In The Self Awakened, Roberto Unger seeks to instigate a thoroughgoing revision of pragmatism by offering a radicalized version of it.  His primary goal, however, is much broader and more significant.  Ultimately he wants to "represent and raise up our humanity" through "imagination and hope."  To this end, in the first half of the book (roughly chapters 1-7) Unger sketches an intriguing account of humanity, which emphasizes our capacity for transformation and vulnerability, and our distinctive and paradoxical unboundedness or "infinity."  Furthermore, he carefully juxtaposes and contrasts his view with its chief historical and worldwide competitor, which he, following Leibniz, refers to as the "perennial philosophy."  This turns out to be a metaphysical view: time, change and difference ultimately are illusions or merely superficial realities, coupled with an ethic of serenity and invulnerability: we attain the only divinity available to us by redirecting our minds and wills toward unchanging ultimate reality and away from the illusory world of flux and appearance.  Unger offers his radicalized version of pragmatism partly on the heels of a complaint that no formulation of pragmatism thus far has gone far enough in rejecting the perennial philosophy in all its remaining vestiges.  Taking completely seriously the full reality of time and change and the priority of the personal over the impersonal are two main features of his rallying cry to complete the break with the perennial philosophy in all its forms.

Unger clarifies and divulges the subtleties and distinctive features of his alternative view partly through a) a fresh reading of three central themes of classical pragmatists (Peirce on meaning, James on truth, and Dewey on experience), which congeals around a controversial criticism of these theorists: that commitment to naturalism is their common and basic mistake; b) a quirky and surprising discussion of antinomies–of time and of objectivity–that inevitably crop up in human thought; c) a rudimentary, but nonetheless, persuasive discussion of the mind as only partly modular but fully and perpetually subversive; and d) a terse, effective summary of the history of philosophy framed by one of the central questions of the book: How are we to think about and relate to established and entrenched structures of organization and belief?

In the second half of the book (chapters 8-13 plus two final "digressions"), Unger sets forth a "series of transformative projects" for politics, religion, and philosophy that are driven by and deeply responsive to the dynamic view of humanity worked out and defended in the first half.  Unger is careful to point out that his proposals provide a direction, not a blueprint, for piecemeal reform that would amount over time to spiritual and political revolution.  Some highlights here include a) Unger's somewhat surprising selection of "experimentalist cooperation" (as exhibited in the "best businesses and the best schools") as the current development that most clearly embodies and signals the fundamental change needed in our institutions and practices and our attitudes toward them; b) a neo-Rawlsian articulation of basic principles of agency, solidarity and revision, in Unger's account of society; c) an extended discussion of the reinvention of social democracy cued by a comment about the growing preference for Scandinavia over the United States, and preceded by controversial proposals for "heating up" democratic politics with a view toward diminishing fate and providing "life," not simply order; and d) a provocative discussion of philosophy (or better, metaphilosophy) that concludes with an aphoristic philosophical anthem worthy of Heraclitus in his best moments.

   Unger writes broadly for an educated audience, but most specifically for philosophers, psychologists, political scientists, sociologists, and legal theorists.  His style is inviting and non-technical, almost sermonic in certain passages.  His capacious and ambitious mind yields a challenge, though, of holding together and keeping in view the multiple facets of his philosophical vision.  His penchant for apt and memorable metaphors, however, assists readers in this task.

Unger also glues together the separate components of his account by recurring repeatedly to the theme of decreasing the distance between our "context-preserving" and our "context-transforming" activities.  The goal of this move is to make progress and innovation in our practices and institutions, and thereby, in ourselves, much less dependent on crisis and much more dependent on imagination.  Some of the most thought-provoking moments in the book occur when Unger traces the connections between this model for social and political change, with its strong emphasis on denaturalization of our social and political realms, and his dynamic view of humanity.

Still Unger struggles to give concrete examples of combining and collapsing together these seemingly disparate kinds of activities.  Also, he barely addresses concerns about how his model may unwittingly unleash and foster anomy.  This problem is exacerbated, in turn, by Unger's repeated refrain that social practices and institutions are "fighting petrified" or "frozen will and interrupted conflict," which "enslave" or "imprison" our ideas and our very selves.  It is as if, for Unger, practices and institutions have taken the conceptual space of Plato's bodies–the old prison houses of immortal souls.  But if we must have them, as Unger holds, we will need a much more lucid account of how we might make constant and rapid transformation of them a permanent feature of our already fragile condition.

This problem shows up in another way in Unger's treatment of religion.  For a work that aims to engage us where we currently are with an ambitious and compelling vision of our potential, which is also at the same time a radicalized pragmatism, the perspective offered on religion is disappointingly ethereal and non-engaging.  Religion historically has been the most widespread vehicle for legitimation (and delegitimation) of social practices and institutions.  Currently fundamentalist religion is and probably will continue to be for the foreseeable future a major obstacle on the path of social and political transformation for visionaries such as Unger, not to mention the rest of us.  Yet there is hardly any recognition of this problem or discussion of how we might address the root causes of it in the human frame, even though Unger devotes an entire chapter to religion.  This is a major lacuna.  There is no avoiding a direct and messy entanglement with religion, if one aspires to be a luminary of the future of humanity (all of humanity).

Amazingly, the laws of nature and the implications for them of the reality of time manage to capture much more of Unger's attention.  He argues, quite unpragmatically, that our conventional view of causation makes no sense because it "lacks a ground beyond time."  In fairness to Unger, this is part of a larger discussion about following out more consistently the ramifications of everything's being temporal (contra the perennial philosophy).  But this part of his account smacks of foundationalism abandoned long ago by pragmatists, a move he endorses in his final "digression."  There he tells us that political and ethical thought has experienced a kind of salvation through being delivered from the need for grounding in "metahumanity" (Unger's substitute for metaphysics).  But then why do we need to be concerned about highly artificial antinomies of time and objectivity?  Many philosophers, especially pragmatists, will suspect as well that Unger unwittingly naturalizes an Enlightenment notion of objectivity to get his antinomy of objectivity off the ground, so to speak.  If Richard Rorty were still with us, he might remark that we could find (or create) many more putative antinomies of thought right under our noses, if we tried hard enough.  Nothing here seems crucial to the ethical, social and political future of humanity.

For a work so energetically geared to future horizons of possibility, it is unfortunate and surprising that other relics of our intellectual past resurface as well.  For instance, while Unger explicitly endorses the "impulse to discard the dualisms that continue to haunt speculative thought," his critique of naturalism in Peirce, James and Dewey reinvigorates the dualism of the personal vs. the impersonal or the human world vs. the world of nature.  Moreover, there simply are too many sweeping diagnoses of and subsequent criticisms launched against various "isms" that are said to infect the social sciences and humanities.  I readily concede that Unger is better situated than most to offer programmatic criticisms about large swaths of academia.  But I doubt that practitioners in these disciplines will recognize much of themselves or their ideas in his remarks.  This style of broad criticism from the singular expert who looms above is unhelpful and may even hark back to patriarchal models of knowledge.  While we are on that topic, I also was very surprised to find at least a handful of references to "mankind" in Unger's prose.  Surely we may expect that any forward-looking discourse about humanity will set aside as much as possible non-inclusive language of our past.

Finally, in a related vein, I must note Unger's insouciant attitude toward the environment.  In a remarkable passage from the "First Digression," Unger states:

We view ourselves as managers, in trust for future generations, of a sinking fund of non-renewable resources.  We balance the call of consumption against the duty of thrift.  It is an anxiety founded on an illusion.  Necessity, mother of invention, has never yet in modern history failed to elicit a scientific and technological response to the scarcity of a resource, leaving us richer than we were before.  If the earth itself were to waste away, we would find a way to flee from it into other reaches of the universe. (240)

In fairness to Unger, he quickly adds that it is "useful to be worried and therefore prudent."  Still this cavalier view is not worthy of inclusion in any responsible vision of our ecological future.

These criticisms notwithstanding, I remain very sympathetic to Unger's overall project and commend The Self Awakened as an insightful and occasionally inspiring book.    

© 2007 Brad Frazier

Brad Frazier is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Lee University.  His most recent publication is Rorty and Kierkegaard on Irony and Moral Commitment: Philosophical and Theological Connections (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).  He also has published articles in Philosophy and Social Criticism, Journal of Religious Ethics, International Philosophical Quarterly, and History of Philosophy Quarterly.

Categories: Philosophical