[MD] Absolute Truth

[Matt Kundert]

The Absolute Truth tangent (which I'd like to consider a dead issue):

Matt said:
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).

DMB said:
Well, this is exactly the source of my anxiety. I honestly don't understand 
how anyone can take the idea of "Absolute Truth" seriously. And you're 
telling me that the whole history of Western philosophy did take it 
seriosuly. Man, that's really hard to believe. And if you're right, its 
really depressing.

Matt:
Nah.  I think you're looking at this the wrong way.  Bracketing how accurate 
it is for me or anyone else to say that "the whole history of Western 
philosophy" took Absolute Truth seriously (in my more careful moments I'd 
say a whole entangled host of problems and bad ideas; much like Pirsig 
saying we've been afflicted with SOM for 2500 years), it should be great 
that we _did_ finally let it completely go.  I mean, we didn't recognize 
human rights as a culture until quite recently.  It might seem depressing 
that it took us so long, but hey, we got here.  Cultural evolution, like 
biological evolution, takes a long time.

Matt said:
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.

DMB said:
Yes, it all seems quite pointless. I honestly don't see what the fuss is all 
about. And, by the way, you still have not provided a single example. It 
seems that you're really talking about God and the history of 
misinterpertation you refer to is basically the history of Christian 
theology. But this is just a hunch.

Matt:
I still don't have the time to go mining for examples in primary texts.  Off 
the top of my head, would it help if I suggested that Descartes' idea of 
"clear and distinct ideas" we know a priori, before and despite of 
experience, is an example?  That foundationalism (which, I think, you don't 
have the same problem of being flabbergasted with) is the tradition of 
finding something that is immutable, things that are "immutable" being a 
requirement for a notion of Absolute Truth?

You're not far off with the God connection.  Since Descartes philosophers 
have been secularizing philosophy to exclude mention of God in the equation. 
  But Heidegger suspected the same thing you do and called "metaphysics" 
(the bad, appearance/reality kind, the kind that produces the need and 
search for Absolute Truth) both "Platonism" and "the onto-theological 
tradition".  Hilary Putnam has been making fun of some of the views of 
contemporary philosophers by saying they require a "God's eye point of 
view".  These are all suggestions that post-Enlightenment, secular 
philosophers are smuggling God back in after they got rid of Him.  So I'm 
kinda' talking about God, except that the claim is that philosophers are 
smuggling God back in without knowing.  That they rejected God, but not all 
the things God did for us.  That rejecting God meant getting rid of the 
security blanket (what Nietzsche called "metaphysical comfort"), but 
philosophers keep dreaming up new security blankets.  That, in fact, is what 
I see in an Enlightenment-esque social/intellectual distinction--I see God 
being smuggled back in.  (Oh, just so I'm not mistook for willy-nilly 
trashing God and Christians and such, which DMB may be fine with, I'm not 
suggesting that believing in God is automatically bad news--there are many 
verisions of religions and God (and believers) that are fine.)

DMB said:
Yep, I confused Harold with Allan. But the Strauss I see in Rorty doesn't 
depend on specific alliances or personal contract or anything like that. 
(Although we are talking about people who know each other's work and went to 
the same school in the same period.) I just mean they both come to similar 
conclusions, namely that there is no real basis for our beliefs, but we 
should assert them anyway, that we should believe in certain myths even 
though they are not really believeable. I can't say why, exactly, but I 
think that stance is despicable.

Matt:
I'm not sure that they do come to similar conclusions.  Let me emphasize 
that I don't know a lot about Bloom or Strauss, but I was under the 
impression that both Bloom and Strauss were throw-back Platonists who 
believed that philosophers could reach the Truth (dare I say...Absolute 
Truth) and that, therefore, we should have philosopher-kings (or, ya' know, 
along those basic lines).  I thought that was, somewhat, the basic gist of 
Bloom's book: that I, because I'm a Platonic philosopher, know what the real 
standards are for education and such, and therefore you should listen to me 
when I tell you that our colleges are going to hell.

In other words, I don't think Bloom claims that "there is no real basis for 
our beliefs".  I could be wrong on this, but I thought it was more like 
"Platonic philosophers will show us the real basis for our beliefs, and 
correct the beliefs when they are wrong."  Incidently, Rorty's review of 
Bloom's book excoriated his Platonism.

As for Rorty concluding that "there is no real basis for our beliefs", 
that's wrong, but I'm not sure how to rebut that criticism anymore.  
Personally, I don't see any Strauss in Rorty at all.  Reading his 
biographical material, when Rorty was a kid he wanted all that "fuse with 
God" stuff, but by the age of 20 he'd given up--20, right after he finished 
with Chicago, i.e. the effort of trying to be a Straussian convinced him it 
wouldn't work.  (Did you ever see that adorable line about him sending the 
Dalai Llama a present, "accompanied by warm congratulations to a fellow 
eight-year-old who had made good"?  If you want to see where almost all of 
the biographical source material about Rorty is coming from in that article, 
you should read the essay it came from at 
http://www.philosophy.uncc.edu/mleldrid/cmt/rrtwo.html.  Maybe it'll give 
you better perspective on why you dislike Rorty.)

Matt

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