Poets and polytheists

My recent immersion in Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism brings back that early-grad school thrill of finding a philosopher so transgressively unafraid to say iconoclastic things no one else was saying, with stylish over-the-top rhetorical excess. Who knew you could get away with deliberately misreading classic texts, to squeeze them into one's own preferred mold of thought? Or that you could so redefine familiar words like poetry that they now meant whatever you wanted them to mean, Humpty Dumpty fashion. 

[O]nce one sees no way of ranking human needs other than playing them off against one another, human happiness becomes all that matters, and Mill’s On Liberty provides all the ethical instruction one needs.

[P]oetry should take over the role which religion has played in the formation of individual human lives, and that nothing should take over the function of the churches... once you become polytheistic, you are likely to turn away not only from priests, but from such priest-substitutes as metaphysicians and physicists.

One can see [monotheists] as Nietzsche did, as blind, weak, fools. Or one can see them as James and Dewey did, as people who are so spell-bound by the work of one poet as to be unable to appreciate the work of other poets. One can be, like Nietzsche, aggressively atheist, or one can, like Dewey, see such aggressive atheism as itself a version of monotheism, as having “something in common with traditional supernaturalism.” PAA 28-9

Over-the-top, yes. But also provocative in ways that can positively enliven a classroom or an academic conference, as I suspect I'm about to confirm. The APA is already underway but I have another day's classes to teach before heading to the airport in the morning. I just hope the unruliest passengers aren't going to Chicago and don't turn up for "Promoting Happiness, Demoting Authority: Richard Rorty’s Pragmatic Turn Revisited" and "Pragmatism and the Pursuit of Hope and Happiness." 

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Postscript.

Live-tweeting the philosophy conference

These conferences involve a lot more sitting and listening than I'm accustomed to. I've amused myself by tweeting about it... 

Last tweets from the conference, before flying home in the morning: