So a Rorty admirer (a Princeton pragmatist, Wittgenstein infused), fresh from reading Achieving Our Country, could appreciate such Hilbert Space word2vec equations as Left - Marx = Hegel + Whitman. Stuff like that. From Hegel we get the synergy of the dialectic: two opposing camps giving rise to something neither had predicted.
From Whitman we get a vision of peacefully slumbering souls aboard a westward heading passenger train, arriving at our left coast 21st century Transcendentalism by a different route than trying to exorcize Marx from postmodernism (a quasi-impossible task, just ask Jordan Peterson).
The dialectic arose in the wake of Darwinism, which devolved into Social Darwinism and a workers over owners propaganda, versus an owners over workers rationale. Both sides presumed a contextualizing Malthusian context. Data scientists extrapolated from various exponential and linear curves, predicting dire consequences. Given the immanent food shortages, the workers and owners would have to sort it out quickly, may the fittest class win.
What the sleepers didn’t realize at first was their train was bound for greater glory, in that these rickety Malthusian underpinnings were giving way to a more robust systems science. Human initiative could still make a difference and redirect energy investments according to more likely-to-work strategies. Pragmatism meets Transcendentalism, our latest hybrid.
