YP rationalization & pragmatism

[Henry Secularpeturbations]

When I look in the newpapers or the popular magazines
here in the States, I often hear or read the term
"rationalization." 

Good word for Doug. 

I think that the term
 "rationalization" surfaced sometime between W.W.I and
W.W.II. Back then I think they used the term to denote
some mental process or mechanism by which we humans
unconsciously put a better face on our conduct or
experience than the facts warrant. In other words, we
excuse ourselves to ourselves by introducing a purpose
and order into that which we are privately or secretly
ashamed. Sometimes historians and cultural critics use
the term rationalization when discussing history and
culture. 
TRP, as a series of recent critical essays on Pynchon
and the 1960s make evident, was influenced by
Pragmatism.
Pragmatism was particularly suspicious of
"rationalization"   and "historical rationalism."
 Jeffrey S. Baker, in his Amerikkka Uber Alles: German
 Nationalism, American Imperialism, and the 1960s
Antiwar Movement in Gravity's Rainbow, Critique,
Summer 1999, VOL. 40, NO.4, 323-341, picking up on
Tony Tanner's recognition that Pynchon (in Entropy,
for example) provides metaphors of classic
epistemological dichotomy-Theory or Callisto and
Practice or Meatball, says:
Tanner's analysis points up a radically pragmatic
political agenda for social change ( as reflected in
the Beat's anarchic rhetoric), as well as a pragmatic
suspicion of the theoretical and an affirmation of the
experiential or particular. Both of these impulses
embody a radically democratizing Emersonian politics
that characterizes nearly all of Pynchon's major
writings. Baker.C.323
Across his body of writing, Pynchon has advocated a
turning away from recognized authority and affirming a
democratization of power based on the individual's
intrinsic worth, the same ideas that drove 1060s
coalitions such as Students for a Democratic Society
(SDS). Philosophically, SDS based much of its politics
and ideology on the pragmatic writings of C. Wright
Mills, William James, John Dewey, and Ralph Waldo
Emerson. 


For the pragmatists, intelligence is in constant
process of forming. To act, to live, to remember.
Retention requires constant alertness or the  "paying
attention to " (VL) and the observation of
consequences. As some Stoic taught (sorry to name
drop), there exists in the young a healthy appetite
for knowledge, open-mindedness, a will to learn, and
courage to readjust to a changing environment, but
these characteristics of Boy Scouts and youth in all
nations are also easily molded and or destroyed. 

Dewey claimed that Historical rationalism, in contrast
with the experimental, re-adjusting mind, turned to
Reason and employed it with a certain carelessness,
conceit, irresponsibility, and rigidity-in short
Absolutism. Just like the rationalizations that
psychologists noted in individual behavior, the
historical rationalism used Reason as an agency of
justification and apologetics. It taught that the
defects and evils of actual experience disappear in
the rational whole of things. In other words, things
APPEAR evil merely because of the partial, incomplete
nature of experience. As Bacon noted, Reason assumes a
false simplicity, universality, and uniformity, and
opens for science a path of fictitious ease. 

"This course results in intellectual irresponsibility
and neglect:--irresponsibility because rationalism
assumes that the concepts of reason are so
self-sufficient and so far above experience that they
need and can secure no confirmation in experience.
Neglect, because this same assumption makes men
careless about concrete observations and experiments. 
Contempt for experience has had a tragic revenge IN
experience; it has cultivated disregard for fact
and this disregard has been paid for in failure,
sorrow, and war. German rationalism was apologetic….it
discovered profound meanings due to the necessary
evolution of absolute reason. The modern world has
suffered because in so many matters philosophy has
offered it only an arbitrary choice between hard and
fast opposites: Disintegrating analysis or rigid
synthesis; complete radicalism neglecting and 
attacking the historic past as trivial and harmful, or
complete conservatism idealizing institutions as
embodiments of eternal reason; resolution of
experience into atomic elements that afford no support
to stable organization or the clamping down of all
experience by fixed categories and necessary
concepts…"    

  --Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy


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