[MD] Rorty's Relativism

[Steve Peterson]

Hi DMB,

When I raised the question about ironism, I was wondering how well 
Pirsig's philosophy stands up to Rorty's critiques of systems, and I 
look forward to rereading Lila in light of what I've read from Rorty to 
imagine what Rorty might have thought of Pirsig. I think it will be 
interesting. I'm sure you are also interested in looking at how Pirsig 
fits in with the tradition of pragmatism and where he doesn't fit. You 
then raised the issue of relativism, and I've enjoyed discussing it 
with you. I've gotten a little too involved in debating, so I want to 
try to do a better job exploring the issue without so much ego 
involvement. I'll respond to your last post when I have time, but first 
just some thoughts...

I'm not sure why it came to mind, but I remember reading a long time 
ago that Cindy Sherman (the photographer that is most famous for her 
phony film stills) said that she believes that the role of the artist 
in society is to expose its myths. Later I read Joseph Campbell who 
wrote that the role of the artist is to create myths. I realize that 
these two people have a very different idea of myth. Sherman meant that 
the artist reveals the lies that society tells about itself while 
Campbell meant that the artist creates the context in which experience 
will be interpreted. Though they meant different things, I still think 
there is something interesting about the mythologist seeing the artist 
as creating myths while this artist sees herself as a debunker of 
myths. There may be something here that relates to the philosophology 
issue, but I was thinking that the it also relates to the role of the 
philosopher. If motorcycle maintenance is art, then so is philosophy.

The point is that Rorty may be best viewed as a debunker of myths. He 
wasn't out to create a philosophical system. Instead he tried to cure 
us of our addiction to such systems. That was his art, and the 
philosophy that is created in his wake will have to address the strong 
critiques he made against SOM and systems in general. Perhaps you can 
at least give him credit for being a strong voice objecting to SOM. But 
you seem to think that the cure may be worse than the disease, so 
probably not.

You are concerned that students will read Rorty and turn into 
relativists, but I don't think students become relativists from reading 
too much Rorty. Students who only read one philosopher tend to be 
swayed by the arguments. If all a student read was Rorty, they would 
share his liberal ethics. What happens instead is that they don't start 
with Rorty. They start with the Socratics and are swayed by 
Aristotelean ethics. Then they read the next philosopher on the 
syllabus and buy into that system instead. They are impressed by 
Kantian ethics and later trade up to Mill's utilitarianism. They 
eventually recognize how they have found all these philosophers 
convincing taken one at a time. They know something about the ethics 
taught by religions as well. The students see that all these 
philosophers or religions have promised a deep foundation for their 
ethical systems and claimed to have such a universal grounding which 
was later shown to be empty and that all these philosophers and 
religions discovered different and contradictory things about the good 
life. They decide that the best we can hope for are systems that are 
self-consistent and are getting the idea that being self-consistent 
isn't even that hard to do. Now what went wrong here? How were these 
students turned into nihilists or skeptics or relativists? The problem 
isn't that they were never taught the one system that really does have 
the sort of universal grounding that was promised. The problem was they 
they learned to expect that any legitimate moral claim needs to have 
the sort of foundation that was promised, some transcultural or natural 
law, the sort of foundation for justifying our moral beliefs that we 
are just never going to get.

Whereas a student who was raised on Rorty and never promised such would 
never have to ask "is slavery wrong?...Yeah, but is it REALLY wrong?" 
Universal Human Rights? Hell yes, that sounds like a great idea. People 
don't look for such a foundation who weren't taught to expect one and 
instead are taught other ways of talking about their moral concerns. 
Rorty can't be faulted for not providing the sort of foundation that 
philosophy never should have promised to begin with. What he tried to 
do in order to repair the damage was offer better questions to ask than 
philosophers were asking before.

His version of the pragmatic method seemed to me to amount to this sort 
of suggestion: "Instead of asking X, try asking Y instead. Isn't that 
really a better question? And note that someone who is concerned with Y 
never bothers to ask X."

One of the things he tried to get us not interested in asking was "is 
it absolute or relative?" For that (and, admittedly, for being too 
careless in the unfortunate pragmatist tradition of making pithy 
slogans that were right in what they rejected but too easily construed 
as wrong or misleading in what they asserted) he was often labeled a 
relativist. But I think it is wrong to do so unless all you mean by the 
term is that he had given up on the sort of grounding for ethical and 
factual claims than was promised by philosophers of the past. Instead 
of trying to "lend our current practices the prestige of the eternal," 
he gave us ideas about how to create a future that will be 
"unimaginably better than the present."

Best,
Steve