[MD] Rorty's Relativism

[david buchanan]

Marsha said to dmb:
Where exactly does RMP reject relativism is ZMM?  Phædrus seems to identify strongly with the early sophists and their relativism, and translates their 'relativity of all ethical ideas' to 'duty toward self' and which he, in turn, translates as dharma. 


dmb says:

I answered that a few days ago but you already rejected it. You said to me, "You've offered words, and I do 'not' see them as evidence...". At the time I thought to myself, "Well, if Marsha doesn't accept textual evidence as legitimate evidence in philosophy then there is nothing I can do". So I just let it go. I mean, if Pirsig's words don't count as evidence for what Pirsig thinks, then nothing counts as evidence and nobody can ever assert anything.
Anyway, here's what I quoted last time but with some emphasis added for your convenience. Near the end of chapter 29 in ZAMM he writes...
" 'Man is the measure of all things.' Yes, that's what he is saying about Quality. Man is not the source of all things, as the subjective idealists would say. Nor is he the passive observer of all things, as the objective idealists and materialists would say. The Quality which creates the world emerges as a relationship between man and his experience. He is a participant in the creation of all things. The measure of all things...it fits. And they taught rhetoric...that fits.The one thing that doesn't fit what he says and what Plato said about the Sophists is their profession of teaching virtue. All accounts indicate this was absolutely central to their teaching, but how are you going to teach virtue if you teach the RELATIVITY of all ethical ideas? Virtue, if it implies anything at all, implies an ethical absolute. A person whose idea of what is proper varies from day to day can be admired for his broadmindedness, but not for his virtue. Not, at least, as Phædrus understands the word. And how could they get virtue out of rhetoric? This is never explained anywhere. Something is missing.His search for it takes him through a number of histories of ancient Greece, which as usual he reads detective style, looking only for facts that may help him and discarding all those that don't fit. And he is reading H. D. F. Kitto's The Greeks, a blue and white paperback which he has bought for fifty cents,.. [...] "What moves the Greek warrior to deeds of heroism," Kitto comments, "is not a sense of duty as we understand it...duty towards others: it is rather duty towards himself. He strives after that which we translate `virtue' but is in Greek areté, `excellence' -- we shall have much to say about areté. It runs through Greek life."There, Phædrus thinks, is a definition of Quality that had existed a thousand years before the dialecticians ever thought to put it to word-traps. Anyone who cannot understand this meaning without logical definiens and definendum and differentia is either lying or so out of touch with the common lot of humanity as to be unworthy of receiving any reply whatsoever. Phædrus is fascinated too by the description of the motive of "duty toward self " which is an almost exact translation of the Sanskrit word dharma, sometimes described as the "one" of the Hindus. Can the dharma of the Hindus and the "virtue" of the ancient Greeks be identical?Then Phædrus feels a tugging to read the passage again, and he does so and then -- what's this?! -- "That which we translate `virtue ' but is in Greek `excellence."'Lightning hits!Quality! Virtue! Dharma! That is what the Sophists were teaching! NOT ETHICAL RELATIVISM. Not pristine "virtue." But areté. Excellence. Dharma! Before the Church of Reason. Before substance. Before form. Before mind and matter. Before dialectic itself. Quality had been absolute. Those first teachers of the Western world were teaching Quality, and the medium they had chosen was that of rhetoric. He has been doing it right all along."






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