I Am An American Philosopher: Henrik Rydenfelt

-An Interview Series with John Capps-

“Pragmatism, in its Deweyan variety, is rightly associated with a type of progressivism. However, that progressivism now tends to be assimilated with the present outgrowth of liberalism, which, using Peirce’s phrase, makes inquiry (in this case into value and politics) something similar to the development of taste. Pragmatism cannot provide for those who have a deep need for certainties and will likely always be best served by authorities, religious or otherwise. But it points to an alternative to both authoritarianism and the liberal project by bringing value and purpose back into the scientific fold.”

Henrik Rydenfelt is Docent of Practical Philosophy and Media and Communication Studies and University Researcher at the University of Helsinki. In addition to authoring dozens of articles and book chapters on pragmatism, ethical inquiry, media and communication, environmental philosophy, bioethics, and AI, he has served as an editor for The Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, Pragmatism Today, andNordic Studies in Pragmatism. He is the coordinator of the Nordic Pragmatism Network and a founder of the European Pragmatism Association. He is also editor-in-chief of the Finnish-language journal Media & viestintä (Media & Communication).

What does American philosophy mean to you?

To me, American philosophy means pragmatism. But these days, I’m tempted to make the usual philosopher’s move and respond to a question with another question: Do I need to be an American philosopher to be a pragmatist? American philosophy must have been at least part of the equation that enabled the rise of the United States from a relatively negligible borderland into a global superpower within the first half of the 20th century. On this side of the Atlantic, we ended up benefiting immensely from that development—for a long time, it helped prevent another hot war in Europe, and gave countries like Finland the opportunity to orient themselves toward the West rather than being subsumed by the Soviet East. But now we are experiencing practical consequences of a very different kind. To me this suggests that American philosophy has either been forgotten, misunderstood, or may contain serious defects after all.

How did you become an American philosopher?  

Helsinki was a stronghold of analytic philosophy and a birthplace of many important developments in (modal and deontic) logic and semantics, due to Finnish luminaries like von Wright, Hintikka, Niiniluoto, and their many students. Thanks to their broad-mindedness, it was not strangled by assumptions common in the analytic tradition then and still now. Nevertheless, the tradition itself incorporated assumptions I found hard to weather: atomism, reductionism, and nominalism. It took time to find the words for what was at issue, but analytic philosophers seemed to find no place within the scientific worldview for intentionality, normativity, and purpose. Many appeared to suggest that we simply learn to live without them, shedding ladders climbed and burning bridges crossed. Worse, some had developed a language game with little practical consequence. Rorty was right, I think, in criticizing such projects as largely trying to carve out a locus for the profession—preferably a privileged, foundational one—rather than truly facing the consequences of the scientific revolution.

I found all of this difficult to swallow and a bit embarrassing for the scientific worldview. Any worldview inevitably involves its own normative commitments, but unlike its alternatives (say, religion) that have easy recourse to such commitments, the scientific or naturalistic one somehow eschews its own. Looking at how things are now, it’s no wonder, I think, that we have seen the rise of both old and new forms of backwardness. Now I need to try to put my words carefully, especially as they are understood a bit differently on different sides of the Atlantic. Pragmatism, in its Deweyan variety, is rightly associated with a type of progressivism. However, that progressivism now tends to be assimilated with the present outgrowth of liberalism, which, using Peirce’s phrase, makes inquiry (in this case into value and politics) something similar to the development of taste. Pragmatism cannot provide for those who have a deep need for certainties and will likely always be best served by authorities, religious or otherwise. But it points to an alternative to both authoritarianism and the liberal project by bringing value and purpose back into the scientific fold.

Anyway, going back to the point of becoming a pragmatist, I did not find much consolation in the central figures of the continental tradition. Kant had already taken a good look at the British empiricists and realized how it would all end up going sideways. But Kant’s response was to make a sharp—initially very sharp, but by the third Critique somewhat less sharp—distinction between the realm that science can deal with and another realm where the topics that were puzzling me were relegated. Continental philosophy seemed to just repeat this Kantian move (as in Husserl), or go even further back to perform an Aristotelian one (reflected in Heidegger). It seemed to me neither the analytic nor the continental tradition—a split that was more pronounced back then—had the tools to deal with the situation.

So I turned to somewhat earlier, 19th-century thinkers for potential answers. I got interested in Nietzsche, who was, I think, grappling with the very same issues, in effect trying to introduce intentionality, values, and teleology into the scientific worldview not by a transcendental move but by what he called genealogy or, alternatively, in terms of the notion of will to power. He understood that the problem with earlier responses was that they all tried to achieve a level of certainty that is impossible: that we have to come to terms with philosophy being able to secure little in terms of its traditional project in order to achieve much more with respect to human life. But because of his misapprehension of Darwin and his rather idiosyncratic assimilation of morality with religion, particularly Christianity, the substance of his accounts seemed to me misguided or, at least, still risked a relapse into the Kantian or Aristotelian alternatives.

It was my teacher from year two at university, Sami Pihlström, later my dissertation advisor and ever after a close colleague, who introduced me to William James. James was, I think, busy with the same questions, more explicitly so than the other pragmatists. He tried to formulate pragmatism as a third way between scientistic, reductionistic empiricism and religious, ontologically promiscuous sentimentalism. It did not take long for me to realize that much of what James said was also said by Peirce, but with a good deal more careful argument, detail, and historical perspective. At the same time, about 20 years ago now, Peirce research emerged, for a while, as a central topic in philosophy in Helsinki, with figures such as Ahti-Veikko Pietarinen, Mats Bergman, Sami Paavola, and Erkki Kilpinen alongside Sami all suddenly and frequently present in the same room. I got to study pragmatism with true experts, and as I began to understand more, I started to think that Peirce and the pragmatist tradition would provide the response to my problem.

I still think so. But while Peirce got much right, he wrote as if he were someone sitting in a late-1800s study or on a porch—as he, in fact, did—not exactly well versed in what was going on around him. It was James and especially Dewey, all the way up until the 1940s, who managed to translate pragmatist ideas into responses to the issues and problems of a ripe industrial era, with rapid technological change, increasing speed of communication, spectre of world wars, and so on—that is, the kind of world we keep experiencing now, just with some more head-spinning speed. Overall, I think there is much more consistency and continuity within the pragmatist tradition than we sometimes perceive, looking at things at slightly too short a distance.

The colleagues already mentioned also enabled me to build strong connections with many central scholars and contemporary pragmatists on all inhabited continents. In 2008 I started to coordinate the Nordic Pragmatism Network. Extensive networks all around enabled me to found the European Pragmatism Association in 2012 with colleagues from sister networks in Europe. It has been one of my more lasting contributions to the community, and one that I’ve tried to foster ever since. I think the European Pragmatism Conferences have always been the most central venue for advancing the field alongside the SAAP meetings.

How would you describe your current research?

One main strand of my research since my dissertation has been to carve out a conceptual avenue to normative science—the possibility of studying normative, including ethical, issues by way of broadly the same scientific methods that have proven so powerful elsewhere. This requires challenging entrenched philosophical and cultural assumptions that sharply separate “descriptive” and normative questions, treating only the former as amenable to scientific and empirical inquiry.

My other foot has long been in media and communication studies. It is a field that has been welcoming to new developments and to people bringing different ideas, methodologies, and perspectives. There, my research focuses especially on the societal and ethical implications of new technologies in media, journalism, and democracy. In my most recent work, together with my research group, I have focused on how generative AI technologies—especially their emerging use by audiences for content consumption—will reshape the overall information environment, media, and journalism, with far-reaching ethical and societal implications.

Although initially disjoint, these two tracks have converged. In our current research, we draw on Dewey’s stages of inquiry to structure the study of normative questions about emerging technologies. These stages offer a way to embed ethical problems, normative theories, and hypotheses about values as the very subject matter of experimental inquiry. In our case, that inquiry takes the form of a pragmatist research through design: new, speculative designs are devised to actualize and embody normative assumptions and theories, and are then tested by putting them to practice.

What do you do when you’re not doing American philosophy?

I have managed to develop a taste for good food and drink, and since American philosophy is not quite lucrative enough to sustain quality meals at good restaurants in Helsinki at all times, I’ve had to develop some cooking skills. Luckily, I find it quite relaxing—something to counterbalance reading and writing.

What’s your favorite work in American philosophy? What should we all be reading?

I keep returning to Peirce’s Harvard Lectures. Although lucid, they are terribly condensed, as Peirce was given only about seven hours to present his pragmatist vision—but we are all the better off for that; otherwise, it might have become yet another grand scheme for a multi-volume series. One book I always recommend to my graduate students is Peirce’s Theory of Signs by Tom Short. Its central chapters were important for me in beginning to unravel pragmatism’s potential. As a Jamesian counterbalance, everyone should read a book by Sami Pihlström (there are many to choose from, covering most topics in philosophy). But now I’m starting to think that in pointing to these I’m also trying to figure out, or help others figure out, how exactly I got to where I did or arrived to where I have.