Abstract

I argue that the modernist notion of a human self cannot easily be post-modernistically rejected because the need to view an individual life as a unified ‘narrative’ with a beginning and an end is a condition for asking humanly important questions about its meaningfulness. Such questions are central to philosophical anthropology. However, not only modern ways of making sense of life, such as linear narration in literature, but also premodern ones such as tragedy, ought to be taken seriously in reflecting on these questions. The tradition of pragmatism has tolerated this plurality of the frameworks in terms of which we can interpret or ‘structure’ the world and our lives as parts of it. It is argued that pragmatism is potentially able to accommodate both the plurality of such interpretive frameworks—premodern, modern, postmodern—and the need to evaluate those frameworks normatively. We cannot allow any premodern source of human meaningfulness whatsoever to be taken seriously. Avoiding relativism is, then, a most important challenge for the pragmatist.