CH A P TER 35 ............................................................................................... P RAGMAT I SM ............................................................................................... LARS ENGLE This chapter addresses three questions: What is pragmatism? How is it related to theatre? How might it be helpful to think of Shakespeare as a pragmatist? While it returns to some arguments made in my book Shakespearean Pragmatism (1993), I focus on work on pragmatism, theatre, and Shakespeare that has been done since then. Having offered the caveat that pragmatism does not provide a distinctive method for literary critics or a reliable weapon in their disputes with one another, I close with a reading of Macbeth that aligns what might seem Shakespeare’s least pragmatic play with pragmatist thought. W HAT IS P RAGMATISM ? .................................................................................................................. Philosophy has always had therapeutic as well as constructive aims. It has aspired to provide discursive cures to deep sources of human unhappiness: the disaster-prone changefulness of social arrangements, the ways fairness is undermined by the self- serving opinions of other people, the instability of evaluation, the elusiveness of truth, even mortality itself and the progressive extinction of selfhood that appears to accom- pany decay and death. Pragmatism, a distinctively American contribution to the history of philosophy, is as therapeutic as other kinds of philosophy, but its aim is to cure us of some of these traditional philosophic aspirations, or at least to get us to accept that the cure is never going to be entirely different in kind from the ailment. Pragmatism teaches that we are stuck with social mutability, with ungrounded com- mitments to what is right and wrong, with evaluative instability, with truth that is an honorific term applied by communities to useful reliable beliefs, and with our own status as sentient but evanescent nodes in an ongoing exchange of words, things, genes, and commitments. As a critique of modern philosophy, it attacks the idea that the goal of philosophy and science is to provide true representations of nature, where ‘true’ means ‘independent of the position of the judger’, ‘getting at the real relations of things Copyright @ 2012. OUP Oxford. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. EBSCO : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 2/24/2019 12:53 PM via UNIV OF TULSA AN: 467043 ; Kinney, Arthur F..; The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare Account: s4717078.main.mcfarlin