{blogger.comtSummary(blogger.comtTextFromField(blogger.comg))} Aug 09, · A pragmatist ethics calls for prioritising feelings instead of facts, because a truly humanist democracy is sentimentalist rather than rationalist. One core tenet of the American strand of pragmatism is a rejection of representationalism, the view that the only measure for what one should believe is whether it correctly reflects or relates to Essays Democracy Essay for Students and Children. + Words Essay on Democracy. Democracy is known as the finest form of government. Why so? Because in a democracy, the people of the country choose their government. They enjoy certain rights which are very essential for any human being to live freely and happily
Essays on democracy is the best form of government
Couples dance on Avenida de Mayo, Buenos Aires. Reason and facts cannot be the basis of political debates and civic life. Love and laughter are the heart of the matter. Essays about democracy is amiss with democracy. What we need to do is further emphasise the importance of science and reason, and perhaps sanction the overtly partisan media outlets that mislead otherwise good-natured people, then everyone will come to their senses and agree on things because they are true, because they reflect reality.
Humans are rational, remember? A pragmatist ethics calls for prioritising feelings instead of facts, because a truly humanist democracy is sentimentalist rather than rationalist. Richard Rorty was a prominent pragmatist philosopher in the late 20th century, who thought that representationalism posed a threat to genuinely democratic social relations.
Rorty envisioned a pragmatist society that could embrace contingency without undermining our responsibilities to each other or backing up what we say with a universal authority. According to the pragmatist, all we ever needed to get authority off the ground is living in community with others and having the desire to be understood, essays about democracy.
In order for reasons to count as publicly justificatory, they must be understood as forceful to those the reason-giver addresses, the actual or potential audience. Justification is a matter of what communities mutually recognise as authoritative, as bearing on what they and their peers should believe, say or do.
The desire to be understood presupposes that one takes themselves to be the subject of assessment by another, essays about democracy, which is to say a perspective other than their own, from which there is a right and a wrong way to do things and, crucially, essays about democracy, the potential of being misunderstood.
In order to be understood, a child has to learn to use words and symbols in the right way, which means the way that their community uses them. Reasons are persuasive only from within a justificatory practice; I have to recognise your reason as a reason, as bearing on what I ought to do, say or believe. In order for that to happen, reason-giver and addressee must share background commitments about the relevant standards for what evidence gives a reason its force.
To be in a social community, then, is in part to collectively recognise a set of reasons that count as justificatory — to participate in a justificatory practice. But no actual democratic society does or should recognise only one universal standard of correctness. Doing so would be next to tyranny. S o an emphasis on the truth as a universal authority will only further bifurcate society because such attitudes carry with them anti-humanist sentiments that are incompatible with genuinely egalitarian social relations.
For example, if I claim that democracy requires abolishing the US police system because it is true that the police system is a corrupt institution, this presupposes a standard for what counts as evidence in favour of systematic corruption, essays about democracy, on what makes that claim true.
Any statement that is true is, by its own lights, essays about democracy, true from any perspective, or universal, essays about democracy. This means it would be irrational for you to deny that the US police system should be abolished, given what is true about it. As such, this claim will solicit agreement from those who already acknowledge it as correct, and denigration from those who do not.
In fact, people who do not share in the same justificatory practice will find such a claim to be something more like a personal attack or political agenda than a description of reality.
This might be why some people think that the very notion of evidence has been nefariously politicised, that we have replaced objective reality with subjective feelings. It is as if we are using the same words but speaking different languages. How can we genuinely criticise an existing social practice if the only means to do so presupposes the validity of the justificatory practice one employs? How can we successfully communicate a politically transformative insight if we are limited by what others recognise as authoritative?
If reasons are forceful only from within a shared justificatory practice, then any type of reason that appeals to the truth, no matter how progressive, will engender the essays about democracy authoritative relations democracy seeks to extinguish. It is decidedly antidemocratic. In a lesser-known essay on pragmatism and feminism, Rorty warns feminist scholars and activists against relying on realist doctrines to advance their utopia of gender equity.
While it is true that gender oppression is unjust, its truth cannot play any explanatory role lest it recreate the very authoritarian social relations it aims to eradicate. The problem, essays about democracy, Rorty suggests, is the idea that feminists need to give publicly accessible reasons at all. But women continued using the term and eventually it caught on. Rorty suggests that such misuses operate not in the space of reasons, but of causes. Typically, to say something operates in the space of causes is to suggest coercion or domination.
If I put a truth serum in your drink, then I have caused you to speak truthfully but I did not convince you to do so essays about democracy rational persuasion. I circumvented your consent and thus failed to treat you as an agent. Threats of violence, propaganda and advertisements cause us to feel or think things as a way to change our behaviour without giving any reasons for doing so, essays about democracy.
Feminists used language in unexpected and idiosyncratic ways, and in doing so were able to change how people felt about certain behaviours, rather than convincing them to care through rational persuasion on their terms. It was to treat their politics like poetry. Audre Lorde has likewise praised the poetic form as a medium for communicating genuine political insights beyond the confines of public reason.
For Lorde, poetry exists outside essays about democracy can be explained, yet it can communicate genuine political and essays about democracy truths. The point of poetry for Lorde is to deliberately misuse elements of a public language in order to cause a feeling or experience in the audience, essays about democracy. Feelings of confusion or bewilderment can encourage audiences to adopt a perspective from outside their existing communal practices, at least momentarily.
can cause people to have feelings that can lead to an ethically transformative insight. Like an inside joke we happen to overhear, it can compel people to want to figure out essays about democracy is going on. However, such feelings do not themselves play any publicly justificatory role. In short, the pragmatic, antiauthoritarian route to overcoming the post-truth gulf in our contemporary politics calls for causing people to feel differently.
T his pragmatist emphasis on the political power of feelings can be found in some of its earliest incarnations. Though pragmatism is most often associated with its American incarnationsits historical origins go back to the 18th-century German idealists, notably the social-historical philosophising of G W F Hegel. But Hegel himself thought that the essence of humanity was rationality rather than sentiment though he did praise the poetic formso I want to shift focus to some of the proto-pragmatist ideas found in the essays about democracy of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the neglected middle child of German idealism, whose work was bookended by that of Kant and Hegel.
Fichte, like Rorty, is often classified as a romanticist because of his emphasis on the primacy of feelings and the philosophical value of artistic forms such as literature. Fichte held that feelings were the foundation for all knowledge: ethical, scientific, essays about democracy, philosophical or otherwise. He believed that self-consciousness or the self was necessarily embodied: its only reality is through action, rather than as an object of reflection or a collection of experiences.
Fichte thought that humans were driven by their natural feelings into a perpetual striving toward unity or perfection that they would never individually achieve but could ever further approximate as a species. For Fichte, a self cannot transmit knowledge to another self, because all self-conscious beings must develop knowledge from their feelings, essays about democracy.
Being in community with others causes us to have feelings and ideas that we then use to develop into knowledge, essays about democracy, which means that humans must live alongside other humans in order to know anything. So long as we can feel in essays about democracy community with others, we can continue becoming better versions of ourselves.
Philosophy is thus continuous with everyday life, so long as one is reflecting on and clarifying their natural feelings. That means that not essays about democracy philosophers actually do philosophy. Fichte understands human embodiment and finitude as a call to action. So long as we can feel and exist in a community with others, then we can learn and continue becoming better versions of ourselves.
To think that we could find the truth that would cease our strivings and settle our worries is to deny the necessary limitations of human existence. Paulo Freire was a 20th-century Brazilian educator and philosopher who likewise believed that the purpose of education was to empower students to harness their feelings into political consciousness and thus action.
Freire thought that modern education proceeded as the unilateral transmission of static truths from the all-knowing teacher to the know-nothing students and, as such, education functioned to disempower the students.
Freire, like Fichte, argued that the purpose of education should be action rather than the memorisation of facts. Problem-posing education does just that: poses problems for students to collectively work out rather than providing ready-made problems with ready-made answers. Like the deliberate misuse of language, education as praxis seeks to cause particular feelings in the students — typically experiences of dissonance or frustration.
The experience of frustration puts students in a position to forge their own knowledge through working through their feelings alongside the teacher and their classmates. Problem-posing contexts also mirror what students experience outside the classroom, essays about democracy.
Ideally, students will understand their own feelings as important indicators for what is important and conceive of themselves as active participants in the search for truth, rather than its passive recipients.
A pragmatist ethics follows from Fichte, Freire, Rorty and Lorde. It aims to cause feelings that lead others to reconsider what they take to be true, essays about democracy, or authoritative, rather than convincing them to accept some pre-established truth on our say-so. Science, the environment, essays about democracy, racial justice — all of these things matter because we care about them. As Nietzsche once mused, the head is merely the intestine of the heart, essays about democracy.
Art can indicate a problem with social practices or values without having to explain what the problem is or why it is true. Art can cause us to feel things essays about democracy lead us to reflect on our ethical or political beliefs or convictions. Art is violence by other means, but it does not force compliance, it will just appear to one as bewildering, offensive or empty. The pragmatist treatment for our post-truth malaise calls for causing people to feel differently about themselves, their fellow citizens and the future — flooding the world with wholesome propaganda.
That there is no objective truth does not mean that anything goes: we must try even harder to communicate, essays about democracy. There is one often-overlooked art form that illustrates the point especially well: humour. Essays about democracy at the command of God is blasphemy. Humour also serves as a medium for communicating ethical truths, essays about democracy.
Satire is understood as the deliberate misrepresentation of some public figure, item or event in order to make a political or moral point. Satire, essays about democracy, like all humour, is interactive — it requires participation by the audience, in the same way that reading a novel or poem requires active interpretation. Humour operates outside essays about democracy space of reasons and causes us to feel things, but it does not thereby lack genuine cognitive import.
Like court jesters throughout history, we can use humour to cloak an otherwise unorthodox, offensive or transgressive insight. This is also what makes humour morally perplexing. I think satirical humour can cause culturally rich experiences that can give rise to transformative moral or cultural knowledge. Twain was particularly adroit at using humour to further political and moral ends. His use of satire — portraying white Christians as racist — demonstrated without explaining or justifying the essays about democracy between those two value systems, essays about democracy.
For a white southern Christian to find such a figure humorous is for them to adopt a critical attitude toward their own cultural practices and values. Satire is a means by which audiences can discern that something is wrong without a full grasp on what it is or why. It demonstrates that what is taken to be necessary and authoritative is in fact contingent and malleable. The political and social potency of humour and satire sheds light on the ways in which an emphasis on feelings instead of reasons still carries genuine ethical, political or social import.
Jokes presuppose that jokester and jokee are members of the same community but one that is based in shared experiences and feelings rather than justificatory practices or moral principles these are not irrelevant to the feelings in question. Humour is the last weapon against the powerful because it operates from outside the realm of accepted authority, essays about democracy, at the same time as it indicates mutual essays about democracy of it as authoritative.
Democracy - A short introduction
, time: 3:10Democracy should be sentimentalist not rationalist | Aeon Essays
Essays Democracy Essay for Students and Children. + Words Essay on Democracy. Democracy is known as the finest form of government. Why so? Because in a democracy, the people of the country choose their government. They enjoy certain rights which are very essential for any human being to live freely and happily 1 day ago · Geography essay competitions the of democracy form best Essays government is on shiksha ka mahatva essay in hindi easy. India of my dream english essay. Writing compare contrast essay dissertation le hros de roman peut-il tre mdiocre. Case study for tqm implementation lord of the flies essay about evil. How should a case study be presented Feb 27, · Democracy was the most successful political idea of the 20th century. Why has it run into trouble, and what can be done to revive it? | Essay
No comments:
Post a Comment