Country United States Pages 277 Genre Philosophy | Language English LC Class B832.U55 2006 Page count 277 OCLC 63680074 | |
Publisher 2007 (Harvard University Press) ISBN 978-0-674-02354-3 (hardcover); 978-0-674-03496-9 (paperback) Followed by Free Trade Reimagined: The World Division of Labor and the Method of Economics Similar The Self Awakened, The Left Alternative, Passion: An Essay on Perso, Social theory - its situation, What Should Legal An |
The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound is a 2007 book by philosopher and politician Roberto Mangabeira Unger. In the book, Unger sets forth a theory of human nature, a philosophical view of time, nature and reality, and a proposal for changes to social and political institutions so that they best nourish the context-transcending quality that Unger sees at the core of human existence. Written in a prophetic and poetic manner that drew comparison with the work of Whitman and Emerson, and delving into issues of humankind's existential predicament in a manner that one critic found evocative of Sartre, The Self Awakened also serves as a summation of many of the core principles of Unger's work.
Contents
Overview
Unger opens the book by describing the predicament of human beings, who are born into a particular world and constrained by particular contexts, but also possess the ability to resist and subvert the given structures of organization and belief in which they find themselves. He asks, what should our attitude be toward these contexts—the structures and institutions that, at the same time, seem to confine us but never fully contain our ability to subvert them? The dominant response to this situation has been a set of beliefs commonly referred to as the "perennial philosophy", which holds that the world of appearance and distinction is an illusion and that true reality is a single, changeless being or divinity.
Unger contends that the perennial philosophy is an unsatisfactory response to the human situation, because it rests on a denial of transformation, difference, and time, all of which he considers central to a meaningful life. The perennial philosophy calls for a diminution of intensity in life, in contrast to the life of risk and engagement that Unger advocates. Unger contends that the most fruitful and promising philosophical position for enhancing human freedom is a form of radicalized pragmatism. Rejecting the distorted pragmatism that disguises insights about humanity as insights about knowledge and being, Unger's radicalized pragmatism celebrates the primacy of the personal over the impersonal and an ethic of vulnerability over a striving for invulnerability. After setting forth his theory of humanity and arguing for radicalized pragmatism, Unger then sets forth a program for the renovation of society in the spheres of democracy, social life, religion, and philosophy, all of which he urges would be transformed for the benefit of humanity by practices of experimentalism, heightened vulnerability, and a social endowment fund that gives people the security to embrace these attitudes and practices.
Key Ideas
The following ideas are central to Unger's argument in The Self Awakened:
Reception
Lee Smolin reviewed the book in The Times Higher Education Supplement. Smolin praised the range and ambition of Unger's book: "These days, few professional academics profess the ambitions of the great philosophers of the past.... One exception to this is Roberto Mangabeira Unger, whose book The Self Awakened shows him to be one of the few living philosophers whose thinking has the range of the great philosophers of the past." Smolin assessed the book as "highly accessible to a broadly educated reader. It is written in a vivid prose style that mixes precise lawyerly argument with poetic and metaphorical passages of astounding vividness. It is a polemic and a call to action, but what it challenges us to do most of all is to experiment with how we live and think. It is many years since I found myself as inspired and provoked by a book of non-fiction." Smolin concluded: "This is a philosophy as ambitious as any being written now."
Douglas McDermid, writing in the Review of Politics, described The Self Awakened as "penned by three Roberto Ungers: a poet-preacher, a philosopher, and a political theorist." McDermid criticized The Self Awakened, saying "The book overreaches hugely: in a mere 256 pages (no bibliography, no notes, no quotations), Unger tells us what he thinks about metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, religion, science, economics, art, mathematics, society, education, politics, consciousness, nature, human nature, genetic engineering, life, and love ..." Decrying Unger's "paucity of careful argumentation," McDermid contends that "his lack of engagement with opponents real or imagined gives the volume an oddly solipsistic, self-enclosed feel—ironic, given its title." McDermid is sharply critical of Unger's use of the term "pragmatism" to describe his philosophy, stating that such a description does Unger a disservice:
In my opinion, it would be much more useful and illuminating to see him as a moralist in the tradition of Emerson. Both Emerson and Unger are buoyant optimists who preach the doctrine of “the infinitude of the private man;” both stress the epiphanic character of ordinary experience; both wage eloquent war against the tyranny of custom; both depict life as ceaseless process, as change without limit or end; and both shine when they eschew dialectic and simply speak their “latent conviction”—often in the form of memorable and arresting apothegms. In short, the best parts of The Self Awakened ... are, like the best of Emerson, simultaneously edifying and provocative, perceptive and hopeful.
Louis Groarke reviewed The Self Awakened in The Heythrop Journal. Groarke acknowledges that the book is "written with an undeniable flair and a cosmopolitan eloquence, incorporating different aspects of a socially-progressive ideology into a comprehensive metaphysics." But Groarke contends that "[t]he knowledgeable reader will find nothing that has not been said, many times over, by other authors in more precise or compelling terms. This is not truly original work. Unger does not undertake the hard work of rigorous, objective argument."
Ruth Levitas considers both The Self Awakened and Democracy Realized in her article "Pragmatism, Utopia, and Anti-Utopia". Levitas writes that "[t]he radical potential of pragmatism is made explicit" in The Self Awakened. Comparing The Self Awakened to Richard Rorty's Achieving Our Country, Levitas writes that while both authors adopt a pragmatist approach to advancing progressive aims, Levitas writes that Unger distances himself from Rorty's "shrunken pragmatism" which is associated with a kind of "democratic perfectionism ... that effectively denies the alterability of social life, fetishizing a particular set of institutional arrangements." Contrary to Rorty's "anti-utopian" perspective, Levitas writes, Unger "may actually be utopian in the best sense of the word."
Levitas also considered The Self Awakened in an essay on the legacy of May '68. She contends that the utopian energies unleashed by the events of May '68 have been "largely extinguished," but refers to Unger's ideas in The Self Awakened as a rare contemporary manifestation of the May '68 spirit.
The quest for alternative futures needs to ... lead to politically effective action. Roberto Unger has suggested that this action leads to a kind of utopian pragmatism—improvisation of new institutions, new social processes, new ways of being. Unger argues for a sense of prophetic identity, which runs counter to contemporary politics of identity and does resonate with the sense of ’68: we should define ourselves in terms of what we might become, not where we came from.
Martin Stone offered sharply qualified praise for The Self Awakened in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. Stone described the book as
vintage Unger: exhortative, deeply romantic, full of moral intensity, relentlessly hopeful, marginal to professional philosophy. The work is part essay (after Emerson or the German romantics), part sermon, part political manifesto, and part critical theory. It is a left-romantic-existential-political Wake-Up Call. There is an American optimism and energy about it too. It seems more spiritually akin to Whitman or Emerson than to the "Pragmatists" it celebrates.
Stone also praised the vivid quality of Unger's writing: "The sound of the writing is one of Unger's signatures—the Epistle to the Romans meets the lawyer's appellate brief. And that is no accident. It's part of Unger's ambition to bring visionary modes of thought—those which are sometimes called prophetic or poetic—closer to the language of institutional rationality." But Stone criticizes Unger's way of grappling with philosophical problems, arguing that his philosophical method is at odds with his message of plasticity, transcendence, and encounter:
Although its ideas are solidarity and sympathy, Unger's writing is notably impatient and dismissive, obliterating where it should criticize or respond. It speaks of the radical potential in personal encounter, but it overpowers the other by netting him in the many "theses" and "alternative views" that rigidly structure its intellectual space. Wanting plasticity and availability to experience, it freezes and fixates ....
Stone concludes that The Self Awakened is "[i]nspiring in the survey it offers of Western thought, as well as in its radicalization of liberal political themes," but that "it is bound both to excite and disappoint the philosophical reader."