International Journal of Language & Literature

The Transcendentalist Culture after Rorty
László Márfai Molnár

Abstract
The term transcendental, the key word of my paper comes from Kant, who meant by that a methodological perspective, which is capable of grasping the totality of the (scientific) forms of cognition, which are known to us. Later Schelling applied the term transcendental to evaluate a future philosophy, which can entail formerly separated entities like subject and object, spirit and nature, etc. in the form of united knowledge. The American philosopher, Richard Rorty revived the expression to indicate the form of a potentially new culture. The essence of his idea is that agents of equal intellectual standing, who are in multiple and complex interaction with each other without a distinguished center, are creating a new form of culture, which we can call transcendentalist culture after Rorty. This means a continuous re-connection with the beginnings since because of the lack of a center the beginning is available at any time to anybody. Plato can be our inspiring conversation partner if we are willing to enter into a dialogue with him through his works. At the same time no one can feel peripheral because we speak of a space whose center is everywhere and whose perimeter is nowhere (Rorty, 1982).In my paper I will make an attempt to continue this experiment and I will address the question of what kind of speech modes and structures can constitute this culture, which could be in its spatiality the space of a new form of consciousness, that of meta consciousness of a similar transcendentalist nature.

Full Text: PDF      DOI: 10.15640/ijll.v2n4a3