatism and Idealism in Keats, Shelley, Coleridge, pp. 15 - 40Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010