[MD] Reason, Tradition, Absolute Truth

[Matt Kundert]

DMB,

DMB said:
Right, these questions get at the heart of almost everything you say. Its a 
shame that you don't have the time because almost everything you say would 
proabably make a helluva lot more sense to me if you could answer them. 
Can't you just give me a brief summary or something? I mean, if these ideas 
are so central to your thinking you should have something to say about it 
right off the top of your head, no? How about if I promise not to jump all 
over it? its doesn't have to be very elaborate or anything, I just want to 
get oriented. Yea, I ask you to do something like this every few months or 
so. Are you EVER gonna have the time? C'mon Matt, I'm only asking you to 
explain what you mean. I'm operating on the assumption that you know what 
you mean and that telling me what you mean would be pretty easy. I can take 
"no" for an answer, but it seems like a pretty reasonable request to me.
...
Repeatedly failing to answer questions about your most central ideas is bad 
enough....

Matt:
I apologize, but do you understand why people think you're a jackass 
sometimes?  And why people don't enjoy having a conversation with you?  
"Repeatedly failing to answer questions"?  I've spent five years answering 
everybody's questions.  It _is_ a reasonable request, as I said, but did you 
ever think that, ya' know, I have job, I go to school, I'm hung over today?  
I've been flipping off pieces to the social/intellectual problem for several 
years, and I've been trying to pull it together for at least the last year.  
These aren't easy tasks.  We're all growing, all changing, becoming better 
and more sophisticated and learned in our philosophies.  Sometimes the 
static quality catechisms we throw at people aren't there, we still have to 
create them by following the wispy threads of Dynamic Quality.

So, yeah, its a reasonable request made by an unreasonable person who's seen 
versions of the answer to this reasonable request before, and so I quite 
reasonably don't make reproducing a tightly bound version on his request a 
high priority.

But you want a sloppy summary version off the top of my head?  Fine, here it 
is.  But someday we should perhaps talk about why you feel the need to talk 
to people the way you do around here.  It's bad, bad Quality and it shines 
all around you.

Reason and Tradition
---------------------------------
The Reason/Tradition distinction arose in the Enlightenment to account for 
the seperation of science from the Church.  We can call "tradition" all 
those things we learn from other people, by authority and socialization and 
stuff.  "Reason" is the activity of our minds to determine truth.  
Enlightenment philosophers thought that Reason could correct our beliefs by 
rejecting everything that was held merely because your parents held it.  
Descartes is the first and paradigmatic example when he set out to doubt 
everything to see what was really indubitable in his mind, and thus be able 
to construct knowledge, "clear and distinct ideas" that were totally 
independent of what they teach you in school.

This distinction was born out in many different ways (scientism, 
transcendentalism, etc.), but considering this arose in a discussion of 
Mill, I'll concentrate on Enlightenment liberalism and how the distinction 
breaks down there.  Enlightenment philosophers roughly argued that 
liberalism was the politics of reason, that if you follow the principles of 
reason, and ignore the taint of traditions, you'll come up with liberal, 
secular democracy.  The problem is that when a secularist argues with a 
traditionalist (say, of a religious background) about their core values, 
they beg the question over the traditionalist.  That's a violation of 
reason's rules.

Another angle is to ask Rawls (the greatest contemporary Enlightenment-style 
secularist), after he says that a liberal society is the kind of society in 
which each citizen has the freedom to have their own "conception of the 
good," if his "justice as fairness" principle that governs liberal society 
is not just one of these conceptions.  If it is (which it is), then a 
contradiction appears.  Its what happens when public schools say that they 
don't teach values at school, and religionists respond that the "secular 
humanism" they teach is a set of values.  And us Pirsigians concur: what 
else could things be?

The argument is that secularist liberals can't get their arguments off the 
ground any more than the traditionalists without an inculcated, socialized, 
educated set of core values.  Logic doesn't work without assumptions to play 
with, and you can't argue with assumptions.  The Enlightenment philosophical 
project created the Reason/Tradition distinction in the hopes that they 
would be able to find assumptions that were self-justified--and then build 
the best society from those.  They haven't found them yet, and without them 
they've produced what critics call the "contradiction of liberal discourse." 
  "They say they're guiding the kids by the light of Reason, but they're 
really brainwashing the children just as much as we admit we're doing."

The solution is to dump the Enlightenment project of self-grounding and 
simply admit that our values are as inculcated as anybody else's.  Doing 
this would be to say that Reason, the activity of our minds, only functions 
_within_ Traditions, bodies of evolving belief that we learn from school and 
our parents, not over and against Tradition.

That's one version of the story of why the social/intellectual distinction 
doesn't work if it is shaped like the Enlightenment's Tradition/Reason 
distinction.  I'm not saying there aren't distinctions to be made between 
social and intellectual or reason and tradition.  But I don't think this one 
panned out.

Absolute Truth
---------------------------------
I called your question here a little facetious.  The reason is that you have 
all the bafflement and rhetorical questions in full force here, but you say 
1) "this idea that 'Absolute Truth' is the problem with Plato and Western 
philosophy is still quite alien to me" and 2) "My hunch is that the quest 
for 'Absolute Truth' is what happens when Plato is taken literally and that 
he is almost always taken literally."  The first indicates that you cannot 
believe that anyone has ever taken "absolute truth" seriously, which is why 
you ask for examples.  But the second says that the quest for this absurd 
thing occurs when Plato is taken literally and "he is almost always taken 
literally."  That indicates that almost everybody takes away from Plato an 
absurd quest for absolute truth, which you were previously baffled with the 
very idea of.  If you say the second, then you must already have a pretty 
good idea of examples, since there are so many of them and all that.

I understand why you say 1 and I agree with the spirit of 2.  Agreeing to 
the letter of 2 would involve a turf war over the correct textual exegesis 
of Plato.  I certainly don't have the experience to do that (and am willing 
to admit that when I point at Plato I'm pointing at caricatures of Plato), 
but the correct interpretation of Plato is besides the point for this 
question: whether or not Plato's interpreters have misunderstood him, the 
point is that they _have_ understood him in a certain way and propounded an 
interpretation that has held the sway of Western philosophy--correct or not, 
an interpretation that breeds the quest for absolute truth.

I understand why you find it so alien because you look to me like somebody 
standing on the other end of 2500 years of failed Platonism (Platonism being 
different from Plato).  The increasing failure of Platonism led to things 
like secularism and fallibilism, beliefs that make it very hard to take 
seriously a momentous notion of absolute truth.  I think you're on the right 
side of this and I wish we could just leave it there.

But you also want to say that the exorcism of (possibly incorrect) Platonic 
ghosts is a pointless task that inflates the importance of something long 
dead.  Look at me, you say, I'm a product of its demise. I agree, but I 
guess I still see ghosts flickering in other people's eyes, which is why you 
keep asking me for examples.  David Hall has said that its difficult to 
teach Rorty if people don't fear Cartesianism--and that most people don't 
naturally fear Cartesianism.  So you have to pump up the ghosts, give them 
life, or else people won't understand what the point of it all is.  Rorty's 
lamented the fact that Philosophy 101 gives people a bunch of philosophical 
views that there is no point to.  It's the cost of understanding, say, him 
or Donald Davidson, but Rorty doesn't think it's all that important for 
laypeople to have a view about theories of truth or what have you.  They 
don't really connect up to everyday life, and putting Cartesian fears in a 
person might start to suggest that they do.

The article you've pulled from the internet makes a lot of Rorty's 
biography, but I think its turned in the wrong directions.  I think the 
author doesn't really understand Rorty very well.  But he does get right 
that Rorty is a fallen metaphysician.  But while the article confusingly and 
wrongly suggests that Rorty's making a return to metaphysics, I think the 
right thing to take from that is that not everybody is cut out to be an 
academic philosopher--Platonic metaphysician or pragmatist debunker.  I 
don't think Rorty's obsession with never being fooled by (or letting others 
be fooled by) metaphysicians screws up his vision.  I don't know, I don't 
see it.  Others do, but I can't make out what its supposed to be.

I think there are still ghosts, but I don't think the ghosts, for the most 
part, are that important.  Rorty talks about his differences with people 
like Habermas and Putnam as "highly technical philosophical issues."  He 
doesn't think anything would really change for everyday life if a 
deflationary view of truth or a Peircian eschatalogical view wins out.  Most 
of the issues dealing with representationalism are remote from everyday 
life.

That's probably what still seperates us.  While you don't think 
representationalism is important at all (which I agree with), you do think 
something really important and momentous can be done in philosophy, that we 
lost something in Plato that concerns about representationalism just 
obscure.  I don't see it.  We both agree that representationalism should be 
debunked, but you see something else that I don't.  Which is what you've 
(kinda') been saying for years, but I have to confess: I still don't see it 
and I still don't see how concerns with representationalism could obscure 
it.  But, maybe that's because my fight against representationalism is in 
the way.

Here's something else about Rorty from an interview article, "The Quest for 
Uncertainty", included in his new book of interviews, Take Care of Freedom 
and Truth will Take Care of Itself:

-------------
Why is Rorty--the advocate of pluralism, of not knowing things for sure, of 
openness and variety--not more comfortable with the balancing act that 
philosophers like [John] McDowell and [James] Conant want to pull off?  For 
all the important mysteries about Rorty, his colleagues call attention to 
one seemingly insignificant aspect of his personality: his voice.  Rorty's 
voice is, as Daniel Dennett notes, "sort of striking--these firebrand views 
delivered in the manner of Eeyore."  When philosophers talk about Rorty, few 
can resist trying to imitate his distinctively somber delivery.  Of Rorty's 
mode of presentation, the British philosopher Jonathan Ree says: "There's a 
tremendous kind of melancholy about it.  He tries to be a gay Nietzschean, 
but it's an effort for him."  For Conant, hearing Rorty speak for the first 
time was something of a revelation.  "It's easy to read his writings in a 
register of excitement and a heightened, breathless voice," he explains.  
"But the note that I heard when he was reading these sentences in his own 
cadences and rhythm was--for want of a better word--depression.  I thought, 
this is the voice of a man who feels as if he's been let down or betrayed by 
philosophy."  Jurgen Habermas concurs that Rorty's antiphilosophy "seems to 
spring from the melacholy of a disappointed metaphysician."  And for Conant, 
this melancholy goes far in explaining the intransigence which Rorty holds 
to his pluralistic philosophy of dialogue and playfulness.  "It's as though 
he's been let down by philosophy once, and he's not going to let it happen 
again," Conant says.

But how are we to square this vision of philosophical depression with the 
explicit role that hope plays in Rorty's philosophy?  For David Hollinger, 
Rorty's somber intellectual mood is not one of depression, but rather one of 
hope wisely tempered by experience.  "I think Dick is rightly concerned 
about the legacy of naive optimism that Dewey is constantly being assaulted 
for," he says.  "There's this idea that the children of the Enlightenment 
were smug and Panglossian; they felt they had renounced God and could go 
forth on a Promethean basis.  In contrast to this, Rorty injects a sober 
realism about the evils of the world: Do you know about the Holocaust?  Do 
you know about the atomic bomb?  There is a feeling in Dick that this 
Enlightenment inheritance is basically right, if only we could be a little 
more chastened about it.  Dick really does see himself in world-historical 
terms.  And he is one of the few people who can do this without being 
pretentious about it."
...
Has Rorty really rejected his one-time ideal of holding reality and justice 
in a single vision?  Or is he merely passing it off in another guise?  After 
all, though he encourages pluralism and not knowing, he puts forth a view 
that settles many questions, and settles them once and for all.  He suggests 
that the single measure for assessing all vocabularies is whether they are 
useful.  Has he, contrary to his own intentions, simply created another kind 
of metavocabulary--a general way of assessing all ways of talking?

Achieving the proper sort of uncertainty may be hard to do, but it is 
critical to Rorty.  When reflecting on his early days at Princeton, he 
begrudges the intellectual climate there.  "Analytic philosophy was 
correlated with intellectual talent," he remembers.  "Exposing the hidden 
assumptions and unclear terms in arguments: That was the only skill that was 
valued."  Rorty confesses that he wasn't "good at it, wasn't sharp enough."  
But he regrets the inability of his sharper colleagues to second-guess their 
teachers or their own most basic assumptions.  For Rorty, the most 
pernicious idea in that intellectual atmosphere was that technical clarity 
in problem solving was the chief intellectual virtue.  "That's a recipe for 
scholasticism if I've ever heard it," he says, shaking his head 
disapprovingly.  "What about imaginative virtues?  If you don't allow people 
to be unclear, intellectual progress grinds to a halt.  It's the vague 
people who are the pioneers."
-------------

Matt

p.s. You mentioned "I think one can see some Leo Struass in him, including a 
specific alliance with Harold Bloom."  Are you confusing Harold with Allan?  
If you meant Harold, I'm not sure where the influence of Strauss comes from. 
  Harold was at Yale his whole life and isn't exactly a philosopher (or 
political commentator).  If you meant Allan, then Rorty doesn't have a 
specific alliance with him.  He did, though, write a review in '91 for the 
New Republic of Allan's Closing of the American Mind.

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