Encounters Between Dewey’s Pragmatism and Continental Philosophy: Shusterman’s Transformative Alternative to Richard Rorty from a German Perspective

Abstract

Shusterman’s transformation of pragmatist philosophy of experience takes as its starting point the aesthetic quality of experience and the soma as the medium to the world. It therefore enables cooperation with phenomenology, hermeneutics, and philosophical anthropology. This transformation represents an integrative alternative to Rorty’s revival of old dualisms (private/public, body/linguistic mind). Dewey’s public inquiry can be regarded as the pragmatist model for a democratic interpenetration of modern divisions in the digital postmodernity (Lyotard), which is not identical with postmodernism. Such interpenetration integrates laypeople and experts to solve problems arising from indirect consequences for third parties who did not cause these consequences. Depending on the problem, participants are needed from regional and global, as well as lifeworld and functional forms of community. Somaesthetics holds the potential to open aesthetically and somatically up the habitus of separate roles for public interpenetration.