The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound

In what kind of world and for what kind of thought is time real, history open, and novelty possible? In what kind of world and for what kind of thought does it make sense for a human being to look for trouble rather than to stay out of trouble?In this long-awaited work of general philosophy, Roberto Mangabeira Unger proposes a radical reorientation of established ideas about nature, mind, society, politics, and religion. He shows how we have to change our beliefs if we are to succeed in doing justice to our most distinctive contemporary experiences, discoveries, and ideals. The Self Awakened mobilizes the resources of several philosophical traditions, and develops the unrecognized revolutionary implications of the most influential of these traditions today--pragmatism. Avoiding technical jargon and needless complication, this book makes a case for philosophy as the supreme activity of the intellect at war, insisting on its power to deal with what matters most.

Table of Contents:
The Philosophy of the Age Rejected Options The Perennial Philosophy and Its Enemy Pragmatism Reclaimed Pragmatism As a Starting Point Three Ideas of the Pragmatists Central Themes: Agency, Contingency, Futurity, Experimentalism Two Misreadings of Pragmatism Pragmatist Insights and American Mistakes The Core Conception: Constraint, Incompleteness, Resistance, Reinvention A Conception of Humanity Four Elements of the Conception Philosophical Attitudes Associated With These Ideas Time and Experience: Antinomies of the Impersonal The Source of the Antinomies The Antinomy of Time The Antinomy of Objectivity The Reality of Time: the Transformation of Transformation The Reality of Time The Thesis That Time Is the Transformation of Transformation The Thesis That Time Holds Sway Over Everything The Thesis That There Is No Closed Horizon of Possible Worlds The Thesis That Mathematics Is a Trojan Horse Within the Mind Against the Recognition of Time The Thesis That Human Experience Has an Inescapable Temporal Structure Self-Consciousness: Humanity Imagined The Imagination Disarmed in the Social Sciences and Humanities: Rationalization, Humanization, and Escapism Self-Consciousness Redirected An Initial View of the Mind The Initial View Developed By Contrast The Two Sides of the Mind From the Conception of the Mind to the Marking of a Direction What Then Should We Do? Conception and Orientation The Indifference of Nature: False Escape Will and Imagination The Manifest World and Hidden Reality The Conflict Between the Enabling Requirements of Self-Possession Self and Character Historical and Biographical Time The Prophecies of Art Society: the Perpetual Invention of the Future Politics: Democracy As Anti-Fate A Moment of Reform: the Reinvention of Social Democracy Religion: the Self Awakened The Problems of Connection and Transcendence Restated How We Encounter These Problems in the Course of a Life Existential Options The Two Awakenings of the Self Demands of the Second Awakening Philosophy: Beyond Super-Science and Self-Help First Digression: Nature in Its Place Second Digression: the Universal Grid of Philosophy Proper Name Index Thematic Index

About the Author :
Roberto Mangabeira Unger is the Roscoe Pound Professor of Law at Harvard University.

Review :
Roberto Unger is one of the very few creative political philosophers of our time. The brief and broadly accessible The Self Awakened, which takes a distinctive position on one of the great questions of political philosophy and develops its implications for the political predicaments of our time, will serve as the best introduction to his complex work. For the brave band of secular humanists who do not wish to turn back the clock, this book represents an important contribution to an important conversation. Unger's interests are wide-ranging, highly informed, insightful, and demanding. His writing is graceful, with poetic overtones. Unger writes broadly for an educated audience, but most specifically for philosophers, psychologists, political scientists, sociologists, and legal theorists. His style is inviting and non-technical, almost sermonic in certain passages. His capacious and ambitious mind yields a challenge, though, of holding together and keeping in view the multiple facets of his philosophical vision. His penchant for apt and memorable metaphors, however, assists readers in this task. The Self Awakened shows [Roberto Mangabeira Unger] to be one of the few living philosophers whose thinking has the range of the great philosophers of the past...Unger has a restless and unruly mind, and is, I can report from several personal encounters, one of the most articulate and penetratingly original thinkers one is likely to meet...His thinking and writing have always ranged beyond the boundaries of legal and social theory, to psychology, psychoanalysis, and architecture. In this book, he takes on the task and direction of philosophy itself and draws out implications ranging from the theory and practice of politics, to psychology, to the most fundamental questions about space, time, cosmology, physics, and mathematics...[The Self Awakened] is written in a vivid prose style that mixes precise lawyerly argument with poetic and metaphorical passages of astounding vividness. It is a polemic and a call to action, but what it challenges us to do most of all is to experiment with how we live and think. It is many years since I found myself as inspired and provoked by a book of non-fiction. Unger aims at nothing less than to invent a new kind of politics, which is evolutionary in style but revolutionary in outcome...This is a philosophy as ambitious as any being written now. This book reads like something from a bygone age. Unger has given readers a humanist manifesto, a text more at home in the 1930s than in the postmodern age. It is that rarest of things: an earnest book...Unger contests the claims of academic philosophy to naturalize all aspects of human existence in the name of science. Instead, he offers readers the hope that human beings will be able to transcend their limitations through imagination, and thereby become authentically futural beings. In order to accomplish this, a renewal of philosophy must take place: a radicalized pragmatism whose practitioners truly realize that they control their own fates.